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In fact we're playing right now!
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Dec 28, 2015 22:44
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| # ? Jun 10, 2024 19:20 |
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Well, I got to play one good game last night with a lot of back-and-forth. We actually had an enemy team spread out across the galaxy, and use tank rushes and some good (for me) micro to completely claim one of the largest worlds, eventually pushing us off entirely. Unfortunately for them, they didn’t really manage any competent footholds on the *other* worlds in the system. Cue a somewhat frantic back and forth when someone pipes up ‘Hey, I could build the 4 Halleys it would take to launch this moon’ and we all agreed that was the best tactic. They use some unit cannons, we harass with orbital, and we spot them building mass nuke launchers. And the Halleys lacked anti-nukes. The last few seconds of the game were a frantic rush to see whether they could launch nukes before we could launch our planet. They couldn’t. Boom. All enemy commanders destroyed in a single fiery crash. Nice way to end a game, I thought. **** Game two could have been much better, as it was a wild system. One reasonably large planet, two worthwhile moons, 4 asteroids, and a metal planet the size of Jupiter (with ~190 metal spots, about 50% of the metal in the solar system) on the opposite side of a truly enormous solar system. We thought it’d be a rush to see who could launch asteroids at whom, a rush to claim resources before those resources blew up under our feet, but the baddies just couldn’t put any pressure on us despite having a reasonably large army. They couldn’t even respond to spamming pelters in the water outside their base. Clean sweep proceeded. Even though someone rushed their commander to the Metal planet at game start, the game was basically over before he landed! It was like a 10 minute orbital trip.
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Dec 29, 2015 15:51
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So I did some math on the Lobs, and it turns out some peoples assumptions are wrong. An unassisted bot factory builds a dox every 3 seconds and its takes 3 seconds for it to reset the platform. Costing 15 M/s and 675 E/s. 45 per Dox as per the unit card. 0.166 Dox per second. Now a lob costs 1000 metal to build, but once its built it builds 9 dox every 36 seconds, 0.25 Dox per second averaged. Its only draw is the 15 metal. So the Metal draw is the same and there is no energy draw. The Higher metal cost of a lob is offset by the need to not build any energy for it, its a stand alone system. Now while in use the lob draws metal constantly, unlike the bot factory, so while it builds dox faster for the same metal draw it builds them for 60 metal per dox. So its overall less efficient. But they also out range pelters.
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Dec 29, 2015 20:30
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Just picked this up. I'm a scrub who takes like 15 mins to stomp a Normal difficulty AI, but I'd love to suck it up with some goons.
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Dec 30, 2015 00:52
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Get on Mumble and IRC. We play every day.
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Dec 30, 2015 03:42
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Just had a 3v3v3 with Gargantua and Verr in which one pubbie team killed the other with a Ragnarok (probably succeeding in large part because we also had a huge T2 army on the planet raiding the defending team), so we went ahead and killed them with a Ragnarok for poetry's sake. Could've sniped their coms much earlier but this way was extra satisfying. Verr did a fine job of fortifying and exploiting the starting planet he found himself totally alone on, as pubbies yet again failed to spread out properly. Meanwhile me and Gargantua had abandoned our shared start to its moons (due to dual enemy presence, meaning we were better off letting them fight eachother while we eco up elsewhere) and were cramming ridiculous amounts of production onto our tiny little 200-ish-radius planets.
