Hello, I have been playing on and off since October of 2022. Here's some scattered thoughts. FYI I love this game, or at least what it aspires to be. It's not pretending to be finished and I'm not pretending it is.
1. The customization options are great. I always play with 100% unlock chance for example.
2. The alien space AI isn't just dumb but it really detracts from the game. In my current game the year is 2037. 64 fusion battleships--half 1st gen z pinches with 1.0g and half 2nd gen flow stabilized z pinch with 2.8s have dug in to the inner systems. Resistance Space Command breathes a sigh of relief until it looks out with it's long range scanners. 243 enemy ships are out there. Most are little ships but there are 10s of battleships, dreadnoughts, and motherships. Pencil pushers estimate Resistance Combat Power at 10k while Alien combat power is at 40k. Mission Control cannot support a further fleet expansion even if resources allowed it. Everyone braces for a major attack...that never comes. Seriously they send just little 1k task forces over and over. It's beyond frustrating. I build a big ass fleet I want to fight a big ass battle. Instead I waste hours of my life clicking through settling Jupiter while the AI dicks around.
3. If the alien space AI wasn't beyond stupid, then the game balance would be off. I don't mean they're full of hubris or something. Any incompetent massed attack on Earth would overwhelm me. Multiple competent attacks on Mercury would've stopped me in my tracks. If the alien AI was even incompetent, you would need 500 MC or so and endgame ships to stop a massed attacked. Instead I had an attack with 4 corvettes, 1 battleship, and 1 destroyer escorting their 4 assault carriers.
4. Alien councilors are frustrating. They can build an alien facility and then respawn on Earth immediately. No matter how much I crush the Alien Nation and the Servants, they just won't die. It seriously takes the fun out of the late game. Controlling Earth's orbit doesn't feel impactful.
5. Killing alien councilors late game is very frustrating. I have all these advanced alien techs but none help me detain or assassinate. My regions are swarming with defense drones, community scanners, pherocyte detectors while orbit is full of stations scanning for aliens and ships ready to put a coilgun round right on them. Except none of it is useful.
6. Protect target NEEDS to work against enthrall. Currently early game you MUST kill every alien in your territory asap before they RNG their way to the capital and steal all the points. Anti enthrall techs slow them down but do not stop them. That's fine but we need more tools than just throwing assassinate at them. Intuitively based on the descriptions, protect target would seem to work against it. I thought so at first.
7. I don't fear the assault carriers as long as I grab USA. I can just park 6 armies under them as they spend a whole month unloading only to pop out at 4.1. And it generates 0 alien hate. However, were this not the case, similar to point 3 the game balance would be off. To make matters worse, there's a slight RNG that the whole strategy won't work because they'll land in the amazon jungle and it takes my armies 32 days not 30 to reach them.
Some ranty thoughts after playing since October of 2022
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theblitz6794
- Posts: 9
- Joined: Fri Dec 30, 2022 2:32 am
Re: Some ranty thoughts after playing since October of 2022
I agree with you generally that despite substantial improvements AI is still far from being decent in regards to strategical and tactical layers. However, with some details I don't agree and your frustrations from p. 4, 5 and 6 probably come mostly from being in space too late - destroy alien surveillance ships early and there won't be enough abductions for alien facilities and enthralls. In my recent game I had exactly 0 enthralling of my CPs (without researching any anti-enthrall techs apart from story-needed) and 0 alien facilities built (Servants couldn't even acquire the tech for them despite having India and China).
This slight RNG is irrelevant when you have ships around - it's enough to attack Assault Carriers in any way during their landing operation as to stop it and they have to assign a new landing operation which usually has a different destination.
500 MC for ships alone is easily achievable by 2037 (10x more total in 2035 don't seem excessive to me) but this is not even true you would need it - against incompetent tactical AI (meaning its current state of not using formations, missile tactics and highly maneuverable walls) but competent strategical AI (meaning being able to mass-attack with large fleets) you would actually need less than 50 MC in endgame ships to defeat any large alien fleet coming to Earth (my standard endgame 30MC-fleet of highly maneuverable wall could do it in at most several fights while coming and going away for rearming coilguns during the motherships-fleet transit). This is why a competent strategical AI isn't enough.theblitz6794 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 12, 2024 4:01 am If the alien AI was even incompetent, you would need 500 MC or so and endgame ships to stop a massed attacked.
