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Demiurge4 posted:So I’ve tapped out after a lot of hours in the game and my one takeaway is that this is a turn based game. It’s an extremely odd way to structure the game in that you re basically just watching the planet spin for for a minute and then doing your actions again. I don’t understand why they decided to have a real time engine and then made every action a succeed/fail when their nation model 100% looks like it was designed for assigning your agents and their skills would apply a daily bonus of some kind. I'm pretty sure that the design intent is for space to be essentially unviable for basically the first 10 years. Everyone tries for it right now anyway, partially because the demo doesn't last that long and partially because it's a space game, but I think it's perfectly viable (maybe even optimal) to skip Luna entirely in favor of Mars or the asteroids. Just spend your early boost on claiming all the low earth orbit slots for research modules instead. And the early space ship parts are also intentionally dogshit; there's a reason humanity has barely managed to keep up a couple space stations in low orbit instead of having dozens of ships gunning to the moon every month. The game devs seem to be taking the timeline pretty realistically; imagine if a major nation today managed to strap a naval cannon onto a rocket to get to the Moon and back within four years - that'd actually be a pretty massive achievement! Now, whether that's fun is to the user, but it certainly feels like these were a conscious decision to prioritize verisimilitude over gamey-ness (or maybe simulation over abstraction). Note that most of your national investments aren't producing things, they're producing incomes of things so it'll all ramp up exponentially. The expectation seems to be that the game itself will change drastically after the first decade or two. The turn-based thing probably has to do with the appropriate timing of later-game space fights, and not the early-game geopolitical map painter? I'm not sure.
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Jun 14, 2022 02:41
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It's also made by the Long War people, so they certainly like to drag.
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Jun 14, 2022 09:17
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It's not quite turn based. You can issue orders to your armies inbetween turns, you can do space stuff between turns, you can change national relations between turns, etc. The timing changes so that the game's scale can change. Notice how the initial scramble has turns that last a week, and then they double in length. You absolutely do not want to skip the Moon, mining makes a huge difference in how much boost you need to make anything, and even the tiny trickle you get there is more than enough to massively aid the initial space rush. The trick is, you want to mine the heaviest stuff to lift, not the most expensive stuff to lift. Money is not a problem, your ability to lift things in orbit from Earth is. A single well placed mining station on the Moon cuts down the costs of boosting modules down to a third or quarter of the original cost. It seems money is intended to become an issue for the mission control modules, since they cost an arm and a leg to maintain. Early stations seem to be kind of a trap, devouring precious boost just to pay upkeep. I'd place maybe a single early station with one solar module and two xenology modules up to better keep an eye on what the aliens are doing, but that's about it. Not really worth it until you've got the stuff you want on the Moon, Mars, and maybe even the asteroid belt locked down. (you can also game the system and boost a station up, and then sell it to someone else for more boost than you paid for it, and all their orgs, and all their spare change - you will most likely do this with the moon bases once you have better bases set up elsewhere - nice way to solidify good relations with a faction and still keep a useful base slot out of the hands of your enemies) Don't hesitate to coup/conquer nations where the executive is held by someone you don't like, or crackdown/purge when they're weak somewhere. you can disarm any nukes if you control the executive, and you can always switch your control points to spoils, and then abandon, which means it doesn't cost you upkeep, even if it doesn't benefit you much anymore and makes it really easy to take over. Spoils focus makes it harder to take the points from you since the elites are happy with giant piles of loot at their feet, and it creates huge instability that whoever inevitably takes it from you has to then deal with. You also might want to eat the influence penalty for juuuuust long enough to start a stupid war that suicides the nation's armies into something. If they eat some of the nukes under servant control in the process, even better. Oh, and don't forget you have that cheap research that gets you influence and ops points. Early on, you don't really have research rush targets, but you absolutely need all the influence you can get your hands on, and a small reserve of ops points for emergencies. (let me repeat: you do not need to wait for your phase to set up a basic "THIS PLACE BELONGS TO ME" base with just the central module, the game will pause when the relevant research is done and you should go to the space layer right away and place two, maybe even three. if the ai grabs a spot, that's entirely on you, send a probe asap, take spots as soon as the probe arrives. if you don't have the boost to send stuff there, don't invest in global space research until you do.) I'd make some scathing condemnations of the game's political system, that idiotic democracy index poo poo, the ignorance of how much third world exploatation keeps the first world afloat, and the "apolitical" political statements the game makes all the time, but eh, it's not like it's something out of the ordinary in that regard.
