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A friend has this game, looks pretty. I've only played AoW 1 and 2, seeing a sci-fi variant is surprising. He says that taking the Vanguard with an APC at the start gives you a ridiculously powerful opening. With the dogbot recharge skill, you can have 2 healing drones in the air, both healing your dudes and being shot at instead of them, and the accuracy buff can last 4 rounds, which is where most of the fighting happens anyway. If you get your tier 1 dudes some defensive mods aso they can survive between heals, and focus your hero on passive bonuses to his troops, they can beat up tier 3 armies.
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Aug 8, 2019 23:40
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 04:26 |
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According to my friend, you sholdn't be afraid to go to war if you have a chance to grab a small settlement of another faction, and that spending 60 influence to nab an NPC settlement is very much worth it. Some of the easy to research early techs can actually help other faction more than their original one. The very first Vanguard tech gives you a mod that is great for everyone, for example. You don't even have to wait to assimilate a settlement, just take it, hold it a few turns to do the research, then bug out. He chooses secret tech based on weapons used by a faction. For example, if a faction has a lot of repeating balistic weapons, there's a mod combo with the prometheans, one gives your weapon aoe burning attacks, and the other gives you extra accuracy and damage against people set on fire.
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Aug 10, 2019 14:06
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:I'm not too impressed with void tech overall. It has got some cool gimmicks and their tech units are all special brands of bullshit. I am not sure why, I'm just never feeling the synergy. The gravity grenade.. this one is like, actively counterproductive? I couldn't picture a unit to put it on, and recently i fought a void tech dungeon where the NPC echo walkers all wasted their melee/quantum clone opportunities throwing mediocre grenades. The protecting yourself by randomly teleporting thing is weird too - its also a proc from dimensional instability, so is it supposed to be something you want on yourself or something you want on your enemy? My friend mentioned the first void mod as being very gameplay defining if you have the right units for it. Apparently, that mod + the bug regen mod lets you autobattle your way through most indies with tier 1 bugs, and the tier 2 void guys are a very good upgrade to them. He also likes void amazon archers, though he emphasized that you should never, ever autoresolve fights with them.
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Aug 11, 2019 15:22
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My friend joked that the game is balanced so that everything is differently overpowerd in a way that somehow mostly evens out. Except the Blandguard who have the might of 4 different flavors of vanilla on their side instead. He made it to the final planet, here's some observations (obviously, SPOILERS!) There's basically 3 factions in the game: - The empress who is apparently not human and also blew up everything and killed almost everyone 200 years ago because she thought the robits had too much power compared to her. Blows up planets to pass the time. - The CORE and the robots who used to run the empire's day to day stuff and their allies, usually celestian, gives me archon vibes a bit. They're presumably united around the slogan "at least we're not her" - The "go gently caress yourselves, we can make it on our own" faction, somewhat self-explanatory. Nominally guided by the previous emperor who was brought back from the dead, but mostly just want to do their own thing Based on the choices you make in the campaign, the characters you play will pick a side. For the final mission, you can play as anyone whose campaign you've won, although everyone you haven't played as yet will show up regardless, as their "default" selves. Everyone gets to keep any hero given to them by story progression, assuming they survived, levels and items included. The ones you recruit like you do in skirmish aren't kept around. Uniquely, you choose which side the character you picked for the final mission will back, even if their own story in your playthrough was fully dedicated to another side. The mission itself is a gargantuan 12 player showdown on a huge map, plus the NPC autonoms backing the CORE, and the NPC space republicans backing the empress. The difficulty massively varies depending on your previous choices, it can be a cakewalk if almost everyone is backing you candidate, and a solo "gently caress all of you" run is presumably the ultimate challege. It seems like the game remembers a number of minor choices you've made, and it could be that it influences the non-campaign enemies you end up facing. Notably, there was an earlier mission where you only had to defeat one member of an enemy duo to beat the mission, and the one my friend left alive is the one who showed up in the last mission.
