I've been binging TI since it came out, and was loving it. Tbf I played on veteran, because I've got 1k hours in Xenonaughts, Xcom, paradox games etc. In other words, I think I am the intended audience for this game. In another thread someone talked about making major changes to the game and the dev responded by basically saying 'you aren't our intended audience' which is another way of saying, 'we disagree' with your opinion, since frankly, the devs haven't taken some kind of poll on the opinion of their intended audience. So here's a list of things I've noticed that have forced me to quit.
I quit at year 2032, with my most advanced drive being Heavy Dumbo, playing as Resistance on veteran with control of the US, Greater Malaysia, some European states and parts of the UAE. I was doing pretty damn well. 90% of habs in space were mine, and I was pumping out nearly HALF my research using orbital campuses, which put me ahead of the other factions. The alien have landed, and taken parts of South America, Africa and Europe, but the US military was sufficient enough to hold them at bay. In terms of major objectives, I've discovered exotic xeno material, but I've not taken an alien corpse (more on that later). I'm pretty sure I'm doing better than the vast majority of players in my situation. I've also probed Mercury, was building habs on Jupiter's moons, and unifying the US and Canada. I was whack-a-moling alien activity with 99% using a maxed out 25 command counselor who had every special forces outfit in the US under him, basically his own private Xcom/SG1 team.
And I still am in a f***ed up failstate that's had me quitting in disgust and frankly not wanting to play this game until some heavy changes are made. Which is a shame, because its the best game I've played in I don't know how long. So here's my list of qaulms, in no particular order, all of which I think are FIXABLE, and do not require some kind of major redesign.
* = extraordinarily unlikely
1. Getting an alien corpse is impossible*. Even if I maxed out espionage at 25, that's still <10% to assassinate an alien. It's 2032 and I've seen them like MAYBE 5 times in the first place, and then for only 2 weeks. It's stupid. I should be rewarded for maxing out my skills and finding them, not arbitrarily, hard-blocked from accomplishing an objective. At least if you removed the cap on skills, or found some way to stack bonuses, then it would be more reasonable. As for finding them, I have literally no idea how to do that- randomly send my consilors on surveil ops, with many countries adjacent? I don't even have a CLUE as to where to do that. So its random, takes no skill and is hard capped. I've managed to accomplish 5+ other objectives whilst failing to do this one since 2024.
2. Destroying an alien landing craft is impossible*. Again, because of the hard caps, my Xcom councilor has a ~5% chance of taking out a landing craft even with maximum effort (I have 3k in operations saved up). They only are up for 30 days. So what, I'm meant to nat 20 or else? WHEN they land, since this is inevitable and it's kind of troll design that you can't actually stop them *but are given hope* they come with three 7.0 tech armies. As the US, with the largest military, I can just about take out one of these with the use of nukes and combined arms, because the AI splits its forces. OTOH my navy can contain them in their continent. All of this is reasonable...ish, since I imagine it shouldn't be compulsory to play the US. Because one set strat is lame design. However, in 2034, they landed THREE sites simultaneously. Impossible to stop them. It's a fail state.
3. Fail states. This game demands a lot of your time. 30 hours to get 10 years into a game isn't ridiculous IF there's a way to avoid fail states- or at least have some warning beforehand of certain essential things, like needing 25 skill counselors, a certain number of habs, specific tech, military forces etc. I can understand not wanting to hold a player's hand, but that also means you are making the design decision to waste someone's time for the sake of a surprise. Since the only thing they'll do is either predict your design decisions in their heads, through...I'm not sure what, since you can't accomplish everything in this game at the same time (IE: build a navy, a military, a nuclear arsenal...) all you need is to warn players shit is coming, 5 years in advance, and then their choices matter. OR remove the failstate (not sure how). I've been save scumming to make up for this. I must have 30+ save files now.
