Fhnuzoag

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Posts posted by Fhnuzoag

  2. Posted

    Actually most places are listing Greenskins as the hardest campaign due to how fightiness works! Dwarves are supposedly the easiest to get to grips with as a new player because their units are very solid and require little micromanagement.

    Dwarves are easy to use but their strategic situation is tricky. And their grudge mechanic has the possibility of a death spiral.

    Empire seems like possibly the best start - and maybe the best campaign?

  3. Posted

    Really, I think people are treating the capture territory restriction wrong. What the territory restrictions are is that they create *oceans* on the map. If you maintain non aggression pacts with those guys, or vassalise them, or raze them, you can create these buffer zones around your territory that give you a secured front, thus enabling your armies to go elsewhere. Otherwise the map would be effectively a flat surface with few chokepoints, and rather less interesting.

    Yeah you can only expand in your selected terrain type but raiding and sacking is a very much legitimate way of running your economy, and that creates an interesting fundamental choice - fight secondary enemies for money, or focus on the big threat?

  5. Posted

    I really disagree, I found a distinctive use for every unit as Empire. It's a genuine improvement to the homogenous yari blobs I used to run in Shogun 2.

    Shogun's big problem is that the fun units are all found deep down your building tree, so you end up only being able to build them faaar back in your home province. They just aren't worth the trouble when you can raise yaris wherever. The new tech trees gives you interesting units like muskets and flyers super early and global recruitment means you can build them directly on the front line.

    Also I found plenty of interesting strategic choices. In my game I mostly ignored unifying the empire in favour of killing off the vampires and ransacking the orcs. And it worked.

  6. Posted

    Having played some more, the real solution to little armies staying out of reach?

    Ambush stance.

    Seriously, give it a try. Basically being in ambush stance means the AI ignores that army when doing its moves. The ambush doesn't even have to succeed, so feel free to pop it in the middle of a plain or something. Lure them close and then whack them.

  7. Posted

    If you are having that kind of trouble, send out smaller armies that the AI wouldn't refuse battle against, consider using agents to fix their army's movement, and upgrade your towns with the garrison buildings. They buffed garrisons hugely in this game, which is paired up with it seems a severe increase in unit upkeep. Large defensive standing armies seem like bad ideas now.

    Also, it can be greatly preferable to sack an enemy town, attack again and raze it, instead of occupying. Gets you a nice buffer zone of destroyed crap, and a huge amount of cash, and means the AI focuses on resettling instead of fucking with your stuff. Keeps your armies nicely mobile also.

    Game plays pretty great, but also pretty differently to traditional total war. I really like the streamlining they did.

  8. Posted

    I'd echo a lot of people's impressions here. Yeah, XCOM2 doesn't explain itself very well. Yeah the UI has issues. But the systems it adds or modifies aren't just random cruft, they actually work together really well and interestingly, once you put in the effort to understand what they add up to and why they are there. (For example, the Intel mechanic is actually pretty important in trimming down the effectiveness of the satellite rush in the first game and ensuring money is always tight. The panel seems to think it's just thrown in for no reason - it's not.)

     

    One thing I've observed though is that people who dislike XCOM2 tend to be exactly those with technical issues with it. I wonder if that's the real problem here. Like, the game clearly functions to very different levels on different setups. Personally I haven't seen any major problems (aside from a few hilarious cosmetic glitches, and choppiness during the cutscene where soldiers are deployed), but if your basic experience is frustration and waiting and crashes and suffering, you'd probably be much less prepared to grant the game the patience it needs.

  9. Posted

    Seconding the praise for Infested Planet, a game chock full of exciting ideas, that many seem not to have noticed.

    This episode was interesting to me. I seem to recall, in the distant past (i.e. around when SC2 came out), an episode of 3MA decrying the single player campaign and saying that developers should give up on it...? Also I think everyone got sick of WW2 for a bit? If so, funny how things have turned around.

  12. Posted

    Hi. To the people who found it too difficult, can you say what you found hard to do?

    Some hints: Are you

    - using WASD active controls to dodge past opponent tacklers?

    - grasping what all the different cards do (specifically, that some of them attack, some of them impede the opponents, some of them give you a buff over time, and some of you manipulate the cards?)

    - are you planning around the 'black' negative effect cards? Of the three, What Is Game can sometimes be triggered intentionally early to get it out of the way, Bird Noise makes the game harder so you should avoid casting it at all costs, and Shitty Wizard can be used to dispel the other negative effect cards.