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Jun 14, 2022 09:50
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everything is glacially paced and why did they prevent saving in the demo when it's already time-limited?
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Jun 14, 2022 11:11
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Griz posted:everything is glacially paced and why did they prevent saving in the demo when it's already time-limited? 
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Jun 14, 2022 11:29
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I played with it yesterday and by four years into the game I had three mining bases on Mars, two on the moon, a couple of research stations around Earth and a geo sync shipyard. I even made a pointless gunship that could tool around within lunar space easily enough. Mission control was absolutely the bottleneck at that point though, not boost. Once you have even a little mining in place boost costs drop dramatically.
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Jun 14, 2022 11:39
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Angry Lobster posted:I miss Dominions, however playing a couple simultaneous games in Dominions 3 where each (lategame) turn took 2 hours kinda broke my spirit. The Throne mechanics in Dom5 really helps shorten the game. TL;DR: holding a claimed throne give you points, when you have x amount of points set at game creation (typically 50%+1, although there have been some funny games with a lot lower amount and one (31/30) incident), the game ends and you win. And if that's not enough, once you hit a pre-set turn limit doom horrors are going to start popping up everywhere, and a doom horror that gets to spend a turn on a throne will eat it, also lowering the threshold by it's value. So if the settings are 13/24 points, after the destruction of one throne the win threshold is now 11/22. This really improves the game. The best parts of Dom are the early and mid game, and the lategame is typically a horrible slog. With good settings, you can just clip off that endgame. And even if you don't, it also really helps with the late-game problem of "my enemy has 200 provs, and will not be hurt particularly much by the loss of any specific one, so the game is just one horrible slog of slowly grinding them down". Because a typical game has 12 thrones, and if you claim 7 you win, and in deep endgame there are going to be a couple which are mostly safe for their holders, the endgame usually crystallizes into massive battles over ~4 or so provinces.
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Jun 14, 2022 13:06
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So I have some thoughts after stewing on it for a day and I want to talk about what I think are some basic design flaws in the game. This mostly stems from what I see as them trying to do but failing, or what it looks like they abandoned but left in the framework for. I also want to address my earlier comment about this being a turn based game. Nations: The game lets each faction completely control nation states. This is kind of at odds with a bunch mechanics which I'll get into, but it also means that the game is basically making each faction the illuminati. Individual nations do not have agency and are just passively there to be controlled or ignored by the player. This means certain areas of the map are more valuable than others and it also means those less valuable areas are actually completely worthless for various mechanical reasons. Where this is at odds with game mechanics is how your faction only gets a pittance of a nations output. If you control the entirety of the USA's control points, you get a vanishingly small percentage of their boost output and the rest vanishes into the ether. What appears to me to have been the intention is that each nation would attempt to get into space on its own or have their own geopolitical goals and you would leech off this, but the nations don't do anything without faction input. There's a mechanic for you to create super states later on by unlocking various techs but most of them are hard or impossible to do. For example there's an early option for an east African republic involving Tanzania getting claims on a bunch of other nations, and I tried to peacefully do this by controlling the nations but I never got the option to actually unite and even if I did the area is completely worthless economically. There's also the initial existence of the two space stations at game start that I haven't really looked at but to me that seems to have been an intended baseline for the nations getting into space. Agents: So I talked about how the game is turn based and what I mean by this is that there are 24 assignment phases through a year, 2 per month. The binary nature of this interaction means that you are almost entirely just setting the job, pressing space and then sitting there clicking popups until the next phase is up and watching the planet spin. The only other actions you can do here is space related or to slightly tweak control points, set research projects and direct investment in nations. Based on the daily ticks being a thing, I think the intention here was that you would assign an agent to a nation with a job and they would passively acquire information or boost various parts of a nations output. For example the stabilize nation command is a success/fail chance with 0.5 unrest reduction on success or 1.0 on a critical success regardless of agent skill levels. The better option in my mind here would have been to just get a daily reduction while assigned based on the skill level of the agent. Orgs are also incredibly unbalanced when counted against national outputs. There's a repeatable tech available later on that costs 1000 research points on the first go, and 2000 on the second and so fourth. It grants you a single org that you have to equip and gives you 0.25 boost per month. There's also various unique orgs that grant 1.25 boost per month, an extra engineering project, research points and a mission control for 3 admin score instead. Those orgs meant that I just built an agent