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 Let’s play, Age of Wonders: Planetfall The original Age of Wonders was a fantasy 4x game in the model of Master of Magic released in 1999, with a sequel and expansion in the early 2000s. Then the series went quiet for over a decade, until a third game was finally released in 2015. Then in early 2019 the series went to space with Age of Wonders: Planetfall Plantefall is a departure from the ongoing plot of the series, taking place in an original sci-fi universe. Unlike many sci-fi 4x games this is not a space game, taking place on single planets covered by post apocalyptic ruins of a once powerful civilization. I’ve chosen to LP this game not only as a fan of the series, but because I feel that the world building of Planetfall is incredibly well done, mashing up a melange of science fiction influences and letting them play off each other in interesting ways. It also takes makes some clever decisions in translating the classic AOW gameplay into a sci-fi setting and incorporating new innovations in the 4x genre while still being recognizably Age of Wonders. Thread Participation I will be running through the entire main campaign of the game and there are several important decision points that I will be leaving up to thread votes. In addition, as this is a 4x game, I will be taking requests for city and unit names. I will also be taking suggestions for character customization ideas for the commanders that we will be using. Prologue  The currents of the void shift around me. Follow my voice, my last possession. We built a paradise on a thousand planets, a glistening web strung between the stars, but the cataclysm shattered all, leaving our people stranded and alien to one another. Forge a new age of wonders.Our story begins in the days before everything went wrong, with the tutorial. 
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Jan 20, 2020 02:12
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  The void Anomaly looms over the planet like a dark omen. These scientists must have been mad to study the phenomenon from this close, but it’s not for me to question their motives. We’re here to secure a foothold, search for any survivors and investigate what happened. Prepare for Planetfall.Meet Jack Gelder, the default protagonist of the tutorial and the Vanguard faction campaign. If you don’t like his bland action hero face however, he can be renamed, and the full might of the character creator can be brought to bear on him until he is more pleasing to the thread.  Good, there is no time to waste. We’ll start by setting up and expanding this colony. Start a surface scan for survivors and existing colony infrastructure. Inform me when our research systems are online. Yes Commander. Recalibrating sensors and initiating surface scan…A biodome has been located nearby, but there are no signs of survivors.Continue scanning the planet surface. If there are any survivors on this world, I want to know about it. I’ll scout the adjacent sectors and investigate the biodome - it should contain supplies that will help us expand our colony.This is A.I.V.A, our pet AI and official tutorial fairy. I will be using my LP’ers prerogative to remove all of her out of character tutorial dialog, in favour of explaining how the game works at my own pace.  We start with a single vanguard faction city set up around our landed ship, and an army with Jack Gelder, a bike unit and four marines. With a lake to the west, a giant mountain to the north, and the edge of the map to the south, we only have one way to go-east, toward our first objective.  Colony production facilities are currently idle, Commander. I recommend we start with building the Central Replicator Facility to increase production. I have highlighted this structure in the colony interface.After moving our army as close to the glowing objective as possible, we get our initial building tutorial. Production works pretty close to a standard 4x game-everything costs a certain amount of production and the city will contribute a certain amount of production to the total every turn. We don’t have any actual choices here, due to tutorial restrictions, so we follow the “suggestions” of the AI, and end our first turn.  Commander, our laboratories have come online and Research is now available. We can begin researching technologies to unlock new deployments to help us on this planet.For Military Research it is recommended to start with Nanite Support to provide our troops with extra protection and unlock battlefield operations.For Society Research, it is recommended to start with Frontier Facilities to unlock basic infrastructure upgrades for our colony. I have highlighted these skills in the research interface for your convenience.On turn two, we finally get access to the research screen. Unfortunately, the tutorial strikes again, and we are forced to take the first tech on the list, Nanite Support, over any other options. Not that it's a bad pick, but there is the principle of the thing.  Then we are switched over to the second research tree, and are told to again pick a tech. This is one of the more interesting design aspects in this game-you have a split between a purely military tech tree and society tech tree, which contains economic techs. In my estimation, this is a good decision in a military focused 4x. Too often with a single tech tree, the optimal move is to grab a bunch of economy techs and try to survive with your starting units as long as possible. Which can make the turn to turn military gameplay repetitive. A separate military tech tree keeps the player from optimizing the fun out of the game, and playing with a steady stream of military technologies.  