Endgame Question

[Malevolence]

Only watched a few youtube videos. It was difficult to get a sense of pacing, because the selected streamers seemed to monologue everything instead of playing. The turns seemed glacial because of it.

As I looked at the size of the map and the streamers play, it seemed like the early game outpaced the size of the map. The players seemed to have reached the boundaries of their maps before even moderate development.

How does this impact the mid- and late- game play? Is the planet essentially conquered before later faction developments?

[Culthrasa]

Check out the post by dastactic on this forum. He has a finished game on a fairly small map (only 2 other majors). He did get quite a way into the tech tree (about 36 techs total) but not endgame techs. I suspect larger maps would make the game longer and thereby get deeper into the tech tree.

[Malevolence]

I'm not a beta tester, so my observations are limited. The end/latests videos indicate the same uneven pacing. His first group of videos ended abruptly.

I'll also offer that the wargame mechanics seemed to stress conventional military forces and tactics. However, the battlefield and setting indicated a need for more anti-access and area denial capabilities.

[KingHalford]

In the early to mid-game you're expanding outwards, dealing with Minor and Major AI until you hit the borders of factions you can't immediately take on. How fast this happens is highly dependent on the planet. I've had games where even several hundred turns in, I'm still expanding out because of a 1600km wide mountain range that is impossible to penetrate logistically. In others, particularly with Farmer's as your main Minor Regime, you and the AI will ROFL-stomp your way to one another's borders much quicker.

At that point the pace of the game changes as you're developing yourself to be able to take on the more powerful neighbours you have. Again, how long this takes, and how to do it, is completely dependent on the planet. In my most recent games, the AI has been a real nightmare to deal with and I've found that there's a game ending war, that sometimes can last many dozens of turns, particularly if you're playing in terrain unsuitable for the wheeled units. Fortunately there's a large roster of different types of equipment to cover every angle.

I'm sure there are other ways this can play out too, I've not played this much since the most recent patch and that significantly changed the way the early game works (the Majors are more aggressive and the Minors seem more powerful now)

[Palora]

ORIGINAL: Malevolence

How does this impact the mid- and late- game play? Is the planet essentially conquered before later faction developments?

The short answer is yes and no. You can have games where that happens, you can have games where that doesn't happen.

It depends on the size of the planet/map, the terrain, the wildlife, the research speed, the economy, population, deposit location, the infrastructure that survived the apocalypse, how lucky you are in finding republic equipment, luck of the dice, luck of the neighbors and the difficulty. The really big selling point is that you can have a lot of variations in your starts, even if you have to reroll a lot to get something that you like.


Early turns happen fast, once you get the original organization out of the way, the reason why let's players take forever to do the turns is because they have to explain game mechanics to people with no access to the game. They also tend to play on small or at least normal maps to keep the campaign short.

The bigger the map, the higher number of major regimes that equal the player in capabilities. The bigger the map the longer it takes for the player to expand everywhere and the more easy conquest is denied by the expanding major regimes. The more mountains and seas on the map the harder it is to get around as chokepoints have to be overwhelmed in frontal attacks while crossing mountains and supplying over them is very hard. Meanwhile on open plains motorized units can take huge swaths of land with little difficulty, at the same time the AI can do the same to you on the plains. If you have aggressive wildlife that'll slow you down or even ruin your start if you can't contain it. If you get unlucky and the minors around you happen to be the very aggressive slavers or raiders you'll struggle whereas farmer regimes will be pushovers.

IMO there's 5 stages in the game:
1) Starting expansion where you basically poke around with your troops to see what's to seize for your self and how much of it you can before you need to invest into armies. Depending on your luck this can be a lot without problems or barely anything as the wildlife and the freefolk give no quarters.
2) Taking on the minors, usually as a result of encountering some limits, be it distance or being boxed in by said minors, this is where you usually expand your armies if the freefolk didn't force you to do it. It's also when you'll get your second city.
3) Dealing with majors, where you'll be fighting people who have real professional soldiers, and similar if not superior abilities. This is where you get into the real wars and the need for proper strategic planing for conventional war.
4) MAD warfare, where it starts to get freaky and deadly with mobiles shields, plasma tanks, AI armies, mobile automated pilboxes, mega-tanks and nuclear strikes.
5) End game cleaning. As with all games once you get powerful enough nothing can oppose you so it's just uninteresting busy work, clearing up the last opposition from whatever cave they've hidden in, final touches on the map painting, crossing your T's, dotting the I's.

