Age of Wonders: Planetfall by Triumph Studios

Grats on the win, @Zilla_Blitz ! Looks like you’re having fun.

Is there a mod that lets us see our units’ locations more clearly? The “military” overlay map is so cluttered I can hardly pick out my units. Maybe I need to pick a more colorful shield than the default brownish-yellow? But what I’d really like is a simple map of the world with just my units on it – not much else. The “operations” map actually looks like this, but it doesn’t include my units. But the “military” map and the main map are so cluttered that I struggle to figure out what’s where.

I did a quick search in the Steam Workshop and didn’t see anything that fits the bill. Maybe there’s a “simple map” view mode that I’m missing in-game? If not, if anyone knows of a “simpler map mod,” please let me know! Thanks.

There are toggles iirc.

So - this is my second Empire game, where it just wont end the turn. This is 129 turns in, about 4 hours worth of game time, more or less like my first time.

Anyone else seeing this? Its slightly annoying.

Edit: And again, at turn 130? What the heck?

sounds odd.

When you launch the game, in the launcher, scroll down and look for “debug mode” - which will throw up a log as you play.

If there is an error, it should be logged.

That log should then help the developers.

Its not an error where I see a crash - The turn just wont finish and sticks on the Independents moving for all eternity.

Okay - I’ve tried this a few times now, reloading earlier saves, and it keeps doing it. Yet another game down the drain.

I just played a second game tonight and about 70 turns in a lot of the command options vanished. Exiting the game and rebooting fixed it. I suppose you already tried that?

Thanks! Yes, so far so good. I played a second game tonight as the Kir’Ko, on a small world, with just 2 AI opponents. The game was much brisker. This time I developed faster than the AI did, and “easy” was definitely easy. Next game I’m going to push the difficulty up a bit.

Yeah, I did try restarting the client, and nothing Validated files as well…

So…eh…
Decided to do the Starking campaign - And reloaded a quicksave. It has the correct name and turn time, but…Its not my game, but another game where I am an amazon.

This is going really well.

And now the campaign I am playing can’t continue past turn 133. It just wont start the next turn.

edit: This fixed itself by restarting the entire computer. Is this some sort of memory leak, then?

After playing a couple of games now, I’m starting to wonder about the game design balance between time spent in the tactical game and time spent in the strategic game, and how the two work together. I want to be able to play some games at higher difficulties before judging, though. I’m curious to see how different it is when the AI is putting up more of a fight.

Mine felt like something like that. My glitch happened after having the game running uninterrupted for a number of hours.

I’ve had to abandon my two Galactic planets. Their savegames were unsalvageable and kept not ending my turn. Luckily, my campaign didn’t do that.

Its fairly frustrating to play a 4 hour game, and then have it just not be winnable.

Yeah, it’d be frustrating to invest that much time and have it go sideways on you like that.

I wonder if the issues we’ve seen are connected to the update/DLC.

AFAIk running in debug mode logs everything in the game, which is why i thought it could help.

I’ve never had the game hang like you describe.

I have had it take a long time to resolve some animations in tactical combat, so the game appeared to freeze, but 2 minutes later the animation had resolved.

That is thankfully very rare.

This is after 15 minutes waiting a few times. Since turn times normally are a few seconds , or at least under a minute, I am certain that isn’t it.

Finally had a chance to dip back in for an Oathbound game this weekend and my goodness. You really want to use the Precognition doctrine and get the hero ability that essentially does the same so all your units start with 2 stacks of precognition each battle. Two attacks just negated (along with whatever status effects they may have applied) is a total game changer, especially when most of the nastiest enemies in the game rely on status effect applications to be truly powerful. And even the ones who don’t hate missing twice.

I’m doing better than I usually do, maybe because I’m taking more time to read all my unit abilities more closely. I haven’t lost a unit yet in tactical combat. I even have won a couple ‘impossible’ battles on manual, heh. I’m on Easy difficulty, but I still seem to need it – I’m behind my only AI opponent (the Dvar). (I chose a small map, 1 opponent, just to learn.)

So I now have the option to spend 8 turns building my secret weapon. I guess that can lead to a victory, but the world will presumably rise up against me. Is this a good option to pursue? The tech is a dead-end, so it’s a pretty big commitment of resources to this one victory type. Is the Unifier victory a better bet in a simple two-person game – just butter up the Dvar and win that way?

Yeah double-stacked precognition is great. Between that and the armor and shields, my guys often don’t have a scratch on them by the time they are in melee and ripping up the enemy line.

You need to build 3 of them, research the final operation, enact it, and survive 10 turns without losing any of them. This will be made easier by the fact that during those turns, the weapon counts as hitting pretty much everything that isn’t you or your allies. Just so you can make an informed decision :)

Cool, that helps; thanks! So it sounds like it’s a feasible way to go. I guess I’ll try it.

I went the secret weapon route in my last game. My ally stood by while my enemy kept on being an enemy. The game ended before the counter ran up because my enemy abandoned his capital (presumably to attack me I suppose), which made it easy for me to attack the capital and end the game that way.

Let me lay out some early game Vanguard theory crafting as an exercise in getting some understanding of the depths of this game. Vanguard is my go to choice b/c they are the easiest to get a handle on IMO.

First, a quick look at the units:

Tier 1, scouty drone thing does scouty drone stuff. Fine.
Tier 1, Trooper, surprisingly good glass-cannon style ranged damage, easily upgraded and useful for a long time. Due to it’s low cost, it should form the core of your early game armies.
Tier 2, stupid bike thing. Don’t like em. Ignore. YMMV.
Tier 2, PUG, robot that heals and refreshes other units once per battle. Decent support unit that is great with:
Tier 2, Engineer, support unit that can create a turret once per battles (but twice if you use a PUG to refresh it) - your PUG/Engi synergy will be a source of much early game winning if you use it right

So early on, a Hero with a PUG, an Engi and 3 Troopers is going to be your vanilla stack that can punch above it’s weight decently and can be modded a lot.

Tier 3, Laser Tank. LASER TANK. Nothing fancy. Lots of armor, lots of HP, lots of range, lots of damage. LASER TANK.
Tier 3, Walker thing, it’s better than I first thought but I keep mistaking its icon for a Drone Carrier. Useful if you are already rocking out with Laser Tanks.
Tier 4, Drone Carrier, not as sexy as most other factions Tier 4 but actually packs a mighty combat wallop due to the fact that it’s three drone abilities have separate timers, thus allowing you to pump out 3 drones and keep them up. Usually comes very late but can be the crusher to break big enemy wheels O Death or tough adventure sites.

Midgame, I transition to modding my Engi/PUG/Trooper stacks and then adding Laser Tanks to replace the fodder Troopers as I go. Very later I will add some walkers or Drone Carriers to taste.

But the core of PUG/ENGI synergy plus ranged damage persists.

(Part 1 of 2)