|
What's the right map size? In AoW3 I just released conquered towns as independents because having to manage 20 towns is an absurd amount of busy work. In large maps I conquered two of them and there's just so many towns that are all basically the same it's just a slog to paint the map. Can I not auto-manage colonies?
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 14:21
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 13, 2024 23:43 |
|
|
Cynic Jester posted:A single food exploitation will get you to 16 pretty quickly. Two will do that, then get all your other cities to 16 pretty quickly. Playing ICS seems like a waste, considering how many turns you'll spend on infrastructure in each new city. Sure, you no longer pay upkeep but there's an opportunity cost to building colonizers(cosmite That a fact? poo poo, what exploitations to build and whatever, I think, are where I'm still struggling to learn. Would even a single food icon sector be good enough to sustain a colony to 16 pop quickly?
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 14:28
|
|
). If they didn't cost cosmite I'd be all for ICS being the bomb, but 30 cosmite is a lot of mods and mods win you combat. A single modded out unit is usually way more effective than two unmodded ones.
|
Oh, I just remembered the one thing above all that I want: please make the Generate Energy option actually infinite. Good god was my brain melting down at that point in the final stretch of my Dvar game.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 14:33
|
|
|
I think someone brought that up earlier and there's a way to do it. I don't remember how though.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 14:35
|
|
|
I don’t find it all that hard to hit 16 pop as the Vanguard, mostly because I set that +15 food doctrine and then follow up with the economic doctrine that gives all core buildings +15. A total of +30 without even tweaking pop distribution to food helps quite a lot. There are better doctrines to use, but I often forget to change them out.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 14:37
|
|
|
Couple of oddities I noted in my last game: -If you finish up an entire tech tree, you will still get the prompt to select a new tech, which you can’t do. You can shunt it to the back of the prompt line by right-clicking, but you can’t get rid of it entirely. This is a very easy mark to hit if you unleash the Synthesis doomsday op on a large map. -There doesn’t seem to be a way to tell a colony to indefinitely produce energy/research, even though they will put an infinity symbol in your production queue. Is this just me missing something? -Mounts will override their hero’s status, which makes sense for the most part, but it’s sort of weird for a couple of vehicles. Any hero put on an Assembly chopper will become a cyborg and can get cyborg mods, and contrarily putting an Assembly hero on something like a hoverbike or the subjugator chair will change them into a biological unit. It makes sense that cyborg mods won’t work if a tyrannosaurus or mega-beetle is fighting for you, but it’s weird that getting on a floating bike makes you less of a machine-person than just walking places.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 14:39
|
|
|
What’s the use case for the +10 energy building? production seems better all the time to just get you to energy exploitation faster, get the colony built up in general and then 15 production turns into 3-4 energy if you need it that bad anyway. Even the research and food building seem niche compared to production but I am using those at least sometimes
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 14:44
|
|
|
Zulily Zoetrope posted:Couple of oddities I noted in my last game: When you finish your tech tree you can select any tech tree from an assimilated race(I guess?) by choosing it in the drop down menu with an arrow on the left of the tech tree screen.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 14:52
|
|
|
toasterwarrior posted:That a fact? poo poo, what exploitations to build and whatever, I think, are where I'm still struggling to learn. Would even a single food icon sector be good enough to sustain a colony to 16 pop quickly? Yepp. Most cities hit 16 long, long before you're making use of 2 terrain food exploitations(unless Forest x Fertile Plains is a possible combo, but I've never seen it so far). My usual start involves going food exploitation first. If you get lucky and you have a bio-dome within walking distance from your capital, your pop growth will be absurd, even with a Central Replicator Factory.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 15:25
|
|
|
ninjewtsu posted:hi gerblyn, the Psionic Drain trait is not in the in game encyclopedia I got you fam! toasterwarrior posted:Oh, I just remembered the one thing above all that I want: please make the Generate Energy option actually infinite. Good god was my brain melting down at that point in the final stretch of my Dvar game. You too! Zulily Zoetrope posted:-If you finish up an entire tech tree, you will still get the prompt to select a new tech, which you can’t do. You can shunt it to the back of the prompt line by right-clicking, but you can’t get rid of it entirely. This is a very easy mark to hit if you unleash the Synthesis doomsday op on a large map. And you! Gerblyn fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Aug 14, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 15:34
|
|
|
drat, that's good to know, thank you. Generally I prefer a 2x industrial + factory center start, especially if there's a +1 shield/armor building right by the HQ sector. Lean on food pickups for the fast boost to 8 pop, then pump out colonizers/troops for the second hero onwards. It definitely has its disadvantages, particularly when it comes to splitting production between troops and colonizers. EDIT: Thanks Gerblyn!