4. This is why I straight up quit and what's really disappointed me: The aliens are committing space genocide. They have been sending fleets to take out all my habs and all my fleets. I painstakingly built this up, beat the opposition, waited the required time for habs to arrive, only to have an ultimate, unbeatable force arbitrarily decide to destroy everything. I kept WAITING for them to stop. I rebuilt 20+ times. I just thought hey, they'll chill out eventually, right? But no, every hab, every time. So I figured, maybe I need to defend them more. And I researched tonnes of weapon teach and space station defense modules. Got my combat up to 500. Phew, I thought. The average small fleet is like 2-300 strength! I got this! But then they sent 2k worth of fleet strength at me. I mean come on. That makes it IMPOSSIBLE to defend in 2030. I don't even understand how to get out of this situation? Is it a failstate then? What did I do wrong? Was I TOO successful? Built too many ships, too many habs? But your game has been telling me to do that. It has been incentivising me to WIN. And now you're like, "do well, but not TOO well or else" and my warning is...a vague message from a councillor on what the aliens might do. Imagine instead some kind of 'meter' (maybe you need tech to unlock it, whatever) that tells you how pissed off the aliens are with escalating levels of aggression until you reach a point of no return. That is fair. That's information I can work with. Instead it's this god-level force that you can't fight back against blowing up all your stuff that you spend 15 hours building in real time. Also, the game TOLD ME to build a fleet and kill aliens. I needed to for an objective. I literally blew up one alien ship. And this is what happens? It's punishing me for the choices the game made me make.
5. No explanation of drive mechanics outside of dev diaries, wiki pages on rocket science and reddit posts. I still DON"T understand why my autodesign picks ion drives, when they take 2k weeks for anything to get anywhere. You've now made a mini-game, and the mini-game is..."realize which techs are useless and don't research them". How is that *Fun*? Or "read up about Newtonian physics before playing our game". These aren't interesting decisions. At the very least, make the autodesign work better or give it more options for those of us who want to focus on other aspects of the game. The thing is, if each drive had like 5+ variables that mattered, then it would make sense to have such a large variety. but right now most don't. The material differences in costs are irrelevant because you're not building a huge fleet (until later on). The powerplant needed might mean you have to focus your research, except no one told me that until I freakin googled a dev diary. Have an easier way to simulate speeds between objects based on drive design. Right now it takes so many clicks, loses your old settings and is convoluted as hell. (I have to manually remember the stats, put them into the calculator and voila. Like jesus christ at least let me import drive designs).
6. No way to stop habs being stolen. I basically stopped making LEO stations. Why, because I invest tonnes of time and resources only to have it stolen. I CAN'T DEFEND AGAINST THIS. What do I do, put a councilor in one hab and perma-defend? I can't even target their councilors because I don't have enough information...I can only investigate ~5 per turn and no clue as to who they are in advance except by where they are- and there isn't enough info in the UI to know what mission they just accomplished, so I can't even work it out. You need every councilor, you can't waste them on defense. There is very little minigame to hunting enemy councilors because there's so little choice involved. You just pick a high percentage one out of the 5 you have each turn, pray they don't go under ground and then see whether when you follow up you should turn/assasinate/steal from them.
7. The game takes a long time to play, and it forces you to save scum. The autosaves don't mark milestones and aren't spread apart. Which is weird when you have such a long-spanning game. Fail states aren't the end of the world if I can at least go back. Even if it loses me 10 hours of progress...he jests...
8. What is the point in multiple time speeds? I don't get it. I just max it out all the time because each 'turn' is 2 weeks. But when I go to space it slows down. The shame of this is that the game is BEAUTIFUL. So I WANT to slow it down. But it takes forever to play, so I can't afford to.
9. Why do you give us all these toys to play with when we aren't supposed to? There is no point to building early game ships as far as I can tell. Not only because you can't fight the aliens...but you don't fight humans either. I thought, design wise, that the earlier ship designs are to fight the human AI. How cool would that be, having our prototype ships face off against each other? But right now, there is no reason to, they don't attack you themselves, so all you have are all these early game techs you don't get to use. Which is kind of lame. I want to fight space battles with basic tech against the other factions! That would be fun!
The heart of this game is amazing, and the general structure as well. But right now there are so many UNFUN elements of it, with little strategic choice. I read somewhere that you don't want to just have one clear strat for any circumstance. That's great, I love that. But unfortunately it is the case at the moment for a lot of the game, and it needs tweaking to get past that. Also the failstates are horrid when I've invested 30 hours of my life into this thing that I genuinely was enjoying. The aliens destroying all my habs really was the last straw.
I love The Expanse, Ender's Game and Three Body Problem and this game is the closest by a mile to evoking those amazing sci-fi stories. That is one HELL of an accomplishment. I am annoyed at myself for playing this right after it came out in EA- I know it's just EA, but I LOVED Long War (even Long War 2) and couldn't wait to play this. So I'm not blaming the devs, no, if anything I'd like to shake your collective hands at this genius bit of what is honestly *art* to me as a sci-fi experience. I'm sorry if I come across as irritated, take it as someone who just invested 30 hours and now lost- it's frustrating! I'm thinking of restarting on 'normal' and spreading out my game time, rather than binging! Because the game does reward careful thought and planning. It does however also have the above issues.