There are no survivors here. It looks like the structure was overrun by critters. We must reclaim this biodome and annex it’s sector to our colony. This will expand our domain and increase our supplies.We do not have enough colonists to control additional sectors yet, commander. We will need additional food to allow the colony to grow. Larger colonies can sustain more province sectors.I want to establish our foothold here as quickly as possible. We can recover extra food from the overgrown biodome after we clear out the wildlife.After dealing with research, Jack and the troops finally reach our first objective-a wrecked biodome occupied by some giant mutant grasshoppers and beetles. Since this is the tutorial, we have a three to one numbers advantage and it would take some comical floundering to even lose a unit.  Welcome to the combat screen. We have successfully moved from a turn based strategy game on a hex grid to a turn based tactics game on a a hex grid. In all these tactical battles the defender gets the first turn, but ranges in planetfall are short enough that there’s almost no way for the defender to hit the attacker in the first turn. Which is good, because we’re just standing around in the open here. All units have three action points base, which are used when moving and taking actions. The colours of the movement range correspond to how many action points will be remaining when the troop moves there. The green “shuffle” area leaves you with all your AP, the blue with two, the purple with one and the red leaves you with nothing.  Since we have a range advantage, all of our troopers move forward into cover and go into overwatch. In concept, this is pretty similar to most tactics games these days: anything that does anything in one of the highlighted hexes will get shot at. This ability is actually fairly rare in planetfall, restricted to mostly rifle armed infantry and a few lighter vehicles, and is a nasty counter to melee units like the wildlife we’re facing. Troopers have the repeating attack mode, which means they get one shot per AP remaining, and that applies to their overwatch as well. Thus ideally we want them to get to a fairly close piece of cover. If they have to make a 3AP move, it's not worth going on overwatch, and instead they go on defence mode, becoming harder to hit.  Vanguard troopers, conceptually, are generic space marines, your standard X-com rookies. They've got assault rifles, cool blocky armour, and can throw one volley of grenades per battle. Their only unique rule is that they are more accurate when in cover. But what does that mean in planetfall? For the vanguard, Troopers will be your primary damage dealers for the early game-9 damage repeating shots with above average accuracy is a lot, three hits from troopers will take half the health or more off of most early game units. That said, they are fairly fragile, need to stay still to do their full damage, and only have moderate range of seven hexes. Most of the rest of early game vanguard arsenal revolves around protecting troopers and clearing lines of fire for them. The last thing to talk about is their flavour text, which says more about the wider vanguard and star union than it does about the troopers themselves. It strongly implies that from a purely military perspective the union would be better of building killer robots then recruiting and equipping these troopers, but from a political perspective having a human military is useful. You need somewhere where the violent can indulge their impulses, the ambitious can climb the ranks, and where the idealistic can feel they make a difference. Which probably means that the Star union didn’t have any serious outside threats, but was deeply concerned about maintaining internal political stability.  Meanwhile our bikes move up and take some pot shots at the giant grasshoppers, but miss. The bike’s laser arrays are a single action attack- they do the same thing with one action point or three, which gives them a more freedom of movement then the troopers.  In ancient times, our ancestors rode bikes to freedom, claiming virtue in a life on the open road. Ancestral records show leather-clad mobs of two-wheeled ruffians decorated with the flaming skulls of their enemies. Some anthropologists believe the Assault Bike captures that instinctive melancholy—without the skulls, of course. The old bikes had no Laser Arrays capable of strafing mobs of enemy invaders or focusing all power onto a single target. One can only wonder if our ancestors ever would’ve left the open road had they these additional capabilities.”— Professor Quinlinn T. Ortivexis, “RV-4367H: Historical Parallels: Humanity’s Twisted Past” Assault bikes are the vanguard T2 combat unit, and they’re about as awkward as they look. Their laser guns have two settings- a focused blast that has a range of five spaces and knocks light targets back a space, and a wide blast which hits the seven hex circle in front of it. And, with a fast move speed it’s pretty easy to get this thing around the enemies flanks for some good shots and, if the stars align, push them out of cover and into the sights of your troopers. The catch is that because of the bikes unique design, it has the exposed flanks downside, and loses 2 points of its armour if you get around behind it. Which is easy to do when the bike has short range and is trying to get flanking shots itself. So they have a tendency to die. The fluff text is a nice combination of jokey text and world-building. We know that it has been so long since “our” present that records are scattered and inaccurate, even before the fall of the star union. It’s not ever made clear if Planetfall is supposed to be the far future of our world or a completely fantastic setting, but regardless, the time when motorbike gangs roamed to roads of a single planet was so long ago that it has been mostly lost in the mists of history.  