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Post by ConstantVitalRivet on Feb 10, 2018 13:15:42 GMT -5
Is there a way to get the Xenos to be smarter or more challenging than the “normal” level without all of the other extra challenges of the “hard” level?
I find “Normal” is basically a cakewalk at this point, and the Xenos can’t keep up with me and pose no meaningful challenge. Even with my first generation of designs beyond the stock Wolf Cruiser and Strike Fighter, it’s basically a mop-up operation and the Xenos never get much beyond their level 3 ships. In a typical game with three Xenos, the first poses some challenge but the other two are just plain boring to deal with.
My first foray into “hard” (Large map 100x75 map, 99 worlds- should be easier) I got my butt kicked. Spread as quickly as I could to about 25 worlds in the lower right of the map. I could barely keep up with population growth and morale, meaning I rarely had cash to invest in mines, exchanges, etc. Had a few trade routes here and there, Bust mostly despite keeping even numbers of colonies the politics were relentless, sending my treasury negative repeatedly.. By the time Xenos showed up on my frontier with level 3 ships and world killers, I had only been able to build 2 advanced designs, 2 more on order, and then boom, Solar War sends the treasury below zero, and its just turn after turn waiting out the diplomacy to end it till cash flow can go positive, frantically build hab units and spice for the overcrowded rioting colonies, finally enough cash to spare on a couple more ships, and... a spy battle weakens the cash flow, research the Rychart politics, wait wait wait to resolve that, and then immediately into another solar war. Obviously something wasn’t as balanced as I thought with politics (this was De Valtos, Rychart and Thulun; maybe the Thulun construction bonuses let those colonies be more successful?). But maintaining balance was an order of magnitude harder than “normal”, driven I think by the population growth and spice demand outstripping my cash flow from the beginning.
So basically is there any way to take an “intermediate” step toward hard, where the politics isn’t so rough, but the Xenos advance and expand faster?
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Post by fallen on Feb 10, 2018 13:17:07 GMT -5
Is there a way to get the Xenos to be smarter or more challenging than the “normal” level without all of the other extra challenges of the “hard” level? I find “Normal” is basically a cakewalk at this point, and the Xenos can’t keep up with me and pose no meaningful challenge. Even with my first generation of designs beyond the stock Wolf Cruiser and Strike Fighter, it’s basically a mop-up operation and the Xenos never get much beyond their level 3 ships. In a typical game with three Xenos, the first poses some challenge but the other two are just plain boring to deal with. My first foray into “hard” (Large map 100x75 map, 99 worlds- should be easier) I got my butt kicked. Spread as quickly as I could to about 25 worlds in the lower right of the map. I could barely keep up with population growth and morale, meaning I rarely had cash to invest in mines, exchanges, etc. Had a few trade routes here and there, Bust mostly despite keeping even numbers of colonies the politics were relentless, sending my treasury negative repeatedly.. By the time Xenos showed up on my frontier with level 3 ships and world killers, I had only been able to build 2 advanced designs, 2 more on order, and then boom, Solar War sends the treasury below zero, and its just turn after turn waiting out the diplomacy to end it till cash flow can go positive, frantically build hab units and spice for the overcrowded rioting colonies, finally enough cash to spare on a couple more ships, and... a spy battle weakens the cash flow, research the Rychart politics, wait wait wait to resolve that, and then immediately into another solar war. Obviously something wasn’t as balanced as I thought with politics (this was De Valtos, Rychart and Thulun; maybe the Thulun construction bonuses let those colonies be more successful?). But maintaining balance was an order of magnitude harder than “normal”, driven I think by the population growth and spice demand outstripping my cash flow from the beginning. So basically is there any way to take an “intermediate” step toward hard, where the politics isn’t so rough, but the Xenos advance and expand faster? One thing to know is that the default map of the game is considered the tutorial and so the xeno are easier. They are toned down. Try larger maps on difficulties below Hard to get your teeth sharpened. |
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Post by ConstantVitalRivet on Feb 10, 2018 13:31:29 GMT -5
Oh absolutely i’ve played through probably 5-6 times on maps other than the tutorial, including both large and small ones on what would be listed as “average” (not “easy”) difficulty. Probably the most fun & challenging was a smallish map (32x64?) where I encountered the Xenos quickly and it was a real race to claim worlds before they did. But then trying “hard” was just so much more hard!
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Post by fallen on Feb 10, 2018 19:21:30 GMT -5
I'd suggest trying hard again if you've done well on Challenging laready. It sounds like perhaps an unlucky start or slaughter.
