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Col. W. T. Philmore

First Lieutenant
98 Badges
Feb 28, 2018
240
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  • Surviving Mars
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  • Age of Wonders: Planetfall Season pass
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  • Age of Wonders: Planetfall Premium edition
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  • BATTLETECH
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  • Imperator: Rome - Magna Graecia
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Here I will describe a typical Planetfall game and best practices. Whether it is a game desigh failure, or not, Paradox will decide.

From the very beginning it is mandatory to build central building, that produce energy. Also claim and build two energy provinces. That's not only because of upkeep, that drains money, but also because of modding units and casting operations drains money too, so you must always have as much big income as possible. Waiting several turns before you can mod a new tank or drop a bomb is a disaster.

For same reason, it is mandatory to have cosmite mine captured asap, so you can begin stockpile it from very start. So it turns good to restart mission several times and roll a map on which cosmite will be close to your base.

Because of AI is a coward and will always sit in city with army of 5+ stacks, and wait for your mistake to come out with all of this, in which case war is absolutely pointless, there is just one possible scenario to win - you must build your own 5+ stacks and face his blob like a man. Either you will come to dig him out from his city, or you will launch a planet destruction spell, ho he will become mad and will rush on u with all he has.

And let's be honest, 99% battles on this game you will do in autoresolve. On small scale, because you are too lazy to bother with any worm in any cave, on big scale because you are too lazy to control army of 5+ stacks and wait for turns. So your army must be prepared to win in autoresolve.

In autoresolve, AI tries to simulate a battle, instead of simply calculating numbers. And in battle there are two possible tactics:
1) Offensive. You come into enemy's reach, and bomb him with maximum of control abilities, like blind, sleep, stun, etc, and use save abilities, like smoke clouds, energy shields, ets. Point is to turn enemy into useless garbage, which will stand and watch how your units get in position. Then you do damage.
2) Defensive. You stand and wait while enemy will do what is described above, and get a punch in the face. Then you heal yourself, clean away controls and debuffs, and do damage.

It's up to you what to choose, but it is important that all units in army must be suited for your selected tactics. What means, all must have controls and saves, or all must have heals and dispels. Mixing will do things worse. Also it is good to have some DOT damage, bleeding or burning or whatever. Burning is the most universal so the best. AOE damage is also good.

And never use flying units. They are good when you control battles manually, but in autoresolve they will die first, because AI thinks that it is good idea to send them to first line, where they are easily shot down because of no cover. My favorite choice is to equip all stacks with tanks and robots, modded with additional armor, healing device and fire dot damage device. And heroes with melee weapons, heavily defended and with ability to repair killed vehicles, just in case. Such blob never die.

Also, autoresolve is heavily influenced by enemy's hp, drained by bombs. So it is mandatory to research all possible bomb spells and raise amount of operation points, so you may drop maximum bombs on enemy's head in one turn, and then drive in. If battle is going to happen on your territory, you also can pop defensive spells, which will additionally debuff enemy. So your blob's power will overwhelm him x2-3 times and easy win.

And this is all game. If you want some lore or roleplay, you may do something else, but if ya want to finally end a mission, you will do this.
 
Because of AI is a coward and will always sit in city with army of 5+ stacks, and wait for your mistake to come out with all of this, in which case war is absolutely pointless, there is just one possible scenario to win - you must build your own 5+ stacks and face his blob like a man.
There is a limit to how many armies the defender can reliably pull into combat. It is 3 stacks + garission.
If you attack from the right angle, you can take out the Garission and 3 stacks with only 3-4 stacks of your own. Or even just 3/5th of their army in the field.
And then it is still 3-4 stacks of yours, vs 2 remaining stacks + perhaps the garission again.

And I actually recently managed to draw the enemy out. Usually I grab the economy around their strongpoint first. That way they can either come out or suffer from lack of funding.
Even if they block loosing units by disabling morale, the only thing they can recruit are unmodded NPC faction units. Mostly Autonom and Paragon ones (as they lack morale).
 
it sounds like you are playing on a big map; too much time, too much teching, too many battles. try small or at most medium.

Rerolling for closer cosmite is silly. You don't need this. If cosmite is a problem, rush the HQ cosmite building techs.

you shouldn't need much energy early game, because you should be getting a lot from pickups

if they are holding defensively in their city move past them and take their sectors+other cities to force an engagement

flying units are bad for cost, deliberately. this is because their strategic mobility is unparalleled. For the most part, they should be used in dedicated flying stacks. The most notable exception is the Mirage which should be in basically every syndicate stack as soon as you can afford it.
 
if they move into the field to take back a sector then you can engage them there. If they abandoned their capital to go for your cities then you can take theirs first. Then you just have to punch out their sovereign.
 
If you will move past them, and take something else, they can go and take it back, when you are distracted, or even try to run for your own empty city. Annoying Benny Hill show will begin.
Funny. That is always when I catch them out of position and kill half their army.
 
Funny. That is always when I catch them out of position and kill half their army.
Once I moved around guys sitting in city and captured another city, which was empty. And when I returned to first city and prepared to position my stack around enemy, he ran out, moved past me and captured second city back.
I thought that it will be long and boring and just went directly to him and killed this nonsense.
 
Once I moved around guys sitting in city and captured another city, which was empty. And when I returned to first city and prepared to position my stack around enemy, he ran out, moved past me and captured second city back.
I thought that it will be long and boring and just went directly to him and killed this nonsense.

Then destroy the second City (as in, instead of migrating/absorbing) and there won't be anything to take back.

