Vic, this "non-aligned forces" behaviour is ludicrous

[Arralen]

This is turn 8 on a "city start, militia only, low tech" game - and it's GAME OVER.
The "independant non-aligned forces" are coming to kill me off:

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I think it is ludicrous, how every one of the ridiculously sized stacks starting within 12 hexes of my starting city begins to converge on it, even going around my troop stacks to go for the city hex.

This is worse than the behaviour of most minor nations, and totally absurd: If there are >2K militia stacks over every free folk settlement to protect the free folk ... why do those come running to band up with the hordes of carnivores which threaten my city? All turned cannibal?

Even if I manage to kill these stacks off somehow, I'll have lost so much momentum, ressources and happiness that there's no way I'll have any chance to win.

[zgrssd]

Stacking your units up the in the same Hex is a loosing strategy. You are supposed to spread them out in a frontline, spanning several hexes. Short of a enemy breaking through, falling back or circumventing your forces don't break the line.

Otherwise the enemy will just come through the gaps or sidestep your doomstack.

[zgrssd]

That being said, yes: The non-alligned forces are too aggressive and impossible to corral with encirclements.

I suggested a while ago to give them some kind of bases - nests or the like - which act as a single point of failure that you can attack like you would a city. Which would also leash them to a specific terrain.

[Magirot]

Even if I manage to kill these stacks off somehow, I'll have lost so much momentum, ressources and happiness that there's no way I'll have any chance to win.

That's not certain. I've won many games where I spent the early game with some ridiculously powerful alien that I had no chance to destroy, parked next to my capital until late mid-game. Depends on if you can contain the threat while still making progress on other fronts.

Also I haven't noticed the "converging" behaviour with non-aligned forces, while it's very noticeable with other minor regimes. I assume that's not actually every stack within 12 hexes, but maybe the aliens happen to have an aggressive trait?

Either way it's silly that the free folk cooperate so readily with alien fauna...

[KingHalford]

zgrssd has given you the key to dealing with this issue.

Threatening to encircle them will usually cause them to fall back in short order or force them to attack you in a hasty way, reducing their numbers.

Honestly, I tend to play with 1 army start if I'm playing on a hostile map. Otherwise, you're asking for situations like this.

[LeoMPanther]

I do agree that it seems a little nonsensical that Freefolk seems to team up with hostile aliens/slavers/surviving AI to attack the player. Some of these should be antagonistic to each other.

[Arralen]

Here are the native animals at it again ... wiping out my milita forces in a concerted attack ... (see saves)

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This is rediculous.
And unplayable.

Vic, can't you fix this?

[Xxzard]

While I sympathize with the feeling of being bullied by non-aligned units in low tech, minimal resource starts, I personally wouldn't want this sort of thing removed from the game.

I enjoy and find replayability in SE because of the randomness inherent in each planet start. Sometimes your planet has no animals. Sometimes it is teeming with creatures so deadly you need anti-tank guns to kill them. It's luck of the draw. It's also fair - every player or AI faction has to deal with them too. I think of a tough starting situation as a challenge to overcome to create a better story - eventual victory will be all the sweeter for it. And if it turns out to be too tough, you can always generate a new planet.

I don't see a huge issue with the way the AI controls non-aligned units. They will sometimes move around your units, which seems logical enough for free folk or intelligent animals. They may cut off your supply lines in doing so. They will not launch coordinated group attacks - only other factions or advanced sentient aliens will do that. The one questionable element is that free folk don't attack/get attacked by animals, but I think we can accept that mechanically and logically.

Now, solutions to help out:

1. Generate worlds without advanced lifeforms - the free folk are usually more scattered and predictable.

2. Play at a lower difficulty level

3. Change starting settings to give you 1 or 2 armies per zone, select tech level 4, etc.

3. Or, change your build order! I notice in your screenshots (that appear to range from round 1 to round 8), you appear to only have militia units and maybe 1 recon buggy unit. If I'm on a hostile planet (and playing militia only city state tech 3 starts), I build an infantry brigade ASAP on round 1 or 2. Early tech infantry can hold defensive positions against free folk and most animals. If you're facing pressure, select defensive terrain and create a continuous line of units. They can't flank you if you present a solid wall of units. Add in machine gun battalions and more infantry brigades if needed. Try to keep the enemies at least 2 hexes away from your city, otherwise the danger penalties are severe. Surround your city with units if needed. Don't attack unless absolutely necessary or you have a significant numerical advantage + surrounding positions.

Only once you've secured a defensible perimeter around your city should you build units that can help you push out, like uparmored buggies, tanks, artillery, etc. If you're not getting troops fast enough, increase recruitment at the city to 1000 or 1500. For the most part, you can reduce the recruit bonus to 0 cr to save money.