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Dec 30, 2015 07:13
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the 1v1 ranked experience: my opponent did not leave his starting 4 metal. he teched up to t2 immediately, then built a billion loving boom bots, which he used to stop me from getting close to him with my small tank raids. he then proceeded to spend the entire rest of the game building up a nuke, which he launched at my t1 factories i built 2 holkins outside his base and shoved land mines everywhere. my victory i guess
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Dec 30, 2015 13:49
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i'm in silver and i just got ranked with some poor guy who was in bronze and it was only his 5th match maybe this is why every other game is awful
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Dec 31, 2015 08:55
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I had a great match last night that I eventually lost. At the end we were counter invading each others bases and my flame tanks got his com to the very end of his life before sadly choking at the last second. Mean while his tank army finally overuns my defenses and destroys my main base. Luckily my com was a ways a way and started the trek to a second staging point I had set up. This guy hadn't continued scouting at all so he just sent his slow tank army to all the metal loads throughout the map trying to finally find and kill me. I had a T2 Air factory that had just finished when my main base was overrun so I was able to build a few T2 bombers before the eco crunch really started to slow me down. I sent one bomber and micro'd it out of range of all his anti air as I raked his soft energy farm underbelly until he finally got wise and built more fighters. As soon as they all sprinted out to my one bomber the others rushed in to com snipe him. They also came so close but he had healed his com back up to about a quarter health which was just enough to save him. And thats how I almost one against a T2 army with nothing but three Mex's and an air factory.
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Dec 31, 2015 18:34
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I hunger for robot death
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Dec 31, 2015 20:40
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late night robots
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Jan 3, 2016 04:28
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EARLY ROBOT MAYHEM STARTS NOW
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Jan 3, 2016 21:12
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today i found a man so incompetent that he fell to obnoxious dox http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/541921754589904595/68D17C6F1DBD9DD6BA0E24E71A7D32C381B0A340/
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Jan 3, 2016 21:47
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i am in mumble if anyone wants to do the robot
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Jan 6, 2016 04:39
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what magical genie took away silver rank's competence last month this is a totally different brand of awful and it's a really dull one literally the past five games i've fought dudes who never went 5 feet out of their starting area. it's like all these guys suddenly became allergic to metal extractors. it'd make sense if they were going for some kind of early tech up -> early t2 aggression strategy (it's how i've been winning water maps) but they all just seem to sit in their base with their thumbs up their asses, spamming dox for 10 minutes. they tech up, sure, but they only do it so they can get t2 metal extractors up in their starting area so they can spam dox harder meanwhile i just let them do their thing while grabbing all the metal on the map, then flood their base with slammers a while later. also: slammers are actually really good. the thing is, they're really good for one specific thing: effortlessly obliterating dox swarms. in 1v1 ranked, that's actually incredibly valuable! so i've been finding myself using them a lot, despite how worthless they are against any kind of t2 threat/tank army. the occasional sneaky amphibious play is a nice extra bonus
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Jan 6, 2016 17:16
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It's probably wannabe dox micro masters not realising that the micro part is pretty key.
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Jan 6, 2016 22:47
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ninjewtsu posted:it'd make sense if they were going for some kind of early tech up -> early t2 aggression strategy (it's how i've been winning water maps)
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Jan 6, 2016 23:03
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Ralith posted:Be careful with this. A skilled player can easily defeat early T2 navy with 3-5 factories worth of submarine spam, which is the standard naval mid-game tactic. No T2 naval unit is more effective against subs than other subs. Subs swarms can be weakened by strong firebases with tons of walled torpedo launchers and pelters, but if you spend on that and the enemy's not an idiot they'll just crank out even more subs and flank you. sometimes i wonder what 1v1 ranked would be like if players were competent enough to remember that submarines exist thus far i have yet to meet one Splicer posted:It's probably wannabe dox micro masters not realising that the micro part is pretty key. honestly they don't even need to micro the dox swarms. just chunking a huge lob of dox at something is still really powerful due to the "you can only kill one dox at a time, even if you're a t2 tank" deal, no micro artistry required. but they don't. they just sit in their base. sometimes a big blob of dox ventures out to destroy 1 metal cluster, and then they don't even bother sending builders to take the cluster for themselves.
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Jan 7, 2016 08:56
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I decided to play with pubbies last night and got WRECKED by a pre-made. I was doing my normal build order, sending out obnoxious Dox, and then realize the other guy on my small moon had rushed up to my base and was hemming me in with laser towers while claiming metal. I dislodged him with pelters only to get tank rushed from the other side. Maybe this all would have been ok, but the other players on the premade were also really good and rapidly destroyed my teammates. Even though I managed to start getting a presence on the gas giant I had to evac my commander to a tiny tiny moon, then one of the pubbies deleted my commander. Yeouch. I do not understand how some people are able to go T2 so goddamn quickly.
