Not exactly, because seals were all over the map and could be claimed and defended by AI before you locate or have the military forces to capture them. Doomsday is strictly within your own (presumably well defended and upgraded) borders. Plus Doomsday has mandatory massive secret tech research, construction, and operation requirements; whereas seals can be captured early on and defended throughout a game with mostly racial military research-> units.
The timers for both (for either countdown or point accumulation) can be customized, but you’re rewarded for holding on to more seals by earning victory points and approaching victory faster. With Doomsday, you just wait out the specified number of turns and that’s it. And because they’re all (presumably) in one general area, they’re much easier to defend.
I see them as different paths to victory with their own technological requirements, feel, and pacing. Oh, and capturing a seal often gave cool rewards. And you know, treasure, fuck yea.
No, of course not exactly. But in terms of an victory objectives beyond the usual, seems like they shifted Seals into Doomsday victories. Since having Seals in Planetfall would take a lot of the teeth out of Doomsday, I’m guessing they were replaced.
I’m not trying to deny anyone’s preference for Seals, but I don’t think they were just arbitrarily left out. Seems they were intentionally designed out, which is my response to Sharpe’s questions:
There’s a ton of workshop content. Maybe someone stuck Seals back in with a mod?
-Tom
Sharpe
2870
To me the key distinction between Seals and Doomsday is that Seals provoked a lot more “back and forth” both between me and the AI and also between competing AI. Basically Doomsday is fairly linear while Seals could be interestingly multilateral.
Also, I checked both Workshop and Nexus for a Seals mod - no joy as yet.
Still an excellent game but missing one of my favorite features for now.
The fact that the devs added no colonizer mode in the Tyrranosaurus patch (another aow3 favorite of mine) makes me hopeful for a future patch
Well there are multiple victory conditions, which can be said to cancel each other out, and most are optional.
So I could see seals working.
The new expansion has the Invasions mechanic, which has some overlap with seals, in that it requires you to go to a certain number of sites on the map, defeat the guardians and thus win. More specifically:
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You get an Invaders scout force (remember - or perhaps this is news? - that there are different invasion forces. They are all dark jellyfish, but with different flavours, e.g. lightning flavoured, and they are all tough but usually with one specific weakness, e.g. biochemical) Their armies are based around a few dark jellies with several normal units “enthralled” - kill the jellies and the enthralled units disappear.
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Then invasion spawn beacons land. Think of these as crashed spaceships or portals to wherever the dark jellies come from. These beacons are defended and also spawn stacks of invaders, who will attack you.
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Defeat the spawn beacon to get rid of it, and stop it spawning.
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Be aware that there are multiple of these things, and they don’t all come at once, so you might get 1 on turn 60, then another on turn 80 etc.
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Defeat x of them and the “main” beacon is revealed.
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Defeat that beacon and you win the game.
Sharpe
2872
That sounds interesting. I had not heard that level of detail about the “invasions” part of the expansion so that’s good to know.
Oooh cool, that’s actually much closer to seals (which I also love) if it plays out they way I think it will from the description.
I don’t see the invasions mechanic listed anywhere in the description of the DLC, although I didn’t read your spoiler text.
500MB patch coming down the pipe - is this ‘it’?
The expansion and associated game update are live on consoles. But I think Steam players will be waiting till Steam does their usual morning updates.
Patch notes:
Here’s a small sample of new stuff (click them to expand):
New Feature: Personality Traits
New Features
New Feature: AI Personalities
AI Personalities adds two personality traits to all AI controlled players: the Preference trait and the Strategy trait. The Preference trait determines which things the AI player will like and dislike, this trait may also change their diplomatic behavior. The Strategy trait influences how the AI player runs their empire by changing which things they will research, which units they build and on which sector specializations they will focus.
Preference Traits
- Xenophile
- Xenophobe
- Elitist
- Compassionate
- Militarist
- Pacifist
- Loyal
- Treacherous
- Ruthless
Strategy Traits
- Warmonger
- Mercantile
- Technologist
- Operative
- Generalist
New Feature: Diplomatic Feedback
We added a Diplomatic Feedback system that will inform what certain diplomatic messages from the AI mean or what effects they have. This is done for a number of different messages to help improve feedback from the system making it more transparent. While giving away some of the AI’s plan, this should provide more agency over diplomacy.
General Updates
General
- Updated combat cards usage: You can now still set either combat vs the AI or vs humans to something other than use combat cards, like force auto or force manual.
- Added support for trading weapons and mods from your item arsenal with other players.
- The system will now block the AI from choosing leaders that humans have picked.
- Added a PFX to sprawl objects spawning when cities increase in size or new sector upgrades are built
- Reworked Observe Mode and added a ‘Follow Enemies Only’ option
- Exploration sites are now added almost exclusively through the Global pass rather than through sector definitions. This should result in less clustered Exploration sites and more variation in the types encountered.