On the political side, if you're facing early pressure, set up and prioritize military research and model design first. Upgrade your infantry designs once you have padded envirosuit and automatic rifle. You can also up-armor your buggies to make them quite resilient. Early game military techs are much more immediately useful in a hostile environment than economic techs.

Don't worry about falling behind. The AI build order is typically similar. They usually build military first and only much later develop mines, industry, and offices. Don't worry too much about seizing hex perks or massive swathes of territory. Hex perks are fairly minor and the territory is of comparatively low value compared to your main city. You won't be able to exploit territory very quickly in a tech 3 start anyway. You can absolutely play tall in SE, so if you lose out on early land grabs, it's fine.

Hope that helps!

[zgrssd]

The 1.21 beta just made some changes in this area:

-Alien wildlife now also attacks Mauraders in same Hex. *
-Mauraders will be much more adverse to enter wildlife Hexes now.
-Added a tiny bit of variety to Maurader Units *
-Some Maurader Units now act more as Garrisons while others have tendency to move around a bit more *
-Unaligned Free Folk settlements now sometimes produce new Maurader Units. (400k free folk will produce about 1k new marauders per turn) *

But note that most require a new savegame.

[PersonyPerson]

I downloaded the Pyrorange save and played on it for around an hour or so. I saw the "unplayable" claim and took it as a challenge. These complaints about the non-aligned AI behaviour don't have merit tbh. I loaded the save and saw that you changed the starting zone settings so that you weren't recruiting anyone. I changed that to max 3k recruits for 2 turns, then lowered it to 1k. With that, I raised a couple of Buggy battalions and an MG infantry OHQ brigade within next few turns, made a new buggy design that had armour and upgraded the infantry's weapons. The creatures, though inflicting significant casualties, were slowly pushed away from the city.

There's nothing to "fix" as this is not an issue with the mechanics behind the game. You deliberately chose to be on an old age, but very underpopulated planet that is stacked to the brim with alien life with a deadly 16m apex predator and sentient life, on the slowest development speed, tech 3, militia start. The only opponent that was in the vicinity to the Non-aligned AI was you. Knowing all that, you put yourself into a rather difficult start to begin with.

Xxzard's post explains it well and shows what else you could do. That situation is certainly not "unplayable". Instead, it was actually quite fun. The beauty of this game is that if you don't have the desired experience in one game, then you can easily start a new one, tweak the settings and the parameters of planet generation to generate a world to one's liking. It's very replayable.

Also the latest beta patch (1.21) has it so there are situations where Free folk marauders do fight the wildlife (and that the Free Folk respawn). The old system could have easily been explained by the fact the Free Folk could have learned to live with the wildlife, learned their migration patterns and avoided them whenever possible to prevent conflict between them, but the other argument also can make sense if you view the Free Folk as being sedentary and not nomadic, so I don't mind as it will now make for more dynamic games.

[eddieballgame]

Excellent post offering great advice on how to deal with the alien life one can encounter.
This, great, game continues to reach new heights per what it offers in gameplay...thank you Vic.
Thank you, Arralen, for sharing your file & allowing the rest of us try it out; which gives me an idea. Does anyone have, what they consider, an extremely difficult starting position they would like to share for the rest of us?
CivFanatic's website offers a 'Game of the Month' (GOTM) challenge for all their Civilization games. It strikes me that Shadow Empire would be an ideal game for this format.

[Tartannosaur]

Excellent post offering great advice on how to deal with the alien life one can encounter.
This, great, game continues to reach new heights per what it offers in gameplay...thank you Vic.
Thank you, Arralen, for sharing your file & allowing the rest of us try it out; which gives me an idea. Does anyone have, what they consider, an extremely difficult starting position they would like to share for the rest of us?
CivFanatic's website offers a 'Game of the Month' (GOTM) challenge for all their Civilization games. It strikes me that Shadow Empire would be an ideal game for this format.

This is a great idea! I read your post and dug up this old save. I consider myself lucky because the very first game I generated was perfect, with lots of nearby cities for expanding against minors, and I was able to industrialize rapidly. In my second game, not so much! I named it "Hopeless Start" because my city was on a narrow peninsula and after expanding south and west early on, unstoppable aliens from the east cut off my supply and I lost my starting militia. As if that wasn't enough, this game had Nemesis enabled and the major regime to the west started with air forces and tanks! They've been bombing us and hammering our forces with armor. So I've been pushed back to three hexes on the peninsula that I've bunkerized and planned to defend to the last man.

This game was my second game ever generated and was made back in January, so unfortunately I've lost the original generated world file. So while you won't be able to create your own empire from turn one, you could take this challenge from the present situation.

