@jpinard they split up the passivity/aggressiveness settings into several sub-options you can choose from within the “advanced setup” tab. You should carefully check the settings for AI aggressiveness, NPC faction aggressiveness, spawner difficulty and visit-site difficulty (IIRC those are the four) - I tend to set the AI to normal, and the other 3 to passive since I like an AI who pushes me some but I don’t like the crazy tidal wave of spawners and NPC demands. One of the nice things about the Tyrannosaur patch is that it let you set those all independently. You can have psycho AIs and wimpy NPCs or visa versa.
There is a warning!
Can you do anything to prevent it?
Speaking of preventing things: I’m playing the campaign. 2nd mission. Round 30: Daiyu Jiang just died. Some stiff, incoherent monolog from charming Jack Gelder. Eh?!?
Oh, and the Syndicat got wiped out too. It also says I failed to protect the spy. But I didn’t. He’s in my capital. Safe and sound. Well, the assassins are still alive because… priorities. But there was no timer etc.?!
What kind of scripted weirdness is this?! …sigh
Thank you so much! This helps tremendously. Can we choose which minor races will be in the game too?
Can someone explain the Heritor Secret Tech? I was trying to do a Therian/Heritor combo and it just isn’t clicking for me.
Heritor is all about Essence.
Heritor units can drain and generate Essence charges. These charges will give inherent damage and defense bonuses to units that have them (for example, +10% damage per essence charge, with some units only holding 1 charge and some units holding 3 or more with upgrades) . But in addition to this passive bonus for having the charges some units have abilities that can consume the charges for one big damage burst or buff.
Heritor also lets you create and keep low tier units called drained in tactical combat. If you create a drained in tactical, you get to take it with you once the battle is complete.
Other than the bonuses, their late stage strategic operations can convert enemy populations directly into drained, you can possess enemies and take control of them in battle, and the doomsday weapon it has a chance to creating drained every turn during tactical combat.
It’s about building armies of super-charged guys and keeping their tanks topped off with Essence.
Do you think Heritor is one of the more difficult ones to play?
So I just won my first skirmish match vs the new Voidbringer invaders that were introduced in the Invasion expansion. The first time they showed up (in my last game) they murdered me to death in pretty short order. This time I tried to be a little better prepared for them, but even though I did manage to win it was a pretty messy affair.
First of all, the last time I described my experience with these invasions I had mentioned that they will occasionally transform random sectors into volcanic once they’ve shown up. This isn’t exactly true, at least not based on this last game. Spawners always tended to do this with unoccupied sectors this time around. I think I was conflating two different issues my first game was having: firstly, invasion spawners, which create volcanic, and secondly, a Fungal Event that WAS transforming various sectors (owned or not) into Fungal every turn for 5 turns. I had both happened at once in the first game, but because the whole world had gone to shit I got a bit mixed up about what was happening to my beautiful world.
Okay, so back to this second game. I was playing on a medium sized map and the Voidbringers showed up around turn 55 or so (I think they showed up on turn 61 the prior game, at least that’s when I first noticed them anyway).
On the turn they first announce themselves the only thing new on the map was a big domed HQ of theirs and one stack of enemy Voidbringers wandering around the map. You can’t get through the dome at this stage, so don’t even try (I did). But you CAN murder that stack of wandering Voidbringers to death. This part could be a coincidence, but it wasn’t until I actually destroyed that wandering stack of a the Void that the next stage began: Spawners started dropping in around the map.
In order to get through the protective dome at the VoidB HQ you will have to destroy a number of these Spawners (I had to destroy 4, I don’t know if smaller or bigger maps require another number). And the Spawners will not all show up at once. There will be far more of them appearing than you actually need to destroy to get through the HQ protective dome. And the turn before a spawner shows up in a sector you will get a warning in that sector about a Spawner coming soon.
So in my game the Void HQ showed up in the most butt-end asshole place on the map, way the hell deep in a bunch of lava mountains that would take me something like 8 turns to travel to from my nearest city. But the spawners showed up all over the damn place.
All remaining players had to choose whether to side with or against the void, and those that sided WITH them formed an alliance, and those that sided AGAINST them were pretty much left in every-man-for-himself mode. Although the AI was quite pro-active in destroying every Spawner they could find near their own borders, they were a little slow about it at first and I was the one that had to kill the first 4 Spawners to breakdown the protective dome at Void HQ.
But I did manage to kill the 4, and I started heading towards the ass end of the world to take out Void HQ. Now, while I was travelling, spawners were still showing up around the world every couple turns. And with these spawners came stacks of new Voidbringers that attacked everything they could find.
Now, I had all my forces far from my own territory because I had read that once I defeat the Voidbringers I win the game… so I more or less abandoned all my colonies for the journey. I was counting on the Void’s defeat to bring me victory, and not worried too much about losing everything in the process. Thankfully I had saved up enough energy to fund my armies for a few turns so I didn’t have to worry about my dwindling income as I lost territory.
But it turns out that victory is not the only option (excuse the shitty off-screen photo taken with my tablet where I play on my Xbox):
Even though I COULD claim victory here, if I wanted to continue my campaign to win my own way, I was free to do that too. Well, I hadn’t planned on that being an option, so because I had already sacrificed so much territory to defeat them and because building everything back up felt like too much work, AND because I wanted to claim this victory condition for the first time in the hopes of getting an Xbox Achievement (there wasn’t), I decided to call it a win here and cash in my chips (I think it was turn 91).
