3308

Yeah, I’ll look for combos like that. I meant to play an Amazon hero with Xenoplague, but I messed up and gave her Synthesis, and I’m not sure Amazon + Synthesis produces those kinds of synergies. But it’s been a very interesting game anyway!

I’m still curious whether people over-write their tier 1 mods in the endgame. I’m guessing most folks don’t have the cosmite to do that.

3309

On experienced, t2+ units rolling around with a primary hero stack? Sometimes. Otherwise, I’ve usually found it better to just build new units with the new mods. I’ve rarely found production to be at that much of a premium.

Then again, I’m not as good or experienced as the BBBs of the world ;)

3310

I’ve been coming around to the Heritors a bit since last I posted. Weirdly the thing that’s made the biggest difference is giving them cheap accuracy mods – their base accuracy tends to be crap, but damage is pretty good. And yeah, the crystal is better than I thought it was. A crystal and a couple Siphoners with some Drained here and there makes for a pretty powerful stack, as long as they can actually hit things.

3311

The upgraded crystals are dope: one of them, a drainer and four assorted factional units make a great mid game stack. Extremely versatile.

3312

I’ve been pursuing this approach, and I do have plenty of cosmite and energy to spare so far. Is it more efficient to produce units with 3 mods than to produce them without mods and then manually add 3 mods? That is, does producing everything at once save cosmite or energy?

3313

Producing everything at once saves energy but you pay more production (basically you spend production instead of energy). There’s no right or wrong answer on this - it’s situational - what are you short on? Energy, Production or Cosmite (usually Cosmite).

3314

Someone was mentioning the Indentured/Overseer strategy for Syndicate and I tried that - cheap but effective. Right now I’m trying some stacks of Guild Assassins and man those guys are nasty when you have a bunch of em. If you have enough relative to the waves of enemies you just shoot the crap out of the enemy before they do much. I do have the Assassins modded with the Tier 1 Syndicate mod that boosts +to hit and damage, as well as the Tier 1 Synthesis mod that boosts +to hit and damage, and my stack is led by my avatar in Imperial APC using the +to hit buff, so I’m shooting the wings of of gnats, which is very satisfying.

3315

I’m terrible at this game.

Totally depends.

I usually hold off outfitting my troops until I have a better idea of what I am facing, even if it is just indie stacks, and then I tailor the mods to those.

That said, depending on faction, I usually have some go to mod layouts.

With Vanguard, the rail accelerator gets used alot. I might add electric and then later fire ammunition, and after that the kinetic phase modulator (ignore 50% of line of sight penalties, add 30% damage.)

I just finished a game with Dvar, and I have to say I struggled with the race. It seems there are basically 2 strategies here, Trencher massing and Bulwark massing.

I ended up loading Trenchers with defense mods and Bulwarks with rail accelerators and shock ammunition.

I haven’t quite yet figured out to use their support unit, feels slightly…clunky to me.

With amazons, for example, the Biomancer can scan stuff, then your Huntresses pile on the biochemical damage. That can scale quite nicely, especially if the enemy is massing one or two units predominantly (which they usually do.)

The Dvar Foreman has a limited heal and can encourage a Dvar unit… :(

When the tanks and rocket artillery show up, by that point you have some nice explosive mods, and tanks with the later game explosive mods can reliably melt faces and tank damage.

And the artillery can dish out serious damage.

The Baron is a unique unit because you can produce it without a barracks, and is a fairly durable 3 shot repeating unit. Expensive, and a tier 3, so hard to mass, but not bad at all.

I find Dvar hardest to play!

3316

Well, I conquered the second planet in my empire tonight. It was complexity of 15 (mild), whereas my first was 10 (low). This time I played on the “normal” setting. One of these days I’ll look at the difficulty options to see what “normal” means, lol. Edit: I also got the Achievement for “Make your own luck,” doing 7 crits in one turn, which only 0.1% of the playerbase has achieved. That was neat!

I played an Amazon again, but this time with Synthesis instead of Xenoplague, with 6 enemies, and I enjoyed it. I started with water just south of me and no nearby neighbors other than Autonom and Spacers. Although the leaderboard had me in last place for the first half of the game, I felt I had a good position, and once I started cranking out my advanced units, I vaulted into first place on most of the metrics. I went with the “secret weapon” victory, which (as someone said earlier) was almost too easy.

The only tough thing was that four players immediately immediately declared war on me immediately, and two of them gobbled up my territory while I hung back and defended my nodes. That strategy worked, although one of the enemies did get close to my positions.

So I’m ready to try a new race and secret tech. I got to empire level 3 with the Vanguard, so maybe I’ll try them. I’m not entirely sure I understand the rewards I get with each level; I think I get some free upgrades, plus the right to buy/build certain mods or units? I guess I’ll find out.

