Feedback and suggestions on 0.4.26

[Biohazard]

Hello,

first off, I really like the premise of the game, and the devs managed to get a game going that many AAA companies would probably shy away from.

That said, I wanted to give some feedback on my playing experience so far. This is based on one run as the Resistance on version 0.4.6
I know there are newer versions out there, but I read the changelogs and did not run across the issues mentioned below, so I assume they persist to more recent versions. If this is incorrect, I apologize for that.
I will try to provide some background, as most frustrations for me occured around two stages of the game.
Denoted with numbers I try to list the bugs/issues I have with the game.

- I had control over most of Russia and most of Europe, and was fighting the Servants in China. Their armies did give me a reasonably hard time, they maneuvered their devisions in a way that I could hardly make any progress.
This completely changed when they handed over China to the aliens:

1. The AI pulled back all the divisions and stacked them in the capital region. I could basically roll over almost the whole country, even having their divisions defect to my side. But that exposed another problem:
2. Apparently, when a division switches sides, it does not force a redraw of the map, so the defecting division starts fighting their former fellows, but does not show up under its new allegiance. Moving focus to some other celestial body and back to earth works around that.

In the end, all that remained was the capital, but this proved to be extremely frustrating:
3. Once you start atacking the Chinese capital and make sufficient headway to threaten their hold, the aliens will just spam nukes at your armies in their own territory. And not just one. Or two. Whenever I sent divisions there, they would get nuked to oblivion
Of course it makes sense to use them in such a manner, it's weapons after all, but I have found no other legal way to take the capital except throwing division after division into a nuclear meatgrinder.
- Going in slowly, with individual or low number of divisions didn't work.
- Going in quickly with 15+ divisions didn't work.
- Inciting an uprising or regime change didn't work. Even a single hydra can easily roll back subversive missions of several of your councilors, so you never get to the point where an uprising has any chance.
In the end I was so frustrated I resorted to cheating, and triggered a revolution by console command. Not pretty, but better than aforementioned nuclear meatgrinder as the sole viable solution.
I can think of several ideas to make this issue manageable or at least less frsutrating:
- Introduce some delay into the nuke spam. Crude and gamey, not a fan.
- Make nuclear weapons based in individual provinces, not all stacked up, so losing territory actually (temporarily or permanently) reduces one's nuclear capabilities. Brings more installations on the map that need CPU time, also IRL there exist mobile units with their own launch infrastucture, not sure how this could be handled properly in game.
- There already exists a councilor mission "sabotage facility", which in my playthrough was pretty useless as it is. I just found my councilors' time way too important to just blow up some rival's launchpad, and by the time my councilors had the time to spare, the potential damage caused didn't matter anyway.
But I argue that for this case it would be ideal.
Target the enemy's nukes with sabotage missions. This can have one of several effects:
- Reduce the damage output of the nukes, making them less effective for a certain time until they have been repaired/restored.
- Introduce a firing delay between nukes, so you can't just spam them.
- Make some of the nuclear arsenal actually unavailable for a while, until they have been repaired.
- Destroy some nukes outright, although I think this would be quite overpowered.
All these possible effects (except the last one) would give you a window of opportunity to strike, but you need to prepare in advance and have councilors able to carry out a (probably high-risk) mission. And it would give an IMHO quite useless mission actual purpose.

4. Somewhat similar to their army movement, during the endgame the aliens also practically bottled themselves up around their starting asteroid and just stopped trying to achieve anything in the solar system. By that point I had enough ships to challenge them, and I assume the AI simply didn't know how to deal with this. By this point, the game was basically over but the crying, and after grinding at the alien fleet for years, I killed it via console to just get it over with. Not sure how to tackle this, but wanted to mention this as it mimicks other games where you have essentially won, but achieving the technical victory condition is just a massive grind wihtout much purpose.

5. Speaking of fleets:
You get messages when rival factions and the aliens construct ships somewhere out in the boonies, but you are not notified when a massive alien fleet starts a transfer to a planet or asteroid with your installations on or around it. I assume such notifications are only triggered when hostile fleets target your specific station or orbit, but I find the information that a big fleet is moving towards your neighborhood more noteworthy than that they have built three more ships.

6. I am playing Terra Invicta using Wine, so I am not sure if this also applies to native Windows users, but using the animated/video councilor portraits causes some kind of memory leak. This becomes so bad that loading the councilor screen a few times with two or three councilors makes the game basically unplayable. Restarting the game resets this, switching to static councilor images fixes the problem.

7. The game's tech tree is massive, to the point where it's really easy to get lost in options, especially regarding powerplants and propulsion. In later stages of the game, you can easily have a dozen or more different branches with possibly multiple stages per branch.
And while I get it that all these options have their own unique characteristics and represent different paths to choose from, you end up not using most of them anyway, at least that was my experience. Maybe have some of the research options result in some weight savings, thrust or efficiency increase instead of creating yet another variant that will be skipped for something better down the line anyway.

8. I like the 3D space combat, even with its "functional" aesthetics. But the spawning/replacement mechanic can be very frustrating:
There is no way to select which ships to actually put onto the battlefield. Especially for bigger fleets I had a quite diverse mix of ship sizes (which makes sense from a realism standpoint), and I often spawned with the ships I did NOT want for this particular fight. Plase give us some way to choose our fleet composition.
This gets more aggravated for reinforcements. Reinforcements spawn in automatically in your current fleet position with some default speed. Which is absolutely fatal if you employ a kiting tactic with lasers and are in a high-speed retreat against incoming hostiles, as your reinforcements fly right into the enemies and die before they can even turn around and catch up with the rest of the fleet.
As an example how to possibly handle this, Empire at War has an interesting system (albeit in 2D) where you can choose reinforcements from a small menu and place them in certain areas using a points system. Something along those lines would make reinforcements way better to handle.


This has been a lot of text. I again want to emphasize that the game in general is good, it's just some aspects are very frustrating and unwieldy.

If you have made it this far:
Thanks for reading, and I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

[johnnylump]

Thanks for posting!

We're not planning to change how nukes work. Invasions of nuclear-armed nations should be pretty suicidal. That's why those kinds of invasions don't happen anymore. We did have the aliens start dismantling nukes, though.

5 we've worked on for more recent builds
6 we've disabled councilor videos for non-Windows users
8 your reinforcements suggestion has already been implemented in more recent builds

[Biohazard]

Thanks for posting!

We're not planning to change how nukes work. Invasions of nuclear-armed nations should be pretty suicidal. That's why those kinds of invasions don't happen anymore. We did have the aliens start dismantling nukes, though.

5 we've worked on for more recent builds
6 we've disabled councilor videos for non-Windows users
8 your reinforcements suggestion has already been implemented in more recent builds

Thank you for your reply.
The aliens dismantling their stockpiles is actually a way I had not thought about ...

Then I'll have to try the newest build and see the changes. When time permits ...
And regarding your comment about non-Windows users, does this just refer to Macs, or do you have a Linux build I have missed?