Thanks for the tips and support, everyone. I’m fairly happy that I still have a functioning society and it’s Round 72 or something. It doesn’t appear that the AI is super aggressive at the “Regular” level. I suspect that’s one of the reasons why I’m still around.
Good luck!
Is that what the red dot means? I’ve been building things like truck stops and supply bases now and then as it’s clear that logistical support of units is huge, but it’s all sort of “build something and see what changes”. I feel like I’ve learned a lot and yet only barely scratched the surface.
It’s been a bumpy ride. Following the bare essentials guide, I picked all the autocratic starting options, and after a bit all the people hated me and I was getting all sorts of revolution warnings. I decided to try to pivot and be a nice person, and I’m pretty sure that’s why all my cabinet members started to hate me, eventually revolting with armed forces and whatnot. The people seem to like me better, but the army, yeah, not too happy with things.
While all that was going on, I noticed that my army was vanishing. Like, literally every turn they’d be a point or two of strength gone from a unit, and some units were disappearing. I finally realized that we had no food and everyone was starving, so I built a couple of farms. But a few turns later things hadn’t gotten better. That’s when I realized that we had no water for the farms, so I created an ice mine and that seemed to stop the problem. But I still couldn’t start building back up the army until I realized that we had no munitions and could buy some of those directly.
So lately I’ve been building up our army and trying to squash the rebels, who really don’t seem to do much except hang out in our country and get in the way. The encircled unit in the top right is a determined lot led by my former Economic Minister, who I never liked in the first place. Whiny little jerk.
I tried a couple times before and never got anywhere. Yesterday I watched that “Bare Essentials” video at 1.5x speed, then fired up the game and walked through the first half of it again, doing the things he suggested. I found that was enough to get a foothold on the game. Once you get going you realize that the video leaves out 99% of the game so I kept telling myself, “Don’t worry about what you don’t know, just try stuff and see what happens.” So far that’s working. I already want to try a new game with the stuff I’ve learned, and now I’ve got a short list of game systems I want to learn more about. There are certain card categories that I can’t figure out what to do with, and I’ve got only the slightest grip on logistics, but they are fun things to be learning while you play.
Shadow Empire definitely reveals itself in layers.
It suits me very well as I’m a serial 4X restarter. I very rarely ever finish a 4X campaign and find most of my joy in rerolling and playing the early game to see what sort of playspace I’ve got this time. SE is amazing at this.
As such, I’ve learned the basics and general wiring of the game very well. Very few 4X games have had so many layers for me to uncover at my preferred pace
Siwa. Alien Life. Spread Out
FOW: Know map, then complete
2 zone start
1 army per zone
All syndicates
Tech 4 (middle)
Development: Normal (maybe Slower??)
DIFFICULTY: Regular
“Give AI More time to think”
“Only supreme council”
Planetology: re-roll until size less than 101, aprox 1 AU
Geology: some water and oceans
Oceans: 5-10%
Rainfall over 250mm per year
Planet: look for Sentient Lifeforms
Initial picks:
+Government
+Heart
+Democracy
Cabinets: Interior / Economic / Military Research
I’m trying to install these but it looks like the install directions are basically just copy into the main Graphics or AltGraphics folders. But each one overwrites the others, unless I’m missing something.
I periodically go deep into this game, and I still don’t have a sense of what’s optimal past the initial expansion phase. To this day, I have never designed an aircraft that can fly. It’s still so appealing though.
This is me in Dominions. In fact, I seem to play that game rather like Small World. Ok, expand, expand, uh, ran into neighbors everywhere, welp, guess it’s time to go into decline.
I haven’t played this in a year, but I enjoyed my one game and feel like giving it another go.
Have they made any improvements to the AI? I found the AI was good at exploiting me when I left areas undefended, but as soon as I set up lines it became way too cautious. The AI would rarely challenge lines of cheap MG units, even with superior forces, and on the rare times that it did successfully contest the line it wouldn’t try for a breakthrough.
Patch notes show a number of AI changes in the last year, especially in v1.07.06 which would have released as 1.08 in Feb 2021. Also, AI speed is increased in the most recent patch and I find it safe and beneficial to play with “Give AI More time to think” enabled.
So the short answer is “Yes, AI is improved” but will probably never be perfect. :-)
Awesome, thanks! Great to hear that the AI speed is improved, sometimes it felt like the AI would spend 10 minutes thinking and then go “Hmm, pass.”
I wonder how this will work. The air unit side of the game already feels too abstracted to me, I wouldn’t want a navy system that works in the same way.
All four of those graphics/UI mods look beautiful. But if you install them, is this irreversible? Can they be uninstalled? The over-writing thing worries me a bit, as I find the game playable without mods, but admittedly a bit drab.
Also, I see these mods in the Matrix forums, but there doesn’t seem to be a Steam Workshop for this game at all. Or am I just not finding it?
Backup the folder first if you want. The “graphics extra” is safe. Backup the others.
But if you delete the overwritten files or folders then Steam should just re-download the vanilla files. Or re-install the game. You won’t break anything permanently if you install those mods.