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 15:36
|
|
|
toasterwarrior posted:drat, that's good to know, thank you. Generally I prefer a 2x industrial + factory center start, especially if there's a +1 shield/armor building right by the HQ sector. Lean on food pickups for the fast boost to 8 pop, then pump out colonizers/troops for the second hero onwards. It definitely has its disadvantages, particularly when it comes to splitting production between troops and colonizers. Sector boosts are just tiny until you're far enough up the tech tree to start leveling them up. I don't bother with em at all early game until after I've put out a few colonizers + a second army. Depends on available terrain but all else being equal I go with a food focus most of the time, since more pop leads to more access to every other resource as well.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 16:11
|
|
|
To be frank, it'd be nice if the encyclopedia had a couple of pages in the game concepts section dedicated to the various status effects, like a page per damage channel detailing the various effects they can inflict. I'd just like to have all that information in a central place instead of having to encounter them in-game and then look them up individually.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 16:12
|
|
|
Digirat posted:What’s the use case for the +10 energy building? production seems better all the time to just get you to energy exploitation faster, get the colony built up in general and then 15 production turns into 3-4 energy if you need it that bad anyway. Energy is the ultimate limiter on how many units you can have. Once you have a couple good production towns, you probably can afford to exchange time for money. Plus, I think you can delete and replace the central buildings.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 16:17
|
|
|
So how's the game? I love me some Age of Wonders, even though I haven't played in a while, and I can't tell if this is classic AoW in space, or if it's a more traditional 4X? And by that I mean that essentially AoW is more akin to HoMM in that it's a war game as much as it's a strategy game, rather than a game with tons of diplomatic win conditions.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 16:23
|
|
|
More 4X than all the previous AoW games but still definitely an AoW game. You're only gonna win by running around and murdering people.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 16:28
|
|
|
Making friends with the weird NPC factions you need for the diplomacy victory? Also involves murdering those they hate, as it turns out.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 16:29
|
|
|
bamhand posted:More 4X than all the previous AoW games but still definitely an AoW game. You're only gonna win by running around and murdering people. Kinda glad to hear that. AoW always occupied this weird niche where you had a lot of features of "real" 4Xs which caused the game to be more involved than just running around grabbing poo poo on the map in HoMM style But the tactical battles in AoW were the best poo poo over. Hope they're still good in Planetfall.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 16:30
|
|
|
The combat is definitely different. It feels a lot more like X-Com as people have mentioned. It took me a couple hours to get used to it but I'm enjoying it. It definitely does not feel the same as all the previous AoW games though.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 16:32
|
|
|
bamhand posted:The combat is definitely different. It feels a lot more like X-Com as people have mentioned. It took me a couple hours to get used to it but I'm enjoying it. It definitely does not feel the same as all the previous AoW games though. When we say X-Com, are we talking about like individual unit based tactics? Or does it still use who squads/regiments similar to AoW 3?
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 16:34
|
|
|
chaosapiant posted:When we say X-Com, are we talking about like individual unit based tactics? Or does it still use who squads/regiments similar to AoW 3? They're normally squads of a few dudes. When people say it feels like XCOM I think they mean that it has an emphasis on cover, flanking and managing ranges.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 16:37
|
|
|
its like aow3, but there's a heavy emphasis on using cover and unit abilities and unit customization.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 16:38
|
|
|
Archaeology Hat posted:They're normally squads of a few dudes. When people say it feels like XCOM I think they mean that it has an emphasis on cover, flanking and managing ranges. Huh, that's pretty cool!
