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[Braxxy]

My previous post was “Suggestions for strategic improvement” in which I gave feedback to many different aspects of planetary supremacy. I am quite pleased that many of the issues which I and others raised have been addressed, and while not perfect are definite steps in the right direction. It’s good to see that the developers are listening to feedback and implementing different things.

In the same vein as my previous post I will be giving feedback on my experience of the current iteration of the game and aim my feedback at achievable goals in the short term.

My second experience

For my second playtest I played the following campaigns in this order:

Space Marines – Astartes difficulty, finished in 5 overworld turns
Necrons – Company Captain, finish in 4 overworld turns
Tyranids – Lieutenant difficulty, finished in 2 overworld turns? (that’s what my victory screenshot says, but it may have been 3)

Overall, there has been a drastic improvement in the game mode. When I had finished my first play test with all three races I had no desire to play it again. This time however I am wanting to go back and play a few more times, to try out different things. For the rest of this post I’ll outline the good changes, the things that I feel are a bit over-powered and areas of concern with suggestions for improvement.

The Good

The Ai opponents are better at higher difficulties

Originally the overworld ai struggled against the neutral tiles and would often lose their requisition units meaning that the final battle was a pushover. This was not the case in my second playthrough, it’s good to see definite improvements here.

The added factions give nice variety

The added Khorne faction along with being able to face your own faction if you allow it provided much needed variety to the neutral tiles. The skull cannons are awesome and chaotic, love it. Also, the penitent engines are a welcome addition to the sisters of battle.

Smaller starting roster lends to a sense of progression

The smaller starting roster is great, it makes it so that you must choose which units you really need to add to your roster, and which ones you leave behind. It adds to the sense of progression, but I do think that there needs to be more variation to be truly replay-able, simply because once a player either knows the best units or the units they like most they will default to a single path on following playthroughs. I’ll discuss this further in the areas of concern.

Siege battles are themed well and provide a great final battle

I love the themed maps, they are well designed and from my experience seem to provide a bit of defender’s advantage, but perhaps not enough. It would be good to see a tweak where each objective calls in a certain unit of re-enforcements after a specified number of turns. The siege points on the sides may only call in a basic unit of genestealers/ intercessor/ warriors every 3 turns, whereas the rear-most may call in a Hive Tyrant/ Librarian Dreadnought / Overlord every 5 turns. This would give an incentive to splitting your forces more and capturing the points as quickly as possible rather than killing all the enemies safely and then capturing the points.

Also, it would be great to be able to zoom out further to see more of the map particularly on the tyranid home base.

Battle Variety

The old overwatch til you win strategy doesn’t seem to work anymore, which is a good thing. The random placement of units is nice in that it allowed you to get in the action earlier, however it does make the enemy quite easy to beat if you play cautiously, and it also means that about halfway through your making turns to move up and try and find the last opponents. I think it still needs work, but it is improving.

Requisition point update

This is a wonderful improvement; it rewards you for recruiting when units are off cooldown, and it also allows the ai to get units that they need when they have lost. Honestly the biggest benefit of this is that the ai have good units when you finally combat them. Also, it makes the bonus that gives -1 on the cooldown of requisition even better.

Dev's, good job.

The over-powered

Last time, the overpowered thing I found was the necron command ability, which has been greatly nerfed, so I’m sorry to other players if this kills a beloved strat. I also will be playing more, so I might find some more overpowered things.

Tyrannofex

The tyrannofex is insanely good in the hands of the player, easily better than the hive tyrant. Not only can it kill two units of infantry in a single attack it often gets enough momentum that it can surge and do it again. When facing a 1500pt army of adeptus sororitas or khorne, you can easily beat them with 2 tyrannofex and 2 primes (for killing the single entities).

The Action point +1 bonus

The action point bonus was already powerful, but now it’s even more effective as the opponents turns are not only taken up with attacking and reinforcing, but also with upgrading. This actually leads me to my first area of concern.


Areas of concern with suggestions for improvement.

HQ upgrades taking action points
In each of my playthroughs I would only spend my action points either once or twice in the entire game. The opportunity cost to get more units, or get their abilities just wasn’t worth it. And while not a problem for the ai on the hardest difficulty (as they get all HQ upgrades) on lower difficulties they upgrade far to often meaning that they fall behind the player after the second turn.