Were it not the case you could still destroy them with more armies from other countries (which are easy to have by the time of invasion even without own IP investments in army creation) or just destroy Assault Carriers in space (the Alien Hate is irrelevant when you do the early Total War which is currently for many reasons the most optimal way to deal with the alien threat) so the game balance would be the same.theblitz6794 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 12, 2024 4:01 am 7. I don't fear the assault carriers as long as I grab USA. I can just park 6 armies under them as they spend a whole month unloading only to pop out at 4.1. And it generates 0 alien hate. However, were this not the case, similar to point 3 the game balance would be off. To make matters worse, there's a slight RNG that the whole strategy won't work because they'll land in the amazon jungle and it takes my armies 32 days not 30 to reach them.
This slight RNG is irrelevant when you have ships around - it's enough to attack Assault Carriers in any way during their landing operation as to stop it and they have to assign a new landing operation which usually has a different destination.
Re: Some ranty thoughts after playing since October of 2022
Spoiler alert.
The storyline has a bit of an explanation for alien behavior. The ayys are not 'fanatical purifiers' bent on annihilating all non-alien life. They are working towards turning humanity into a useful tool species, like cattle or dogs. Annihilating human space presence is not required, especially when they outpower you so much.
There was a recent announcement of a fix to several techs and other things meant to give a boost against alien councilors, that weren't working as intended.
The biggest thing you can do to limit alien councilor function is get aggressive against the ayys on earth *and in orbit* early. The more flora growth the higher subsequent chances of alien success in a region. The more orbital scans (I forget what exactly it's called) the more of a bonus alien councilors get. It isn't safe to ignore the alien surveillance ships, target them early regardless of cost.
All in all, it sounds like the aliens are winning. They don't need to destroy human ships. Because it sounds like, in a relatively short while, those ships will be theirs.
The storyline has a bit of an explanation for alien behavior. The ayys are not 'fanatical purifiers' bent on annihilating all non-alien life. They are working towards turning humanity into a useful tool species, like cattle or dogs. Annihilating human space presence is not required, especially when they outpower you so much.
There was a recent announcement of a fix to several techs and other things meant to give a boost against alien councilors, that weren't working as intended.
The biggest thing you can do to limit alien councilor function is get aggressive against the ayys on earth *and in orbit* early. The more flora growth the higher subsequent chances of alien success in a region. The more orbital scans (I forget what exactly it's called) the more of a bonus alien councilors get. It isn't safe to ignore the alien surveillance ships, target them early regardless of cost.
All in all, it sounds like the aliens are winning. They don't need to destroy human ships. Because it sounds like, in a relatively short while, those ships will be theirs.
Re: Some ranty thoughts after playing since October of 2022
That's a perfectly good story explanation for why the aliens are trying to remain undetected initially, why they're doing the whole infiltration routine, why they're not being more openly aggressive against life on earth, etc. It's not really a good explanation for their behavior in space, especially a couple of years into the game when the invasion is pretty overt.
Regardless, fundamentally the game needs to work as a game so if the story were precluding good gameplay then it's the story that need be changed rather than the gameplay excused.
I definitely echo the complaints re: artificial stupidity and in general think the scenario has boxed itself in a bit too tightly with starting the aliens so much stronger and higher tech initially that artificial stupidity is the only way they're opposable. It'd probably be a much stronger game if the aliens initially had fewer, worse things in space but used those things more intelligently once things started getting hot and the human space presence became significant.
Another example of decisions enforcing artificial stupidity beside the fleet deployment decisions is fleet interception. The twin decisions that the aliens have vastly superior drives and that that having those drives means there's no reasonable way to intercept them means that you can't actually fight to defend the earth in this game about defending the earth from aliens except via trusting the AI will misjudge your fleet strength and make a bad call to engage you. I guess we'll see how the patch notes about the aliens learning to estimate fleet strength better goes; one could imagine that it creates a window where you can exploit the alien misjudgments but need to tech up to faster drives before they learn, which would be cool, but that's a real tightrope to walk.
Back to the original subject of the alien ship deployment, though, what bugged me even more than the fact that it makes you feel like you can only play the game because the aliens are designed to not use the tools they have is that instead of meaningful threats to respond to I've just got a giant, noisy list of nuisance attacks to deal with. In my last two games I'd see literally hundreds of alien fleets and they'd be sending constant tiny raids that I could easily defeat with my ships if I adjusted my defender's orbit to be around the target station in response to each.