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Aug 12, 2019 09:36
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Sedisp posted:Holy heck the indentured are baaaad. Gonna annex some amazons and replace them all for bullshit blinding stagger shots. My friend thinks they're the best tier 1 unit in the game. And having seen him clear the promethean factory with just 4 of them, their support unit, and a tanky hero, I have to agree. The trick to making them reeeeally good is getting them the targeting system mod ASAP. It's probably the single best mod for ranged units until well into the lategame. Bonus to accuracy, bonus to damage, multiplicative bonus to flanking damage, which you'll be using often because you've arranged them in a loose gunline (right?), their damage output is insane. Overlapping overwatch melts melee units. As for ranged, defend with the hero in cover a bit in front of your guys to get the enemy to advance and waste their shots on someone who won't die, then advance your gunline as much as you need for maximum (number of shots x accuracy) and kill them off. Don't be afraid to get out of cover to get a good shot - you don't need cover if there's nobody left alive to shoot back at you. And they're dirt cheap, especially with the 50% discount, and don't actually need any other mod to be a great unit. That having been said, do get the amazons if you can, their defensive equivalent of the above mod is the second best early mod in the game, and actually lets your guys survive if things don't go as planned. Early synthesis mods and tactical ops work great with them, too. He ranks amazon archers as second best tier 1, their main flaw being that a single mistake with them tends to lead to an expensive failure cascade.
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Aug 14, 2019 06:25
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Sedisp posted:Having to stick them in gun lines makes them ridiculously susceptible to stagger from nades or those hateful blinding arrows. There's also a whole load of maps where this simply does not work. Loose gunline.  Maybe I phrased it poorly - A formation, linear or slightly concave, such that the enemy gets in their range in roughly the same moment, but your guys are also spread out to make it easier to flank around the enemy and also to not get AOE-d to death.
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Aug 14, 2019 08:55
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The espionage missions are a trap. My friend vented about that planet, he ran into the same problem, though he mostly compained about how insanely difficult it is to keep track of which portal goes where. He won by replaying the previous mission to get his hero the mods and gear needed to make her a combat monster, then completely ignoring the espionage stuff and rushing scouts through the teleporters to find a few players and then rushing them one by one with his hero and a growing swarm of indentured while befriending everyone else.
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Aug 15, 2019 06:23
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The one game I played, I also found a Tyrant's Gauntlet in the first crate.
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Aug 15, 2019 15:14
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A "Sure, whatever, take it, whatever you want, just shut up already" toggle would be nice for demands of some NPC faction. 
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Aug 18, 2019 01:15
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Carnalfex posted:I looked through their skills and mods and there is nothing that gives them a revive Look again. It's a mod.
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Aug 18, 2019 16:28
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Captain Oblivious posted:Man y’all are cowards. I cleared a silver Voidtech landmark on turn 14 with a starting Syndicate army with a couple mods slapped on. I think I lost one dude. Modded Indentured are really good at clearing landmarks. In particular, voidtech, synth, pyrex factory, and amusement park landmarks are doable with minor losses. For other factions, less so.
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Aug 21, 2019 16:41
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orangelex44 posted:What if it wasn't a full refill? Just one more action point? That lets you either move, go into defense mode, or use abilities. That alone is probably worth it. Making it work like the sequential kill system mod, refunding one action point rather than all of them would be just about right. You could still do hilariously deadly things if you build your hero around it, but there wouldn't be quite the same level of - walks out of cover into the middle of the enemy army - "BOOM, YOU'RE DEAD" - walks across the map to go to cover that still lets you flank someone - "BOOM, YOU'RE DEAD". Having to commit to a location really does change the way the hero plays, and if you use a shotgun to keep the lethality of your hero's attack, you are forced to compomise with less range - which again plays into the positioning aspect of it. Maybe let it activate independently of any mods, though? So if you give your hero an action refund mod, you can go for a hat trick.
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Aug 24, 2019 17:24
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APC start is really good with the Vanguard, especially when doing fights manually. Defensive mods are better on your tier 1 dudes while you're clearing surface indies, offensive mods are better once you start dealing with dungeons and players, and generally getting into fights where you can't avoid losing units. 2x fully modded Engineers + 2x base PUGs = happy fun turret times for the whole family at half the cosmite price. You will be more heavily defined by your secret tech than most other factions. Don't be afraid to dig deep there. e: vvvv Yeah, OWLs are really, really good. Also, put a target on some rear end in a top hat in cover from a safe(ish) distance and watch them melt to your gunline.
