2768

The Vanguard is the worst campaign. I liked Dvar and Amazon much better.

2769

IIRC most of them have a goal-win first stage, and a skirmish-like second.

Try Dvar next and turn the difficulty up for the first world.

2770

One of my hangups is that since I’m goal oriented I will go for the goal-win if I think it is the most expedient way to win :-)

Thanks for the Dvar recommendation.

2771

The campaign structure is very ambitious, in that you can skip many parts and still get to the conclusion.

It’s quite impressive how they managed to organise it.

And did you know the guy doing the campaign work used to be an AoW3 modder?

Anyway my favourite missions are Dvar 1 and 2.

2772

While Planetfall is by far, very far not the worst game I’ve played in 2019 / 2010, it is the one that makes me the saddest. I’ve spent some more time with it in the past couple weeks, for the first time since the expansion, and those damn unit mods still just sap much of my enjoyment from the game. Sorry for beating a dead horse, but I really want to like Planetfall after liking AoW3 so much.

My personality wants me to say, “I want these mods on my units to take that structure because those defends have ability X, but then I need these mods for that enemy over there.” In reality I don’t really need to do this as much as I do because I can still win the battles, I just feel inefficient if I don’t - but tedious if I do.

I love the baked in abilities the units have. I also like being able to just look at a unit and know, OK he can do this and his strength is this without examining each one to see what mods it has.

I know you guys are probably annoyed at me saying this as many times as I have, but I just need to vent. I also know I’m in the minority, so it is a ‘me’ thing. I’m glad so many of you love this game. I’d like to too.

2773

Hey, I get where you’re coming from completely. I’ve played enough of both at this point to be comfortable saying broadly speaking I enjoy AOW3 more.

So I’m just trying to enjoy each for its own thing at this point.

I actually like the mods, so we differ on that, and I love overwatch. But there’s something about the, I don’t know, clarity of vision in game design throughout AOW3 that just works for me.

And then there’s this one element I can’t get around because it stares at you the entire time you’re playing Planetfall, I don’t just dislike the look of the maps (strategic and tactical) compared to AOW3, I’d go so far as to say I hate them. This really dawned on me yet again playing a co-op of AOW3 last night.

So, like I said, best I can do to enjoy Planetfall is try hard not to compare the two, but it’s not easy.

2774

Nah man, you’re good. I have come around from being super-annoyed by the mods to being sort of indifferent to them. They do take up less brain space once you’re more familiar with the game, which helps, but it’s still extra stuff to keep track of.

The biggest help I’ve found is a general sense of, “Oh Psynumbra units do this, Synthesis dudes do that, ooh yeah that’s a scary combo, beware of Psynumbra Overseers…” But even so, you still need to dig into the dang mods and figure out if there’s anything you need to keep in mind on top of, “Eh, this is roughly 10% harder-hitting and 20% tougher than standard.”

To be real honest, I’d rather have stuck with the same AOW3 model where base Echo Walkers do XYZ, then Vanguard ones get A, Amazon ones get B, etc. But wishes, horses, etc, etc.

Similar issues with the map for me, @easytarget.

Still, I’m at something like a B/B+ game compared to AOW3’s A+, so life goes on.

2775

Is there a mod/setting to disable the unit mods? I think the game is pretty cool, but I have to deploy my middle-aged apathy powers to keep myself from obsessing over the stats as much as the game is designed for me to potentially do. So I understand where you’re coming from. Also in a 2770 post thread, repeating a thought a few times seems totally fine!

2776

I disagree with the mod complaints.

But I do understand the complaint that the mods make every unit that bit more complicated.

One could argue that that’s an inevitable result of making them more useful.

In AoW3 a swordsman was a swordsman, and you forgot about them quite quickly, except for cases like Dreadnoughts making the armoured ones slightly more armoured, or cheaper.

In Planet fall, your initial infantry are more differentiated in their base form, and the mods mean you can use them pretty much all through the game.

But if you’re the type to try and remember all the numbers and modifiers, your brain will melt.

I do understand the visual complaint alot more though.

All I can say is that you do get used to it.

2777

I found using the templates made it much easier to manage mods. Find a few templates that work for you and apply them to all your units of that type.

If you need an alternate mod composition build those via their template.

I never played AoW3 though so maybe I don’t know what I’m missing.

2778

It’s not just a “you” thing. Plenty of people feel this way, and there are two issues here:

#1) You don’t need mods, so there’s no reason to care about them, if you’re playing on too easy a difficulty level. If you’re just using brute force to plow over the enemy, there are entire systems you can ignore, and that goes for any game. So if you want to get the most out of mods, you’re going to have to push up the difficulty. Because anyone who says he can win battles without mods is playing on too easy* a difficulty level.

#2) Don’t be all “waaaah, I don’t wanna build my own spaceships” in a game in which spaceship construction is a part of the game design. I read this complaint so many times about games like Alpha Centauri and GalCiv and even Star Ruler. I’m not saying you’re doing that, @robc04, but I suspect that’s part of what’s going on with people who don’t like the mod system. It’s an integral part of the game design, and if you** don’t like it, you might be playing the wrong game.

