Some mid-to-late game frustrations:

Post Reply
Ashery
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Oct 17, 2022 11:39 pm

Some mid-to-late game frustrations:

Post by Ashery »

There'll be some minor spoilers throughout, and I apologize if some of these issues have been brought up before, but I'm at least trying to wrap up this first play through of the game without foreknowledge since you only play a game for the first time once. Because of that, I'm not particularly active in the community right now. I'm holding off of joining the Discord for the same reason.

Landed UFOs/Alien Armies

Specifically, I've reached the point where the second wave of (4) UFOs have landed and released their armies. The second pair landed in territory that I control (Russia) and things played out as I would've expected: Both of my high tech EU armies failed their assaults on the UFOs (20%), but were well positioned to kill the armies as they emerged at 50% strength since they were on the defensive and supported by some much lower tech Russian forces.

The initial pair, however, was an absolute mess, as they landed in Servant controlled Mexico. I was initially surprised when I checked the international relations screen and saw that Servants were willing to accept an alliance from me with Mexico (And only Mexico) at 100%. I thought I had lucked out, but I ran into an issue I had also dealt with during the first wave: As soon as the turn phase ended, the Servants immediately cancelled the alliance with my armies already enroute. To add more frustration, they only cancelled the EU's alliance; they were perfectly happy with the Pan-Asian alliance, though their tech level was no where near the EU's and they would've been massacred by the aliens without the EU's support. This isn't a Servant unique issue, though, as Exodus cancelled an alliance on me during the first wave: I ultimately lost three armies because of Exodus as the alliance I was relying on for reinforcements got cancelled in the same manner.

One of the few saving graces this time was that I hadn't gotten rid of the EU's colonial holdings, so the armies got a week long vacation in the Caribbean while I dealt with the bureaucratic red tape. I was also out any real chance of trying to take out a UFOs before they released their armies; it might've only been a 20% chance per UFO, but with four attempts, there was a 59% chance of me destroying at least one of'em.

Bereft of other options, I ended up declaring war on Mexico so that my armies could at least get in position before the alien armies got released. And this is where things got worse.

While my EU armies traveled fast enough to get sent to the Caribbean over a week before war was officially declared, my Asian reinforcements took so long to arrive that they got there right after war was officially declared. They were high enough tech (Early robotics era) that they weren't going to lose to the garrison, but they took significantly more damage while trying to occupy the territory than the EU armies would have. Damage that ultimately lead to all three of my reinforcement armies being wiped out by the aliens later.

What's more, once the UFOs released their armies, they immediately healed to 100% despite my presence in the region. And since I was technically at war with Mexico, instead of turning around to fight the aliens, which is why I'd originally wanted to send my military to Mexico, I instead saw my armies tag teaming the Mexican garrisons with the aliens. Only after that fight was over and the alien nation was formed did my armies finally turn to fulfill their original purpose. Despite the Asian loses, my EU forces still managed to pull off the win, though with margins much smaller than I would've liked. I closed the game last night at 3:30am right as the EU forces that had been in Russia arrived to help clean things up.

Academy Victory Conditions

...These just seem absurd...

Controlling 75% of the world's population is actually probably the easiest of the set to achieve, though focusing exclusively on population makes it substantially more difficult to approach governance in a benevolent way. Full democracies in the larger unified blocks seem to stabilize at 0.0 Peaceful with around 55k per capita GDP, and controlling 75% of the world's population at that level of living standard feels utterly absurd. I'm at 668/663 admin cap and control 49% of the world's population. The EU and Pan-Asian Combine are fully developed, with Russia well on its way to being properly developed with a flawed democracy and per capita GDP in the mid 20's and an authoritarian India only in the upper single digits after the abuse from the Initiative over the last decade+ of play. GDP wise, though? Pretty sure I was over 75% of the total global GDP. The Pan-Asian Combine alone was over half, though that's not going to last long as India starts to redevelop. I've still got room for another ~150 admin cap from councilors theoretically if I max persuasion, command, and admin on all of them, but their actual growth in practice will be very limited as I don't want to cripple their performance for raw admin cap. The only real genuine expansion here will come from dumping 20k+ into augments that aren't beneficial for anything besides admin cap, and bear in mind the fact that I've already got +2 command augments on everyone; this won't be cheap. I think I also have 75 admin cap left on the non-repeatable techs. At least the +1k cost to management research starts being trivial once you research it enough times; 2k to 3k is a big jump, but 12k to 13k much less so.