All in all I really enjoy this new victory condition, but it flips the game over on its head quite significantly when it activates, so it’s up to you to decide when or if you want invasions turned on when setting up a skirmish game.
One other thing of note: Like I mentioned earlier, some players will join the void, some will not. The ones that join are immediately all allied. The ones that do not join aren’t forcibly allied together. They can still war with eachother, sabotage eachother, and pursue their own avenues of victory completely unrelated to the Voidbringers (if they can actually manage to do that while under constant assault from waves of the Void spawners).
in my game, I still had to bribe my way into the good graces of the people that stood against the void, and they each neared (domination) victory by wiping eachother out and claiming eachother’s land. I don’t know if AI players can defeat the Voidbringer HQ and claim a victory that way (I didn’t give them a chance), but I do know that when I claimed victory all other players, whether friend or foe of the void, were recorded as losers.
I wouldn’t consider Heritor more difficult, but I do think they require a little more micromanagement from the player. The reason for this are those essence charges. In order to get the most bang for your buck, you want to make sure you’re filling your units up with charges, and spending them when appropriate. But that’s only an issue on the tactical level, which means it isn’t much of an issue if you like to auto-battle all but certain key battles.
As for strategic gameplay, I did find myself mostly ignoring their most of secret tech upgrades on the few games I played because its benefits didn’t align with my chosen paths to victory for those few games.
I just love the Forgotten NPC minor race, and they show me how awesome Heritor/Essence units can be, but I honestly haven’t delved very deeply into the actual Secret tech just yet.
Is there a way to fix which minor races will be in a skirmish game? I’d also like the Voidbringers to come later. They hit too early and I lost my last game.
Yea, you can choose which NPC factions appear. There are some limitations depending on the map type, for example only Forgotten can show up on one type of planet, but other than that you can choose what shows up. You just can’t chose which one specifically of them show up next to your starting city, but whatever does it will be from among the allowed NPC races.
As for Voidbringers, I think you can set what turn they’ll show up on in the advanced setting during set up (or just turn them off if you desire as well).
Which planet type do you like the most? Or do you just rotate?
I mostly rotate between these three, with the first and third being my favorites:
The default one, Imperial World:
It’s very balanced and offers a balanced variety of environments and NPC types.
The lush green one, Frontier World:
It has no landmark sectors to conquer but it’s full of NPC dwellings (which is handy for Unity victories). It also trends towards lots of fungal, ocean, forests and mountains. There’s also tons of resources, but no roads. the Amazonians do well on this one because of all the wild life they naturally synergize with.
The dusty gold one, Capital World:
It has a lot of high value sectors and landmarks, lots of dwellings AND settlements (the latter is something I really like if playing in no-colonizer mode) and a variety of NPC factions. Resources and climate are mostly balanced.
I don’t play Ravaged (Tomb World) much unless I’m trying to punish myself and everybody else. It doesn’t have any settlements to take over, and there are only one or two NPC faction Dwellings most of the time. Resources are few and far between, there are landmarks to conquer, and there’s a ton of roads, but the world is mostly volcanic and mountainous, making for slower advancement. I do still play this world, but not as often, because the world itself is an enemy.
I haven’t played the other world types yet.
Awesome. Now I know what to go for. Making the game more fun. Thanks!
@jpinard it’s worth going through all the tabs of “Advanced Setup” options b/c all the stuff you have asked about, plus a lot more stuff, is available there to tweak the game to your preference. You can control the aggressiveness/passiveness of opposing factions, control which NPC factions will show up, adjust the terrain settings, turn free resources pickups on or off, turn the archeology stuff from Revelations on or off, and so forth. There are 3 or 4 different tabs under advanced settings and at least 2 of the tabs have interesting options. Note: you probably don’t want to mess around with the turn settings tab unless you are sure.
Also, once you find a batch of settings you like, it allows you to save the template for future use. I have a custom “Sharpe’s Special” that I’ve been using, to suit my taste. YMMV.
Okay, I wasn’t warned that this invasion, which was pretty cool, was going to result in some of the other factions siding with the invasion! That’s what did me in. Suddenly my best buddy nestled up against my border is all aggro because he decided he’s pro-Void? Who goes pro-Void?
At the very least, I wish I didn’t have to vote blindly. If I’d seen my buddy was going pro-Void, I might have considered joining the cause with him!
I love how the different maps make for different types of games. Lots of really gratifying gameplay tuning you can do with the map settings, and the presets have a ton of personality.
-Tom
For my next game I will be playing on a Capital World. I’d like to go for a unifier victory since I haven’t actually pulled one off (I always end up with a Domination victory on my way there), and I’ve selected “Random” for the commander.
It looks like the game has assigned me the Kir’ko Celestian, Chin Til’trz. I had fun as the Celestians last time I played as them, and the Kir’ko get some cool abilities of their own. If I remember correctly the early Celestian unit is a melee, which should synergize swimmingly with the Kir’ko’s early claw mods.
I think this could turn out quite well. We shall see.
Oh, I also lowered the chance of invasion down to 30% from 50%, so it’ll be more of a surprise for me whether or not this map gets invaded. Even if invaded, I’d like to finish out the game as Unifier, so we’ll see how that goes.
Not sure if serious.
-Tom