Anyway, keep up the great work, I can't wait to see how this game improves and iterates over time. All of these points are fixable/modifiable elements of balance etc. If I'm just missing the point of the game let me know as well, so I can quit!
Just sunk 30 hours into a game I must now quit
Re: Just sunk 30 hours into a game I must now quit
Yes to basically all of this.
Have you reached the "AI can just take your defended CP whenever it wants at 5% support vs your 50+"? I have. Every three to five turns, instantly lose a CP in Germany, France, Japan, to non-alien (Initiative, Protectorate, Humanity First) factions. It is uncounterable, because of the way the action system works. My first orbital just flipped with no warning because reasons, too.
Have you reached the "AI can just take your defended CP whenever it wants at 5% support vs your 50+"? I have. Every three to five turns, instantly lose a CP in Germany, France, Japan, to non-alien (Initiative, Protectorate, Humanity First) factions. It is uncounterable, because of the way the action system works. My first orbital just flipped with no warning because reasons, too.
Re: Just sunk 30 hours into a game I must now quit
So far I haven't lost CP's that I defend, with one or two exceptions, but also I didn't control ANYTHING in Europe except the baltics. But I've heard MANY people say they have, just like you. It's not fun to have force majeure ruin your plans regularly. Once in awhile, a black swan event is fun and something that forces you to adapt, but a constant stream of uncounterable BS is unfun and not strategic. This is only barely excusable if losing CP's for reasons isn't uncounterable up to a certain point, tech-wise, but then it cascades because you failed to keep up and cannot be stopped without huge changes to your economy/impossible to change.
That's just a failstate. Which also sucks, and is barely justifiable. I know the devs said that at veteran the AI gets bonuses whereas on normal they don't, so I've restarted on normal. But they also *hinted mysteriously* that some magical force the aliens have can flip you. I feel like there should be some kind of communication that this is the case if that is what is happening so you can adapt. There are some techs that prevent you being 'enthralled' which might be it.
But if I'm a human player I'm not taking 5% shots at flipping something only to know I'll lose it 5 mins later, that's just pointless. However, if I had a spare councillor and literally nothing else to do then I might try for the hell of it.
Either way there should be a mechanic to counter it. ATM I think there isn't much counter play against enemy councilors, you can't stop their missions, so you lose stuff arbitrarily.
IMO imagine knowing where all councilors are, all the time and what their mission was. This is of course, an extreme example- but how much tactical decision making would there then be? It would be awesome. Atm you can't see squat. The ideal zone must be somewhere in between. More info = more decision making that matters. Right now with enemy councillors there is too little.
That's just a failstate. Which also sucks, and is barely justifiable. I know the devs said that at veteran the AI gets bonuses whereas on normal they don't, so I've restarted on normal. But they also *hinted mysteriously* that some magical force the aliens have can flip you. I feel like there should be some kind of communication that this is the case if that is what is happening so you can adapt. There are some techs that prevent you being 'enthralled' which might be it.
But if I'm a human player I'm not taking 5% shots at flipping something only to know I'll lose it 5 mins later, that's just pointless. However, if I had a spare councillor and literally nothing else to do then I might try for the hell of it.
Either way there should be a mechanic to counter it. ATM I think there isn't much counter play against enemy councilors, you can't stop their missions, so you lose stuff arbitrarily.
IMO imagine knowing where all councilors are, all the time and what their mission was. This is of course, an extreme example- but how much tactical decision making would there then be? It would be awesome. Atm you can't see squat. The ideal zone must be somewhere in between. More info = more decision making that matters. Right now with enemy councillors there is too little.
Re: Just sunk 30 hours into a game I must now quit
Yeah I don't understand. I've been playing Resistance several times now, normally to around 2033/2034. No matter what I do, the aliens always show up then whether I'm aggressive or not.... and there's no way to stop them by that point.
Re: Just sunk 30 hours into a game I must now quit
Good stuff - as to your alien threat meter, the Resistance has one in their alien intel tab, not sure about the other factions. It should say how likely they are to come after you based on how much you have pissed them off, threatened their interests, etc...
Re: Just sunk 30 hours into a game I must now quit
I agree that destroying the landed craft seems unfeasible. I bombarded it with 28 ships built with bombardment focus ( LARGE advanced rain gun cannons. Sent all my high level agents.. results all ships destroyed and no result at all.
Re: Just sunk 30 hours into a game I must now quit
Well there is. 2 of my team are in near permanent murder duty to keep the competition.. low...