-Tom

* which is an observation and not a judgment, by the way

** again, I’m not directing this at you, @robc04

2779

Exactly! The mods are a fundamental part of the game’s progression.

I love how the icons and unit names do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of visually identifying units with specific mods.

-Tom

2780

I like the mods. I think they add a lot of strategic depth to the game. I pick how I’m going to mod my units and stick with it and not go crazy trying to adapt to every situation. You also have hero abilities, secret techs and strategic and tactical ops to help in difficult situations.

2781

It’s possible I played on too easy a difficulty, but it wasn’t my intent. I used:
Intensity: Normal
Opponent: Hard
Size: Medium
I hadn’t played in a long time so I didn’t know what I should use. I did use mods, I just didn’t picked the ones I used without stressing too much about it.

You aren’t wrong Tom - which I guess means you’re right :-) I am doing that. I just wanted to like this game so much and I guess I’m bummed at what it turned out to be, because I like many other aspects of the game. I rarely preorder and I preordered the whole shebang with the season pass. I’m not mad about it, just bummed each time I fire it up and get disappointed.

Like @inactive_user said, some of this would probably be improved if I spent more time with the game, or put some effort into learning the mods - but I’m just not there at this point and since I temd to play one game and put it down I don’t really get there. I just finished my game and won with the secret tech weapon, which is what I always seem to do - probably because then I can avoid needing to put too much brain power into my enemy’s mods :-)

2782

If its any consolation, the interplay between mods and units is so deep that I don’t think anyone is an expert in it all, not even the devs, or anyone but the most hardcore multiplayers, whose games revolve around much shorter matches than what I play.

In a typical game, and I play long games, super large maps, many opponents, I still have things to research and miss to play with post turn 150.

You don’t need to remember all the mods.

You’re best of thinking of a basic theme, and focusing on that for most of the game.

For example, Syndicate shock troopers. That means indentured, going heavily down the arc weapons tree.

Late game, some of those mods are amazing, almost broken.

There’s a stun mod for example. Low chance to stun, but you can get 3 shots per round per indentured, and you can mass them, and there’s another mod that lowers arc resistance.

So you can win the game by massing indentured and nodding them, which means your brain bandwidth is conserved, until you get more experience and can start to experiment with more stuff, like holding off on indentured and instead focusing on Enforcers and the Racial healer, whose name eludes me.

Those are both psionic. Load them up with mods, melt faces.

And we’re still on just one race, not even half the units, and we’ve completely ignored secret tech.

Point is, the game can be very straight forward, or you can go down a very long rabbit hole, but the choice is yours.

So mods are very much an integral part of the game that I don’t see getting changed.

The visual complaints, as I understand them, are with the map looking clutters and somehow washed out.

I do think AoW3 had maybe the best map in the series.

2783

I like mods and I understand why are they there but I think that they move the balance too much into the tactical battle side.

AoW3 was close to perfect in that regard. You got hundreds of different units broadly falling into one of the categories. Units differed by experience level and special boosts (like you’ve built them in a special city or you have some leader upgrade e.g. Dreadnought could give every cavalry man a pistol). In AoWPF I feel that strategic layer is a little lighter if only cause now you think about the map in terms of provinces. And tactical layer is much, much more complex. Even without the mods units are more diverse. With mods you get tactical complexity that rivals dedicated tactical games. XCOM comparison strikes again.

As BBB says this system is so complex that it’s relaxing, on the other hand. When you play XCOM tactical battles you want perfect play. Here perfect play is impossible cause there are just so many possibilities. So in a sense you may think long and hard about your overall strategy and goof around in tactical battles. I guess. I don’t know. I can’t wrap my head around how complex they are in a genre where the battles are almost always decided before they start.

2784

That’s an interesting take.

I think it has made the tactical space much larger.

But at the same time they’ve expanded the strategic space too.

It’s simply a bigger game overall.

2785

Maybe they did. You obviously know those games better than I do. But to a casual player AoW3 strategic layer feels much more complex I think. A lot of things are streamlined in AoWPF starting with city foundation. I understand that they facilitate interesting choices instead of measuring hexes in AoW3 (“If I place a city in here I’ll need to rush stone walls and observatory and one populace growth. Then I’ll reach that Heart of the Blight”) but on the surface it looks like a complex choice replaced with an artificial dilemma. Kinda like in old X-Com games you might have several alien attacks at the same time givin you a dilemma while in new one they literally happen at the same time.

When you explore you know that everything important is in the middle of a province so exploration feels simpler too.

I’m not saying it’s primitive, I gladly accept when designers boil down miriad of choices (many of which are obvious when you know what you’re doing and thus are just busywork and traps for newbs) to few interesting ones. But it feels like they did streamlining in strategic layer and the opposite was done in combat. Now in combat everything has up to 3 (4 for heroes) modules in addition to improvements from city buildings, hero specialization, spells and so on.

2786

What settings do people like to use? I’m mostly asking about difficulty related settings, but really any settings you deem important.

2787

Extra large maps, highest difficulty, hardest marauders.

Game gets quite challenging quite quickly.