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 16:40
|
|
|
The combat is different, but it's still very much up to AoW standards. It's got more emphasis on flanking and terrain usage and less locking down the enemy with bulky melee dudes, but it's built on the same skeleton.Alamoduh posted:When you finish your tech tree you can select any tech tree from an assimilated race(I guess?) by choosing it in the drop down menu with an arrow on the left of the tech tree screen. Yeah, but this was in the Society tech tree. I had like four assimilated races at that point, but I was getting like three Military Techs per turn so I would have run that tree down if someone managed to knock down a basilisk node and I'd have to start over as well.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 16:45
|
|
|
Just finished my first skirmish game as the Voidtech Kir'ko on a mid sized continental world with 6 players on severe difficulty. It took me 110 turns and I won via sector control after allying with one faction and killing 3 off. Commander: Voidtech Melee Gear Martial Tradition Military Detachment Party Animal I wiped out the 2 other players on my big continent around turn 55 using 3 stacks of heroes + modded T1 and T2 units. Engulfers with the mod that adds slow/imobilize are extremely powerful, especially when paired with a Transcendent who can do share pain. I felt I had pretty much won by that point given my territory advantage, but wanted to play though the late game to get a feel for the higher tier units and do some dungeons. Shortly after I killed off the 2 players I ended up getting a tier IV psychic sword with lifesteal from a silver dungeon which pretty much let me 1 shot any 2 units per turn with martial tradition since it ignores armor and shields. I was doing about 25 damage per hit and had a very high critical chance. I found the neutral factions to be a larger threat to my sovereignty than the computer players. I'm not sure if they are really good at sneaking or they have the ability to just spawn powerful armies but the psyfish had a couple good attacks on one of my coastal villages. I think the AI really struggles to get off of continents that are too small and by the end of the game they were just continuously warring against the neutrals taking the same territory back and forth. I didn't get attacked by a player on my continent until 3 turns before the end of the game. Some observations/feedback/thoughts from the experience: 1 - Going all-in on secret tech/ racial weapon synergy is not necessary. Finding a cool mod that synergizes defensively or as a utility (like the T1 void tech mod that gives 20% evasion and move through cover) is also a valid way to play. Void tech was the first research that I did, but also the last tree that I finished up. Finding good break points in the trees is key. 2 - Regeneration and Evasion seem very strong. Preventing losses is important for snowballing, even without the regeneration mod having some sort of healing unit that gives +strategic map regen is extremely important early game. There should probably be some kind of diminishing returns on evasion, the additive stacking of percentages makes it easy to get <20% hit rates in cover, and <50% out in the open! 3 - Colonizing constantly is important, but managing 16-20 or so colonies is exhausting by the end of the game. I don't care that they finished production! There should be a way to automate production or have a longer queue. 4 - Specialized colonies outperform generic colonies in the long run, but getting a good spread of everything early game is important. You can go back and specialize once you can get the T3-5 sector bonuses and buildings, or finally clear that dungeon you've been waiting on. 5 - Food sharing is really good and important for growing out colonies in the long run. I wish there was an easier way to manage food sharing from the colony overview tab. 6 - martial tradition and anything that refunds your action points is stupid powerful, especially in dungeons. A Kir'ko tier IV mod gives this to your light biological units, it's the last thing on the tree for a reason. It makes me think martial tradition is a bit OP in it's current form. It might be better balanced if it was once per battle. I think the combat AI struggles against it because I can use my double staggered unit to get the killing blow, and then I have a full 3-point turn after that to do whatever. 7 - Acid rain tactical operation is really really strong and should probably have a duration (maybe 10 turns?). At one point I had a t3 town garrison defend against a 12 stack Dvar army with 2 heroes (2200ish combined) at the end of the game by turtling one of my guys back and letting the turrets/acid rain slowly wear them down. The AI also seems to use healing abilities a bit early and didn't seem to realize that undoing 7 acid damage when it's going to happen again at the end of the turn isn't going to help much. 8 - Kir'ko light units are especially vulnerable to stagger since they do not get access to any mods which grant stagger resistance 9 - Slower T3 units are really useful for longer campaigns in enemy territory, but they take a LONG time to move around the strategic map, even with improved infrastructure they can only move 12 tiles per turn (if they are all in your domain). I probably had a good 300 cosmite or so tied up in units that never saw any action. 