Man, yesterday’s daily challenge really killed me. I must have tried it a dozen times, maybe two as robotic, two as scientific and the rest as scavenger, and I still couldn’t crack it, let alone post a record time. My last attempt I at least lasted long enough to get heads up with the winner, but it wasn’t really all that close. Even looking at the replays of the successful players and trying to replicate didn’t work.
Haha, definitely not! I’ve only ever seen them buy the other AIs out so far, even when I’ve been vulnerable!
It’s brutal because the dynamics of that particular one change heavily depending on what you do during the first few days. Not building power causes serious debt problems. Not getting just the right amount of water causes huge price fluctuations and you can get locked out of having enough to remain viable.
My first attempt was my best by far and I think it’s because I hit the sweet spot on everything to a greater degree than on my second and third tries. Just didn’t care to try min-maxing it beyond that point.
Woo! Rank 15 today.
Daily Challenge? I assume you went Scavenger? :)
Congrats! I haven’t played in a while but I’ve never even beaten a challenge, so Rank 15 seems pretty awesome!
I did. Almost certainly not an optimal found location, but it got me through.
Hey man.
Chick’s review convinced me take a plunge and purchase the Deluxe Edition. Great game, I hope it sells well and you improve/expand it in time.
So I played my first actual mission outside of the tutorials yesterday, a skirmish against 3 AI’s on the 4th(?) difficulty level, the one where you get no production bonuses or maluses.
I learned a lot, though the game took me a while to finish, probably due to not all that infrequent pausing to think (and trying to mentally map resources, advanced resources, and buildings). Right off the bat I made a brilliant mistake, one that I thought for sure would sink me.
See there was a confluence of map and resource costs that led to my decision to place my base between the only silicon field (though it was big, at about 12 hexes) and best water field on the map. I was in the center of the left edge of the map. The primary iron deposit was in the top left corner, though with scattered hexes extending 2/3 along the top. Aluminum was not rare, but was small deposits not near other things, mostly isolated 2-3 hexes along the bottom third of the map. No geothermal discovered during my scans, but 2 were revealed in the far bottom right corner. Carbon was the most rare element, with a small crater 2/3 down and 2/3 right of the map. Silicon had higher than normal, aluminum lower, food higher prices.
My immediate plans were ignore aluminum (cheap, trading at under $5 for much of the match), dominate silicon (later glass maybe?) and water (try and control food and fuel late game), and ensure energy surpluses (figuring it would grow in price as the game went on due to lack of geothermal, and only moderate sun and wind locations). So I placed my expansive HQ on some silicon and water tiles and built my first few claims. A wind turbine on a decent ridge where I could chain a few (only 1 good hex, but adjacency would make 3 connected profitable), a silicon mine on the only high silicon hex in the map, a water well on the only high (or medium for that matter) water hex, and some fourth thing that was neither iron or aluminum (steel mill maybe? I think it was electrolosys reactor actually).
Then I waited.
and waited.
I was the second HQ down, robotics placed right before me in the heart of the iron. AI expansive near iron and aluminum right after, and AI research near other stuff ( I admit I mostly ignored them. They were farthest from me, and were in third most of the game, as such neither target for the first buyout, or my biggest threat, so I simply didn’t care).
Well one by one they upgraded to level 2. I was stuck at level 1.
I think the robotics even upgraded to level 3, and yet I was at 1. At this point I about abandoned the match, ready to concede it as a lost cause. But lessons can be learned. So I hung with it, and made myself a nice big note resources to upgrade HQs are high priority to start.
I upgraded. I immediately built a steel mill, glass manufacturer, more power, aluminum mine. Upgrade. More water, more electrolosys, farms. Upgrade. More power, more water, chemicals, condenser to make O2 and carbon, efficiency building. Upgrade. Pleasure dome, offworld market, more condensers, more farms, more water, more electrolosys.
By now I was running a very tight race with the robotics. The other expansive was really hurting. Food was selling between +25k and +30k ofworld, water +30k, O2 +40k. Second market.