- The amount of Exploration Sites that is placed on a map is now linked against the amount of Low Value Landmarks in the Advanced Setup.
- Added a new early-game Paragon NPC faction quest: Natural Order
New Tactical Combat Maps
Tactical Combat Maps
- Water Energy pickups now have their own Tactical Combat Map
- Water Production Pickups now have their own Tactical Combat Map
- Water Cosmite Pickups now have their own Tactical Combat Map
- Water Cosmite Nodes now have their own Tactical Combat Map
- Submarine Spawners now have their own Tactical Combat Map
- Bronze Landmark: Sunken District now has its own Tactical Combat Map
Tons of Diplomacy Improvements
Diplomacy
We’ve gone through a lot of the Diplomatic feedback and made improvements in areas where we think players may have difficulty understanding and engaging with diplomacy. Such as understanding what certain messages mean or what effects have happened, when you can or cannot improve the diplomatic state with another player.
- We have performed an overhaul of the AI planning system in order to expose more of how it works by making all internal modifiers visible in the opinion of an AI player. Additionally we have changed how they determine who to befriend making it more directly related to their opinion of the player.
- When a player surrenders as vassal, any structures they currently occupy that belong to the overlord will be returned. The overlord does take all structures that they occupy. Because it is now easier to become a vassal of an AI player, this will prevent players from quickly absorbing colonies from other players by offering themselves as a vassal.
- The AI now has a neglect timer which will trigger when they share an increased diplomatic state with the player and have not had any interactions from the player for some time. This system will give incentive to continuing to interact with AI players after you have achieved a certain diplomatic state. This neglect can be overcome by changing your diplomatic state, trading and sending a compliment or insult.
- AI players are no longer allowed to actively offer or demand peace/vassalage if they have an attack request against the target player. This is done to prevent them aborting war coordination by quickly leaving the war. The target player may still broker peace with your ally however.
- You can now trade energy- and cosmite for 10 turns again in Teams games and in a vassalage.
- The opinion of human players is no longer visible as it has no gameplay value.
- Open Borders, Shared Vision, Shared Intelligence and Orbital Relay pacts can now be traded during vassalage.
- You can no longer trespass in occupied sectors.
- During a turn you can now exceed the max influence cap if you for example complete a quest or empire task, only at the end of the turn is the maximum applied and will it be set to 200 influence.
- The AI will no longer actively go out of wars during campaign missions where the AI is scripted to go to war.
- The AI will no longer foreshadow about going to war if they are not ready to do so at the time, we’ve done this to help avoid confusion about AI players threatening war but never following up on it.
- AI players now only look at the tradeable Casus Belli points when declining a trade because of Casus Belli because the player cannot directly act towards removing those.
There are still tons and tons and tons and tons of more balance adjustments and changes in the linked patch notes above.
Mine was live half an hour before your post.
Edit: ok so the 1.3 patch is live, but the DLC is not.
Steam forum claims it unlocks at 9 AM ET.
Thanks for the patch notes - I have intentionally not followed this much, and while I knew it was coming out “a week after Warhammer 2’s DLC dropped” I was shocked to see that’s… in just a few hours. The summary of the free update was impressive, especially since it touches on a favorite feature of 4X games of mine (the idea of having fun diplomacy with AI players, which is rare indeed, so I’m excited to see where this goes).
I don’t follow some of these notes. What are combat cards, for instance? Has it been that long since I played?!
Lastly, does anyone have a good summary, or a good (short) video I can watch to summarize the DLC features? I have avoided watching streams and want to come to the game fresh, but a write up of the new features would be keen.
It’s multi-player stuff. I don’t know too much about them other than they can be redeemed during play to do manual combats or something. I don’t play multi-player.
Oh that’s right, now I remember them. I only played online with real life friends (and my son) and we don’t use that system - if you want to battle it out, by all means, we say. But probably wise with rando players. Thanks!
The DLC seems to be available on GOG already. It’s there in the download page, but I can’t check if it’s actually live in the game for another 8 hours or so, alas.
SamS
2883
Got all excited when my steam game was updating! But only the patch.
Mark_L
2884
Already in love with my new lizard Bros. Just they and I and hot rocks to lie on 4 life.
The GOG version now includes a Mac port! Thank you Triumph gang, I’ve been super hoping for that (along with the expansion)!
Diego
Oh, cool, and the Mac version was just added to Steam as well. I’m away from my main computer and was bummed about being unable to play the new DLC, but now I can play it on my laptop!
-Tom
Most disappointing thing?
Steam still shows this as the background for the game in my library. Time for a cool new image Triumph! ;)
