Yesterday, having played Planetfall for maybe 25 hours, all in all, I realized that, playing the campaign, I did most of my battles as autobattles (expert difficulty) - which was somewhat bewildering; in AoW 3 I haven't fought many battles via autocombat, and when I say "not many", I mean virtually a handful, not more, in 5 years of playing the came nearly constantly every day.
Analysing the reasons, it was pretty easy to see why. In AoW 3, there are 3 (actually 4) resources, that you have to (or at least CAN) manage in battles. These are: 1) unit health (to keep units battle-ready - if a unit loses too much health you are likely to lose it when you send it into the next battle); 2) Mana and hero casting points; 3) XP gain and distribution
Now, suppose you have a "safe" battle waiting, that is, a battle in which you will very probably not lose a unit in autocombat and won't see the health of one or more of them seriously depleted, there is still one reason left to fight manually, and that is the management of the XP resource, because that's what XP is, a resource. And in AoW 3 you made sure that no matter how much XP you already had gained, you could always use more and had never enough of it (unlimited upgrading).
Admittedly, you set it up in a way, that made it too abundant, but that was nothing that couldn't be changed and righted with simple modding and try and error. However, the general idea was more than sound and offered a massive incentive to fight battles manually. In fact, it was a pretty ground-breaking thing. Think about it this way: if your after-battle reward in gold/energy would be dependent on the hits you delivered and took, people would try to maximize the gain here as well - and of course fight battles manually.
And this is the trick that AoW 3 pulled. Battles are an important part of the game and a lot of work has been put into the system to make it really great (and the game is universally lauded for it). However, when people, who LIKE the battle part of the game, use autocombat in single player (too much) so early after starting to play it, then something isn't right, when so much care and work went into battles, battlefields and every in connection with it.
However, players are not in any way FORCED to battle manually in AoW 3, and they are also not forced to maximize experience gain or directing XP where it does best use, they don't have to fight battles "in an unnatural way". Instead they can fight the way they want, get XP and rewards and enjoy themselves.
Competetive spoken, however, maximizing and making maximum use of resources is what you do in these games, and what AoW 3 gave us, is ANOTHER resource to maximize and make maximum use of, and that's experience.
I have no idea why EXACTLY this was changed so drastically in Planetfall, but no matter the reasons, it's a huge step back. The system we have now is, in comparison, bland. XP is shared equally, units get only 4 upgrade levels and there is abundant healing (playing the first real Jack Gelder map, Field Medicine, Nanite Injectors on everyone plus PUGs make sure that the AI can competently manage the health of your troops), so:
Suddenly there is no reason anymore to fight a battle manually, when you are halfway sure you won't lose anything.
That can't be good in a game like this - for me, it isn't. Because:
It is a good thing when the player knows, no matter how well the AI fights for you, you will be able to do it better, manually. And that is something you can't do in Planetfall, when the AI comes out of a battle not only without losses, but also with your troops in good shape.
Now. Obviously the system in Planetfall has its uses in live MP games, because a solid, dependable autocombat is accelerating things and the equal sharing of XP supports this, so I wouldn't want it to be changed, now that it is in place.
But for all SINGLE play and PBEM play, you took something away.
That's why I''ll make a suggestion (in the suggestion thread) to re-introduce the AoW 3 system as an OPTION (same way as simultaneous and classic turns) to pick when setting the game up.
Believe me guys, that AoW 3 system IS brilliant, it just needed some balancing and fine-tuning to work with minimal potential for "exploits" and it HAS added another dimension to battles.
I would implore you to give this serious thought and take this into consideration - part of the community, myself included, has put a lot of time in refining the numbers in AoW 3 that deliver "the right amount" of XP - which is, in reality, not that much different from balancing the availability of the other resources, gold, mana, energy, cosmite or "Strikes" - you name them. I'm sure, everyone involved would share their insights into this, so the balancing at least, wouldn't be much a problem.
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