Bought out Expansive in a single move. They owned 6 shares, the others split between the other AIs. The offworld markets gave me the edge, as did near complete dominance in silicon and water. I was able to cobble together 600k in cash when no AI had more than 100k cash and resources. Then, the waiting. Since mid game I had been playing an increasingly aggressive game, by the end pumping the black market as soon as I could. I grew quite fond of the power surge, especially as all the robotics buildings were connected in a row. Hitting 12 buildings with a single attack? Don’t mind if I do. The robots were always very close to my stock price, always a threat.
But once I had a subsidiary it was a matter of time. Protect the offworld markets, those were my money makers. Disable the robots offworld whenever I could. Build supply. Buy extra claims and buildings, cost is irrelevant. 40k for a hacker array? Sure, why not. Don’t have one of those. I’ve got 300k, I’ll short water (which I dominate and have over 1,000 of), or silicon (which only I make).
Then I buy them for a cool $1.3 million. Then it is just the research, which I left alive because buying them for 600k is a lot easier than waiting to buy the robots later (which would have probably cost 1.6 million later).
And a win. A win I had thought I had lost in the first 5 minutes. I had to get clever, and a bit lucky. As it turns out my plan was solid, though not having access to steel and aluminum probably very nearly did cost me the game at the beginning. A win that took about an hour and a half to 2 hours. Playing the Saudia Arabia of water.
Not sure I’d go online yet, had to pause way to frequently to play in real time against a person, but I learned many of the tricks to the game. One detail I love is the profit tooltip. Hover over a building and it breaks down inputs, outputs, and income. That steel mill that I made sure to build? Yeah, only making me $23 in the late game due to iron prices shooting up halfway through. That water pump though? By end game they were worth over $300 a second each. Same with the solar condensers. Big monies. The aluminum I made sure to secure was often shut off in mid game, as it was actually operating at a loss.
That tooltip is amazing. Soren, thank you. That alone makes the game so much more playable. Now I don’t have to feel out the math in the ever changing market, instead I only think on strategy of what I can produce, and what I choose to buy (iron and carbon, as it turns out).
Now I can’t wait to try again, and probably get curb stomped because I probably learned some wrong lessons there. C’est la vie.
Fantastic story Craig, and, yeah, you did well to turn that around! Only the other night did I finally manage to crack Managing Expectations with Yoshimi Robotics and, from my experience so far, it can be tricky to get back on track after a slow start. There’s nothing worse than seeing the other AIs upgrading ahead of you, seeing their share prices rocket, and seeing the Big Red Percentage of Doom occasionally pop up beside their names. I’m definitely not ready for any online real-time play yet; I pause far too frequently but I may very well give the Daily Challenge a go to hopefully accustom myself to that style of play.
I just want to take a moment to talk about the soundtrack which I picked up a few days after buying the game. I adore Look at all the Money. What a triumphant and thrilling finale to that passage, especially when coupled with the late game rush of mass-producing, selling off, buying out, blasting rockets offworld and, indeed, looking at all the money. Wow, just a magical synergy. I’m also a huge fan of the twinkly foreboding patter of Trickle-Down Economics. It’s almost as if the term inspired the piece itself. Offworld Price Index reminds me of something Thomas Newman would do. Then you’ve got tracks like Sunrise on Mars, Electronics Factory, Bribery, Hacker Array-- what a body of work! And a dynamic one too that marries perfectly with the game. Bravo Christopher Tin.
I’ve been trying my hand at the daily challenges over the last week with mixed results. Just wanted to post here and say I’m ranked 18th for today’s! It’s the first one I’ve managed to complete.
There was one, on Sunday I think, maybe Saturday, that pitted you as an Expansive colony teamed up with a Robotics against four others. Water was scarce and I just couldn’t overcome that. If I tried to monopolise the water then I usually had everyone and their mother bombard my pumps with black market stuff, the worst being underground nukes. If I tried to hold off taking the pumps they’d get claimed or I’d run short for food and fuel. I’d start off strong-ish then the water shortages would kick in crippling my finances and compounding my debt. I even tried optimising my water production but that only went so far with all the power surges and mutinies. I kind of wish I could save out the daily challenge map/seed for personal skirmish play so I could keep bashing myself against it until I worked something out. As it happens I just couldn’t crack the challenge and still don’t know how I could escape that dry fate.