I think it would be better if it did not require action points, for several reasons:
1. It discourages the player from upgrading and experimenting with different units.
2. It slows down the sense of progression from gradual, to a few large bursts.
3. It counterintuitively it makes the game easier at lower levels as the ai upgrades often

I know that you can turn off this option in the settings and I will try the campaigns again with them off to report how different it feels.

AI withdrawing

In each campaign I played I only fought the opposing factions on the battlefield once each time and those were the siege battles. This is because every other time when I have attacked, they have withdrawn. As such they didn’t weaken my army at all, and I could attack their Base at full strength on the same overworld turn.

You could make it so that the ai doesn’t withdraw, but I think it would be far better to have a point limit for each tile. I’d actually love to have a tile with a 500pt limit, especially if it was against a few more powerful opponents or a horde of weak ones. It would force you to pick which units you want to get veterancy as well as consider which units you are willing to lose. The main benefit though would be that instead of withdrawing the ai opponent can have an even playing field and have a chance against the player especially just to slow them down instead of constantly fleeing.
In my previous post I detailed my ideas for battle size limits, and I think they still apply here. I haven’t payed much attention to the neutral faction composition, to see if it’s improved but I’ll keep track of it in my next playthrough to see if it’s improved.

Never defending

I have never had to defend. In terms of having new experiences, I’d like to see what it’s like to be sieged, but that’s never happened for me. Perhaps I’ll try letting the enemy taking the entire map to check it out, but it would be nice if it happened organically.

I’ve already mentioned that one of the reasons for this is that the ai wastes turns upgrading, the other is probably that I finish the game too quickly. However, I don’t see the point of increasing my army cap to be even greater than the ai’s as it just makes the game too easy. I don’t want an unfair skirmish; I want a challenge.

HQ upgrades, Strategy of the tiles and Replay potential

I was honestly surprised when the HQ upgrades came out. I thought it was a more difficult task to implement than it apparently was. It is nice that you are able to upgrade your units and grab different abilities rather than starting out with all of them. It has improved the sense of progression; however, it also means that I often just won’t use special abilities as the game is often over before I have enough points to get that deep into the tree.

The main reason for this is that the tiles still have little strategic importance other than the bonuses, so I’m never going to get all the HQ upgrades. It will mean that people will often play without knowing how good a unit is with their full upgrades, especially for the necrons and tyranids, as they didn't have a story campaign.

I don’t think the solution is to make the upgrades cheaper I think it lies in making the tiles have greater strategic value, so that you do actually fight more battles and max out a few units before the end.

One way I think would be good is if each unit had it’s own upgrade line, completely separate from the others, along with a weapons upgrade line. Have every unit and the weapons line locked at the beginning of the game. (Excluding the units which require no requisition pts). When you start a new game you have two random units unlocked with their HQ lines fully upgraded (this is important). The rest of the units both yours and the opponents are locked behind different tiles. As such when you look at the map you have to decide not just what gives you the most points, but which units you want to seek out and acquire. And also, which units you would like to block the ai opponent from getting.

This addition would lend greatly to replay potential as you would be forced to use different compositions and you would get a feel for how good units are when fully upgraded when you otherwise wouldn’t have tried them. For example, I still have never used the Librarian. He looks cool, but I’ve lent more towards other units. If however I started with intercessors, assault marines, a librarian and a land speeder I’d definitely learn how to use him. Then in future games when I see him as an option I’ll be able to judge more accurately if he’s worth going for.

The smaller start has been good for each of the races I have played, but if you choose this route, I think it needs to be reduced right to the core + 2 random units.

I know I spoke about this in my last post, but I think it still stands as an issue as there is still no reason to seek out tiles that aren’t on the way to the enemy, and especially no reason to take empty defeated tiles. If however when you conquered an opponents base and there was a good unit on a tile they used to own it would be worth taking.

I think that this is a good solution for adding strategy to the map and also increasing replay potential. As ideally you want to be thrown into a familiar situation with a unique challenge in order to keep coming back and playing again.

Conclusion

Thanks again for working on this game mode and listening to feedback. I hope that my feedback is helpful. I do also still stand by my suggestions for battles size limits and themed enemy compositions from my previous post if you would like to look at those again.