combo to investigate enemy agents and hostile takeover those orgs because you get to choose one from the factions entire org pool. Another flaw with the assignment phases was that once I was 4 years into the game I wasn't doing anything with them anymore, not really. The assignment phases became a chore because I felt I'd done everything I wanted to do on earth and was just trying to get into space. The one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism: Space is a mess. I talked earlier about the stock ships being poo poo but this is also true for the first few tiers of tech. I had solid fission II and the nova and dumbo engines available to me and I still wasn't able to design a ship capable of doing anything unless I wanted to spend hundreds of water on propellant. I made a small ship meant to intercept alien ships in earth orbit and gave it 2x it's own weight in propellant and after undocking it wasn't even able to change its orbit to match the alien ship. I think the basic problem with this is that boost is precious early on but becomes absolutely worthless once you actually get the mining set up, because any mining output goes straight into a magical warehouse that's reachable from anywhere. There's no convoys or transport mechanic despite the ship designer very specifically having a transport design class. I'm going to chalk this one down to the game still being incredibly early in its design (despite promising to release the full game a year ago on their kickstarter) and the space part just being a framework. It's just odd they'd leave it in like this for the demo when that is absolutely the part people would rush for. Again I think the ideal implementation here would have been for the various nations to establish their mining ops in space and you as a faction only being able to get a trickle and influencing the expansion in various ways. Research: A lot of the techs have cool themes to them and the text descriptions indicate they vastly revolutionize human society. In practice they're just percentage modifiers that don't do anything in practice. Creating civilian photonic computers that will vastly revolutionize computing on Earth? Here's a 5% boost to economy increases. Cybernetic implants available to the general populace? Here's a +1 to agent scores. You created the technology to cheaply and efficiently turn carbon dioxide into oxygen? 5%. None of these make sense and none of them are priced fairly in terms of research points. Balance is all over the place, worse some of them are just straight up bad or obvious trap choices meant to help the aliens. There's a tech that lets you make a bunch of nations into smaller independent states, the Servants researched this one on one of my runs which makes perfect sense. What doesn't make sense is why I'm getting a bunch of project options to turn minor third world states into even smaller ones, I don't get it. Conclusion: Terra Invicta is a loving mess. There's the framework of a good game in there but the implementation is incredibly shoddy and there's obvious patch fixes everywhere. The UI is a trash fire and there's half baked or non-functional features everywhere. I don't have a lot of hopes for improvement either because the devs are either lazy or incompetent, in that their solution for releasing a demo was to just dump the entire game out (15gb) and just implement a time limit. At the same time they don't let you save and it's just what the gently caress. I'll probably keep playing when they release though. Demiurge4 fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Jun 14, 2022 |
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Jun 14, 2022 13:39
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It's multiple different games crammed into one, and most of them don't really matter.
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Jun 14, 2022 13:52
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Yeah my read on the turn-based thing is that its core to a part of the game that basically isn't present in the demo - nobody has actually gotten into major combat with the main threat that I've seen, the demo is essentially the getting Earth in shape part of the game only.
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Jun 14, 2022 14:39
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Hopefully the game proves to be very moddable. The irony of someone making a Long War-style conversion mod for the game put out by the people that made the Long War would be great.
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Jun 14, 2022 15:42
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I actually think the earth game is probably the most interesting thing they have, and that the detail of the space parts feel like slavish devotion to an old design doc. X-com that's entirely geoscape is absolutely cool, though.
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Jun 14, 2022 15:44
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Panzeh posted:X-com that's entirely geoscape is absolutely cool, though. Totally agree, and it's a shame that's not what this game can really offer  I feel like if the concept had tightened up to being just about "XCOM but the global strategic layer" it would have been a much better experience. As it currently stands, at least within the scope of the demo, the most XCOM-ish events that happen are fungal blooms or whatever and occasional flavortext about occasional abductions. And a ship that crash-lands every 6 months and that gives you a tiny +% modifier to your xeno research when investigating it. It almost feels like one half of the studio wanted to make what was described above, and the other just wanted to make a Sol system colonizing simulator a la Aurora, and they just mashed the two ideas together in a way that satisfies neither, but which they'll get away with because there's basically no other competitor in that space (besides XCOM itself on the one side and Aurora 4x on the other).
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Jun 14, 2022 15:47
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sounds like the old sometimes it's better to not have a demo problem.
