My experience has been much closer to what Kevin describes than what @DeepT is experiencing, seems like.
I assumed the overall score was based on some weighted average of the various categories (military score, economic score, etc.) but I’m not totally sure.
DeepT
1789
A lot of what you mention are things with the races. I think the races are well defined. Its just the secret techs that find lacking. Sure they have influence beyond the damage type, but I just find that influence weak. It does not, for me, dramatically change the game-play. Its not like Ill have a whole new strategy because I picked void tech vs pyro tech. Yes, there are differences, but they are not all that big.
For example, lets say that void tech gave mods that ANY unit could have a quantum duplicate, or any unit could teleport or any unit could shoot and move through cover. That would really change up the game-play with them.
As another example, the plauge tech. If any infected unit died, there was a 100% chance (in combat) for one of the little bio-horrors to pop out. If a non-infected unit died, then a bio-horror unit could eat the corpse, heal to full health and evolve right then and there to the next tier up. At the end of battle, you could keep all these units, which also would have only a minor up keep. The net effect would be a cascading effect of an ever growing bio-horror army reminiscent of anything you would have encountered in a movie or video game. The counter could be, don’t fight them with biological units, quantom echos don’t leave corpses, and corpses burned to a cinder can’t be consumed.
Anyway, all the techs could have a make-over like this, so they offer dramatic different game-play. That is what I really want. I am fine with the races, they are different enough already.
I suppose I owe it to myself to play syndicate with the psynubria techs and give that a go. Perhaps it will change my mind.
Well, Firearms is just generically the best weapon tree in the game. Rail Accelerator and Fire Burst Ammo are game-changers that come early. Even stronger when taken with Promethean. Dvar or Vanguard Prometheans are extremely good beginner choices, and probably just flatly the best overall.
Melee’s best generic tree is more debatable, but Void Tech is definitely the best secret tech for melee related enhancements.
The other really strong (quite possibly busted, but I played it my first game before I had any handle on the game balance and would want to revisit it before making the claim) build is Xenoplague. Once you realize there is an extremely cheap Operation to apply Parasitic Infection to enemy armies and a Doctrine that increases your chances to evolve based on how many heroes you have participating, you can snowball stacks and stacks of Plague Lords which is pretty… good.
The secret techs all have cool and unique stuff in them, though they almost universally share some big duds as well. The game balance in general seems pretty good, even the stuff that I mentioned doesn’t feel insane. But specifically I think a lot of the modifications need to be re-visited. There are far too many that I would never equip for any reason, and there are too many that I would equip on virtually every unit in my roster. But it’s a pretty small complaint, really.
Trying out xenoplague Amazons after getting bored with the second vanguard campaign (bleh!) and they’re just what I needed! Throwaway xenos to fuel aggressive conquest, super aggro tier 1 Huntresses, I’m loving it.
Squished a production landmark right away and then rolled right into a Growth dwelling just in time to drop a colonizer next to it. Lost I think one huntress and a xeno blob to it? Squish squish!
I am amused.
KevinC
1792
Man, that’s just completely opposite for me. I don’t know what to say, haha. It’s like sharing some vanilla ice cream with someone and them saying “wow, this ice cream sure is spicy!”. Huh? :)
Playing Promethean vs Synthetic vs Psynumbra just feels like a completely different game to me. Their operations, Doctrines, units, and mods have major impacts on how I play the game.
Anyway, it just makes me a little sad they’re not clicking for you because I find them to be a big part of how I play out each game. For me, I’d say in terms of impactfulness it’s maybe a 60/40 ratio of Race/Secret. Race is the bigger choice by a margin, but not a huge one.
On annexing dwellings:
Figured out the confusing bit – you have to click “modify sector” after clicking into the dwelling. That takes you to the normal view where you can annex it to a colony.
DeepT
1794
So, the AI does not play by the same economy rules as you do. I have this faction down to once city. It has no sectors, but 4 full stacks of armies on it. How is it paying its troops? How is it feeding its populous?
What difficulty level?
Also, it could have banked a surplus of unspent energy.
DeepT
1796
Normal difficulty. It has been about 5 turns or more and there seems to be no change. Its not like the units in the stacks are going away or anything.
Not sure what to tell you - video game AI’s need economic boosts to be a threat to players. 24 units seems like a lot, I’ll grant you, but maybe you don’t lose units when you can’t pay for them?
Piemax2
1798
I have seen the AIs troops have big morale penalties from not being paid.
DeepT
1799
Ahh yes. I am examining their units in their armies, and they have -800 moral. Most of them, not all. However, its building more stacks, or somehow the other stacks were invisible. Now every slot in the city is full of stacks. I have no idea how to even attack it. Its not like I can surround any one unit.
Set up your adjacent armies to draw in only three of theirs, and wipe them out while they have such a crippling morale malus.
DeepT
1801
I kind of try that. I surround one guy with 3 of my stacks, but then when I attack, its the entire cities worth.
Edit: I guess that kind of worked. There are still some stacks on the opposite side of the city still alive.
Anything within one hex of the hex you’re attacking will get pulled in. This includes city militia if any one of those hexes is a city hex.
Xeno Amazons remain amazing.
I’m favoring Void Tech Amazons. Having your skirmishers be able to run through walls is amazing! Also adding mods to the Void skirmishers that can clone themselves feels crazy powerful. I especially like Amazon mod that heals every turn for the cloners and potentially keeping them alive all combat.
Melee is so powerful in this game if you can use it. You get the attack on your turn and then an additional melee overwatch attack if the target is doing ranged stuff (which is most units).
I just handily won a battle with my two stacks vs my opponents three stacks and it has me on a big high for this game right now.
Echo Walkers are crazygonuts, yeah. I bet phase modulated Lancers are real damn strong.
I’m still just in love with Huntresses in general. Yeah they don’t overwatch, but eh. Sniper hero has been getting the work done.
One-shotted a t2 flier with his overwatch yesterday. In other news, War Cry is crazy strong in the early and mid game where most fights are 6v<4-6> and last like 4 rounds max.
I tend to agree, but alot of people on the Pdx and Steam forums are saying melee is weak!
Probably because they’re bad? Overwatch feels super powerful but melee just shreds anything with overwatch after taking its lumps. Heroes of course excepted. I actually really like how heroes aren’t like crazy op themselves, but just let you break the normal rules enough that you can do silly things.
I turned off the auto save because it was spamming me up with a ton of saves, then I needed one and regretted having it off, now I’ve turned it back on and I’m getting spammed again. Every turn auto save seems like something it would be nice to have a setting for, so you could set it to say every 5 turns or a time setting. Anyway, can you shift highlight all of them and delete as a batch instead of individually deleting each one?
And my second QOL question is: are they going to put in a manual save option in coop? Because while it’s slick it just works like it does, it also not infrequently desyncs and I have to log out and log back in and pray it works. This happened repeatedly to me yesterday. Making me wish I had something available to me that was a bit more under my control, namely a manual save option not unlike what was available in AOW3.