On the enemy turn, the mega beetles manage to dodge overwatch fire completely and manage to score a grazing hit on the forward squad of troopers. All attacks in planetfall have a 25% chance to graze for half damage and reduced chance of additional effect on top of the displayed hit chances. So, a 50% chance to hit will do something 75% of the time, and anything with a listed hit chance above 75% will do damage. This makes planetfall combat pretty lethal without being too swingy. Even with cover you will take some damage, and can reliably be worn down with concentrated fire. It’s also a more transparent way to implement the whole “lying about hit chances because people are bad at estimating statistics” that is fairly common in the turn based tactics genre.  The giant grasshoppers, not having a ranged attack, brave three units worth of overwatch and predictably get cut down.  After that, a squad of troopers run up and use a grenade to dig out the beetles from the cover they’re hiding behind.  This leaves them wide open for a hail of bullets, ending the battle. Commander, out colony has now grown big enough to supper an additional sector. I recommend annexing the sector which contains the biodome, as this will add its food income to our colony. Good. We’ll annex this sector to our colony as a province sector so we can start exploiting the land for resources as soon as possible. Taking the biodome gives us an bunch of food and gives our capital 4 population. This makes it big enough to expand to more territory, annexing the sector and gaining the benefit of the biodome we just cleared. This process takes a turn. Surface scan completed, commander. I am picking up a vanguard military signal nearby. This could signify the presences of survivors on the planet.Bring it up on scanners. Let’s find out what the hell is going on here. Once we give the order to annex a new sector of the capital we get our next objective- a strange signal just out of our vision range. One of the cool features of planetfall is your scanners. If there are any units close to a city but out of an actual units sight range, you will get a sensor marking that something is on a space without telling you what it is or who it works for, even if you haven’t scouted the territory. Yellow sensor markers like we see here indicate units that haven’t moved in their last turn, while red markers with exclamation points in them mean that the unit is moving. We can see here that there are two stacks of units by our new objective marker that are currently static. Commander, that sector has been successfully annexed to our colony, and is now considered a province sector. It can now be exploited for additional resources.Let’s get his exploitation up and running as soon as possible. What does terrain analysis tell us? How can we best exploit the new province sector Upon our next turn, our AI continues expositing about how to develop our sole city. Province sectors like the one we just claimed at base only provide the income of special sites within them, like the biodome. They can be upgraded to provide one of the four common city resources-food, production research, or energy which is the primary currency. Depending on the terrain and climate in the sector, each province is better at certain productions. Fungal plains sectors like the one we just claimed are good at food or research production, and the tutorial script has decided that we’re making a food production sector.  Starting our third turn, we finish our first two technologies. Nanite support is the first vanguard military technology and unlocks a mod that gives most units a small self heal once per battle, and a pair of defensive operations. While these are good, mechanically, I do want to focus on the quote. It is the first technology quote you’ll see in the entire game, probably, and its about how they aren’t going to try to explain how the technology works. This is not hard sci-fi. It’s not trying to be hard sci fi, and getting that established early is for the best.  Our other technology, Frontier Facilities, might as well be a mandatory choice for every single game. It lets you make new cities. You want new cities. You need new cites. And, I suppose, extra happiness and fortifications are useful. But not as useful as cities. Meanwhile, our army advances towards the mysterious signal, finding what appear to be friendly troops, staring at more overgrown insects.  