Continuing the above point, I'm aware the exact phrasing implies that you only need to control the executive and half of a nation's control points for their population to count towards the objective, but if you've got a nation with shared control, that implies the AI has the potential to contest control points in that nation. Which means you're going to have six very focused enemy factions trying to wrest control of any partially controlled nations from you since you're forcing six factions to split such a small remainder of the pie. Not to mention the fact that sharing a nation means the AI will reap the benefits of any long term investments you make there, making them substantially more threatening in the long run.

Fleet power? The numbers clearly indicate that the aliens are being counted here, so either there's some way to make peace with the aliens that I'm not aware of, or I'm expected to wage war on the scale of what you'd expect from Humanity First despite wanting to cooperate with them long term. There's no way to reach those values without breaking the unstated retaliation mechanic for going above a certain amount of mission control.

As for the last objective...

"Our faction's control point values must be at least 75% of all control point values on Earth."

"141/466"

I don't even know what that means. It's clearly not raw admin cap use, as those values obviously don't line up. Taking a more awkward approach and adding up how much a single control point costs to control in each country I control instead of taking the country's total cost leaves me with 126.23. Still short, but closer. The aliens still technically control Mexico in the most recent save I loaded, and a country of that size would roughly account for the disparity between the two...Let me check. Apparently alien controlled nations don't list their CP cost. Checking Saudi Arabia, which has a slightly higher GDP, would add an additional 11.65 and still leave us a bit short, at 137.88. It's really close, but not quite there. The language is also very explicit about it being "Our faction's...".

I'm really at a genuine loss of what to do for this one.

Feedback

Address the cancellation of alliances.

There are two potential solutions here that I've thought of: 1) Put a timer on any alliances formed, much like there's a timer for improving relations, so that alliances simply cannot be broken for a few months after being formed. This is the easier option as it uses mechanics that are already in place. 2) Give us a fourth option that fits between neutral and alliance: Nations won't come to each other's defense, but armies from each nation can move through regions of the other. Since war requires rivalry, this can't be exploited to have your armies in a country prior to declaring war. You could place your armies in a country that borders the rival you're about to declare war on, but you can already do that with alliances, so that line of argument is a bit moot. For most of the game, this new relationship would be treated the same as an alliance in terms of whether another faction would accept or deny one, but once aliens land, only the Servants would unilaterally not accept any kind of intervention. The Protectorate might want to appease the aliens, but they're appeasing them in an explicit attempt to preserve humanity. Just rolling over and letting the aliens have free range over their home turf seems like the quickest way for their faction to become an irrelevant afterthought. What you should not expect from the Protectorate is for them to intervene on someone else's behalf.

Address "combat order."

I'm less sure what to do here, but it's still an issue. This also happened during the first wave I dealt with, where the Resistance was already at war with the nation the UFOs landed in. While I was busy fighting the aliens, a Resistance army walked into the middle of the fight and started attacking the garrison, flipping control of the country just a day or so after I killed the last alien army. I had actually genuinely been concerned that the Resistance would flip control first, cancel the alliance, and boot me out before I could finish the fight.

Fix the alien armies immediately healing upon exiting the UFO.

Again, this is also an issue I faced with the first wave of landings. My forces were already enroute from a neighboring country, with an eta of only a couple of days, when the armies exited the UFO. I breathed a sigh of relief with the notification said that they started at 50% health and that now was the time to strike...and then reacted in horror as they immediately healed to 100% when they exited without forces ready to defend at that very moment.

I suspect that the healing gets triggered if an alien army's first action is to fight a garrison.

Academy Victory Conditions.

I'm firmly in the camp where games like this shouldn't be overly restrictive about conditions needed for victory. The victory conditions should be such that that faction's superiority is without question, and you don't do that status justice when it gets so narrowly defined. Narrowly defining it also tends to lead to it being set at a point well beyond when the faction is, in practice, the dominant force in a game. Ie, winning only gets triggered well after the game has been won.

To that end, I feel like one way to approach this issue is that there should be a baseline of AND conditions that all need to be met with some additional OR statements that are set above the levels of the AND baseline. Crudely, something in the vein of 50% of the population AND 50% of global GDP combined with 66% of the population OR 75% of global GDP. In this simplified case, a player can win with either 50% of the population and 75% of the global GDP or 66% of the population and 50% of the overall GDP.

A more refined system could have the baseline AND conditions along with needing a certain amount of "Victory points" that one gets by going beyond those baseline numbers. So, instead of only the two potential victory conditions in the above simplified example, a faction could also satisfy them with, say, 60% of the population and 58% of global GDP.

Something like that would give more flexibility in meeting end goals and allow for more flexibility in how the meta of the game develops.

I think I'll wrap this novel up here. I might've missed some other thoughts I had over the course of my frustrations last night, but I've spent long enough writing this as is. I need to shower and then get back to cleaning up an alien invasion of Mexico :D
Post Reply