10 - Fast fliers/defenses are important to have in strategic locations for defense, especially against the sneaky neutrals! 11 - Having specialized production cities that give +armor or +shields to your units are super powerful. I was cranking out 8 armor elites by the end game. 12 - When you control 90+ sectors, it is hard to see where your armies are using the military overview because of all the much larger forward base icons. It would also be nice to be able to zoom further out on the world map. There was a time where I was zooming back in to use the minimap because I had a better idea of where things were and could move from one side of my empire to the other. 13- When you finish off a player, it resets any migration you are doing with colonies you already captured. This might be a bug. It also sets any unconquered enemies to outposts, which makes them difficult to subjugate without enormous amounts of influence. If you conquer them, any other cities you already integrated will start to hate you. It would be good to have a way to mend relations with the difference races, maybe through a strategic operation that costs influence (maybe it's there but i missed it) 14 - Strategic operations are super powerful and can really help turn the tide. I had other operations that helped militias fight against crazy odds (voidtech one that gives you 4 free units comes to mind). 15 - Covert ops are probably more useful in multiplayer games, but also useful for getting more map information. I think the most important one is the sensor relay operation. I was cranking out about 1 per turn before I went on my continental rampage. Stealing maps is also good for finding enemy capitals. Overall this game is really fun and I'm going to try something different in a new game!
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 18:02
|
|
|
Like a true goon I worship and adore the Network Link. Has the ability to reset cool downs, has the ability to reset it's reset cooldown ability, has a tech mod that lets your hero reset it's abilities and when you use them with a Syndicate commander you can steal your opponents infantry with control collars every turn.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 21:30
|
|
|
guys i think assembly might be overpowered
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 21:40
|
|
|
ninjewtsu posted:guys i think assembly might be overpowered For auto-battles, fo sho. For manual battles, it's more ehhhh. If you can manual every fight, the others get even at the very least and some of them are probably better.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 21:58
|
|
|
drat, that last Assembly planet in the campaign is such bullshit with its Lava terrain and Mountains... I had to cheat my way through it by giving myself unlimited movement. It took forever to get anywhere and was almost bored out of my mind.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 22:19
|
|
|
if you're manualing every fight you can afford to get really aggressive with your clearing, which means that battlefield autopsies is going to break the game in half
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 22:19
|
|
|
LordSloth posted:I don’t find it all that hard to hit 16 pop as the Vanguard, mostly because I set that +15 food doctrine and then follow up with the economic doctrine that gives all core buildings +15. A total of +30 without even tweaking pop distribution to food helps quite a lot. Aye found it easy as vanguard and kirko
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 23:43
|
|
|
In the other age of wonders games I always disallowed founding new cities and that being important in this totally ruins the game for me. The enemies expand too fast and I just....I dunno, it doesn't suit how I want to play. It's a shame but I just can't get into it. I also find the battles way less straightforward and they take longer so I'm barely ever fighting them. Taear fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Aug 15, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2019 00:29
|
|
|
You can't build roads in this one, right? Moving armies around the map feels pretty slow, but maybe that's just me being bad about big picture planning.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2019 00:54
|
|
|
Guildencrantz posted:You can't build roads in this one, right? Moving armies around the map feels pretty slow, but maybe that's just me being bad about big picture planning. Roads are built automatically between your own sectors.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2019 01:04
|
|
|
Taear posted:In the other age of wonders games I always disallowed founding new cities and that being important in this totally ruins the game for me. Yeah this has been a bummer for me too - I prefer playing with city founding off and lots of neutral settlements to capture. I've been doing fairly well just by outplaying the AI in battles and capturing their settlements as they expand but I still haven't actually finished a game of Planetfall because I'm not very interested in the city management stuff and once I have a bunch of sectors to control I re-start and play the early game stuff again. There's something I don't quite get about the sector improvements system: why I would want to match the improvement to the terrain - I'm still just specializing my cities as 1-2 energy cities, 1 production city and every other sector is Research. Doing anything else requires a lot of glancing around at different icons and bonuses for what ultimately feels like no gain because research and cosmite are the only things I'm ever in dire need of. I'm having the opposite problem with battles, the city management and overworld stuff feels so drawn out I feel like I'm not getting enough of the battles. They took me a while to get the hang of but now that I fully understand the mods system I'm loving them and I would kill for a purely tactical battle mode like Total War has. I'm still really digging the game overall and keep launching it, I love the aesthetic and the world and the combat deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Aug 15, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2019 01:06
