Age of Wonders: Planetfall. Reclaim the Star Union.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Age of Wonders: Planetfall. Reclaim the Star Union.

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Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Before I read the thread had anything been said about charm type stuff?

# ¿ Oct 17, 2018 15:38

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 20:29

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Gerblyn posted:

You can still do that. They just will look a bit different once you leave combat is all!

The issue in AoW3 was that the player could bypass the city production queue completely and just mass charm whole armies, which led to big balance issues, especially in Play by Email games. We looked into other options, like having mind controlled units randomly break free after the battle was over, but they all looked became quite fiddly and annoying.

This still seems to have the same root issue, where you directly gain units to the strategic layer without a per-unit strategic cost.

Purely for vanity reasons, where did only getting to keep them post combat if you pay a cost equivalent in strategic resources break down?

# ¿ Oct 18, 2018 19:02

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Also sorry for diving straight in with the kvetching I'm super hype for the game! Looking forward to sticking bugs on things.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2018 19:03

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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ninjewtsu posted:

What's good about this change is that if you eat a t3 unit, assumedly you still get a t1 or t2 out instead of a t3, and even if you get a t3, it's abilities won't be busted for your class.

In aow3 pbem people were getting t3 armies on turn 15ish by going into high level dungeons/wizard spires/whatever and abusing conversion, which got them better units earlier and more frequently than trying to produce them. Idk the exact number stats because that scene sounded so dumb that I didn't want any involvement with it, but I can tell you it was really absurd. Running into a t4 angel on turn 13 and converting it just breaks the game, there's nothing else comparable in power to that at that point in the game, and you more or less get it for free (you still have the unit you used to convert it, afterall)

I should have phrased that as it only solving half the root cause. The other half is that there's often no strategic opportunity cost to catching a thing on a per-thing basis. To give the archetypal example, you've pretty much finished a fight or are otherwise fighting a fight that you can't lose. You can either wrap it up quick OR start chain webbing a unit so you can get some risk-free charm in because the only strategic downside to grabbing this unit is the upkeep cost. NOT catching the unit would be really dumb, because there's no strategic trade-off. The only resource is your patience.

Zore posted:

I mean I loved it because playing druid pokemon with all the animals ruled but I understand why its gone

That's the other reason why I'm Very Interested in charm effects, because I love playing catch them all, but since there's no downside to catching them all, failing to catch one feels extra bad. If catching one came with a strategic cost then if I don't catch one then I haven't "wasted" the opportunity, since it means I still have <potential strategic cost>, or I might decide to deliberately not catch one because it's not worth <strategic cost>.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2018 21:58

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Gerblyn posted:

The issue is it's not just the unit's gold/mana cost that's been skipped, it's also the production time in the city/spell book that's been skipped as well. It possible that having the player need to pay some kind of binding cost to keep the unit after combat would help, though.

If we make AoW4, we'll need to bring the feature back, so we'll need to come up with some kind of solution!

As for the current idea not fixing the root cause, the mind-control-esque ways of acquiring units are only really available in the mid to late game, and only give you low tier units (the kir'ko worm is tier 1, but can evole into a T2). The balance issues of players snowballing the early game shouldn't come up (we hope!)

Yeah my post was bad, there were three big issues: research jumping, lack of per-unit production time, and lack of strategic resource costs. I never considered the lack of production time to be that big of an issue as I view charm as subbing out production time and tying up cities with things like travel time and other opportunity costs. There's no equivalent in AoW charm for the resource cost of a unit though.

T3 units producing T1 and T2 units definitely solves the research issue, and significantly mitigates the others since by the time you're pumping them out en-masse an individual t1 isn't going to be gamebreaking. It does still leave the issue that there's little to no trade-off to "Farming" - if you can convert a guy with little to no risk it's 100% gain over just killing them. There's no downside. But yeah nowhere near as big an issue as when you could use it to generate current or next tier units.

"Binding Cost" is a great term.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2018 14:23

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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It's real good.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2018 21:08

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Autoresolving battles as a necromancer was basically committing slow suicide. Too much tactical to strategic layer crossover.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2019 12:02

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Whilst

# ¿ May 15, 2019 13:24

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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I haven't bought this yet (I intend to) but quick expectation management query, what's the deal with pulling units into a fight? Same as AoW, with all the associated stack jockeying?

# ¿ Aug 12, 2019 19:13

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Ages ago I signed up to the notifications thing but only got the game just now. Is there some kind of unlocks that came with that? Do I need to do anything to get them?

# ¿ Feb 23, 2020 18:07

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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LordSloth posted:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/718850/announcements/detail/1599254462551348873

There were three cosmetic packs, at least. It didn’t take me any extra steps to get the content in the game. Aside from logging in maybe?

