Just a word of warning. If you put that fire mod on them, watch out for friendly fire. I’ve savaged my melee guys a bunch of times accidentally.
Glad to help. Like you, it took a while before I could appreciate and understand a lot of the game which was different than AoW where I was instantly “there”.
I wish… I don’t know. There’s something about this game… too much combat? I can’t get over the pace though. I think the most I’ve played is about 50 turns… and I can’t go any further. I turn it on, play for a few minutes, turn off the TV and come back to it after a day or two… it’s just… shrug. Steam says I have over 250 hours played but most of that is idle time. I think it’s idling now. There’s a lot to like and yet…
When I had the largest battle I’ve had yet - three full stacks vs three full stacks - I hit save and… auto resolved. Because I really didn’t want to spent all that time fighting it. Most of my units died, but I won, and … good enough.
That’s probably not a good sign for my future interest.
If in playing this you’re thinking there’s too much combat I’ve got to ask, did you play AOW3?
I did. Was a bit down on AOW as well.
I think there’s something… hmm. Let me put it like this, I think (trying to parse out my issue here):
In Total War games, you can win 2 to 1 or even 3 or 4 to 1, in the right circumstances, with the right units, heroes, spells or defenses. Here… I feel like… that’s not the game being played. The game being played is one where ideally, you never lose a single unit. Which is great… but if you’re outnumbered… 2 to 1… you’re not really going to not lose units. Frankly, you’re quite possibly not going to win, especially in the early-mid game, which tbh is about all i’ll ever really get to, most of the time.
But unlike in Total War, you… don’t really have epic defeats. You have setbacks and mistakes. It’s more like Civilization rather than an RTS or Total War game, where every decision builds on every other decision, and too many negative results doesn’t make an epic campaign, it just means you have to restart.
And that means that when I fight, every fight has to be played perfectly. Every facing, every mod, every special ability. And that’s… great! For a little while. Doing that with 18 or 24 or 30 units though… or doing it dozens and dozens of times, over and over again, that’s just…
… tiring.
That’s an interesting perspective because I am quite happy losing units, and figuring out how to compensate for their loss.
I love the game, but I also can only play in short bursts. My issue is the UI. Not being able to move armies when zoomed out. Having to switch between resource and army view, it should allow you to enable the map features you want to see like in TWWH2. Difficulty distinguishing things on the map. It gets tiring. I hope they improve this. It also doesn’t help that I game late at night and am a bit tired. I usually end up switching to something more accessible, like Gladius or Deity Empires.
The terrible (un)readability of the map is by far the games biggest downside and why I ultimately kind of lost interest. The map mode defaults to Resource rather than Military, which is far more situational. These map modes should not even be different things, there is not so much information to take in that the mind reels. The whole part where apparently none of these guys ever played a Total War and saw how they locked your camera to relevant (and highly filterable) AI movements is… beyond my comprehension.
It’s a great game in a lot of ways, but man does it fight you every step of the way.
I have the same thing with AOW3. There is so much optimization you can, and should, do in every single battle that it’s quite exausting to play for any length of time.
You should list all of this with concrete ways to improve it, and then send it to Triumph.
See you just have to put 500 hours into it so the basics of the combat optimization become second nature and it doesn’t take so much cognitive energy ;)
(I’m not actually kidding, you should definitely do that.)
Anyone else feel like turning off the NPC factions? I looked into figuring out a way to turn down how often they ask for stuff, but I’m already at the lowest setting before turning them off. It seems I don’t get more than 2-3 turns before I’m asked to do another task. It’s a bit ridiculous and if it wasn’t for the minor benefit of having them as a friend, and the big detriment that is having them spawning armies to attack me, I’d just want to ignore them anyway. I’m not sure that it’s really a great benefit when I’m wasting research, production, or exploration time on completing this stuff.
I have always hated minor races in all 4x games. They’re an annoyance getting in the way of my world/galaxy domination. That being said, they didn’t bother me too bad in this game bu now that you brought it up…
I’ve had my moments where the constant requests bugged me, but I got past it by just weighing what they offer against what they’re requesting and doing what they ask when it feels like a sufficient benefit and declining when it doesn’t.
The way it’s rolled into the game I don’t really have the option of just completely ignoring them because I get diplomacy and build points for completion. I don’t much care about the units they give, although I do like some of the ones they offer to sell you along with some of their mods.
So, net: I’ve learned to live with them by taking advantage of them, and ignoring them when they don’t up to the point they threaten me with declaring, at which point unless I’m planning to remove them I do whatever they ask or give them what they requested.
For me once I get mid campaign the requests aren’t much of an issue in terms of what they ask for, I usually have research capacity or cosmite production capacity to spare and just give them that or energy if that’s what they’re asking for.
All that said: I would tweak how often these come up and tone it down just a smidge. Early on though this is a pretty reliable place to get diplomacy points, something early on I’m often short on and need.
They’re excellent for scouting. Also: cannon fodder.
Yeah, if you approach them like MMO quests where you feel like you’re expected to complete them all…woof. Nope. Treat them like minor powers on your path to world domination. If the deal is good, sure. If not, move on.
That’s true, I have put them to use doing that. I’d very much like an auto-scout feature then I could fire and forget these guys.
You make it sound like a fighting game with that description.
I think you are onto something here. I have…a few hours in the game, and I don’t really think about optimizing stuff.
I think there is a setting to turn them off. Also, you only really need to worry about demands, not quests. You can decline all the quests given, to no real detriment (unless you are doing quests for one faction and ignoring the rest) but demands have consequences if not met.
It has been requested by many people. Hard to program reliably though I think, like do you make the scout stop if it sees enemy, neutrals etc, do you divert it to pick up free loot etc.
I guess my rough take on auto explore would be if you’re going to be lazy enough to rely on it (I would be) you’ll have to suffer the consequences of it running into stuff and either being stopped by it or destroyed by it.
As for loot, it picks up whatever it passes over.
Net: If I was worried about the ding I’d take for losing a battle due to a scout death I should manually scout and remove it like I do now when I know it’s going to get killed before my next turn. Thing is, I don’t really care about that ding when it comes to NPCs or maruaders, so in general I like the idea of a fire and forget scout with the commiserate downsides factored in.