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Jan 7, 2016 15:54
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if you put your commander on the t2 building and don't stall out, you can make it pretty drat fast
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Jan 7, 2016 17:24
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all of the competence in silver has ebbed into the 1-70 silver tier. anything above that is garbage, but after 70 suddenly everyone's really good!
ninjewtsu fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 18:05
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What add-ons do you guys use that are useful? Also, until I have actual time to devote to playing with other people (at the moment with work schedule+being sick it's tough to have more than 30-45 minutes to devote to a game) what AI mods are useful that can make the AI more difficult?
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Jan 7, 2016 21:17
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So, hmm... I've owned the base game for a long time but have yet to actually dive in. And now Titans is on sale for something like $12. Worth grabbing, or should I try PA-vanilla before I invest any more in it? And will I be able to find multiplayer games (or play with friend goons) if I don't have the expansion?
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Jan 7, 2016 21:28
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Ghost of Starman posted:So, hmm... I've owned the base game for a long time but have yet to actually dive in. And now Titans is on sale for something like $12. Grab Titans.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:06
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Ghost of Starman posted:So, hmm... I've owned the base game for a long time but have yet to actually dive in. And now Titans is on sale for something like $12. MF_James posted:What add-ons do you guys use that are useful? Ralith posted:Had some good hard-fought victories today. Pubbies taught us that, with enough (i.e. 10+) unit cannons, spamming a location with slammers is a nearly impossible tactic to defend against, at least until you can assemble a substantial T2 tank army or air force to clean them up. Highly effective approach for commander snipes, even with a basic fortress established. Another useful tactic I picked up recently (I think from concise?) is that you can use an astreus to transport air units, which is a great, cheap way to get some build power in with an attack force when for one reason or another you can't just shove a handful of tank/bot constructors through a teleporter.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:27
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Recommended Mods List
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Splicer posted:Get Titans it's good. Big stompy robots etc. That said there are non-titan games up and it's a shared lobby so you can give it a titansless try first if you want. How stompy are we... ...oh. Oh my.  Only question is, are they actually viable? Like, is it feasible to see them in a match where they actually matter? Or is it more like a win-more, victory-lap, dance-on-your-opponents'-corpses kind of thing. (Looking at you, Mavor...) Ghost of Starman fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 23:16
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Ghost of Starman posted:How stompy are we... Yes. If you get to endgame, Titans are a great way of helping end stalemates. Basically, at endgame everyone gets Unstoppable Spears. Nobody gets an Unbreakable Shield. So it comes down to who is cannier/craftier/better with their use of nukes/Halleys/Titans
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Jan 8, 2016 01:54
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Ghost of Starman posted:How stompy are we... That said we tend to play high planet count matches and go heavy into orbital, so in actual play we see/build a lot more Helios and Zeus (orbital and air) Titans. We've still forced a few commander fortresses by using orbital builders to throw down the stompys though. The Mavor equivalents in PA are the big metal planets, which you can turn into Death Stars. Mile'ionaha posted:Basically, at endgame everyone gets Unstoppable Spears. Nobody gets an Unbreakable Shield. Splicer fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 02:22
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Well, uh, trying the Vanilla game, and... hmm. I like it, so far, the little I've seen, but man is Galactic War an unimpressive way to make a first impression. I'm thankful for the fairly slow, deliberate introduction to the various units and structure-types - it just seems like I've played 5 or 6 matches now where the AI is utterly, hilariously unprepared for my relatively straightforward 'swarm with tanks' approach. Does it get better / more interesting as the campaign goes on? So far it's been strictly 1v1s on single planet maps. 
