I totally understand it but the objectives really do not force you to follow them. We actually had in mind the same as you do and therefore if you don’t follow the objectives, you are not penalized. It should be taken as “side quests”:)
Yes, the random maps will be improved so the factions will have the army types which are closer to their initial natural setup.
Not sure if they have been mentioned up-thread but wanted to point out the ‘Blitz’ and ‘Stalwart’ upgrades for military units. Blitz adds an additional attack per round and Stalwart adds an additional defense per round. These are very powerful upgrades as each attack a unit receives that is beyond the units ‘defenses per turn’ stat number results in much lower defense strength effectiveness (70% for 2nd, 40% for 3rd, 10% for 4th). Given the relatively low unit count in the game, having a force/defense multiplier like this is very upkeep cost and power effective.
Yes, thank you for pointing it out Vormithrax. Those are very important unit improvements from the tactical point of view.
Can someone help me understand “Happiness?” This is the one ‘resource’ that I’m struggling to manage.
In my game as the Roman Republic I was steadily gaining ground and winning battles but the Happiness was dropping and army size was the major factor. At some points I was seeing nearly a 50% malus due to army size with Happiness in the mid 60s.
A few turns later, after capturing a couple of town from the Celts (which is now one of my objectives) happiness is over 150 and army size is not even a factor even though I’ve added some milites legions and another principes legion.
What am I missing and how can I manage this resource more effectively?
I’m just going to make a couple guesses here.
Maybe the malus was due to heavy recent recruitment of population into military regions, concentrated in certain cities. And they had time to recover.
Or maybe you just had too many total troops for the population, but your addition of Celt cities pushed you back into acceptable territory?
I’d be interested in what Pavel has to say.
If I ever experienced this, I never noticed, because that is one “resource” where the impact is all local, so I look at the map, not the accounting. If I see areas on the map where happiness is dipping, I mouse over that. And I have had times where they were unhappy I had too few military units. (I’m cheap.) But I cannot remember a time when they were unhappy due to too many units.
btw, a big thank you for listing Star Traders in the Best of '18 thread. I had not even heard of the game, but I got it and am having a blast.
Hello,
happiness is probably the most tricky resource. I always recommend to watch the dev streams we recorded few months ago. Happiness is in this one (it is already pointing to the part about happiness).
Army size impact is measured per ratio between number of citizens and number of soldiers. There is a “sweet spot” when the happiness impact is very high (I think around 30%) and everything on the right or left side from that sweetspot has impact either less positive impact or even negative. Aka having too many soldiers makes your people not happy as well as having not enough soldiers. The negative impact is not equally negative on those two side of that “curve” - people are more unhappy when they don’t feel secure.
In your case I bet that the problem was high number of soldiers which was “diluted” by newly conquered population.
Also please remember that part of citizens happiness is also so called “national pride” which increases with successful military actions (conquering cities, etc) and decreases when things go wrong on battlefronts.
Count me in as one of the people who grabbed this. Probably be a week or two before I get a chance to try it.
Keen to try it but I’m stuck with a laptop with an Intel HD 620 for a few weeks while I’m here in Indonesia; processor & memory meet recommended specs.
Minimum spec for graphics is “directx 9 class gpu with 1gb ram”. I don’t really know what that means practically but I see the HD620 is DX12 so I suppose the only way is to install it and see what happens.
Game runs fine on my laptop with HD 620. I had to trim some visuals, like trees, and I’ve not experienced any performance issues.
Happy to return the favor.
Thank you. I will watch the video. More I play the more I enjoy this game.
And my axe! I will probably dive in this weekend.
Hello UtilityDogAK,
the game is able to run even on integrated GPUs like the one you have. It is just something where we cannot guarantee 100% stability on a longer run (like hours of gameplay). That is why the minimum requirements are a bit higher.
In game is an autodetection system of your GPU power. It should set it automatically probably to medium or lower graphic profile and hopefully it will run fine. If not, try to lower the graphic profile to even lower value.
I hope you will have fun
Great to hear that you have decided to give it a try. It is an honor.
If you have any questions I am usually available on our Discord channel as well (altough I will try to pop up here from time to time as well).
Have a nice weekend.
Pavel
Thanks Pavel (and @orald). Yes it works fine and the dialled down graphics settings are still perfectly serviceable.
I did a little of the tutorial last night so hoping to dive in more today.
Now that I’m 15 hours into the game I’ve been reading the 247 page manual a bit and learned how to use influence. In case anyone else wondered how it works, in addition to the passive effect of spreading your dominion, you can also "use influence on all foreign cities within a maximum distance of 10 tiles from one of yours. Apply it by clicking on the city you want to influence and executing the “Influence” action. You can perform this action several times in one turn on the same or different cities, provided that you have sufficient resources.
Influence can be used to feed rebellious moods in other players’ cities to either ignite revolts against local rule – which can make it easier for you to take over the city – or even to provide enough incentive so that a city or region joins your empire without starting a war."
Maybe this is old hat to others but it is new info to me. I am enjoying learning how the various systems work in this game. Don’t know quite where I am on the Chick Parabola, but I am ascending and very much enjoying the view.
I’m about a dozen hours in an similarly really enjoying learning all of the mechanics. There are numerous elegant design decisions at play which really help reduce the slog that plagues most 4X, especially turn based. At least so far (only a dozen hours in) the AI on normal doesn’t seem braindead, which is a good deal more impressive than what is standard for the genre.
I expect to spend quite a bit more time with this…
I think the two biggest tips/lessons i learned were to research Wagons as fast as possible (they have massive range and can relocate units to the far side of your empire in one turn) and using them to medi-vac wounded units back to cities that can heal them much faster/cheaper (a city that can also produce that unit type provides that bonus). This ability to get new units to the front lines, as well as retreat/return damaged units quickly is incredibly powerful.
Bummer. Poor Herminius and his doughty crew.
As Rome it takes a long time to advance technologically to build Triremes. Once you do they take a while to build and train the crew properly. So it hurts to lose one in battle. And now this happened.
Is this a random event or can the player mitigate chances of this? Does this event fire less often if sailing closer to shore? It occurred while sailing from southern France to Rome so they were crossing a lot of open water.
Hello orald,
sorry to see that. Answer to all your questions is “yes”. Namely:
On the other hand, it doesnt happen often and you know - “s…t” happens to everyone in real life:)
