Now that i understand the game a bit better i find myself playing it like an extended WH40K tabletop skirmish. Instead of a set number of points with which to field an army it uses the 4X infrastructure to control the drafting of troops over the course of the game. But otherwise i find myself moving armies around just like in tabletop games. Finding good terrain with my units in cover and clear lines of sight the enemy has to advance through, combined arms groups, leaders and healers, etc.
I’ve ended up playing on the ‘fast’ setting because the pacing of the game seems off. It can take ages to even get 4 units up and a factory ready. The necron has an ability to speed up production which can cause some serious heart-ache early on in the game using the default settings.
I also think luck plays a huge factor in the game. Getting an artifact that heals all your troops 1 hp per turn is great, getting two makes you unstoppable.
I’m not sure about how fairly the AI plays. In one session I was under-developed compared to the two AI and yet it seemed that they called a truce to beat me up. Their units were literally lined up behind each other, sniping away at my smaller force.
I guess it depends on what you mean by ages. If you’ve got no units, the turns go by pretty quickly considering there’s nothing for you to do during your turn. :)
But, yeah, production speed is definitely one of the game systems you have to manage. City slots are arguably the most important resource. Speaking of, I wish I could see what buildings the AI is putting in city slots. Which leads to…
It’s supposed to depend on the difficulty setting. As I mentioned upthread, I’ve watched what it does in a test game. It seemed pretty above board to me. But given that we can’t see the buildings in its cities, maybe there are some shenanigans going on. Like it doesn’t have to build buildings or something?
-Tom
Yes given how long the game takes there was more Randomness in the map layouts than I would like. I’d love to see some Civ like map options for balance starts and for different map types. Sometimes I’m on an open plane other times there’s lots of water and narrow choke points
Man, you sold me on this game :-)
I quite like it, took me a while to figure out that it is a wargame with 4x trappings, not a 4x game with an added on wargame (quite like Age of Wonders).
I actually read the manual, found something interesting:
Dan Grilledoctopus & Alec Meer - quite the RPS alumni writing team !
Oh hey, neat. That’s very interesting, thanks for spotting and sharing!
Okay, I know it’s odd that I posted like one minute after Freethegluten, but I pinky swear that he or she isn’t my alt account. For one thing, I have gone on record with my desire to imprison all gluten indefinitely.
My take is that the gluten can go somewhere else - preferably far, far away :-)
Ok, so I am convinced the AI cheats a little.; As in gets a bit of a resource boost even at normal.
However, still not a great challenge, at normal.
I have won with Guard (my favourite, you really have to go for the surround with your infantry to stand a chance, then get the armour and artillery out and just smash face) and Marines (Marines + heroes can win you the whole thing. devastators are just dangerous as hell, Heroes tank, especially the Captain- yes your economy will suffer compared to the rest, but you need a much smaller economy relatively speaking to be as good, in my experience so far. Bring out Vindicators later for anti tank stuff, but if you have a line of Devastators you don’t need these. They performed quite well in my last game crushing Nekron armour)
I stopped a game with Nekrons because it seemed a bit easy (that as pre-patch though) as they just melt everything, heal every turn by default, and can heal an extra 6 health. It was also a bit grindy on an extra large map coming up against 2 other Nekrons.
Hit, heal, hit, heal…
I’ll try the Orks soon. I hear they have the funkiest set of mechanics.
Ack, so I tried to read the manual, but I don’t get it.
As the Space Marines; according to the tutorial you have to put down a whaterveritis of redemtion next to a resource to harvest it. But seems like you can just aquire the tile (by moving over it) to actually get the benefitns, so why bother with the tower? Is it just for defense?
If I’m understanding things correctly (which I might not), each resource has both a straight bonus like +2 requisition and a percent bonus to overall production like +20% requisition. If you just grab it by sending your Marines to take the tile, you get the +2 requisition. You won’t get the +20% requisition bonus unless you stick a tower next to it.
Finding this game surprisingly good. I dislike city micromanagement, and prefer the tactical focus of games like HOMM, AOW and this one.
The mechanics don’t seem to be explained all that well though. What are Hero, Invulnerable and Witchfire damage reduction? How do the 50% and 33% Invulnerable damage reduction on some heroes stack? Additively, multiplicatively, not at all? How does LOS work? What do the techs for increasing ‘tile acquisition radius’ actually do? Is excess population beyond what you need strictly a drawback? Which units/buildings increase in price the more you have of them? Does a point of armor reduce damage by ~8% additively or multiplicatively and does it apply to all types of damage? Many questions!
Thanks, makes sense, but weird that they didn’t put that in the manual, or tooltip!
I agree completely, first time in a long while that I felt compelled to read the manual … and then it doesn’t give me the stuff I really need to know!
Yeah I was excited to read the manual, but just sat down to read it, and it’s practically useless.
I have answers for a few of these:
LOS is fairly obvious with just a couple exceptions: units in forests can only be spotted if an enemy is directly adjacent. Height differences can block LOS (cliffs are sometimes REALLY hard to notice unless you zoom way in and specifically check for them). You can also check the Z coordinate info for the hex to tell what elevation its at. Given all that i have had times where LOS was blocked for no reason i could determine.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘excess population beyond what you need’. Each building requires a population point to operate. If you have excess population you just have room to build. It is important to always have housing available for population growth. The speed of growth slows down as you approach your housing cap. So always try to maintain a good amount of spare housing to keep the growth fast.
Tile acquisition radius is the range within which you can add tiles to your existing city. When you start you are limited to tiles within about 3 spaces from your headquarters. Each acquisition tech you acquire increases that range by one hex. So the circle of land around your headquarters that you are allowed to claim gets bigger and bigger with each tech so you can hopefully reach special resources.
Correct. Space Marines cannot build additional cities to acquire the +20% special resource bonuses far away from their starting cities. The Fortress of Redemption is their method to acquire these bonuses (and get a nice blocking/defense building when these are built in…creative…places).
This is explicitly true. If you check the starting game info, if the game as a whole is set to “Medium” difficulty, then the individual AIs will each be set to “normal” difficulty (Nob for Orks, Comissar for Imperial Guard) and if you mouse over the “normal” difficulty it says “small loyalty advantage given”. One point of loyalty improves the production of ALL resources by 2%, so a “small” loyalty advantage will yield a percentage point boost (I would estimate around 10%) to all resources for the AI. That’s a small advantage but it does add up.
If you want the AI to have no advantage, you have to set the difficulty to “Easy”. (I personally don’t like this but oh well.)
I have trouble seeing cliffs too.
One positive thing is that unlike Civ the AIs turn times dont get too long for me even on large maps.Unfortunately there is still a Civ like grind in moving all your troops over to the far corner of the map to get the last faction, so i think I’ll go back to medium maps in the future.
Wow this has sucked up several hours of playtime in no time flat. Although I think I’ll turn off quests for future games - it’s hard enough pushing back the other factions than have to also deal with some of the crap the storylines throw up.