Also, now that I’ve won on “normal,” what difficulty level would you all recommend? And do you guys ever disable the secret-tech win?

3317

I typically don’t disable the secret tech win but I usually just choose not to pursue it and win other ways. I’ve been having fun with the Voidbringer victory condition which results in a big war and some huge battles.

I’m curious which advanced Amazon units worked well for you. When I’ve tried the Amazons I’ve had a hard time getting a handle on their unit lineup.

3318

Also I took some of my uber-modded Guild Assassin stacks into the big battles with the Voidbringers and it was kinda laughable - turns out you can defeat the Voidbringers by killing all of the “Voidbringer” labelled units in their armies (in other words you do not have to kill the “Enthralled” units). So with my long range snipers I cherry picked those evil jellies right out of the sky and won several behemoth-type battles with no losses. Poor evil jellies; they had no chance.

3319

I’m hardly an expert on the Amazon, having played them only twice so far, but of the late-game units, I made the most use of the Bombardon. I liked him because he’d be my artillery, and I’d put a Dazzler mod on him (blinding the enemy) plus a defense mod and some other offense mod. With his splash damage, he could in theory debuff multiple enemies at once, though I’m not sure how often this actually happened.

In conjunction with him, I’d use lower-tier things, especially Lancers, on the front liens – plus a Luring Field Pylon (a tactical operation) to spit out a random melee animal unit every turn. So I’d bombard with the Bombardon (taking care not to hit my own troops), and then move in with my melee doggies and grasshoppers and such. I just got a big kick out of that pylon. It would produce lowly little critters who would go win the battle for me.

I did also crank out a lot of Tyrannadons, and I used them a fair bit in my first game, but in this most recent game I didn’t need their speed as much. I made quite a few of the Queens too, and I liked fighting with her the couple times she was in a tactical battle, but she played exclusively a support role – healing, rezzing, etc.

The Amazon unit I have trouble using is the huntress. She seems so squishy, and her damage underwhelming. But then in my most current game I didn’t really set up synergies with her damage channel. I did in my first game, and she was somewhat more effective there. The Lancer, by contrast, has nice ranged damage. His melee is maybe a bit more underwhelming, and more than once he charged in when I wish I’d made clear to him I wanted a ranged attack. :)

3320

Note that the Queen can resurrect enemy units, and they stay after combat!

3321

Oh wow! I actually had trouble getting her rez to work, and then I remember being surprised when it did work on an unexpected target. Does her rez not work on friendly deceased units?

Also, I’ve started my third planet, this time as Assembly/Psynumbra. What a fun combo! I’m not playing optimally; I’m taking too long to build a third colonizer, and I think I put too much into research and not enough into city growth. But I’m sure enjoying the experience.

Plus in this game I’m seeing DLC features that I didn’t see when I bought the first two expansions in the middle of my previous game. There are “hero landmarks” I haven’t explored yet, plus the periodic random events, plus the possible invasion, though I don’t think that’s enabled on my (rather mild) planet. They all seem like nice touches.

3322

I’m also not am Amazon expert, only played them once, but to me the main benefit of the Huntress is to blind, which is very powerful, and don’t forget to keep them in cover for the +1 range. Add a Biomancer for sleep and it’s a powerful combo. Also, the Biomancer scan makes the Huntresses attacks much stronger. I had a really beefy high defense hero that the AI scanned with a Biomancer and one shot from a Huntress took half of its health.

3323

The cheap armor melt mod is excellent on Huntresses.

3324

Also the Huntress is great for shooting though cover.

3325

And they are pretty easy to mass I think.

3326

Thanks for all the advice on Huntresses! I’ll try all those suggestions next time.

3327

I just finished an Amazon game, getting some pretty heavy use out of a couple of stacks of heavily modded veteran Harriers - with flying leaders and the right mod combo (defense mod + regen mod + laser precision mod) they become quite strong and at max level they get a very nice AOE attack.

I won the game with a victory against 3 stacks of Voidbringers, total enemy strength 6K, my 2 stacks of Harriers + Leaders slightly under 4K, and I had used all but one of my Tactical Operations points that turn so I had to fight with only a single crappy operation usage. The fight was tough but satisfying: after my Harriers took a lot of damage and killed a lot of enemies, my main Leader got shot off her Harrier but she had a few hit points left and also an unused rocket launcher, which she used to take out the last Voidbringer. It was like “Oh you shot my ride, but I have this rocket launcher here…”

I like the Amazons, but I tend to make use of tier 2 and above units rather than the Huntresses. YMMV.