I’m having fun with it. I do like that I now make progress even if I lose, with this new Empire mode.
So I just had the option to let a marauder retreat. If I do so, I’ll get some sort of buff for 10 turns, but I can’t find the icon in the encyclopedia. It looks like a bright sun. After I chose the option, I got a reputation boost, so I guess it stands for reputation? Is it a good idea to let marauders retreat to earn this?
As someone said earlier, I wish the game had the persistent tooltip system of Old World and the like.
I just figured out what that little white icon means last night and it is in fact reputation. Your reputation has several levels and is linked to at least one victory path. I also noticed that one of my heroes leveled up after I allowed an enemy to retreat, so I’m guessing that heroes get some amount of experience even if you allow enemies to retreat.
I’m not sure what happens to the units that you allow to retreat. They vanish on the map but I wonder if they are eliminated or are just somehow repositioned to appear later.
On the right side of the screen, after you choose the planet, you can specify the planet settings, e.g. how large etc. There you can set how dangerous the Marauders are, the level of the Ai etc.
Thanks for the help on retreats. I hadn’t noticed my guys also gained XP! I hesitated to permit the retreat precisely because I want XP for my troops, but I needn’t have worried.
I’m enjoying the game a lot now. The Black Arrow Gaming videos have taught me a lot. One big lesson: I need to slow down and think more. I mean, I always think a bit, but I have some bad habits from other games. That gamer thinks hard about every decision he makes – what mod to use, what research to choose. Another interesting thing: twice I’ve seen him shoot at cover to remove it, to give another teammate a better shot at an enemy. I haven’t really tried that.
Sure thing, happy to help. I’m not sure if the hero gets the same amount of experience when allowing a retreat as when fighting, but I’ll keep an eye on it in my current game. Things are tilting in our favor so we’re getting a lot more options to allow retreat.
Things are starting to click for me a bit more now too. Portions of the tech tree, mods, and tactical combat are feeling a bit more comfortable. I’m starting to see the connections among the things.
I’m still in the back end of my first empire planet game, but I also went back and started playing the very first campaign. The tutorial actually helped remind me of some things I once knew but forgot. I’ll check out those Black Arrow videos too, those sound helpful.
I’ve been doing fairly well in the even tactical battles in the game I’ve been playing, until we started going up against some Kirko armies. The first couple went pretty well, but then three Kirko armies caught three of our armies in the open as we were advancing toward one of their cities.
It was an epic battle that started out promisingly. We pretty much wiped out their right flank and things were looking good. But then enemy units started appearing inside our defensive perimeter, suddenly half our troops were electrified (something to do with Chaos zones?), they mind-controlled another unit or two, caught some clusters of our troops with AOE attacks. Before I knew it, they’d taken down our entire force, including three heroes.
There are some obstacles on the battlefield that explode, and can be worth destroying to not only remove the line of sight penalty, but also to stagger units next to them.
One more thing to understand that will really help you is how stagger works.
Most of the really powerful abilities require 3 action points, stagger negates them :).
After each turn, open the log and read it. It can be tedious, but it is useful.
My promethean dvar had some fantastic battles against a heritor syndicate ai. It went all in on the heritor tech, and the battles were insane. My flames were everywhere, but my machine heavy force was just gutted by entropy aoes. An absolute slaughterhouse.
My Oathbound Celestians are slowly grinding down 2 Assembly. But it is very hard going. They are coming at me with Wreckers and Reverse Engineers, and I just saw a Reaver.
My energy is simply never enough, and the AI hurt me badly by capturing my 2 main energy cities, which I since got back, so my economy is recovering.
I managed to take a city of theirs, but they took it back, and I just now took it again.
And for the first time ever I seriously considered just burning it down. 3 turns raze versus 9 turns absorb!!
The game autosaves every turn for about 20 turns in a row iirc.
If you really want to dig into it, load up your current game, and save it with a unique name, so you don’t mess up your progression, then load up the turn when the battle happened.
My awesome promethean dvar game had a suitably awesome ending. Just as they started to move towards my home cities, the Voidbringers appeared and offered a deal. I took it. Newly summoned Voidbringers were exactly what I needed to roll back the tide. I sold out the entire planet so I could be eaten last!
I just discovered the Doomsday victory is apparently disabled in this campaign scenario. Boo! I guess I’ll have to spread Celestian truth the old fashioned way.
Thanks for the offer, that’d be fun. At the moment I feel like I’m making progress, so it’s all good. I think that’d be fun to do when I feel like I’ve got the basics down more.
I finally finished off my first Empire game, capturing the Kirko capital on Turn 123. The end was a bit of a slog, but that’s probably more due to my not understanding how to play/win effectively and the passive AI on the easiest levels.
The Empire stuff is super cool, and a lot more stuff is starting to make sense now that I can see the results of the first game and how it’s impacted my Empire. At the end of the game, you get the following results tally that shows all the XP you got with the various factions and secret techs. About halfway through my game I started to wonder if some of the XP-bearing quests I was getting in the game were related to Empire progression, and it turns out they are.
Lastly, Empire mode tracks your game’s main hero stats and results, and levels them up as well. Apparently these heroes can be recruitable heroes that show up in your subsequent games, or of course you can just use them as the main hero in future games as well.
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.