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Aug 29, 2019 17:41
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Though I'd probably add, my advice depends on who you're fighting. If I were fighting an Assembly player early on, not taking secret tech into account, I'd use basic troopers with flechette ammo, the anti-stagger armor, and the stimpack healing thing. Flechette ammo works on every single assembly unit, since they're all cyborgs, and the -2 physical resist they get from the bleed really helps kill them a lot faster. The armor not only protects you from stagger (from snipers and melee units, both things that the Assembly loves) but also gives you 2 resist against physical damage and status effects (from assembly snipers and melee units, both of whom use physical damage). The healing thing isn't actually for the healing, though it's nice, but for the 2 turns of 2 damage resist to everything, which utterly neuters status effect chance, and massively reduces the damage you take. Ideally, you'd rush all your units ahead, accept the losses you take on turn 1 of actual fighting, next turn pop the stims on everyone, including people who aren't damaged, move in to exterminate the scavengers with extreme prejudice, then close the distance with the snipers. The turn after, the stims will expire, but that's OK, you're in range to unload everything you have into the surviving enemies. Don't try to play smart against the assembly, they can play smarter.
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Aug 29, 2019 18:07
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Aug 30, 2019 22:30
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Holy poo poo, Kir'Ko scouts are actually a decent combat unit. And they scale really well with mods that give them extra HP, due to their armor and swarm shield.toasterwarrior posted:I've reached endgame with my Voidtech Vanguard game, and it's probably the least inspiring combo I've done. Blandguard.
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Sep 1, 2019 07:05
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The Bramble posted:Man, any tips on Syndicate mission 2? The small islands are a huge change of pace from the continents economically. I have a really hard time keeping up with the AI. The teleport network also makes my brain melt, especially once it starts scrambling itself. I've been stuck on this mission for a few days now and need to make progress! my dad posted:The espionage missions are a trap. My friend vented about that planet, he ran into the same problem, though he mostly compained about how insanely difficult it is to keep track of which portal goes where. He won by replaying the previous mission to get his hero the mods and gear needed to make her a combat monster, then completely ignoring the espionage stuff and rushing scouts through the teleporters to find a few players and then rushing them one by one with his hero and a growing swarm of indentured while befriending everyone else. You can probably kill 2-3 enemies before the 50 turn time limit starts being a concern. e: toasterwarrior posted:Meanwhile, I also recall my Troopers barely getting hit and needing heals once you get a Nanite Support Station up along with the Phasewalk Modulator, so that's another slot free for damage mods. AoE sucks, but thankfully the station calldown is ludicrously cheap for what it can achieve. NSS single-handedly saved my rear end against Assembly AIs countless times. my dad fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Sep 1, 2019 |
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Sep 1, 2019 16:06
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Bouquet posted:-Is there any way to boost the odds of a status effect working? Hero levels, unit rank, mods, operations? Sedisp posted:-Anything that lowers the resistance to the damge channel the status effect is on also increases the chance of the status effect landing. In particular, Biomancer scans make enemies more vulnerable to sleep. Relative impact of +1 anything is generally 10%. Speaking of which, Gerblyn, does the +10% and +20% stuff actually add 10% and 20% respectively, or are they just simplifications of a logarhitmic scale used to calculate damage/success, based on powering 0.9 or 1/0.9 or something like that?
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Sep 1, 2019 19:27
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Digirat posted:Can you make them stagger immune by using the vanguard and the celestial stagger resistance mods at the same time? Yes. There's a lot of really neat stuff you can do by comboing early mods of different faction. The thing is, you can't really count on having it available to you.
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Sep 3, 2019 21:16
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The total integration mod is one of the best mods in the game, especially considering it's only 10 cosmite, and a good reason to dig a bit deeper.
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Sep 4, 2019 19:40
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Huntresses do really poorly on autoresolve, yeah, the AI isn't bad but it's also not good at keeping fragile units alive. But they also require a much different playstyle than most ranged units, and seem a lot weaker until you get the hang of them, after which point they eat most other tier 1s for breakfast. Ignoring cover and having a ranged AOE stagger/blind is a huge deal.