Gerblyn posted:

I can check with someone tomorrow if you can't figure it out, but I believe that you need to log in with your paradox account in game. That account/email should be the one you signed up for the mailing list with.

Cheers. I haven't checked if I have the things yet, playing the campaign.

I don't have any experience of the old sector system but from a complete novice perspective this one seems very intuitive.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2020 23:23

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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LordSloth posted:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/718850/announcements/detail/1599254462551348873

There were three cosmetic packs, at least. It didn’t take me any extra steps to get the content in the game. Aside from logging in maybe?

Gerblyn posted:

I can check with someone tomorrow if you can't figure it out, but I believe that you need to log in with your paradox account in game. That account/email should be the one you signed up for the mailing list with.

Good news! I have the things and that bubble helmet is going to go on all my guys. Having a blast with the campaign, haven't tried any random maps or skirmishes yet. Really liking the blend of unique items and EL-style craftables.

e: And much belated thanks LordSloth for tracking down exactly what they were

Splicer fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Feb 29, 2020

# ¿ Feb 29, 2020 17:59

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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ninjewtsu posted:

quick question to field to the thread: how do you guys feel about planetfall's learning curve? i feel like i understand the game pretty thoroughly at this point, and i'm still finding fun new ways to combine units and mods and exciting new builds i can try, but the flipside of that is i have a really hard time recommending this game to my friends: i recall that it took me like 20 hours of gameplay before i felt like i had anything much resembling a grip on the game, and it probably wasn't until the 50 hour mark that i felt reasonably comfortable in my level of knowledge about the game. and that's just a really huge investment to ask of a buddy that i just want to be able to play my favorite video game with. would you say you guys feel like that's a fair assessment of the game?

I jumped in pretty blind (but obviously with a background knowledge from AoW3) and it was pretty straightforward. I'd get creamed in multiplayer but for single player or co-op comp stomps or the campaign I don't think you need an encyclopedic knowledge of the game to enjoy slapping bug backpacks onto cyborg party dudes. Just tell your friends to treat anything above "risky" as a death sentence until they get a handle on things.

On the economic side the sectors system is pretty intuitive, and the UI is pretty friendly.

It helps that the campaign is a decent tutorial.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Mar 11, 2020

# ¿ Mar 11, 2020 15:52

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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How are u posted:

Planetfall is definitely a sizable complexity jump over AoW3. It was enough so that I bounced off it when I bought the game at launch and tried playing a few scenarios. I reinstalled to try the t-rex patch and it really is an improvement.

Yeah I jumped in at t-rex so my experience would not be match the rest of the thread

# ¿ Mar 12, 2020 09:46

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Went back to the game I was playing, looked at my setup, and suddenly realised a billion things I'd done wrong.

Carnalfex posted:

I honestly would like to see how you could change the game to have a split military and infrastructure production queues for cities. Similar to what they did with casting points. It would take additional tweaking perhaps since it would speed up the pace of the game, especially now that buildings don't have a gold cost. The point of the idea basically being that it would permanently cure the simcity newbie trap since they don't have to stop playing simcity to field an army.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2020 17:23

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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How do those passive "+x food in a food sector" buildings affect things? Assuming there's not a +x science sector available of course.

Are water sectors good? They seem good.

What about food core buildings?

# ¿ Mar 13, 2020 14:13

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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If there was some benefit to having units in adjacent sectors then you could do neat stuff with ships, like bombardment actions in combat or such.

Or have a late game tech to put legs/wheels/antigrav on all your ships. Inverse embarking.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2020 00:34

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Anticheese posted:

One thing that I only really recently grasped is that you don't need to have overlap between faction and secret tech damage channels! There's some pretty awesome synergy to find with like...Psynumbra Amazons going all-in on poison and morale effects!

Is there a trick to xeno plague/assembly to get my assembly stuff to work on my xeno stuff?

# ¿ May 3, 2020 13:40

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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So does pop growth drop massively in value once you get your fourth sector? I know you still need more people to actually work the jobs but is that a good rule of thumb for swapping out stuff/shipping your food elsewhere?

# ¿ May 3, 2020 14:33

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:

You can also swap sectors between cities

Somehow missed this until ninjewtsu replied. That is very very good to know, thanks!

# ¿ May 3, 2020 15:31

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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I was wondering why this got no replies:

Splicer posted:

Is there a trick to xeno plague/assembly to get my assembly stuff to work on my xeno stuff?

# ¿ May 8, 2020 18:12

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Mzbundifund posted:

"trick"? Not sure what you mean. Xenoplague units are compatible with any of the assembly mods in the appropriate categories. They can all benefit from the flesh rippers implant, pustules and destroyers get access to the mods for light units, plague lords get access to the mods for heavy units. A couple assembly mods are for cyborgs or mechanicals only, so yeah xenoplague's biological units can't use those, but basically any secret tech is going to have some non-racial mod applicability.

