I played my first Monopolize (3-star) mission just now and barely won. Good Lord! Near the end, the Senate was everywhere with massive ships! It didn’t help that I was sucked through a wormhole on turn 3 that pooped me out far from my home world (“Yeah, I won’t be capturing that prison planet near my home world any time soon!”)
Had a few battles near the end that were 50/50 on paper, but I managed to draw some key tactics and use ship abilities as best I could (I play battles on normal speed; slow is for sissies!). The only reason I survived was because I stumbled upon the fact that dismissing (?) a defeated commander provides tyranny. Otherwise, my tyranny would have run out.
Someone mentioned in the front page thread that placement matters in combat. How so? Combat seems to be just a row of ships and you click them occasionally. What am I missing?
I’ve played with placement but haven’t come to any conclusions. I’m usually too busy looking at my ships ready to hit an ability, to see what ships are being prioritized by the enemy. Maybe ships in the front get hit more? Yeah I’d like to know as well.
Well, some ships get special abilities that can be applied to adjacent ships; so positioning those ships well is key to using them effectively. There are also abilities that the enemy can use that hit all ships in a line, and if you anticipate that, you can position your ships in a way that will minimize damage/casualties in such a case. So yeah, in specific cases, placement does matter; apart from that, though, I don’t think there’s any big difference in practice.
Ships in the front will be targeted more often than those in the rear, and those in the center more often than those on the sides. Your ships will turn toward the ship they’re firing on, so it may be best to hold off using a ship’s ability until you see which ship it’s targeting.
There is some bug with achievements. I haven’t played since EA, where I just poked around and never finished a game. But, I just loaded it up and got achievements for winning 50 campaigns (which only 1.5% have done), unlocking the space slugs, and a couple of others. Kind of disappointing.
The biggest factor in placement is that most attacks will target the front ship in a row and will only target ships in the back row or rows if there is no ship in front of them. The exceptions to this rule are fighters, who seem to march to the beat of their own drum, the back-row special attack of the insect cruisers, and the all-ships special attack of the slug dreadnoughts. All of the normal blaster/missile/beam attacks target front rows before back.
This means that putting squishy ships like frigates up front just gets you a lot of dead frigates. For small ships, you pretty much always want destroyers up front, and frigates (who do twice the damage but only have one third of the hit points) in back. When you get to 3 rows of depth, you can either put tough large/mid size ships up front with frigates in back, or you can use destroyers as an expendable front line of defense in front of carriers or other big ships you want to protect.
Also, positioning matters in that there is a line of sight rule for targeting: ships can only target opposing ships that are within I believe 2 rows of their own row, with the exception of hitting ships further away if they are in the back rows and their is no other ship blocking the LOS. So for example if you scout the enemy ahead of time and see on the map that the enemy has a nice target like a carrier in the back row not defended by a front row ship, make sure you have ships that within line of sight of the carrier so they can auto-attack it.
The combat is actually pretty tactical, more than I expected from it’s fairly simple presentation.
I bounced off it because it felt like I was spending most of my time clicking around and not doing much interesting, but everyone keeps talking abhout it and making me think my first impressions were maybe wrong…
The clicking around during battles can be less important than the setup prior to battle. Especially early on. As you move through the tech tree and gain more abilities for your ships activating them at the right time becomes somewhat more important.
The game’s unlock system works against it at the outset. You need the locked Overlords, Cap Ships, Cards, and Tactics for things to really get interesting.
Although combat does remain more of a “what I planned for” affair, it will surprise you on occasion (and occasionally you’ll have a dead to rights fleet roll snag Armagheddon and you’ll just laugh at the doom fleet the AI is about to lose). The cap ships (by which I mean Battleships and Dreadnoughts) have interesting powers (some moreso than others). All the mechanics combine to make for a fairly interesting affair given the level of abstraction.
Combat, at the very start, isn’t interesting outside of understanding immediate tactical implications (e.g. black holes, fighting mollusks with missile heavy fleets), for lack of those locked things and lack of tech upgrades. The tech upgrades do spice things up. Of course you can roll a shitty map for it, not have cards to help with research unlocked, etc.
IMO the game’s biggest drawback is having to start from that point 3 separate times (once for each race).
What’s this all about??? I have played this game a ton and have no idea what you mean. Missiles are good against mollusks? I’m not smart enough for this game!
The mollusk (Techno-Slug) ships all have shields and missiles are weak against shields. Missiles do like 1/4 damage against shields. This means if you are running a missile heavy fleet, until you beat down the mollusk shields, you are going to be saying “My Missiles! They do Nothing!!”. This is why the excellent bang for buck combo of destroyers in front of cruisers which works so well for the warrior bunnies against everyone else is actually tactical suicide against the urbane mollusks.
Another thought: Tom, think of this game as comparable to Rise of Nations in that it seems abstract and streamlined and yet there is a ton of tactical crunchiness packed into the combat.
The different weapon types work differently: blasters can miss, but are good against all targets. Missiles never miss but are weak against shields. Beams never miss and are good against all targets but they are usually only available on very high end expensive ships. But, wrinkle: some upgrades (like Frigate Tech 2 for the warrior bunnies) will give a beam attack to a less expensive ship. Highly teched warrior bunny frigates are actually nasty little glass cannons. Some of the big damage numbers on some ships, like warrior bunny battleships, are not that high in practice as those blaster shots miss, more so against small ships. Ship size affects evasion, which affects hitting the target. There’s also a tiny little mini-game going on with the fighters dogfighting each other and taking losses from flack (I have to slow the battles down to see that.)
There’s a lot more: shields, special abilities, stuns, environmental effects, leader abilities, etc. It’s actually a robust tactical game, much more so than it first appears.
@Sharpe covered it. Missiles suck against shields until those shields are down. A problem with the game is that it doesn’t openly explain this (or that black holes destroy 50% of fighters/missiles in flight. Although it feels like a higher % to me). Beams do 50% damage in Nebula as well, or something like that.
Blasts can be evaded, and fighters take time to get to targets (and suck in black hole battles).