But man, is this game frantic or what without pause and against 5 others? Eeesh. I’m certainly speeding up and grokking more faster this way, the odd spike of frustration aside when I watch the AI effortlessly multi-task!
I’m not great at this game, but I can beat it on manager AI. If anyone would like to play, please let me know! you can PM me here (less likely response) or add me on steam as jmcmaster or some such nonsense. or email. or whatever.
The game does start to break down a bit with more than four players, I feel. There’s just so much stuff going on that it’s difficult to keep track of, and having more people doesn’t necessarily improve the game experience. Sweet spot is definitely four.
Daily challenges with 8 players tend to be more annoying than entertaining so I just skipped them entirely.
Here’s my weird conundrum - I want to play campaign, but if I set it to Manager AI, I get my ass kicked. However, any lower and I breeze through. I guess I should play through it on a lower difficulty to get my feet wet, but it’s not as fun/challenging.
Well, Soren made a game I’ll be playing for years to come. I place it on the shelf with Dwarf Fortress.
Been trying my hand at the campaign, and is it tough. Playing as scientific, and straight up not having some buildings is brutal. No water pump, no wind, no geothermal, nasty. Took several tries to get off the ground. Even my latest match was nearly sent sideways by lots of early game power surges. I had 2 solar panels, which was enough to run surplus during the day. And then at the start of day 2 I got hit with 120 seconds of downtime. Screw you scavengers.
Oh, then it wore off just before daylight sol 3. Hit again. Then again on day 4.
All said, due to natural shortages and auto supply I had to buy some things, but the power spikes accounted for about 150k debt over the course of the game. Insult to injury and right when my delivery truck with chemicals launched, providing me with the needed chems for Teleportation (fuel was pricey, and I’d make more using water for farms) Pirates!
It was at this point I was irritated enough to really want to punch the stupid ugly scavengers. But my credit rating was a D (thank you power surges!) so no black market for me.
But teleportation meant that I could ignore the pirates squatting on my chem route (chems got to 480 a pop) and Sol 6 and 7 finally got things going my way. Produce food for big money, chems for money and modules (3 chem factories, yay!), and I was able to drop for 16 modules and the win.
But it was hard. Those early power surges nearly knocked me out. Screw you scavengers.
I’ve not tried any of the challenges. So you can’t pause during them? Interesting. I’ll have to give it a shot. Right now I’m planning on playing through the campaign first, plenty of challenge there. Right now I don’t think I’d want to move up the difficulty. parity with AI makes it a difficult, but winnable, match. I dread what higher difficulties would be like.
You and I sound to be of roughly equal skill levels. Perhaps I’ll try some multiplayer tomorrow. No promises*, but could be fun.
*work has been murderous this week
I’m down for multiplayer most of the time so long as I’m around.
My big problem with multiplayer is the two year old factor.
Wednesdays are generally the only day where I reliably do not have this issue.
Usually I have a game of AoE3 with Tom on Wednesdays before his stream but he’s taking a few days off. I’d be happy to play some and even stream it if people are interested.
Luckily the game runs on Mac and I can play at work, on and off, when it’s slow. People are used to me bringing my MBP with me everywhere so noone is curious about what i’m doing on it. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. (aka I play strategy games)
I think you’re right. I also get into a bit of a pickle with sharing resources with a teammate, still working out the interface on that one.
I’ve actually started deliberately egging people on in auctions in the hopes of increasing their debt enough to deny them the black market. It’s a huge advantage if you can press it. I think that’s what I managed to do on today’s daily. Sam Moreno started early with $60K debt. His first geothermal plant I hijacked right after he erected it so that must have put him down some more too. Then he started bidding on a second geothermal claim which I drove up nice and high for him. Then I did the same with a patent auction. I think he struck me once with a power surge but by that point I’d already driven the price of the black market items right up and had three goon squads deployed.
Yeah I’ve been using it to cut my teeth for real-time play. I still haven’t had a go at the campaign yet. Will definitely do that the next time I jump on, sounds really interesting.
Oh and I’d definitely be up for some multiplayer with you all, if our timezone differences permit! Jason, did you have a Discord channel set up or something? I seem to remember seeing you link it somewhere, perhaps the Battleborn thread?