(And I can see how new players could get frustrated because the very first game they generate isn't very good; like I said, my first game was amazing so I had a great first impression of Shadow Empire. Unfortunately not every one is as lucky.)

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[BlueTemplar]

[...]
Also the latest beta patch (1.21) has it so there are situations where Free folk marauders do fight the wildlife (and that the Free Folk respawn). The old system could have easily been explained by the fact the Free Folk could have learned to live with the wildlife, learned their migration patterns and avoided them whenever possible to prevent conflict between them, but the other argument also can make sense if you view the Free Folk as being sedentary and not nomadic, so I don't mind as it will now make for more dynamic games.

I thought "Marauders" was specifically the name of the new coastal pirates, introduced in the Oceania DLC ?

[Tanaka]

While I sympathize with the feeling of being bullied by non-aligned units in low tech, minimal resource starts, I personally wouldn't want this sort of thing removed from the game.

I enjoy and find replayability in SE because of the randomness inherent in each planet start. Sometimes your planet has no animals. Sometimes it is teeming with creatures so deadly you need anti-tank guns to kill them. It's luck of the draw. It's also fair - every player or AI faction has to deal with them too. I think of a tough starting situation as a challenge to overcome to create a better story - eventual victory will be all the sweeter for it. And if it turns out to be too tough, you can always generate a new planet.

I don't see a huge issue with the way the AI controls non-aligned units. They will sometimes move around your units, which seems logical enough for free folk or intelligent animals. They may cut off your supply lines in doing so. They will not launch coordinated group attacks - only other factions or advanced sentient aliens will do that. The one questionable element is that free folk don't attack/get attacked by animals, but I think we can accept that mechanically and logically.

Now, solutions to help out:

1. Generate worlds without advanced lifeforms - the free folk are usually more scattered and predictable.

2. Play at a lower difficulty level

3. Change starting settings to give you 1 or 2 armies per zone, select tech level 4, etc.

3. Or, change your build order! I notice in your screenshots (that appear to range from round 1 to round 8), you appear to only have militia units and maybe 1 recon buggy unit. If I'm on a hostile planet (and playing militia only city state tech 3 starts), I build an infantry brigade ASAP on round 1 or 2. Early tech infantry can hold defensive positions against free folk and most animals. If you're facing pressure, select defensive terrain and create a continuous line of units. They can't flank you if you present a solid wall of units. Add in machine gun battalions and more infantry brigades if needed. Try to keep the enemies at least 2 hexes away from your city, otherwise the danger penalties are severe. Surround your city with units if needed. Don't attack unless absolutely necessary or you have a significant numerical advantage + surrounding positions.

Only once you've secured a defensible perimeter around your city should you build units that can help you push out, like uparmored buggies, tanks, artillery, etc. If you're not getting troops fast enough, increase recruitment at the city to 1000 or 1500. For the most part, you can reduce the recruit bonus to 0 cr to save money.

On the political side, if you're facing early pressure, set up and prioritize military research and model design first. Upgrade your infantry designs once you have padded envirosuit and automatic rifle. You can also up-armor your buggies to make them quite resilient. Early game military techs are much more immediately useful in a hostile environment than economic techs.

Don't worry about falling behind. The AI build order is typically similar. They usually build military first and only much later develop mines, industry, and offices. Don't worry too much about seizing hex perks or massive swathes of territory. Hex perks are fairly minor and the territory is of comparatively low value compared to your main city. You won't be able to exploit territory very quickly in a tech 3 start anyway. You can absolutely play tall in SE, so if you lose out on early land grabs, it's fine.

Hope that helps!

In dealing with the non-aligned these are nice tips thanks. But I don't think the solution should be you should only play advanced start and no lifeforms.

I am playing with the newest beta and am also experiencing this. Yes it makes the low tech minimal resource starts almost non-playable. All of the free folk, aliens, and life forms just all make a beeline for me and my city. Yes if you start the game with armies you can deal with this better. But it means that those of us that like to start at the slowest settings and build up cannot do this. Slow start, militia, etc. cannot play with this option. There needs to be some sort of option so that you can without having to turn everything off. I agree that if the creatures and the free folk and the aliens and the minor regimes and the major regimes attacked each other (an actual living world) and were not all just anti-player this would really help. As it is with the slow starts I like to play I cannot play with lifeforms because it is too much to deal with aliens and lifeforms and free folk and minor and major regimes all converging on you at once. If they were all fighting each other as a living world should and not all anti-player this would make the game much more fun and you could handle a few things coming at you at a time and not all at once. We could use a few more game options like rare life forms (not so numerous) or living world (not anti-player).