I think you Kind of optimized the fun out of your game yourself. You know, by making "autoresolvable armies", the fights, in particular the "very dangerous" ones and sometimes even impossible ones CAN be won, without losses even, if you got the right army, but that army probably won't do too good in autoresolve battles.

So, if you find the fights too boring, then AoW probably is the wrong series for you, as those battles are Kind of the specialty of this 4X series.
 
Not much I agree on regarding mandatory strategies.

Overall I like the game flow although I do agree that the AI could do with a bit less turtling. Then on the other hand, them suicide rushing their armies against player defenses would also be bad.

The only real pacing issue I have with the game is that a lot of matches tend to drag in the late game. Games often continue far past the point of being functionally decided, especially with the 10 turn count down after most victory conditions. But in general if they make the AI more aggressive during these segments, they really should be throwing everything at anyone ten turns from winning - a small chance is better than none, then I think they are in the clear. Even then I think domination victories could do with a reduced/no timer. When you control enough of the map for this victory, there is no longer much any opponent can do. Then again, if they throw everything, after all, they only have to bring you one sector below the threshold.

Also, the AI is already quite good at asking for alliances to join in on the victory, which is good, but they should probably give up fairly quickly and declare war if they are refused.
 
Not much I agree on regarding mandatory strategies.

Overall I like the game flow although I do agree that the AI could do with a bit less turtling. Then on the other hand, them suicide rushing their armies against player defenses would also be bad.

The only real pacing issue I have with the game is that a lot of matches tend to drag in the late game. Games often continue far past the point of being functionally decided, especially with the 10 turn count down after most victory conditions. But in general if they make the AI more aggressive during these segments, they really should be throwing everything at anyone ten turns from winning - a small chance is better than none, then I think they are in the clear. Even then I think domination victories could do with a reduced/no timer. When you control enough of the map for this victory, there is no longer much any opponent can do. Then again, if they throw everything, after all, they only have to bring you one sector below the threshold.

Also, the AI is already quite good at asking for alliances to join in on the victory, which is good, but they should probably give up fairly quickly and declare war if they are refused.

Yeah. I did go the "all reactor and energy exploit" way last game and it indeed improved my early game a lot, also prioritizing energy in the colonies. I could afford the heroes as they came and they got their own armies relatively quick, before I was often starved of energy, now cosmite is the limiting factor (which is probably the intended bottleneck).
But actually the production of Units took 3-4 turns each, same with most Buildings which significantly slowed down my Progress.
Also many of my colonies were lacking the Research Center for XP, as they simply didn't have 3 or 4 sectors.

So the current game I'm going for an all Food central Building, and probably prio energy.
Having energy but no People to work is bad as well. And every important colony will have at least one production exploit and Research exploit for units.
Also I probably made the mistake of releasing the energy prio way too late, should've done so once the eco stabilized, to gain more workers sooner.

But I agree, there is no mandatory way IMHO.
Military Perk isn't must-have anymore since the patch, and going secret-tech heavy with star-Union perk, or more on eco with Trader.
And going production, Food, or energy early on might all be viable, maybe depending on map-size and player-Count. And maybe there should be some balancing of early and lategame Units, so far (against AI, anyway), researching the later Units is a low priority, as better mods make the existing Units just fine, while T3 would Need to be built, with a Special barracks, with cosmite costs included, and many of them slow.
Thus I think fast-teching towards later Units isn't worth it at the Moment. Modded T2 beats unmodded T3 any day.
 
So the current game I'm going for an all Food central Building, and probably prio energy.
Having energy but no People to work is bad as well. And every important colony will have at least one production exploit and Research exploit for units.
Also I probably made the mistake of releasing the energy prio way too late, should've done so once the eco stabilized, to gain more workers sooner.
FYI, in the Beta there is a new setting "Share all excess or sell it for energy".
It's primary purpose is to allow us to cap growth, so energy was made the fallback thing if no colony will take the shared food.

Wich means if you go full food, you can still draw some energy from it once you hit 16 pops/whatever your happiness cap is.
 
FYI, in the Beta there is a new setting "Share all excess or sell it for energy".
It's primary purpose is to allow us to cap growth, so energy was made the fallback thing if no colony will take the shared food.

Wich means if you go full food, you can still draw some energy from it once you hit 16 pops/whatever your happiness cap is.

Yeah, I suppose it has the same abysmal rate of "Produce Energy/Research" (is it 25%? 15%?) though. Better than nothing of Course, but I don't think it could become even Close to a Substitute (going Food exploits instead of energy exploits for example). Might be interesting for Kir'Ko, with their Food bonuses as well as turning Food into unit production.
Having Food supply you with production and energy, there might be something there :D
 
Yeah, I suppose it has the same abysmal rate of "Produce Energy/Research" (is it 25%? 15%?) though. Better than nothing of Course, but I don't think it could become even Close to a Substitute (going Food exploits instead of energy exploits for example). Might be interesting for Kir'Ko, with their Food bonuses as well as turning Food into unit production.
Having Food supply you with production and energy, there might be something there :D
I think the coversion is 1:1, but of course the share tax still applies.

It is more then just the energy conversion. If you have any takers, you still get to use that food.
Especially it allows you to maintain a population.

Previously I had to chase after the Happiness Buildings. The growth was just that much. But now I get to stop growth at any time.
It is also worth remembering that food is a longterm investment. Each food you produce now, is a extra colonist (to work in the slots) later.
Not to mention the importance of getting past the sector unlock tresholds, wich give you a large flat bonus each.