This sucks as a mode of gameplay. You need to be continually sorting through an enormous and mostly irrelevant list of data and identify the alien fleets that are a threat and try to keep your fleets pre-positioning to be there when they arrive. The alien intercept course notifications generally give a decent initial heads-up, but it doesn't suffice because enough little fleets are incoming that you can't just park a defense fleet in the way upon notification and be done with it. You'll probably need to have defending fleets block one invading fleet while another is incoming, resupply, and reposition for the next. This means that you constantly need to try to remind yourself what your guys are doing and re-identify which incoming threats you have and haven't accounted for. It's also just a hell of a lot of clicking for a lot of largely uninteresting battles.
(and, no, this isn't intelligent raiding behavior by the aliens either, it's yet more the aliens handicapping themselves by acting stupidly- if the tactic *was* to overwhelm the human defenses with a lot of small attacks, you'd see five raiding fleets striking five different stations simultaneously, not five fleet arriving to different targets on the same planet a few days or weeks apart)
It's an unending game of whack-a-mole where the individual decisions aren't particularly challenging or interesting, but if you aren't OCD enough about keeping track of the game state you lose a station. Fewer attacks with some of them being larger fleets instead of lots and lots of tiny fleets would be much better; replace lots of busywork with fewer, more significant threats to respond to. (and more epic space battles!)
Regardless, fundamentally the game needs to work as a game so if the story were precluding good gameplay then it's the story that need be changed rather than the gameplay excused.
I definitely echo the complaints re: artificial stupidity and in general think the scenario has boxed itself in a bit too tightly with starting the aliens so much stronger and higher tech initially that artificial stupidity is the only way they're opposable. It'd probably be a much stronger game if the aliens initially had fewer, worse things in space but used those things more intelligently once things started getting hot and the human space presence became significant.
Another example of decisions enforcing artificial stupidity beside the fleet deployment decisions is fleet interception. The twin decisions that the aliens have vastly superior drives and that that having those drives means there's no reasonable way to intercept them means that you can't actually fight to defend the earth in this game about defending the earth from aliens except via trusting the AI will misjudge your fleet strength and make a bad call to engage you. I guess we'll see how the patch notes about the aliens learning to estimate fleet strength better goes; one could imagine that it creates a window where you can exploit the alien misjudgments but need to tech up to faster drives before they learn, which would be cool, but that's a real tightrope to walk.
Back to the original subject of the alien ship deployment, though, what bugged me even more than the fact that it makes you feel like you can only play the game because the aliens are designed to not use the tools they have is that instead of meaningful threats to respond to I've just got a giant, noisy list of nuisance attacks to deal with. In my last two games I'd see literally hundreds of alien fleets and they'd be sending constant tiny raids that I could easily defeat with my ships if I adjusted my defender's orbit to be around the target station in response to each.
This sucks as a mode of gameplay. You need to be continually sorting through an enormous and mostly irrelevant list of data and identify the alien fleets that are a threat and try to keep your fleets pre-positioning to be there when they arrive. The alien intercept course notifications generally give a decent initial heads-up, but it doesn't suffice because enough little fleets are incoming that you can't just park a defense fleet in the way upon notification and be done with it. You'll probably need to have defending fleets block one invading fleet while another is incoming, resupply, and reposition for the next. This means that you constantly need to try to remind yourself what your guys are doing and re-identify which incoming threats you have and haven't accounted for. It's also just a hell of a lot of clicking for a lot of largely uninteresting battles.
(and, no, this isn't intelligent raiding behavior by the aliens either, it's yet more the aliens handicapping themselves by acting stupidly- if the tactic *was* to overwhelm the human defenses with a lot of small attacks, you'd see five raiding fleets striking five different stations simultaneously, not five fleet arriving to different targets on the same planet a few days or weeks apart)
It's an unending game of whack-a-mole where the individual decisions aren't particularly challenging or interesting, but if you aren't OCD enough about keeping track of the game state you lose a station. Fewer attacks with some of them being larger fleets instead of lots and lots of tiny fleets would be much better; replace lots of busywork with fewer, more significant threats to respond to. (and more epic space battles!)