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Jan 8, 2016 04:16
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The AI on hard can pose a challenge. On higher difficulty levels its actually competent. Especially in Skirmishes. I'm not a fan of the Galactic war setup as anything other than a way to tutorial in different types of units. Play with people
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Jan 8, 2016 05:15
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M_Gargantua posted:Play with people I'm afraid of being a bad and all the kids who are better at robot murder will point and laugh at me  ...In all seriousness though, it's really intimidating to just jump into the deep-end with something like this. Especially something like TA/SupCom, where the geometric progression means that, like, taking 10 minutes to get set up when your opponent gets going in 9 seemingly dooms you from the word 'go.' 
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Jan 8, 2016 05:38
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1v1's Tend to only pit you against people of marginally similar skills. Once you've got some of the basics down a few losses will teach you well. Playing 4v4's with other goons also teaches you very fast. Big things to remember: 3) Dont all start on the same planet. 2) Expand, raid enemy expansion. Don't have 8 buildings in one spot and sit there. 1) DO NOT JUST BUILD BUILDERS. BUILDERS BUILDING BUILDERS, etc. Make units with guns.
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Jan 8, 2016 05:56
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Note that massed catapults (ideally a few spaced out batteries) are highly effective at whittling down stompy/tank titans that don't have significant sniper or repair bot support. A zeus will also die rapidly to massed and/or carefully microd fighters. The AI can be really challenging in skirmishes where you manually turn up the difficulty. No idea what the curve is like in Galactic War. Regardless, if you're capable of building an army and expanding without tanking the eco more often than not, you're more than good enough to join us. Pubbies are bad and in team games we can support you a lot while you learn. The most important non-obvious rule is probably to always be raiding the enemy. This distracts them from expansion and interferes with any plans they might be working on, and helps ensure you're up to date on what they're doing. One of our go-to tactics to accomplish this in games where we're doing extensive multitasking is to build 1-3 bot factories set to mass-produce dox with orders to auto-patrol the entire planet. It's amazing how often this will occupy an opponent's full attention while you tech up or capture the rest of the system. Ralith fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 06:21
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unfortunately i think stompy titans are one of the least used titans but zeuses and helioses definitely see use also come play with us anyway you will be a bad and ralith will yell at you and then you won't be as bad anymore but ralith will still continue to yell at you and me and everyone else and himself
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Jan 8, 2016 07:12
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Will do - not tonight, but I'll try and join in the fun this weekend with you all.  Since I've done ~10 skirmishes with the dang AI and still barely seen any action in orbit, can I just ask: is making the jump to orbit analogous to teching up to Advanced stuff, i.e., it's a major risk if you try to do it too early? Like, is the general flow of things "planet surface --> surface + orbit --> full-on interplanetary"? Edit: I am no-poo poo pretty excited to play more and git gud, you guys. I didn't know it was a goal in my videogaming career to BLOW UP A loving PLANET until I watched that intro video. Ghost of Starman fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 07:25
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sort of. it's easier to go orbit than going t2, but on a single planet map not anywhere near as valuable on a multi-planet map the first one to go orbital usually wins, so it's super important! doing anything extensive with orbital is very similar to going t2 though, yeah. those orbital factories cost a lot of resources, as do all the advanced orbital stuff
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Jan 8, 2016 07:29
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As other planets tend to (but do not always) represent large reserves of unclaimed metal or even game-ending superweapons, interplanetary expansion is often much more important than expansion on contested starting planets. Our current favored tactic is to ship a handful of engineers over with an Astreus for maximum sneakiness (since nothing remains visible in the orbital layer, cluing in the enemy to where you are) or even sending your com if you're early enough in the game that the enemy won't be able to snipe you while you're airborne and vulnerable. Do check how metal-rich planets are before dispatching transports. Once you land on another planet in a shared team game, you have a few central priorities: - Eliminate any existing enemy presence and establish defensive emplacements and armies adequate to prevent them from returning. Standard tactics here include a mid-sized ground army and a T1 air factory cranking out planet-wide bomber patrols, to be later complimented with a variety of T2 aircraft as the game progresses, but be prepared