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Jun 14, 2022 15:50
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I really do love the idea of starting as one kind of thing and then getting more complex and transitioning to another kind of thing as the game continues, I like it when you struggle and plan to accomplish things and then theres a breakthrough or a new tech and things become much easier and the whole paradigm shifts. And all the faction stuff is also really interesting especially the ones that have broadly similar goals I just have no idea how it's going to pan out, and I also cant really tell if I'm doing well either. I will say though this demo has me stoked which is pretty unusual
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Jun 14, 2022 16:03
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uber_stoat posted:sounds like the old sometimes it's better to not have a demo problem. With Steam's refund policy you might as well. And I suspect but don't know, that Steam dings you for too many refunds, thus the spurt of demo fests we've been seeing.
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Jun 14, 2022 16:04
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Mayveena posted:And I suspect but don't know, that Steam dings you for too many refunds, thus the spurt of demo fests we've been seeing. That's absolutely wrong. I have refunded almost 150 games and I'm yet to be denied a single valid refund request.
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Jun 14, 2022 16:10
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Jack Trades posted:That's absolutely wrong. Context leads me to believe the "you" in Mayveena's statement was the game publisher/developer.
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Jun 14, 2022 16:12
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Jack Trades posted:That's absolutely wrong. Yes I should have been clearer. The DEV is dinged, not us 
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Jun 14, 2022 16:13
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Demiurge4 posted:their solution for releasing a demo was to just dump the entire game out (15gb) and just implement a time limit. At the same time they don't let you save and it's just what the gently caress. These two things are actually connected. Since the demo is just most of the game (some things are removed) with a time limit, a save file would include information about what the aliens are doing, and the devs want that to stay secret until launch and not expose it to people datamining save files.
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Jun 14, 2022 16:17
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The Chad Jihad posted:I really do love the idea of starting as one kind of thing and then getting more complex and transitioning to another kind of thing as the game continues, I like it when you struggle and plan to accomplish things and then theres a breakthrough or a new tech and things become much easier and the whole paradigm shifts. And all the faction stuff is also really interesting especially the ones that have broadly similar goals I think this is the idea with the mega nation techs. By making countries merge you reduce the micro required to manage them. Like the North American one is Canada, US and Mexico. This removes 7 control points.
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Jun 14, 2022 17:36
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Demiurge4 posted:I think this is the idea with the mega nation techs. By making countries merge you reduce the micro required to manage them. Like the North American one is Canada, US and Mexico. This removes 7 control points. God this game is gonna be so spicy if it gets wider recognition. Can you make the amero real?
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Jun 14, 2022 18:02
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Demiurge4 posted:I think this is the idea with the mega nation techs. By making countries merge you reduce the micro required to manage them. Like the North American one is Canada, US and Mexico. This removes 7 control points. The big nations are more resource efficient and easier to defend. It's not as noticeable with the North American one because the US is already big and easy to defend but it makes a big difference in Europe.
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Jun 14, 2022 18:07
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i will join forces with our Alien friends to block the imposition of the Amero on these United States.
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Jun 14, 2022 18:34
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I just don't get why you would join the two surrender factions. I got a feeling that the aliens, in a twist at the end, are the good guys and the game'll wag its finger at you for picking one of the alien murder factions.
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Jun 14, 2022 19:37
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I am very curious about what gameplay for the Servants will be like. Are you even trying to get into space to do anything; or just trying to stop the Resistance or Humanity First from fighting the aliens?
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Jun 14, 2022 19:41
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Servetus posted:I am very curious about what gameplay for the Servants will be like. Are you even trying to get into space to do anything; or just trying to stop the Resistance or Humanity First from fighting the aliens? In my experience in the demo the Servants are trying hard to stop everyone else from getting into space.
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Jun 14, 2022 19:46
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THE BAR posted:I just don't get why you would join the two surrender factions. I got a feeling that the aliens, in a twist at the end, are the good guys and the game'll wag its finger at you for picking one of the alien murder factions.
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Jun 14, 2022 19:48
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Splicer posted:Challenge mode/be the bad guys? Be the bad guys through surrender, I like it.
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Jun 14, 2022 19:51
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THE BAR posted:I just don't get why you would join the two surrender factions. I got a feeling that the aliens, in a twist at the end, are the good guys and the game'll wag its finger at you for picking one of the alien murder factions. I wonder if the aliens get some random rolls on their true nature at the start of each game, or if, as you come to communicate with them you can research techs and take actions that change the nature of your interactions with them? At the very least, the protectorate faction you'd think would need to prove that humanity is worth that status And this is where I think I'm probably liking the possibility of what the game will be in my head vs what will actually come to pass but what I'm seeing so far is really capturing my imagination at least. Like you could turn the concept into a very neat semi-coop board game, (ship battles aside )
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Jun 14, 2022 20:54
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The aliens sent a Kaiju to destroy Singapore in my last run so I dunno about them being the good guys.
