The Wicked Flea

Join Date 01/2005

[Spoil] Campaign Complaints

Balance the damn thing!

I am very unhappy with the "balance" of the campaign. The first few maps are training sure, but you flip the stupid switch from 'drizzle' to 'downpour' on Siege! I had been playing on beginner and winning without any trouble prior to Siege, but on that I got creamated in mere weeks.

To beat Siege I had to resort to a heavily defensive strategy and literally dig in so that I could survive long enough. I also had to turn the diffituly down to Simple, something I am not happy doing.

Yes, the Dreadlords are unstoppable. But how about giving them a bit of a slowdown, eh? They murder on the lower difficulties just as efficiently as on Normal. Give us a chance to hold on, will you?

Achillies was stupid. Yes, it's a strategic move, the map was stupid. The only way to win is a rapid rush before the Dreadlords get solidified. IE, you must attack within roughly 12 weeks.

And now Apocalypse. What am I supposed to do? "Act fast". Duh, I have done that since Achillies now and it's stale. Where are my target? High-tech is no weakspot when they can afford to build a factory right off the bat, they then build stuff faster than I can imagine!

Sorry for being such a downer. While I enjoyed the long hard battle I fought for in Siege, it took 9 years, this is just rediculous! The Drealords almost entirely ignore the Yor and Drengin, because they are evil. Everyone else is fair game, and get manhandled as such. If I were an ancient and deadly overmind I would IGNORE all but one target and systematically take over, one race at a time. There is no "slow march of approaching doom", only the irresistable blitz. I could take on the Dreadlords in Siege with a loaded Military Starbase, but only on attack.

C'mon and balance it. Until then, I'm sticking to skirmishes and the metaverse.

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I agree entirely, though I had to beat Siege using the 'rush' tactic, buying factories and colony ships and building up as much of an invasion fleet as I could get. It's a race to Planetary Invasion, really; get the ships spaceborne and into Drengin space before the Dread Lords wipe you out. I played on Normal, got creamed, took it down a notch, and it took me three tries to beat it. As for Achilles, I tried the same tactic, letting my allies tie up the Dread Lords while I built up in the corners and send in my fleet. Didn't work, since there's no way to coordinate my attacks with the AI except sitting and waiting for them to make a move. Gave up on the campaign as well - oops! At least skirmishes are still fun.

Love the game, though. It's like the bastard child of Civ4 and Ascendancy.

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Finished those without having to resort to rushes on Normal, but I am having trouble (finally) on Deception.

Those other missions you can usually hang in there until you can develop a ship that causes 3-4 dmg, fleet 4+ of them, and you can take-out most dread lord ships if you attack. The key is of course you MUST attack or you will lose the fleet... ie invest in engines and weaponry. So its not too bad.. Once they start losing ships its only a matter of time before you win. Also, if you crank up a starbase with attack and defense, they tend to waste ships trying to take it out.

The problem I have with deception is that they start with shields (13) on some ships, which means 3 defense in armor and point-defenses ! I can't come up with a ship to do any damage to them. Even a fleet doesnt do anything.

I'll have to try it again.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2411

You do know you can lose a campaign mission and take an alternative route right?

The whole point of Siege was so that expert players would have a challenge and other players could go to the alternative missions.

If you're playign to win every single mission, you're missing out on a lot of the cool missions.

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After I complete the campaign I'm thinking of going back and intentionally losing some missions just so I can play them.

I have observed, though, that no one seems to play the losers' scenarios. No one ever resigns. When we think it's hopeless, we restart. That's always been true for any SP game. I'd recommend a quick UI to allow players to choose between missions--you went to the trouble of designing them, you should get them out there so more people play them. To handle losing, what Close Combat does in their campaigns is they restart the same mission with some extra advantage (like extra units). But you pay a price at the campaign level; for example, you only have so much time to complete the campaign, and losing costs you time.

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You do know you can lose a campaign mission and take an alternative route right?

The whole point of Siege was so that expert players would have a challenge and other players could go to the alternative missions.

If you're playign to win every single mission, you're missing out on a lot of the cool missions.

Wow I had no idea actually..

You know one thing that might help with that is putting in text in the mission description along the lines of

"If you can't do it, we'll try a different route, do your best but we'll try a different tactic against these Dread Lords if you can't hold on.."

or something to that nature

Hmm now to go play and lose the campaign some

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I just finished Apocalypse on normal difficulty last night (at 2am). I didn't act fast at all, except to grab the nearby planets and resources. The game lasted around 6 hours.

