I just unlocked tech tree information. No problem following the tutorial directions so far- the previous mission (taking out a trio of pirate bases) was tense at the end, but a win’s a win!
Once you get the ability to customize your flagship I found a setup that does the drop missions easily and quickly: Special ability 1 cloaking device, special ability 2 afterburners. You use the cloaking device the first turn, afterburners the second turn, third turn you can set a course straight for the drop point. You win and your ship warps out the second you touch the drop point.
My first set of abilities didn’t include either of those, but I wanted to start a custom game with a different race against me to see what it was like, so that may be why. I would sell my sister to Al-Quida for some kind of cloaking device.
Interesting… I think I actually started with 2 different cloak abilities. I didn’t realize that they were random.
Makes sense though.
I just finished my first game, on Normal/Normal. It got pretty tedious in the end. I had to fast forward for a couple of decades before the war finally wrapped up.
As far as I can tell you upgrade your ship by getting certain techs, either by finding a spacefaring race that doesn’t have them yet and doing a dispatch mission to help them research it, or by finding a spacefaring race that already has it and doing a tech theft mission to steal it (which will piss them off by like 20 points). If you’re already aware of that then I dunno.
Just bought this game.
My first start was good, but i decided to start over again because i accidentally flew to a few planets while viewing them.
My second start was not good at all and would have made me quit the game if it had been my first. I destroyed one ship and the 2nd one proceeded to kite me around for 20 minutes with neither one of us able to do any damage to the other. This is a serious design flaw. I don’t even think i can finish this game. I think i need to restart the game just to finish the first level. Stupid.
edit: Ok i eventually managed to get the enemy to not run away constantly and actually fight, but this is a major problem where the AI can screw you if they decide not to fight and (at this point in the game) there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Ok it seems like the whole acutian race is programmed to do this shit. I will probably drop this game right away.
i have played 5 times and i’ve lost 5 times :D :D
Flying to another planet takes either no time or so little time as to make no significant difference in 99% of cases. Just FYI.
The turn based combat works most of the time, but sometimes it doesn’t.
There is a turret called a wall turret or something like that that fires a constant wall of fire after being triggered. The problem is that you can really easy miss them and i’m not sure which which way they are going to fire until they do.
So i will tell my ship to move forward, it will trigger the wall turret in the middle of its movement path and then it will be instantly destroyed. This happened a lot.
Here’s something I just discovered may help if you’ve played enough of the tutorial to be comfortable with what you have to do: Start a custom game with the tutorial deactivated and everything unlocked. You’ll not only have power allocation controls from the very beginning, but access to ship customization, special abilities, and the black market as well. Should make the early game a lot easier.
Ok i’ve had a little time to calm down.
The game concept is really interesting to me. I primarily bought this because i recently read a book with a sort of similar concept (First Admiral series by William J. Benning).
The combat engine is cool, kind of similar to space rangers. There does seem to be somewhat of an information overload though. In some battles there was literally a hundred small ships flying EVERYWHERE on the screen and i basically had no idea what was happening.
Your gunners are stupid. They cannot aim against a moving target at all unless you’re flying at the same speed and broadsiding them. This is kind of stupid. I don’t expect 100% accuracy against a long range target moving erratically, but you can’t even hit a mid range target that is turning slightly. All of your shots will miss. You pretty much need to broadside your target unless you want a very long fight. This leads to my next point…
Sadly, similar to starfarer/starsector, the AI will sometimes kite you until the end of time and you can’t really counter this through sheer power (ie max engines and rest in guns). You really need to just ignore them for a while until they eventually come back to attack you. Then you do a pass on them and they run away again. Repeat a few times.
The player ship seems really weak even on normal. I guess this makes sense since you just stole a cutting edge tech ship and don’t have tech above other races.
The strategic side of things is really cool, but i suspect (as others have noted) that it may get repetitive in the long run.
I tried to give a second rare space tech after doing a few battles and it seems impossible at this point. I almost did it once, but there are a ton of things that just instantly kill me.
I find that I consistently connect with ships that are in my range. The only thing I have to be close and broadside-ish with is the Gigacannon special. Also I didn’t have any problems doing data drop missions - you can hover over defenses to see what they are and what their attack range/direction is, then just thread through them with depowered weapons and amped shields and engine. Are you aware of the ability to set movement waypoints by shift clicking? That helps do fancier maneuvering.
The kiting is incredibly annoying, but it’s been rare and there’s an easy solution: when they’re down to just kiting flagships, stop moving they’ll then stop kiting and come back to fight, giving you a sufficient window in which to kill them.
I havent tried going stationary, i will try that.
When i’ve ran away in return, it has only allowed me one pass on them before they run away again, making even the easiest battles a long back and forth.
I haven’t put that much time in to the game though. In my current game i’ve only had 4 battles, involving the acut-something. They have this ship that is a carrier and has a shotgun like weapon it. It does nothing but fly away from me and fire it behind itself (at a range which it does no damage to me).
It could just be that i’ve been unlucky and picked the kiting enemy to fight at the start of the game.
I thought the wall turrets didn’t have the firing arc, but i’m probably mistaken.
Yes, i tried this when i found a weakness in the defenses (they didn’t have wall turrets in the back). I got about two ship lengths from the target location before dying. My ship basically disintegrates, even when i avoid most of the defenses. I could probably make it by suiciding until i get lucky.
If you can do one of these missions early game, i salute you, but for me, i just got one shot my some random missile from full shields.
Does anyone know how passive weapons work?
I was messing around with the different ship types and i could never get these things to work reliably at all. I think i would notice them trigger once or twice in a battle, so i assume i’m doing something wrong and not turning them on or whatever.
What use is a passive anti armor laser (the name escapes me at the moment) if it only fires once a battle?
Some of the ships seem harder than others as well, not even getting an anti shield weapon.
I love this concept, much as I loved it in Drox Operative.
That said, I think the game might need a little more time to bake. My first game has gotten stuck in a weird state where there are literally several THOUSAND points of fleet power all attacking the Thoraxian homeworld but nothing ever happens. Two different major powers invaded it, and now after literally decades of sitting there camping the planet with no enemy resistance fleet wise, they never start ground invasion. This has somehow occupied all the invading power’s fleets, so minor powers are taking over the rest of the universe because the major powers can’t respond to them - presumably because their mega fleets are all tied up in the Eternal Struggle going on elsewhere.
The ship combat I really like, though it gets a little broken once you unlock the right abilities - between Stealth and Gigacannon I can take on 10 or 12 GI class Armadas with no problems now.
It can get a little repetitive - if there’s a planet with no fleets protecting it, you can steal literally every tech but you have to play the same several-minute minigame of getting to the space station each time. Not quite as onerous but still repetitive is when you want to give a giant pile of tech to a newly spacefaring race - you have to click through a bunch of menus for each individual tech.
With a few cleanup and UI patches though, I think this could be amazing. Already it’s probably my favorite of the Arcen games, so I hope it’s successful enough for them to give it the same level of support they gave AI War (that is the same developer, I think).
Reading upthread about ground combat not starting either - I wonder if something is just broken with ground combat. There didn’t appear to be any way to manually assist ground combat the way you can fleet combats.