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Sep 7, 2019 07:44
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Bigger starting army is really dependent on faction. Blandguard don't get much use out of it, in my experience, but it can be a huge deal for the Dvar. As much as I like lancers, you probably need at least two of them for them to be fully useful. ninjewtsu posted:also, for whatever reason, shrikes are god drat immortal Shrikes are pretty good dogfighters, though I'm still amazed you won. I guess you got lucky with the hazard procs burninating the enemy while your laser birb resisted?
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Sep 7, 2019 07:52
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Mzbundifund posted:It feels like a strange idea to combo the nature lovers with the nature obliteraters, but Promethean Amazon really works well together. Purifiers lay down a hot spot and Arborian Sentinels entangle people to force them to stay in it. Lancers with pyro absorption armor run in and stab everyone with ignition module lances, then regenerate since they're standing on the fire. Everyone gets +20% accuracy +30% damage to everything since everything is on fire all the time. Not sure how well the later promethean units will do, but the early / midgame synergy here is strong and a lot of fun. Nothing kills Xenoplague dead as hard as Promethean Amazons do. Hell, you straight up hard counter Xenoplague Amazons, since you resist every single damage channel they can bring to the fight, and they can't resist your burninating.
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Sep 8, 2019 06:42
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Obviously, Ichaborg Brain the Headless Wrecker appears on the battlefield, chasing the hero to get his head back.
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Sep 8, 2019 12:19
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A major thing people forget about huntresses: They're actually a de facto 6 range unit. They get +1 range when they're in cover (from any direction), which is 99% of the time.
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Sep 10, 2019 03:24
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orangelex44 posted:You're not wrong, but they're still at a range disadvantage in normal situations. I also haven't explicitly tested how their accuracy decreases with range; that extra tile may matter less if it's attached to -40% to-hit. Assuming cover, nah, they're usually doing better than their enemies. They play really weird in the sense that your shorter range and lack of overwatch force you to come to your enemies, but once you're actually in range, the enemy generally needs to come closer to you to match your accuracy, losing some actions along the way. e: orangelex44 posted:edit: I also find that cover can be a limited resource on many maps - especially cover that's relatively close to the enemy. Yeah, that actually leads to one of the better ways to fight huntresses - set up not so that you're in cover, but so that they have to end turn somewhere they are not in cover in order to be useful. Reminds me of how drakes fight in Battle for Wesnoth (defensive terrain don't do jack poo poo for them, so you set up not to make use of it but to deny it to your enemies) e2: This is why my friend loves void huntresses with the no-flanking mod. They can do some bashit crazy bullshit in close range fights, and not give a single gently caress about some positioning tricks longer ranged enemies may attempt. my dad fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Sep 10, 2019 |
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Sep 10, 2019 03:36
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Amazon players who know what they're doing can almost completely hard counter you with lancers that have stagger my dad fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Sep 11, 2019 |
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Sep 11, 2019 05:55
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Helion posted:It sounds like you pretty much need to go Promethean, for the fire damage channel, in multi. Do you see any other, better options? As orangelex said, you have other options (although going Promethean is certainly a good one), the best other idea being to double down on fire-modded psi. Psynumbra is a good pick - focus flames Initiates are quite deadly, and can make good use of your starting Indentured with their ability. If you plan to use enforcers instead, go Celestian, you need that stagger resist reeeeeeal bad, otherwise the lancers are inflicting 3 hits on you for every 2 hits you inflict. Bio channel gets countered by the Amazon regen mod, though it takes some research to get to it, and they have to give up on the flanking immunity mod to get it. Integration... if you can live long enough to rush pacification protocols for the total integration mod (and that's a big if), your enforcers with that and focus flames can stampede over the Amazons. But if you're already spending that many resources on research, it's better and easier to tech to Wraiths, regardless of your secret tech, the Amazons will have a much harder time dealing with them.
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Sep 11, 2019 19:04
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Colonizers actually have a weapon and are fairly beefy, so this might not actually be a bug.
