The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the capture enablers (grasp/Perm control/flex especially) are just outright better at generating prestige and easier to use than trophies.SineMora wrote: ↑Sun Apr 05, 2020 8:43 pm You'd be surprised by how quickly some players manage to blow through prestige once they stop gaining it, but sure, sacrificing prestige to reinforce engineers will speed up scenarios. With heroes you don't get to that point, though -- in the second part of my first (and only unless they are nerfed into the ground) campaign with heroes I was finishing scenarios in 10-12 turns on average (with 25-35 allotted), with hero units just clearing out everything. Even if you pushed in thousands of prestige per scenario to cover your losses it'd be difficult to get similar performance from mere mortal engineers who have to waste turns reinforcing. No amount of prestige can get you the performance of the über units of the Wehrmacht, and once you start adding challenge modes to the game, well, heroes make it somewhat easier to deal with all that OSed Soviet armour.
The recommendation hasn't really changed as far as I'm concerned for the average player -- I believe one of the devs said that Colonel is the most common difficulty setting, which means they're likely to get a lot more out of prestige bonuses; it's not the players on Generalissimus who are complaining that they're running out of prestige as a general rule -- so Liberator and Trophies of War remain great picks for them. It's just strange to rate them as particularly strong for experienced players.
The thing is, trophies doesn't in any way help you get captures. It just makes captures more valuable. Flex and Grasp especially allow you to massively suppress (and do minimal damage to) the units you want to capture as well as making capture easier and safer (since grasp inflicts a massive 4 suppress on their turn, it makes fighting back for them really hard). I would argue that'd lead to bigger captures and those captures would be easier and safer to implement with the skills that support capture and that may actually result in better prestige gains overall than just trophies on it's own with nothing to actually support it.
I recently Ironmanned for 2 hours, with "Absolutely denied airforce and artillery" I.E. I had none of either and sold all the starting ones. I went all in on the capture enablers and I was shocked at how much easier they made some of the battles. Grasp is a monster ability if you can lock in enemy units and deny them supply.
