TBS Age of Wonders: Planetfall - AoW gone to space

[Heroic Liberator]

Also cooler aesthetics

Perhaps my tastes are too vanilla, but I prefer the steoreotypical SF human civ aesthetic of the vanguard. (Dvar > both tho.)

 

[chuft]

I just played a random map as vanguard/voidtech and the AI loooooves to get out of defensible positions if it thinks it's stronger than the player. I never would've been able to win the battle for the Assembly's capital if they didn't march right out of the city and out of range of their defense towers. I researched 0 voidtech technologies and didn't feel the loss. Zboj Lamignat is absolutely correct in saying there's little synergy between race and secret tech, with a few notable exceptions.

Note one of the design objectives was of course to make any race playable with any secret tech, just like AOW3 with classes and races. That's not a bug, it's a feature.

 

[Lacrymas]

If that's the case, they either succeeded too radically or went about doing it the wrong way. As it stands now, the two aspects don't interact much and don't even need to interact.

 

[Lacrymas]

I'm doing the second Assembly campaign map as Celestial and am trying out melee. The AI can't handle melee ;d The map itself is kinda strange. I'm trying to go against CORE and siding with Logen, but I'm also trying to avoid fighting 4 AIs at once, but the Assembly leaders hate me from the very beginning and one of them declared war on me by turn 32ish. We'll see where this goes.

 

[chuft]

Beware of morale problems from fighting your own race. Tenets of Tranquility is a very useful mod here.

 

[Lacrymas]

I dropped that map. You can't traverse lava and the teleporters were situated in the worst possible places for what I was going so I said fuck it. Then it turns out the second map of the Syndicate is these tiny islands on a huge map that also have teleporters on them. I'll see if I can handle it, if not I'll just play the Vanguard on the last mission.

 

[cvv]

Then it turns out the second map of the Syndicate is these tiny islands on a huge map that also have teleporters on them.

Jesus I still have nightmares about that fucking map. Took ages to attrition my way to a miserable victory.

 

[Lacrymas]

Both Assembly 2 and Syndicate 2 are borderline unplayable. I get what they are going for, but they should've made the maps waaaaaaaaaaaay smaller.

 

[chuft]

Yes I did not finish everything. In fact I did not finish the last map either, which is unfortunate because I was hoping for some actual lore from it, but I couldn't take the brutality of it.

All in all I should have just done random maps/Empire mode after doing the tutorial/Vanguard maps. I was hoping to get some lore from the campaign, but ended up knowing almost nothing by the end.

Someone on the Discord found a lore dump on a Russian wiki which I have been reading. Learned more in fifteen minutes of reading it than I did from hundreds of hours of play in the campaign.

 

[chuft]

By the way I think Syndicate's way around those maps is Wraith tanks with leaders also in Wraith vehicles. You just fly over everything rather than bother with the teleporters. But yeah I think it was just too big of a map. I think I may have done a Doomsday Device victory on one of them rather than bother with the immensity of the map.

 

[Lacrymas]

I also have no idea what's happening or why ;d I can say for sure that the campaign is worse than AoW3 base campaigns. It not being coherent is the least of its problems. Maybe the expansion campaigns are better, we'll see. The one thing I liked, however, is that you get different secret techs on the second mission depending on what choices you made in the first one. More of that and less of everything else, please.

 

[cvv]

Oh some AoW3 campaign maps can be a right honourable pain in the ass too.

It's not a Planetfall problem, it's Triumph problem.

 

[Lacrymas]

So, anyone care to explain Empire mode to me? I'm willing to test it out, but I seem to have had other ideas of what it was. I thought you get planets with a fixed amount of opponents and teams, but it seems to be that I choose the number? What is the difference between chaining different random maps together and Empire mode? You get more freakishly overpowered on Empire mode? ;d

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

You get different modifiers, like starting at war, and different bonus objectives that give you "empire currency". You can re-roll the planets if you wish, afair. You use the currency to get access to mods from different factions and also neutral units that you normally don't have. I was mostly interested in it so that I could build and test "summoned" unit for each faction normally, like valkyrie for vanguard. Apparently you can't do that, lol.

It's mostly a thing that will help you get more mileage out of the game if you like it already. Not something that will radically change your perception of it.

 

[Lacrymas]

My main issue with the game at this point, having played through almost the entire campaign, is that the races are bland and somewhat one-dimensional. Even my beloved Syndicate gets old fast. Since all races use a unique damage channel, most mods are worthless for the vast majority of units, with too few exceptions, so there's not much of a point to trying out difference race/secret tech combinations even just to try out different mods. This is obvious in the Empire mode UI where you get to choose what kind of units/operations/mods you get from other races. The *only* synergy is with kinetic mods because more than one race uses that damage channel. Everything else that can potentially be synergistic (i.e. arc or biochemical) have the problem that the two races which use them have the exact same mods for them anyway.

 

[chuft]

Each race uses two damage channels and their secret tech units may use a third so I am puzzled by your remarks here.

 

[Lacrymas]

Each race uses two damage channels and their secret tech units may use a third so I am puzzled by your remarks here.

My point is that races have mods that support their own damage channels in the same way, so there is no synergy between the mods of different races because they are either literally the same mods or don't support the damage channel.

 

[chuft]

It means if you get units from another race, or an NPC faction, which uses one of your damage channels, those units can make use of mods you have researched. How is that not synergy?

 

[Lacrymas]

It means if you get units from another race, or an NPC faction, which uses one of your damage channels, those units can make use of mods you have researched. How is that not synergy?

Because they have the exact same mods if you play that other race. NPC factions are something else entirely and not relevant to this discussion.

 

[chuft]

They don't have the exact same units. If you conquer their cities you can research and build their units and they can use your mods because they share a damage channel with your race. That's synergy.

 

[Lacrymas]

But they don't play differently regardless of what race you chose because the mods they have are the same for each damage channel. I don't know whether you are being obtuse or I'm not explaining it well enough. Even if you say "well, that's synergy because they have the same mods so they can use each other's units", then the problem becomes "only races which share channels can effectively use the other's units" (which is the exact same problem, just looked at from the opposite side), which is not much better, let me tell you.

 

[chuft]

I guess I have no idea what you want. Maybe I'm just less picky than you.

 

[Lacrymas]

Some unusual combinations that aren't available otherwise?

 

[chuft]

You don't think having a Disassembler in the same army as a Laser Tank, with the Disassembler able to leverage your Vanguard kinetic mods, is unusual and otherwise unavailable? How about having multiple versions of a secret tech unit, like some flying Amazon Lightbringers joining your Vanguard Gunships that have Celestian mods to make a cool flying army as your mobile force? I love capturing Dvar cities because then I can research the op that lets me turn mountain sectors into habitable ones. If you don't see the advantages and fun of having multiple racial units/ops available to your forces, units which can leverage your mod research and bring their own abilities into play to combo with your racial units, and different versions of your secret tech units from other races, I don't know what to say.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Both Assembly 2 and Syndicate 2 are borderline unplayable. I get what they are going for, but they should've made the maps waaaaaaaaaaaay smaller.

in 4x games the only true victory condition is "i'm bored of wiping the floor with these enemies, let's start another game". maps smaller than the biggest size available shouldn't exist. ipse dixit.