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Sep 18, 2019 22:28
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Bulwarks will be able to use trenches now? That'll be interesting. Scan:Catalogue nerf is good. Grounding harness can go on mechanical units now? Oooof, not sure it's a good idea. Enforcers get stagger resistance? Interesting, especially with the change to how their shield works. Shredder bomb nerf: Well deserved. Phase walk modulator nerf was... a good choice, as much as I hate to admit it. Hazmat at purifier tier 1 now? Nice. Dvar purifiers get entrench? Well, that's certainly one way to change things up a bit. The overall regen nerf is good. Awwww, that total integration nerf sucks. Having a very powerful midgame mod like that one was one of the few reasons to even bother going higher up into synthesis rather than just picking up the early stuff and ignoring the rest. It should at least give increased resistance to status effects. The speed boost to wild shrikes and wild harriers makes me worried about autoresolving with light garrisons, but I guess we'll see how that plays out. Naval changes: Very good. Movement changes: Very good. Overall regen nerf: Very good. Gameplay, colony, and research changes: Good. I'll have to see the tactical AI changes in action, but they sound pretty good. Did I say that the regen nerf is good? Because the regen nerf is good. e: Waaaait, wait, wait ,wait "Any unit upgrade that adds a status effect on hit to a units attacks now has a higher strength to apply from single shot attacks than from repeating attacks." You buffed the assembly? Seriously? my dad fucked around with this message at 12:04 on Nov 7, 2019 |
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Nov 7, 2019 11:45
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Do note that the outrage about "buffing the assembly" was an exaggeration for comedic purposes.
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Nov 7, 2019 16:10
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Nov 11, 2019 02:39
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orangelex44 posted:Troopers always seem like they're the absolute most average unit in the game. Probably intentionally. The thing is, an "average" unit is not really good enough to justify heavily modding, especially as a T1. They're just a bit too fragile, and since you need to bring more of them to be the same effective power level you end up spending more cosmite overall. Blandguard.
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Dec 31, 2019 08:17
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orangelex44 posted:Production for the HQ. Energy and tech can come from your other cities This. Even if I have a city that is to be a dedicated breadbasket, I'd rather get a production building that helps bring the city online faster. The only time I'd consider a food building is a scenario where you start in the absolute worst terrain for food and know it's unlikely that you'll be able to get a food city soon.
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Jan 9, 2020 21:52
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It might be worth converting food into a civilian industry resource for building infrastructure (while also being what your pop growth speed is based on), with production remaining as a mostly military industry resource. Though it still wouldn't solve the core problem. The best solution I can think of, if not for this AoW, maybe would be for the next AoW in 5 years or whenever: Split the production chains so that your cities can simultaneously build up their economy and their military - maybe building settlers requires dedicating both production lines at once to replicate the already existing tradeoff of doing so. That way, your war game won't require you to make a choice between the optimal (more units, MORE UNITS) and the suboptimal (anything else that isn't settling another city to pump units out of) - what was done to the tech tree to avoid the military>economy problem was a step in the right direction, but it didn't go far enough. Something would probably need to take the axe to avoid making things overly complex, but the pop assignment system just isn't contributing much - it was a fine idea, but it just didn't really work out - and could probably be cut without too many complaints, especially if the replacement does its job better. Even the food sharing mechanic could still work - once a city has reached a "good enough" point of growth and development, you could dedicate it to boosting the growth of other cities. Under no circumstances should there be a way of directly converting food to production and vice versa, though, because that would kinda break the whole point of the split.
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Jan 21, 2020 13:23
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Looks cool.
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Feb 12, 2020 12:23
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I'm suprised you didn't even mention Voidtech Vandguard.
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Mar 16, 2020 03:12
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Makes sense.
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Mar 16, 2020 03:44
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Campaign heroes should get damage oriented skills and mods over more leadership/support oriented ones. You usually start scenarios with weak armies, and having a monster of a combatant right out of the box is a major boon.
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May 3, 2020 07:06
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 04:26 |
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It's not a matter of distance. A city can have a maximum of 5 sectors - the city center and 4 expansions. Decide which sectors those are going to be, and just place your next city so that it has some other sectors to expand into.
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May 3, 2020 14:25
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