All of those stages can be very different. I've had very easy starts where I've expanded fast because of weak neighbors and defensible terrain, I've had abandoned starts where I was pushed back and boxed in immediately with little chance of success. I've had good starts ruined by horrible dice rolls on events (got my economy crippled because slavers stole half my workers), games saved by good rolls (getting a tactical nuclear warhead at the right time to use against an enemy doom stack).

If you take the time to tweak the game settings you can make it offer a lot of what you want.

[Malevolence]

Understood; thanks.

[KingHalford]

ORIGINAL: Palora

ORIGINAL: Malevolence

How does this impact the mid- and late- game play? Is the planet essentially conquered before later faction developments?

The short answer is yes and no. You can have games where that happens, you can have games where that doesn't happen.

It depends on the size of the planet/map, the terrain, the wildlife, the research speed, the economy, population, deposit location, the infrastructure that survived the apocalypse, how lucky you are in finding republic equipment, luck of the dice, luck of the neighbors and the difficulty. The really big selling point is that you can have a lot of variations in your starts, even if you have to reroll a lot to get something that you like.


Early turns happen fast, once you get the original organization out of the way, the reason why let's players take forever to do the turns is because they have to explain game mechanics to people with no access to the game. They also tend to play on small or at least normal maps to keep the campaign short.

The bigger the map, the higher number of major regimes that equal the player in capabilities. The bigger the map the longer it takes for the player to expand everywhere and the more easy conquest is denied by the expanding major regimes. The more mountains and seas on the map the harder it is to get around as chokepoints have to be overwhelmed in frontal attacks while crossing mountains and supplying over them is very hard. Meanwhile on open plains motorized units can take huge swaths of land with little difficulty, at the same time the AI can do the same to you on the plains. If you have aggressive wildlife that'll slow you down or even ruin your start if you can't contain it. If you get unlucky and the minors around you happen to be the very aggressive slavers or raiders you'll struggle whereas farmer regimes will be pushovers.

IMO there's 5 stages in the game:
1) Starting expansion where you basically poke around with your troops to see what's to seize for your self and how much of it you can before you need to invest into armies. Depending on your luck this can be a lot without problems or barely anything as the wildlife and the freefolk give no quarters.
2) Taking on the minors, usually as a result of encountering some limits, be it distance or being boxed in by said minors, this is where you usually expand your armies if the freefolk didn't force you to do it. It's also when you'll get your second city.
3) Dealing with majors, where you'll be fighting people who have real professional soldiers, and similar if not superior abilities. This is where you get into the real wars and the need for proper strategic planing for conventional war.
4) MAD warfare, where it starts to get freaky and deadly with mobiles shields, plasma tanks, AI armies, mobile automated pilboxes, mega-tanks and nuclear strikes.
5) End game cleaning. As with all games once you get powerful enough nothing can oppose you so it's just uninteresting busy work, clearing up the last opposition from whatever cave they've hidden in, final touches on the map painting, crossing your T's, dotting the I's.

All of those stages can be very different. I've had very easy starts where I've expanded fast because of weak neighbors and defensible terrain, I've had abandoned starts where I was pushed back and boxed in immediately with little chance of success. I've had good starts ruined by horrible dice rolls on events (got my economy crippled because slavers stole half my workers), games saved by good rolls (getting a tactical nuclear warhead at the right time to use against an enemy doom stack).

If you take the time to tweak the game settings you can make it offer a lot of what you want.

This is really encouraging and seems to confirm what I suspected about this game: a huge replayability factor owing to the myriad planet settings.

[balto]

You mention mountains providing some form of denial of access/protection. I thought the AI can make free roads everywhere? Actually, I know I have watched them do it within mountains, I am just not sure how often.

[Saros]

It's worth noting that you can start fairly advanced and with multiple zones if you want. This puts you and the other Majors pretty much into the conventional war phase from the very start.