I mean how a bunch of the assembly stuff, especially healing stuff, only applies to cyborgs and mechanical units. Xenoplague comes with a few mods to make units count as xenoplague units so I was wondering if I'd missed a way to turn xeno plague units into cyborgs.

# ¿ May 8, 2020 18:38

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Mzbundifund posted:

Oh I see, no you can't change unit types, probably to prevent issues like installing biological-only mods onto a guy that you then install a "turn into a cyborg" mod onto.

Pretty sure the only cyborg-only mods that assembly has are the corpse reprocessor and the regeneration one, but if it's healing you want, Xenoplague itself gets a healing spore mod that works on biologicals, cyborgs, AND mechanicals, and is extremely strong.

The Reverse Engineer can only resurrect or heal mechanical or cyborg units, and some of the hero abilities, including I think the heal per turn leader ability, also only affect cyborg or mechanical units. Mods and tactical operations I'm not hugely pushed about since you can end up with so many but the hero and unit abilities seem to make them an especially bad matchup and I was wondering if I was missing something.

Also the game already has situations like you described, where you equip a hero with mods that apply to weapons and then you remove the weapon. The mods just turn off.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 19:00 on May 8, 2020

# ¿ May 8, 2020 18:58

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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ugusername posted:

Xenoplague doesn't really need mod support in my experience. I tend to look at it as all or nothing. Either it's just a crutch for my early game with a couple of free units letting me dedicate my economy to teching up for my main plan or it's all-in rush where I put everything into it to get to T3 as fast as I reasonably can. When T3 with regen start appearing in the field it doesn't really matter what kind of mods there are. And Assembly in particular have crazy good science game.

This must be bad phrasing on my part because you're the second person to misunderstand: I'm not upset that there's no mods to put on my xenoplague units (and this is blatantly untrue anyway, there's loads), I'm bothered that my assembly healers and a bunch of my hero skills don't work on my xenoplague units.

And bothered isn't even the right word, I was just wondering if I'd missed some straightforward way to mitigate their apparent below average synergy and it looks like the answer is no, I didn't.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:44 on May 9, 2020

# ¿ May 9, 2020 16:56

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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I refuse to believe it's not a reference to TradGames "favourite" Furry Pirates

# ¿ May 18, 2020 15:24

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Any idea how long the sale is going to last? Literally asking for a friend.

# ¿ May 26, 2020 10:28

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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I know it goes without saying but the music is amazing. I never knew my life needed an age of wonders theme/x-files theme mashup but here I am

# ¿ May 29, 2020 13:33

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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What's the mirror shades count so far

# ¿ May 30, 2020 12:17

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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chaosapiant posted:

So I'm getting back into some classic AoW 1, and god drat is this first campaign scenario for the Half-lings pretty rough. I'm playing on easy and, while I think I just need to get used to it, the AI is super drat aggressive. Anyone else still play the original game?

AoW1 was the one with the incredibly pro points-based scenario carryover? I cannot understand why that didn't catch on.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2020 23:37

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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How are u posted:

It's been like 20 years since I played AoW 1 but I recall being able to build heroes that eventually would just solo everything because they were so insanely powerful and untouchable.

Late game hero balance aside, what I meant was you could only bring over a certain points value of stuff between campaign maps. So if you cheese the map to get all the items and exp grind your hero you'd have to leave half your stuff behind. If you blitzed through and ended a map with a low level hero and found very few items then you'd have points left over to bring over a couple of troops.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2020 14:02

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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If I never repeated myself in threads I'd have a fraction of my post history.

Also FWIW I noticed this too, things pop way less than in AoW3, which popped less than AoW2, which popped less than AoW1. I think as the tech has gotten better at making things look more like part of the landscape they've also started looking more like part of the landscape. Personally I'd love an "outline mode" or something.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2020 17:42

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Reharakhti posted:

Since the big january patch there is a glow effect around all units.

Yeah but for buildings.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2020 19:09

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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I really liked endless space 1 until it got memey. Then I uh... didnt

# ¿ Aug 22, 2020 10:59

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Anyone know if the effects of Archaeology Adept stack if you've multiple heroes?

Also it'd be kind of neat if archaeology skills had some other side benefit, like increased rewards for clearing structures or bonus damage inside structures or something.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2020 23:08

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Is there a way to get rid of the timeout kick in multiplayer?

# ¿ Sep 15, 2020 18:56

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
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I've been playing simultaneous turns online with Mrs. Splicer and e.g. if she's in a fight and I'm looking over her shoulder I get kicked if I don't go wiggle my mouse every few minutes, and vice versa.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2020 19:37