Case in point I had free folk converging on me from east and west. Aliens from the south. And a minor regime from the southeast. I could handle each of these separately but not when they were coming at me all at once from every direction trying to cut me off and they have no worries about each other. It's like playing wack a mole put out the fire back and forth. It would be cool if even the animals attacked each other as well. Had to quit this game because I was overrun.

Now my current game with only aquatic lifeforms, no aliens, and it seems no minor regimes and only 4 other major regimes which are actually distant from each other I am having no problem dealing with just free folk on a slow start. But I would not want to play this same type game always. Also what causes no minor regimes to be generated? No minors might be a cool option as well. This might be a fun game with only majors as majors seem to grow too fast swallowing up minors.

[BlueTemplar]

Out of 4 games, 3 of them with animals, I've never had issues with them.

The only one I had issues with non-majors is when on my 2nd game I ran early on into Arachnids, for the first time (which are a separate minor faction, not aliens nor animals), seemingly (?) pissed them off (I'm guessing by advancing too much into their territory ??), and they not only proceeded to beeline to my city, but also then camp on the few ruins I had. (It was made worse by having no metal mine, starting without envirosuits, and non-armored infantry still rolling for armour design.)
But that was mostly due to surprise, and also the time to figure out they actually had hard armour.

Why would you think that other majors don't have to fight minors and non-aligneds ??

[Tanaka]

Out of 4 games, 3 of them with animals, I've never had issues with them.

The only one I had issues with non-majors is when on my 2nd game I ran early on into Arachnids, for the first time (which are a separate minor faction, not aliens nor animals), seemingly (?) pissed them off (I'm guessing by advancing too much into their territory ??), and they not only proceeded to beeline to my city, but also then camp on the few ruins I had. (It was made worse by having no metal mine, starting without envirosuits, and non-armored infantry still rolling for armour design.)
But that was mostly due to surprise, and also the time to figure out they actually had hard armour.

Why would you think that other majors don't have to fight minors and non-aligneds ??

Interesting I did not know lifeforms and minors personality could change I thought it was just always anti-player. As for majors it just seems when they are right next to you their focus seems to be on you and not the things around them...

[BlueTemplar]

No, for instance at least Farmers and Aliens might ask (gesture) Majors (also AI ones ??) to "respect borders", at which point they become fixed.

[Tartannosaur]

Anyone have any luck with my challenge save? Looks like a few people downloaded it.

[coot33]

Anyone have any luck with my challenge save? Looks like a few people downloaded it.

Stable metal

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Solve the metal problem finally. Was able to turtle with At-guns and rpgs attach to mg division. I downgraded your motorized to basic infantry on the first turn. Ai moved out of the ruins as other major declared war on them. That 4k scavenge was so needed for the Demetalization plant.
I finally unlocked grenadier division and can spread my rpgs around. Should be able to push in 10-12 turn can take the metal deposits.

Mostly been surviving the Passion time and unrest then teching up like crazy on learning era. So many rebellions. And the always spawned on the second tile making them mandatory to kill in one turn.

Got a cloning facility from the 2nd artifact fate card few turns ago it finally stabilized my pop. I got Battledress, missile and serpentinization from ceo/ fate tech unlock. Battledress would be useful but no machine yet in about 6-7 turns heavy industry will be build.

Tech Tree

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Have atomic unlocks researching tactical nukes then it's rush to micronuke rpg. Taking a gamble on unlocking industry automation which also unlocks walkers techs. I need both anyway no pop. I'm in a learning era so it should be fine. Got to spam those bureaucratic push now.

[Uemon]

The main dynamic of early game low tech wildlife/non aligned forces is that they are bad at attack and good on defense.

The same exact way your units are.

So. What you need to do is scale down in manpower use per stack, and go VERY wide (unless your current planet has like size 20+ top predator, they are good at offense too).

Basically start recruiting independant manchinegun battalions and dont stack them into a single hex. Make a wall out of them and in places that you feel you are most likely to get attacked (or dont have favorable terrain) leave some units behind in a second line.

The idea here is to get max entrenchment bonus on your wall of units and make the alien life / non aligned forces attack you, instead of you attacking them.

Like i said, early game, they are as bad as you are on the offensive, and often 500 machinegunners can beat 3600 militia riflemen when defending while inflicting heavy casualties and suffering none. That way you slowly atrit your enemy in particular locations.

Also im pretty sure you must at all cost secure 2 hexes away from your city (more if they are farmlands) otherwise your city will start getting various penalties like fear and danger and if you dont fix that asap you will sart actively losing population. If that happens you go on a doom spiral thats extremely difficult to recover from (other zones will suck your population out) and you might as well just restart that game.