You know, I finished work feeling rough, and I really focused hard on the negatives with the campagin. There are positives, which I’m glad you pointed out.
I do like the fact the maps are randomised. It was a nice surprise when I restarted a campaign and realised the map was not the same as before. A second thing I like is that Commander gear (for Vanguard at least) goes over from one mission to the next. It does feel like a bit of continuity there. Never mind that the tech tree restarts, but that’s ok. Doing the right thing by Tibbles is pretty worthwhile.
My main issue is the scope though. Feels too big, and you’re right, it is just difference in perspective.
I tried the AOE fire mod. I liked it so much I nodded every single unit. This ends up being a big problem when you shoot units in melee range as you cook your own dudes.
I was pretty surprised I had to go all the way to the 3rd page of Steam’s best seller page to find Planetfall, behind games like Rimworld, Divinity Original Sin 2, The Forest, etc. A bunch of much older titles not currently on sale.
Has this game sold poorly? Between it being summer and EGS snatching up exclusives, Steam hasn’t exactly been bombarded with high-profile new releases lately. I would hate to think it’s doing poorly, I think it’s an excellent game that keeps getting better the more I play.
I’m revising my thoughts on using the auto system for combat. The game is so long as it is I wanted to move through it a bit faster so now use auto on all safe battles unless I want to learn to use new units, how to defend against new units, or just want to have some fun. In tougher battles, I feel I can often eke out a better result if I do it myself (sometimes).
I only started paying attention to ‘visit sites’ on the world map and also finally saw these areas that regenerate your move points for you when you pass over them. The map really doesn’t make things obvious. I was spending too much time paying attention to marauders, other civs, and sectors and not enough time really looking at all the other advantages (and disadvantages) strewn around the map.
The thing that drives me nuts is the frequency of losing a unit even on Safe battles, where I really have no business losing anything. An example from last night would be two full stacks of highly experienced (max rank or near), heavily modded T1 and T2 units led by three heroes against an army of 4 of those jumper bugs resulted in the loss of a unit. That’s ridiculous, considering when I played it manually they couldn’t even reach me before dying.
I find this to be a problem in both early game and later. Early game, the attrition can set you behind. In the later game, it can whittle away at your attack armies in enemy territory that are difficult to reinforce.
IMO, a Safe battle should result in no casualties so that I know I can auto them. I’d say I lose a unit 40% of the time on them, which often results in me manually doing the battle. This is especially important when playing with a couple other players since more people feeling like they have to manual easy battles bogs the game down unnecessarily.
That’s not really that surprising - units are fragile and the AI knows how to hit you where it hurts. Watch the replay after, and see if you would have done better. So far I don’t think I would have. :)
I think there has to be some benefit to doing your own battles. Avoiding attrition’s totally acceptable. For MP, it’d be neat to have some kind of resource you have to spend to manually battle to help people prioritize.
I think it would be very useful to have a battle rating which indicated that auto-combat would result in no loss of units (although units could still be damaged). This would allow players to use auto-combat in situations where there was overwhelming force and thus prevent having to fight tactical combat for all battles. This would speed up play and remove tedium.
Certainly the name “safe” seems to suggest that this combat will not result in loss of units. Unfortunately that’s not true.
I mean, I do. I replay the battle, and basically don’t even take damage. The tactical AI is good for sure, though. It just doesn’t do much at all to preserve units, which any human player will.
Still, I think there should be a threshold where the army strength disparity is so great you can autoresolve without losses. I don’t want to play all these lopsided battles, but I’m kind of “forced” to in many cases.
There is a thread on the official forums asking that there be an option that “safe” battles give all units resurgence, or something along those lines, to prevent this kind of issue with lop-sided battles, so you aren’t alone - hopefully an official solution can be found!
I think that would be fair. Leave the unit with 1hp so I have to take time to heal up, that’s fine. I just can’t afford to replace a max-level unit with 20 Cosmite invested in mods to “Safe” battles where I have overwhelming odds, so it means a lot more trivial manual combat than necessary.
There have been suggestions for a “replay battle” system, allowing you to replay the auto fight if you don-t like the result.
Probably the easiest to implement.
Also, you may not realise it, but apart from the 2 hardest difficulty levels, the auto combat is actually weighted in favour of the player iirc, precisely to reduce these complaints.
That’s interesting. And overall, I feel like auto combat is pretty fair. It’s just these edge cases where one army is overwhelmingly superior in quality and quantity that results in casualties that irk me. I wouldn’t even mind if that’s a once in a blue moon type of thing, but I feel like it’s around 30-40% of the “safe” battles.