for a skilled opponent to ship in a mass of anti-air units in mid game, or a concentrated blob of T2 fighters in late game. A Zeus or three is an excellent way to respond to a surprise army teleporting onto your planet, but requires significant T2 fighter support (ideally with repair platforms) to be reliable. Planet-wide umbrella builds (especially when doubled up) are a good way to secure medium-sized planets against mid-game orbital attacks and unit cannon employments, but are never 100% reliable, so have an army ready just in case. Planet-wide umbrellas are too expensive to be effective on very large planets, and are pretty much guaranteed to have major blind spots on small planets and planets with lots of unbuildable area. - Set 2-4 groups of 2-4 engineers building metal extractors over the entire planet. - Ensure that you're constructing enough energy to keep pace with the metal ramp-up. Don't rely on other people to handle that part. In mid-game it's important to keep building energy (I like to have 2-3 engineers working on queues of planet-spanning lines of T2 plants so large they'll never finish before the game ends) above and beyond what is required to balance your metal, so that losses elsewhere don't cripple your economy. - Determine whether any of your allies will need production support soon. This occurs when someone has lost ground or mis-managed construction such that the team has adequate resources to provide them with the armies they need, but the player no way to actually produce them locally. If production support is required, set up a bunch of T2 tank and bot factories to ship units through a teleporter to wherever they are needed. If no production support requirement is expected, start raiding the enemy somewhere that your team isn't already threatening them, by whatever means seem appropriate. Never build significant new production when efficiency is typically below 50%, or even 75%--instead, focus on metal. Always be prepared for an enemy unit cannon drop anywhere on your planet. If the enemy has significant orbital assets, always invest heavily in defensive railguns, and consider using them to raid any enemy orbital assets that aren't massed railguns. Railguns are by far the most reliable way to kill an attacking Helios. Always have enough anti-orbital defenses around your com to destroy the sum total of enemy orbit-to-ground assets in a matter of seconds (yes, this means you need 20-50 umbrellas and a railgun swarm in late game), or a competent enemy will snipe your commander. As of mid-game, always have at least one fully loaded anti-nuke launcher covering your commander, commander defenses, and orbital assets. Ralith fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 08:17
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if there's a gas giant, make sure to always keep an eye on it, even if you aren't planning on building there quite yet. always have at leasta handful of avengers around, so you can snipe early enemy efforts to get established on the gas giant. if they do get established, build lots of railguns and use them to raid enemy jigs. move in, kill jigs, zip out before enemy units can hit you. if you do move on the gas giant, also make sure to bring lots of railguns along to stop your enemy from doing this same thing to you! orbital combat can best be described as "whoever has the most railguns wins." massed avengers do beat them, but that doesn't matter much when you can instantly gently caress off back to your home planet before the enemy avengers get in range. avengers are good to build as a chaff type unit, say if you want to get planet-wide orbital coverage for cheap, but don't invest more than a couple factories on avenger production, and don't expect them to be able to ward off any serious attack
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Jan 8, 2016 10:11
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Ghost of Starman posted:Well, uh, trying the Vanilla game, and... hmm. I like it, so far, the little I've seen, but man is Galactic War an unimpressive way to make a first impression. people posted:Advice for orbital Alt-Q copies your current view into the PiP and Alt-M does a neat thing where the PiP locks onto the reverse side of the planet you're looking at. Splicer fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 14:20
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| # ? Jun 10, 2024 19:20 |
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Taking the advice given, I started a new Galactic Conquest on Hard (or, whatever the step above Normal is). It continues to underwhelm. Like, I make no claim to any sort of RTS acumen, but the AI seems to have little-to-no knowledge of self-defence. My teeny little raiding parties are enough to put a sizable dent in the AIs first base, which rapidly snowballs into an unsatisfying end as the enemy Commander is either whittled down by waves of Infantry bots or killed from full health in a single, massive 'gently caress you' airstrike. I don't think I've had a match go longer than 18 minutes. It's only compounding the frustration that a.) I only have T1 Bots and Air with which to secure my anticlimactic victories, and b.) I DO have full Orbital tech, but no game has yet even come close to lasting long enough that I can do more than get a constructor into orbit. Very frustrating.  And I know, I know I should just play Skirmish with the AI / dive into multiplayer...
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Jan 9, 2016 02:21
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