Oh! The frustrations!

[core2k]

Mid game. Normal difficulty. Trying to take China from the Servants.

Using 4 characters. All maxed out. One for purge, crackdown, and two for public support. The other two chars have around 18 in public support.

Got the national support to around 75, crackdown-win,

Next turn, purge. Pass turn. Humanity First takes the node. Crackdown on same node. Pass turn, crackdown gets cancelled. 0% chance after that.
Next turn, crackdown on another node. Success! Purge, success! Protect node, and crackdown another node. Pass turn, success all round. Yay!
Next turn, Purge cracked node. Crackdown another node. Pass turn. Previously protected (mine) is taken by The Protectorate completely (no crackdown and with no national support), and the cracked node is taken by The Resistance.

Back to nothing. Scream loudly and repeatedly. Have a smoke outside, kick a few things. Return.

Leave to admin the EU, and Russia for a few turns. Return to China. National support to 90%. Awesome.
Crackdown, and then purge. Success! Protect node. Crackdown another node. Pass turn.
Aliens appear. National support drops to 40%. Both nodes revert to The Servants.

I'm too old for this much stress.
Anyone else got their own examples of major frustrations in the game? Still love the game BTW. Just.. gonna take a break until my frustrations settle a wee bit.

[ecpgieicg]

Got the national support to around 75, crackdown-win,

Next turn, purge. Pass turn.

Why don't you crack and purge in the same turn?

There is also a pair of techs iirc that helps crackdown and defending against crackdown. But factions get them soon after another. Nullifying relative advantages/disadvantages. Just make sure you are not missing them as human player.

There are some alternative methods to gain control over China too.

Note that some techs can help with unrest, which enables the player faction (obviously applies to AI factions too) to incite unrest effectively on large nations like China. (By midgame, starting large nations like China is not large anymore.) A few 25 command agents should be able to flip China with a few months. Can also Protect them as you wait and roll the dices. That said, it's probably more sensible to do it earlier than later so that the control of China is most impactful.

More to the point, it seems to me that Human First is scripted to apply that strategy often and prioritize applying that strategy on USA first before other factions. So from a game design perspective, a player in their first playthrough will see the AI doing it to USA -- prompting them of the existence of such option for use by themselves.

For me, China was so well managed as a neutral, I had zero incentive to seize control. By the time Academy gets to control it via large amount of public support for some reason (scripted event effect?), there was no way for me to deny it. And ofc I wouldnt have the control capacity for China with my ongoing strategy. Such things don't turn on a dime. Not long after, Alien landed in Beijing and before China could nuke that contingent of alien armies, the province was occupied and the whole China flipped. <--- now that deserves some review in terms of game design.

Thankfully the Alien Administration started with Africa and thus sub 3 miltech. China was on its way to get Robotic Age armies....

[Honarius]

I just stopped a playthrough at 2040 because most of the Earth's economy was destroyed by nukes and AI prioritizing spoils, leading to EVERY AI faction was trying to steal what few scraps that were left relatively intact. I spent about 4 years having around 4 councilors sit in the EU every assignment, having to have at least 2 of them do a public campaign because I would have at least 3 enemy councillors spamming public campaigns on the EU instead of doing anything else useful. There was at least one turn where I had 2 successes and a crit success and still barely gained any ground because I had at least 4 enemies succeed in doing public campaigns against me.

Every other country I owned was slowly decaying because I couldn't stabilize them or protect them because of this quirk of the AI, every faction prefered to invest their time into trying to steal what I had instead of build up what they had neglected. All of this was occuring while I was getting orbitally bombarded because I couldn't lower alien threat.

I would really like a late game tech that can protect against enemy public campaigns for this reason. The AI factions have been a bit of a let down when it comes to watching them resist the aliens, I was playing as the Resistance and only Humanity First was proactive on Earth at retaking ground lost to the Alien Nation. I don't even know if the other factions fight the Aliens in orbit, I never experienced it.

[core2k]

Interesting. Thanks. I haven't done much with the flipping of countries, as I thought the crackdown/purge to be fairly reliable. Still, it's one to pay more attention to.

[core2k]

Is the late game ability of the AI factions to flip protected nodes without any problems in countries like India, China, or the US intentional?

I've just rage quitted a game over my main country, China, losing two nodes out of the blue. I've got all the techs to protect against Alien interference, my national/population support was close to 90% my way, 0% unrest, etc. I control all the small countries around me, along with India. There shouldn't be any way for them to flip a node without some notification of an initial attack, such as a crackdown, and even then... I can understand this working for small nations, but the big ones? And then, it's close to impossible for me to return the node to my own control.

So, is this an intentional/desired mechanic? What's the point of getting all the tech to protect yourself, if the AI can just swoop in and take nodes easily?

With the limited number of counsellors how are we expected to protect our capital nodes, while doing other things aswell? Ugh. I controlled China, India, and the US. Within my control cap. Am I expected to have one counsellor at each capital on protect 24/7?

This game just kills me. Love it, and hate it with equal measure now. So, damn frustrating. That's 20 hours down the drain.. because I have zero desire to wrangle over something that should have been protected from a reasonable amount of interference. Meh.