Near the end of the game, the Dreadlords had control of 6 planets with an additional 2 that were constantly changing hands between my allies and the Dreadlords. They also had entire stacks of fleets. I'm not talking 4-6 ships. I'm talking over 30 ships on a single tile. Several planets were filled up with dreadlord ships until the starbase was full. They were sending a steady stream of fleets (not single ships) at my planets. By the time I got to their last 4 planets, they were each producing a dreadlord battleship every 2 turns. The production rate of the dreadlords was just sick. My battleship fleets were working full speed just blowing up the ships as they were being built. By the end of the game, one of the battleship fleets had so many levels that a few of the ships were over 300hp. They started with 24hp.

And we thought that they were few in number, hehe.

My allies were pretty much useless, even after I wiped out the Drengin and Yor. I was hoping that by removing those races from the field that my allies would be able to help me focus on conquering the Dreadlord planets. It turns out that the only thing that I could count on them to do was send in a transport ship to steal the planet once I had managed to wipe out it's defenses. But actual ships to fight the dread lords? Not a single one.

I wish you could tell your allies which planet to focus their attacks on.

They wouldn't bother to defend the planets once they ninja invaded, of course, so it would be stolen back by the Dreadlords a few turns later unless I parked my fleets near the planets and prepared for another siege while the Dreadlords would send fleet after fleet after fleet to the planet to try to take it from me. The planets in the area of conflict were degraded down to quality 2 and 3 by the time I massed a strong enough offensive to push towards their main clusters.

I did the alternate mission for Siege as well - you have to defeat the Yor for their missile technology rather than try to steal a planet from the Dreadlords. It was very easy compared to Siege. The mission after that was even easier, you have to win a new race as an ally. I just built a few influence stations on the MANY influence resources around the map and won the game without even building a combat vessel. Then it was back to the brutal Dreadlord fights.

I agree that it's an astonishing jump in difficulty and brutality once the dreadlords show up. You either have to try to win very quickly or you will have a long hard fight on your hands. Rediculously long, if the Dreadlords manage to bulid up any sort of economy, because their economy and morale is just overwhelming. Luckily they play kind of stupid. If the Dreadlords had attacked with all the ships it had squirrelled away by it's core planets, the galaxy would have been doomed.

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Hi!

The whole point of Siege was so that expert players would have a challenge and other players could go to the alternative missions.

Huh?!? Now you tell me?

You know one thing that might help with that is putting in text in the mission description along the lines of

100% agree. This game is not a Wing Commander, where a missile ended my mission, and I was simply put in another track of missions. Every branching of this campaign should be explicitely laid out the way imagiro proposed.

If you're playign to win every single mission, you're missing out on a lot of the cool missions

Could you please post a campaign map so we'd know what missions not to win?

BR, Iztok

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If you're playing to win every single mission, you're missing out on a lot of the cool missions

I like that. Pretty much every strategy game I have played in the past decade has been a win or lose game. There were no defeats -- unless the campaign called for you to lose, and losing in a certain way was a victory condition. Starcraft would have been a lot cooler if you didn't have to win every single mission, if you could fail but still proceed with an alternate route, perhaps with an alternate ending.

I think the alternate mission option just need to be made more prominent. I didn't notice it the first time I lost Siege. Or the second... or third... I think that the entire screen could be redesigned to be more intuitive, the text VCR style options just seem a bit strange when I think about it. A tree-style map would be better, listing your path through the campaign so far, perhaps with stats on each game (how many times you played that mission, how long it was, how you won, etc)

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I just finished the campaign last night and I was disappointed, too. "Anticlimactic" comes to mind. First, all you get at the end is the credits. Okay, so maybe Stardock doesn't have the resources to do a cutscene. Fine. But at least have some kind of storyline or something at the end. But the other thing is, the scenario itself was very anticlimactic. You just rush to Planetary Invasion and invade the DL planet before they crank a single ship out. It would have been nice to have a Battlestar-Galactica-like scenario where you have a bunch of colony ships, who need to run the DL blockade and make it to the safe planet. Just an idea.

I did learn something from the final scenario, though: the power of Mitrosoft! Once I got Planetary Invasion, I just bought transports on all my planets from Mitrosoft and invaded. Who cares about the absurdly long leases--the game ends in 3-4 turns.

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it was kind of strange to find that the dreadlords do NOT have their planet developed. In fact, I found out that they were building soil enhancement and all that good stuff while I was making my way over.

I also like how the Terrans think. The Drengins are overwhelming, the dreadlords are right after them, let's go into dreadlord's pocket universe and try to defeat them on their home planet where they should have the infrastructure to build all the ships and defeat us easily as emphasized throughout the campaign.

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I wonder what was up with that storyline right before the final scenario? Those two aliens appear to the Terran leader, and he's caught in a dilemma. That shadowy figure suggests they go into that pocket universe, the Thalian says, "no, don't do it!" Was there a campaign choice we missed?

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