So I got this over Christmas. It’s a bit overwhelming, despite knowing Age Of Wonders 3 quite well!
I have a question: in one of the first campaign missions (Leave-6), I suddenly have a turn where one of my stacks is ‘blasted’ by a red effect, and the whole stack wiped out. What’s going on? What caused that? How do I avoid it? I can’t find out what happened anywhere.
Fired this game up after not playing since the first expansion release and was quickly reminded why this game annoys me so much. I can deal with it and compensate for it but the AI omniscience is fucking annoying and it’s a shame Triumph appears to be incapable of putting together an AI without this crutch after so many iterations of the formula. The fact that the AI immediately knows where you start, knows the instant you move an army away from a city to deal with another threat and that sort of thing is just really annoying to me.
I also find this game’s battles to be significantly more impacted by the random dice rolls than other games in the genre that I play (Gladius and Deity Empires spring to mind). There’s still variance in battles in those games but I find the outcomes are far more heavily weighted to tactics as opposed to a string of good/bad rolls.
On the plus side, in a very small sample size it appears that for non-team games the diplomacy is less ass? Appeared to me that they had put some work in there.
If memory serves, that red effect is a scripted event. Did that stack contain the Hero Daiyu Jang? If so, it’s part of the plot of the campaign and more will be revealed later. (I also found this to lack some explanation when it happened to me but it became clear later.)
Ugh. Some campaign bullshit, play Star Empire instead.
KevinC, I had the same reactions when I first started playing PF: omniscient AI, lots of RNG. But now that I have 140-plus hours in the game, both those objections have fallen away. This feeling may reflect what others are saying here: the great strength and weakness of the game is that you have to really dig into it to appreciate it fully. I do think the UI could communicate more: I’d like to see icons telling us what sort of mods a unit has. But I really do enjoy the game now, especially Empire mode, which is a thing of beauty.
Oh, thanks! I was pretty confused.
I have about 300 hours into it so it’s not a lack of familiarity, it’s just that I don’t like those aspects. I know how to deal with the AI omniscience, I just find it tedious and annoying having to constantly do so.
Example on the RNG: There’s an Op for Psynumbra that has a chance to inflict Catatonic on every unit on the battlefield but at a weak strength (six). I had a massive 3v3 stack battle going on where the AI cast it twice and it landed on every unit but 3-4. And I was defending here, so I even had the garrison. Complete wipeout. I replay the battle and I lose maybe three units. Definitely a more extreme example but heavy RNG swings happen routinely. It doesn’t ruin the game for me but it’s a frequent irritation especially when other games do it better.
I feel like we could have a 300 page conversation on the hows and whys of AI not being very good. This is not a problem exclusive to Planetfall. Unfortunately even a very mediocre gamer like myself can win these things on the highest difficulty once you understand how the AI is making its decisions. The AI always having 100% map awareness is painfully apparent in this game in particular, but it can’t actually do the battles with any kind of efficiency.
But honestly out of all the AI’s I’ve played against I’d say Planetfall doesn’t feel as stupid as the entire Paradox catalog. If you ever want to see some horrifyingly bad AI, put yourself in observer mode in literally any Paradox game. It is… grim.
I don’t think it’s an issue with you, this game is noted for being hard to get into. I’m not sure it can be made easier to start without sacrificing some of the juiciness that comes later.
An interesting design problem though for sure.
And |I think having a set of relatively simple mechanics that feed into each other (for example, city management and army management don’t really feed into each other) might help.
I’ve been playing Spirit Island, and that is also a fairly complex game with front loaded complexity, but underlying it is a set of fairly simple mechanics (Invaders ravage, build, explore in that order, spirits have fast and slow powers, spirits are constrained by energy and the number of cards they can play each turn, game ends when x,y,z happens) which feed on each other.
It also fired my imagination on how a Druid class could play :).
On the mod itself there are icons that let you know if the mod is defensive, offensive etc, and what tier mod it is.
I aloso think this is to do with how maps are laid out, i.e. the obviousness of the AI.
In a PF map your territory takes up huge amounts of space on the map, and your forces are very mobile, compared to previous games. Look at AoW1 for the opposite of this, where you needed multiple turns to traverse the same amount of space in PF. And your towns took up much less space in AoW1.
That meant gameplay was more concentrated on parts of the map, and things were slower.
In such a situation, imho the AI knowing your map movements would matter less, as you can occupy them more, and also they would take more time to approach your cities.
However, having inbuilt garrisons mitigates this issue to a degree imho, because it is harder for the AI to snipe you, plus the lower unit count overall also means the AI needs to commit more of its available armies to try and steal a city from you.