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Post by constantvitalrivet on Feb 11, 2018 10:10:55 GMT -5
I'd suggest trying hard again if you've done well on Challenging laready. It sounds like perhaps an unlucky start or slaughter. Ok trying again on “hard” at 64x64 map and 2 aliens. It’s going better; I didn’t expand quite as fast and I managed to get out in front of the population/morale problems and build some revenue. Both Xenos showed up sniffing around my borders on the exact same turn but by then I had built up a few ships. The negative politics have happened but not as relentlessly and with some more funds I’ve been able to keep the positive ones going. So maybe that first time really was just a string of bad luck, or expanding too fast. |
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Post by fallen on Feb 11, 2018 11:56:27 GMT -5
constantvitalrivet - let us know how the new Hard game turns out! It is definitely a bump in difficulty, but sometimes it takes a try or two to get your footing and understand where you have to play more carefully. May Shalun guide your hand, commander!
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Post by constantvitalrivet on Feb 17, 2018 19:23:22 GMT -5
constantvitalrivet - let us know how the new Hard game turns out! It is definitely a bump in difficulty, but sometimes it takes a try or two to get your footing and understand where you have to play more carefully. May Shalun guide your hand, commander! I’m about 1000 turns in and doing well. Key I think was managing the expansion. It’s challenging enough to be fun. the negative politics happen now and then but not nearly so relentless and I can recover before too much damage happens. The two Xenos are Zenga and Krangg. Zenga hemmed in Krangg early on with only 10 planets so they are not able to muster as much opposition but Zenga is definitely keeping pace with me. |
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Post by constantvitalrivet on Mar 8, 2018 2:03:42 GMT -5
Well I just finished off the last of the Zenga worlds to win. 940 turns (I was off in my previous post). It’s hard to say what exactly the turning point was but at some point I think I had destroyed whatever surplus of ships the Xenos had, and they just started coming one or two ships at a time, probably as fast as they were building. Seemed like they stopped building world killers- I didn’t see any world killers past their level 4 models but by game end they had been on their level 7 gunships and torpedo ships for a long time. Last few colonies of theirs I took, it’s like they didn’t bother to defend either. Numerous rounds where my invasion fleet took no damage. Unsure if that was a bug, or if the Xenos were somehow too stretched to defend their colonies?
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Post by Cory Trese on Mar 8, 2018 9:30:12 GMT -5
Definitely not a bug, just the AI doing what it can to play the game.
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Post by constantvitalrivet on Mar 8, 2018 23:45:04 GMT -5
Definitely not a bug, just the AI doing what it can to play the game. Interesting, so even though those colonies had Non-zero radiation and defense numbers, some >20 defense, they aren’t able to ‘defend’? Is there some other resource they need to utilize their defenses, which is perhaps stretched thin as they lose worlds? |
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Post by Cory Trese on Mar 9, 2018 9:03:30 GMT -5
Definitely not a bug, just the AI doing what it can to play the game. Interesting, so even though those colonies had Non-zero radiation and defense numbers, some >20 defense, they aren’t able to ‘defend’? Is there some other resource they need to utilize their defenses, which is perhaps stretched thin as they lose worlds? Depends on what you mean since 'defend' is pretty vague, honestly. |
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Post by constantvitalrivet on Mar 10, 2018 0:48:44 GMT -5
Interesting, so even though those colonies had Non-zero radiation and defense numbers, some >20 defense, they aren’t able to ‘defend’? Is there some other resource they need to utilize their defenses, which is perhaps stretched thin as they lose worlds? Depends on what you mean since 'defend' is pretty vague, honestly. Well, what I mean is that none of my invasion ships received damage. They reduced population, defense, and quality of the planet, but didn’t take a single point of damage. That’s with 8 ships invading the planet. and purging to zero population in 2-3 turns. The same invasion ships earlier in game, against planets with similar defense/radiation stats, would take as much as 50-60 points of damage per turn while invading, and could be 4-5 turns to purge a planet. The last 5 or 6 worlds I took mostly played out this way except for a couple turns where it was back to the usual with each invading ship receiving 20+ points of damage. So for the colony under attack to do damage to the invading ship, does it cost the Xenos money which maybe they were out of? They were cranking out ships pretty fast (1 ship every 2-3 turns per world, which I destroyed as fast as they could produce, which maybe stretched their resources). Or do they have something like morale where if it drops too low they aren’t effective at counterattacking? Whatever is happening on the Xeno side of the game isn’t obvious to me! |
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Post by tenbsmith on Jun 20, 2018 15:40:01 GMT -5
As I recall, experience plays a big role in invasion. My guess would be that constantfitalrivet's low damage during invasion of the last 5-6 worlds was a combination of lucky RNG and more experienced invasion ships.
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