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Jun 14, 2022 22:46
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The I still managed to take total control over Russia, most of the US, end the war in Ukraine, have humanity first cede half of Ukraine to Russia anyway (why...), had Russia annex Georgia because it was controlled by the stinking quisling alien collaborators, put a few space stations in low earth orbit and also founded the first and only colony on the moon. Fun! I also thought the UI and tutorial were horrible dogshit for the first few hours until I learned how to play. I'm fine with the UI now, but dang did I think it was garbage for those 2 hours. e: I done had the wrong game woops. Lowen fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Jun 16, 2022 |
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Jun 14, 2022 23:10
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You (the royal you) could also consider playing the Pegasus Expedition demo, its sort of a narrative 4x? Like Imperium Galactica 2 possibly ( I have never played its just been described to me so don't yell if I'm way off) The demo starts off late-early game and the enemy is designed to be straightforwardly weaker than you, so I'm not sure how things will shake out in the real thing as the economy is already solid and my military keeps winning. The combat system is interesting, may be too hands-off for some
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Jun 15, 2022 02:36
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The Chad Jihad posted:I wonder if the aliens get some random rolls on their true nature at the start of each game, or if, as you come to communicate with them you can research techs and take actions that change the nature of your interactions with them? At the very least, the protectorate faction you'd think would need to prove that humanity is worth that status They've said the alien nature and motivation is fixed and doesn't change between games.
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Jun 15, 2022 07:06
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How is Distant Worlds 2 with 3+ months of patches and fixes?
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Jun 15, 2022 10:18
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For those of you interested I made a simple mod for the Terra Invicta demo. It reduces research costs by 50% across the board and gives every faction a base income of 2 boost per month. It should help people experience more of the demo in the short time frame. The Shorter War
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Jun 16, 2022 15:18
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Kanos posted:I've never really understood the prevailing desire that the AI needs to be playing the same game as the player. A lot of the times the AI simply can't juggle all of the systems the player has to in any meaningful way and ends up breaking down completely unless you assign it insane levels of cheats. It feels like a much easier solution to simply remove the AI having to deal with that crap altogether. This is actually really interesting to me; do you know if Nobunaga’s Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms are similar? I know those games are all related, gameplay wise. Mostly I just like 4xes in concept and have put tons of time into a bunch of them without ever getting good at any of them, and I think my biggest problem is that so many 4xes seem primarily designed for multiplayer but I find multiplayer 4xes to be very dull, even with friends
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Jun 16, 2022 19:59
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Demiurge4 posted:For those of you interested I made a simple mod for the Terra Invicta demo. It reduces research costs by 50% across the board and gives every faction a base income of 2 boost per month. It should help people experience more of the demo in the short time frame. That's good, I feel like I kinda ruined myself on the demo by rushing things and then feeling like the cleanup phase of any 4x where I'm just tediously clicking to make the game progress as fast as possible without accidentally blowing it.
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Jun 18, 2022 02:44
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DoubleDonut posted:This is actually really interesting to me; do you know if Nobunaga’s Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms are similar? I know those games are all related, gameplay wise. Nobunaga’s Ambition certainly used to have a mechanic where once you become the biggest threat, the other factions merge into samurai Voltron to try to beat you.
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Jun 18, 2022 06:36
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DoubleDonut posted:This is actually really interesting to me; do you know if Nobunaga’s Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms are similar? I know those games are all related, gameplay wise. The Koei games Nobunaga and ROTK vary wildly between titles in the series. Some are heavier on 4x others are more focused on playing individuals (who also can run empires) like Crusader Kings. Some of the best regarded Nobunaga games: * Sphere Of Influence: Ascension - stand-alone expansion that allows playing as individual characters instead of the traditional 4x omnipotent god * Sphere Of Influence - traditional 4x omnipotent god Some of the best ROTK games: * ROTK 11 - traditional 4x omnipotent god, turn based, units/ cities/battles all occur on the same overworld map. Nifty unit combat that’s kind of like Fire Emblem * ROTK 13 + PUK - best regarded one where you play as individual characters. With expansion you can do stuff like just be a merchant trying to make cash or a mercenary, or get drunk with your bros. Real time with pause, battles take place on separate zoomed in maps like an RTS, but still exist as time passes on the world map so reinforcements can feed in. Battles are not quite as complex as 11. I think you can only directly control battles where your character is physically present.
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Jun 18, 2022 17:17
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