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Ground Control is just a beautiful game, and it plays well with its simplicity - you really get a feeling that you're a hard-bitten corporate mercenary whose loyalty is to her men first, and the company a long way second. Brilliantly, it manages this with voice acting and subtle interface design. Such a beautiful game. The expansion pack was okay but the game simply couldn't handle that much plot.
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Mar 28, 2020 11:06
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Alchenar posted:Past mission.... 4 I'd say that they get a bit too long for them not to have checkpoint saves. Ground Control is very, VERY much a game where you play every mission twice - the first time to know what surprises the mission will spring, the second time to actually complete it. Crayven as a faction are a bit better about this, having multipurpose units that can stand in for specialists if you didn't think to bring them along. But if you're playing the game alongside the LP, expect more than a few "augh" moments as you realise you just didn't bring the hard counter to an incoming enemy unit type. This, combined with the lack of mid-mission saves, is what can make Ground Control hard to swallow. When you're an hour into a complex mission, having to restart because the enemy brought Tactical Bunghole Infantry and you didn't think to pack your Anti-Bunghole Squad is deeply frustrating.
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Apr 1, 2020 00:42
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I always liked that touch about Dawnie bishops stopping their own hearts rather than letting a heretic touch them. It establishes the Order are ascetic, secretive, and not loving around.
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Apr 1, 2020 16:17
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Some useful takeaways from this mission: 1. The new Crayven vehicle we're introduced to is excellent; a multirole infantry support unit and light tank. It greatly outmatches its Order counterpart in a stand-up fight as can be seen by the way we shredded multiple squads of them. A squad of them had a place on my dropshops on offensive missions right up until the finale. 2. Both sides' basic infantry are quite effective against the side and rear armour of vehicles. Crayven infantry are quite nasty in this kind of flanking attack because Order units are fast and lightly-armoured. Their defence is speed and Not Being There to get hit. 3. Attacking bases in this game is very much about dismantling defensive networks. And yes Major Thomas is a hyper-generic rear end in a top hat but I did like the way they made the obligatory warcrime a vaguely plausible "hot blooded" one.
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Apr 4, 2020 22:35
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Nice touch to see our heroine look up the same Ominous Names as we did. I'd planned to talk about the new units seen in this video but I'm honestly confused as to how the spoiler policy is being enforced at this point.
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Apr 12, 2020 02:20
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Strategic Sage posted:The reason I don't think that works is there are at least four transporters in the convoy. So you could theoretically get one or two with precise timing, but I think the others would just turn around. This is quite true and I have done it. You can hide and let the first light hoverdyne squad pass you by, but I think the one in the crater is specifically positioned there at map start. As soon as any Order unit has you in line of sight the transports run for it. You can chase them down if you took a squad of light terradynes but you probably won't be able to kill them before they get back into range of the base's heavy turrets. Main Battle Terradynes can, incidentally, take those heavy turrets in a stand-up fight. The Crayven Wolf is...well, a tank. Heavy frontal armour, powerful main gun, and decent straight-line acceleration. They're a solid match for any ground unit and are never a bad choice for a battle. Their HP won't last as long as you'd like, so keep that APC around and heal them up between fights. The only dangers to a MBT are hard counters that kill it too fast to pop its mostly-defensive equipment, so they're better on mobile offense and need scouts out ahead. We also got a glimpse of the Order's MBT-equivalent, the main battle hoverdyne. Slightly longer-ranged, looks like a hovering 1950s truck cab with a big turret on the roof and shoots big blue plasma bolts. Vastly superior to the "sneeze and they explode" light hoverdyne and hoverbikes we've seen to date but will lose hard to Wolves in a stand-up fight (even light terradynes can give them trouble if the terradynes use their equipment). But of course they have the speed and mobility to circle around and get flank or rear shots, and the big blue bolts hit quite hard. They may seem outmatched but it's very much a GDI/Nod balance situation with these two. More on this later.
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Apr 12, 2020 17:44
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We haven't seen the Scout TD in action so I won't comment on it just yet, but this mission does make clear why you might need them - the Order's Medium Hoverdynes can shoot from outside your MBTs' vision range! (Also, the reason that base entrance leading off the map is there is because this mission uses part of the same White Asem map as last time, but rotates the terrain 90 degrees. That entrance is the one we defended back in Mission 2). Enrica is a remarkably well-realised example of a Corporate Arsehole and gives me flashbacks to real corporate arseholes in my life who even sounded rather similar. Just without the alien artefacts.
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Apr 15, 2020 20:45
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Ah the Jaegers. Excellent infantry that struggle only due to having small squads. At first glance they're a standard RTS stealthy sniper unit (there weren't that many such units at the time Ground Control came out, actually - pretty much only Starcraft's Ghost), but their rifle is anti-materiel so they are VERY capable at light anti-tank work, particularly from cover. They're excellent at picking off defence turrets too. They will kill infantry so long as the infantry doesn't locate and overwhelm them. The Scout terradyne is a dune buggy with attitude. Slightly armoured but it has no business getting into a fight with anything other than infantry or light aircraft. It'll last longer than Order hoverbikes (and can kill them handily, and even engage a light hoverdyne squad one on one although you shouldn't let them). I found them useful for their long sight range and for chasing down infantry, since they're one vehicle that has less trouble cleaning them out. Lastly, I like the asymmetrical design of Order light aerodynes. A nice touch.
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Apr 18, 2020 18:18
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Torpedo infantry are extremely rude. They fire their missiles upwards from special backpacks, making them excellent at ambushes and hiding in amongst buildings. I'm not sure if this game models top armour but it always seemed like they were ripping through my units' HP at a terrifying rate.
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Apr 22, 2020 11:00
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I wonder what the unit names are in other languages? Presumably the Swedish army has its own collection of wry references and injokes. I never had a problem with artillery's power in this game. In the words of the classic quote, artillery wins wars. The only issue is that it makes players less likely to take any other units, so some interesting stuff in the faction rosters sits unused because the slots are used for artillery all the time. ANNIE-1 mentions it when the power station goes up, but if you kill the voltage houses in each gun installation then the attached turrets can no longer fire. This and the dug-in SAM sites in the hills are actually holdovers from an earlier version of this mission, which formed the game's demo. Here they're just artillery bait, but in the demo version you could take a different unit mix. That made the back route a bit more viable, at least. And yes we've now met the Order heavy hoverdyne. It's decidedly lacklustre. Higher rate of fire than the Medium and a heavier punch but it's one Order unit that has to engage your gunline to do its job and MBTs just blast it to pieces.
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Apr 26, 2020 13:49
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 13:44 |
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I will have more to say on artillery being the be-all and end-all later (and I did play MP but it's impossible to discuss without spoilers, sigh). But yes the simplest counter is to simply move when you see the shells coming down. There's a reason the JANICE warhead has a higher and faster trajectory if you look, and that's because it's a YOU! DIE NOW! button for troublesome heavy turrets/hoverdynes. And yes in this map we saw when Heavy Hoverdynes can be dangerous. Against a line of MBTs in open terrain they were fodder, against one squad of MBTs in dense terrain with their range advantage, they can mulch you. One thing I was sad we didn't see shown off on this map; the "anti-aerospace" guns sit underground in silos at mission start. If you scroll over to one and watch when it first comes into visual range, they have some amazing animation of slowly opening their domed hatches and rising out of the ground. The silo interior is even lit and detailed too if you zoom all the way in. Some structures also have ambient sound effects if you move the camera close, mostly Crayven ones.
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Apr 30, 2020 03:35
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