    - are you trying not to pause the game too much? The first new spell pickup after you unpause happens after 5 seconds, and then new pickups appear every 3 seconds thereafter. So if you pause more often than every 5 seconds you don't get any spells...

  13. Posted

    This was great, are you planning to work on it any more?

    I might... in the short term, I'd probably just add a credit page so I can credit the people I got the music from (http://incompetech.com/) and the sound effects from (https://www.freesound.org/).

     

    The game itself was sort of intended as a test-bed for some ideas I had for making a semi-XCOM style tactical strategy game. I'll probably experiment on that when I have time for the time being. Unless people think the Wizard Sports could be polished up further and expanded into a fuller game? (I didn't end up implementing everything I wanted. In particular there was a Boss Fight sequence I was interested in doing, but I didn't have time.)

  19. Posted

    We're coming up to the end now, and it would be good to get some playtesting done for some of the games, for interface streamlining, bugfixing and difficulty balance.

    Does anyone want to help out? Post in this thread if you can! Or if you need a player for your own game....

    (To keep things going smoothly, please don't ask for a playtester if you aren't prepared to play someone else's game to help out!)

  23. Posted

    Day 9. Been busy finalising AI and implementing a lot of spells, so no Gif.

    The AI basically works like this:

    There are two movement modes, walk and run. Walk just moves directly towards a target position. Run keeps track of the current direction of the unit, turning towards to the target, and tries to dodge other players in its way.

    There is then three basic states to each AI player, a defensive state, a neutral, and an offensive state. A commander function assigns the frontmost and nearest to the ball players as offensive, and the players nearest the goal as defensive. Everyone else is neutral. Every few clicks, this function re-assigns everyone a role.

    Neutral players just guard their home points, maybe shuffling around a bit from time to time. When the ball gets close they try to tackle the player by running at them.

    Defensive players interpose themselves between the ball and the goal, again only tackling if close.

    Offensive players have the most complex task. If the player is in possession they just keep trying to tackle. If they have the ball though, then they try and attack: players without the ball pick a random relative position from the ball and go there, repositioning once they arrive. The ball holder meanwhile attempts to select a random waypoint that brings it closer to the player's goal, and is still clear of players units. If the path becomes blocked, however, it finds a new waypoint. From time to time, it will consider passing the ball based on how likely the player is to intercept, and whether it brings the ball closer to the goal. If it is close to the goal and it sees a possible shot then it will shoot.

  25. Posted

    Day 7.

    Started to work on spells, also some backend stuff for large clever formation AI stuff that might not work.

     

    The basic idea of spells is that they are pickups that are slowly generated (after a delay) while the player is unpaused, thus encouraging the player to not constantly pause the game, and to move his units around the pitch.

    Picking up a pickup gives the player one of a deck of shuffled spell cards, which the player can carry up to 7 at a time. If the player picks up any more, the oldest card is discarded. (This is a good way to get rid of the harmful backlash cards)

    The player clicks on as many cards as they want to cast them.

    If multiple spells are cast, they are held in a queue and then cast one by one, with a 1 second interval in between.

    In general, spells either do damage, stunning the enemy, provide the player with buffs, alter the game in some other way, or affect cards.

    Already stunned enemies explode when stunned again, potentially triggering a chain reaction.

     

    Only implemented the random explosions spell so far:

    7TvyDqU.gif

    Tried to think up some spells:

     

    ??? - random explosions that stun the enemy
    ??? - Targetted attack, stuns and pushes them aside
    ??? - Random periodic lightning bolts stun enemies near your cursor
    Babywall - Creates a wall that slows the enemy
    TBS mode - all units with orders complete them really quickly, then are stunned for a short time
    ??? - for a time, all your units have area of effect tackle ability
    ??? - for a time, all your units move really fast
    ??? - for a time, when you shoot the ball, you go with it
    Diplomacy - charms an enemy for a really long time. (Charmed enemies will always pass the ball to you and will auto-tackle their teammates.)
    ??? - cast a spell twice, one after the other
    ??? - cast a spell three times, one by one
    ??? - transmorphs spells into new spells
    ??? - drops X more spell pickups on to the battlefield
    ??? - collects all the pickups on the map, and the ball if it's free.
    ??? - Creates smoke cloud that blinds opponents, referee for a time
    ??? - Creates a second ball
    ??? - allows you to set waypoints for the ball, then shoot it like a XCOM blaster bomb
    Gun - all units shoot automatically at enemies close to them, pushing them away/slowing them
    ??? - Backlash! [Has a bad effect/Must be cast/Returns to deck]
    ??? - Reshuffle