|
|
|
Cinara posted:Roads are built automatically between your own sectors. This, and also I can't stress enough how much faster Colony Infrastructure tech makes you.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2019 01:12
|
|
|
deep dish peat moss posted:Yeah this has been a bummer for me too - I prefer playing with city founding off and lots of neutral settlements to capture. I've been doing fairly well just by outplaying the AI in battles and capturing their settlements as they expand but I still haven't actually finished a game of Planetfall because I'm not very interested in the city management stuff and once I have a bunch of sectors to control I re-start and play the early game stuff again. Matching improvements to proper sectors is a complete non-factor early on but matters quite a lot later. You can brute-force an improvement to level 3 regardless of terrain matching(though the second level of generic improvements is quite late in the tree). To go to level 4 or 5, terrain matching is mandatory; a forest(+food/prod)/arctic(+research/energy) province can go to level 4 of any improvement with the proper terrain tech, but can never go to 5, for example. The level 3-4-5 upgrades are extremely powerful and dramatically boost output so they're very significant later on in the game. City specialization is important early on, but later on cities become inherently less specialized by default. You can only build 2 of one improvement type so there's a relatively hard cap on how many pop you can put into a specific job, so you're going to start adding secondaries to your cities. Plus there's a fair amount of incentive to splash different improvements into your production cities, like energy improvements making units cheaper. So to summarize, early on, simply don't sweat your improvement matching because it's not relevant until you're fairly in on the research tree, and don't sweat trying to find the ~perfect~ city points; just get more cities period and it'll work itself out later. A good rule of thumb to go by is at least one new city every 8-10 turns minimum, and a good spacing rule is at least one sector away from the last city you settled. You also don't need to sweat building every improvement in every city; most of your cities will do fine with just econ improvements and using them as feeders for the cities who matter. Kanos fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Aug 15, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2019 01:21
|
|
|
deep dish peat moss posted:
The battles for me have always been a secondary thing so making them a load more complex makes me just auto it all. I'm the player who was absolutely happy having a single doom stack of top tier units with maybe two heroes on the map. Or an army of heroes possessed by dark elf incarnates. I liked that. This is just a lot more complicated.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2019 01:26
|
|
|
Kanos posted:Matching improvements to proper sectors is a complete non-factor early on but matters quite a lot later. You can brute-force an improvement to level 3 regardless of terrain matching(though the second level of generic improvements is quite late in the tree). To go to level 4 or 5, terrain matching is mandatory; a forest(+food/prod)/arctic(+research/energy) province can go to level 4 of any improvement with the proper terrain tech, but can never go to 5, for example. The level 3-4-5 upgrades are extremely powerful and dramatically boost output so they're very significant later on in the game. I understand this but that's what I don't like. It's a lot of busywork and once I have 10+ colonies I don't want to think about it anymore so I restart on a new map and go back to having 1-3. In AOW3 I turned city founding off and I can't do the same in Planetfall. I end up plopping down 2 research or energy sectors then stop annexing that colony unless it's somewhere I want to build units, then it gets production instead.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2019 02:20
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 13, 2024 23:43 |
|
|
deep dish peat moss posted:I understand this but that's what I don't like. It's a lot of busywork and once I have 10+ colonies I don't want to think about it anymore so I restart on a new map and go back to having 1-3. In AOW3 I turned city founding off and I can't do the same in Planetfall. I end up plopping down 2 research or energy sectors then stop annexing that colony unless it's somewhere I want to build units, then it gets production instead. ...try playing a smaller map? "Small" map with 3 AI should mean you can just conquer towns instead of building any.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2019 02:25
|
|