But that omniscience is indeed unfun sometimes. :(
I’ve had AI sneak past 3 cities to take a little town in the centre of my empire. That didn’t even help it because I was able to recapture it immediately. And the AI always tries to hold onto a town and either absorb or migrate. If they did a raid like this and burnt the town down…well that would make more sense.
PF also suffers from the campaign, which traditionally for the genre and series is the starting point for many of not most players, being an actively shitty introduction to the game.
AoW3 didn’t have a great campaign, but at least it introduced concepts at a managed pace. Or the first level did, anyway. That second level was some bullshit itself.
Yep, that’s helpful, though I find those icons too small to read easily. But I was talking about icons hovering over the heads of troops in the field, at least on the tactical map. Maybe a suite of four simple icons to indicate that the unit has buffs, debuffs, shields, or armor. Or a blue halo around shielded units, an amber halo around armored units, some such. Maybe that would be too much clutter, I dunno.
The game does give us the ability to assign icons to mod configurations, and that’s helpful. I’m still getting used to it.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the game. I just think the mod-related UI could be clearer.
Not a bad idea but…
My fear, especially for differing mods/multiple effects. Maybe 2 icons, one for debuffs and one for buffs.
but all that would do is tell you it has one or more de/buffs, which may or may not be enough.
True, no argument there. There’s a fan/modder/graphic artist called Tibbles who has done some graphics mods, and some of her stuff got incorporated into the main game, such as how your units all have a slight glow around them, so they are easier to pick out on the strategic map.
I always imagined/hoped for some sort of icon system above the unit to go along with their health and action points. Mods have their own symbol, maybe just the icons for any mods to give the player information that particular mods are on a unit and familiarity with icons (“oh hey, that one has the laser mod”) will keep the player from needing to dive into the info screen for every unit every battle.
Also some kind of summary of total armor or shield modifiers might be helpful in icon form. That way you can also see if a unit is heavy in one or the other, or see the number go up or down when buffs or debuffs hit it. Again, this could be done without going to the second information screen and could be digested in the battle map.
This means there would be 2 to 5 new icons floating above units. Maybe it could be an “extra battle information” option that could keep things cleaner if players didn’t like it. I can definitely see it being valuable to experienced players as a time saver and also valuable to new players to help them digest something that is not very obvious in battle screens. Heck after returning to the game after a long break, I was fumbling around trying to figure out just what a particular debuff effect was and forgot where the information was even displayed. A lot of the game gets hidden a layer down in the information screen. If some kind of iconography can bubble that up to the surface battle layer, it would immensely help the game’s digestion by players.
Cure worse than the disease IMO.
I don’t think there’s really a better UX solution for the current design.
Maybe. As I look at a screen still, I am imagining tiny icons spread horizontally above and along each unit’s health bar. It would be sort of like what you find on the medium sized unit card for a selected unit, but further boiled down so that it can be seen on units across the battlescape without selecting them (such as when deciding target priority for the selected unit). I think it would be very useful, but perhaps not. Maybe such an interface could be a “hold key” type information pop up like unit ranges and move lines in Total War.
There is an option, press alt or ctrl I think, that gives extra information when a unit is selected.
I was not aware of these commands so I did a quick check. Alt calls up all targets a selected unit can fire at (including terrain) with to hit percentages. When selecting a target for an attack, Ctrl displays what appears to be a condensed unit card for the hovered over potential target (I don’t know if it displays mod icons as my test load didn’t have mods). These commands are useful and I didn’t know about them before.
I still feel like too much is held down at that double click to get information screen. After dozens of hours I didn’t know about the Ctrl command and I can see me using it as a reduced version of my suggestion here.
Can anyone explain to me the point of Shakarn Infiltrators?
They are an extremely expensive T2 unit costing 90 energy and 10 cosmite natively. Worse, they can’t even equip mods. They have terrible stats (40hp, 0 armor, 1 shield). Their unique thing is that they can change form into other T1 or T2 biological units but will not copy the mods of the unit they copied.
So… I have a T2 unit that in a given battle can potentially transform into an equal or lesser unit, so there’s a bit of RNG involved. It costs 10 cosmite out the gate and can’t ever equip mods which is a major negative factor. I get that maybe the idea was that they’re this flexible unit that can adapt to what you see on the battlefield but in practice I’ve found these to be terrible. I’d rather just have a Deadeye or a Raider with two mods.
One other question, what does the red candle symbol mean? I can’t click on to take me to a contextual help page and searching for “I dunno, reddish candle thing” in the help isn’t going to find much.
Their infocard UI sucks. Every unit, ability, etc. has a bunch of effects and modifiers but you often can’t click through to get to relevant pages. Sometimes the infocard is good and explains what it does, like “Applies analyzed, reducing resistance by 2”. Most often it’s just “Applies one of 37 different status effects” and then you have to go search for it in the help.
Been away from the game for a while and all these annoyances keep coming back to me. :)