Lieutenant Jiang? What the hell are you doing on this rock? Last I heard, you were stationed on Leave-6. Commander Jack Gelder!, I require your immediate assistance! Our settlement is overrun with hopper hounds and we need help fighting them off. We are sending you blueprints for some weapon modification, let’s burn theses bugs down.Commander, before engaging in battle we should mod our units to make them more combat-effective. Select our army, and inspect units in the army panel below to see and equip mods. We can equip the mods Lieutenant Jiang game us on troops or your weapons commander. Please bear in mind that while the process is immediate on your weapons, modifying our troops leaves them vulnerable for a single cycle.We are going to ignore that conversational dodge, because we are easily bribed. This conversation gives us the first firearms and laser technologies for free, though it doesn’t trigger their tech popups, which I’ll show when we get them is a real mission. Between them and the tech we got last turn, we can start to kit out our army. All units can equip up to three mods, which are unlocked via research. These can a variety of things- in this case, the nanite injectors will let units heal themselves for a moderate amount and gain an armour boost for the rest of the battle, and the incineration module gives jack’s laser rifle have a chance to light targets hit on fire. However, all mods either give a percentage boost to damage, bonus health, bonus armour or bonus shields. This is an interesting design decision, since regardless of the effect of the mod, your unit does get stronger in a reliable way. It also means that there aren’t any mods which are a pure damage or pure defensive upgrades, no obvious but boring choice. It really makes lowers the barrier to experimentation.  Also once a unit has gotten a set of mods, it can be renamed. There’s a fairly sensible automatic name generator that will provide a name based on the highest tech mod, but I will be taking name suggestions from the thread.  Anyways, after a turn of kitting our stack and Jiyang’s stack with mods, we can do some high powered extermination. We’re up against four units now, a giant grasshopper alpha, two units of red hopper hounds, which have better stats because they’re red, and the same beetles as last time. When multiple stack of units get into a fight, they all start in the relative position on the tactical map that they were in on strategic map. This leads to a maximum of seven stacks per fight, the attacked stack and the stacks on the six hexes around it.  Also, conveniently, when selecting a space to move to, enemy units will get a coloured marker around their healthbar if they are in range and line of sight of the hex your cursor is over, with colour corresponding to the hit chance. Here, if Jack stands behind the tent with the icon near it, he is in range of the two front hopper hound units, and with clear shots at the edge of his range, they’re yellow, which would be around 65% chance to hit.  As we are still fighting a primarily melee enemy as the vanguard, everyone walks forward and goes into overwatch. Or deploys gun turrets and has the turret go into overwatch.  Engineers are the first researched vanguard unit, armed with shotguns, powered armour, and a variety of engineering tools. They are a hybrid of a support and combat unit, but because their support functions only work on mechanical units, and early game vanguard armies tend to be focused on biological troopers, you won't be using that half much early game. If you do find a strong enough mechanical unit that it wants dedicated support they have a relatively strong heal effect, can boost their accuracy by a huge 30%, and all mechanical units in their stack will heal an extra 6hp per strategic turn. Even without that they aren’t that bad in a fight. By themselves, they’re a more fragile, slower and lower damage assault bike, but they bring along a gun turret, and two units for one slot is a decent deal.  The gun turret is basically a trooper, with no grenades, ability to move, and worse damage and health. Their primary advantage is being completely expendable, since a new one can be spawned every fight at full health. Any bullets that get shot its way aren’t landing on units which actually have to spend turns healing Engineers, and their turrets, also start the vanguard tendency of being composed of total goofballs in their fluff text. It’s a way to take the edge off what is, on paper, a highly militarized society and one of the primary military arm of the star union. Lots of the “generic space marine” factions in sci fi media can easily fall into pretty fascistic narratives, and keeping a healthy degree of humour helps undercut that tendency.  The overwatch pays off immediately when giant red grasshoppers jump on Lieutenant Jiyang, and are immediately shredded finely by flechette rounds.  On Jack’s side, the overwatch fire gets split up between the two enemy units, and they come out mostly intact, and take chunks out of my attack bike and troopers.  To extricate my bikes from grasshopper induced doom, its time to call in the orbital laser cannon. “Operations” are essentially a replacement of what spells were in previous age of wonders games. They range from air support, orbital weapons, electronic warfare, psychic powers and anything else that isn’t easily modelled as an unit that exists in a map hex. The laser strike is a pretty basic operation, that hits a single unit for a moderate amount of damage. Crucially, it cannot miss or graze, making it very useful for finishing off a mostly dead unit when everything else in range has moved. This is not that situation, but it’s also the tutorial and I have no meaningful choices.  With that done, the bikes and troopers finish off the big one, and Jack shoots the beetles. Thank you, Commander. You got us out of a tight spot there.Don’t mention it, Lieutenant. Status report. What happened here?A force of Outlanders made planetfall a few cycles ago and assaulted our positions. Their assault was centred on the Voidtech facility nearby. We fought them off, but we suffered heavy casualties.Any survivors?None on their side, but our colony was burned to the ground during the assault. You are looking at all that remains of my detachment and the colony.What a mess… I’m sorry about your casualties, Lieutenant. What about this void tech facility? Why were they after it? I don’t know commander. All of the scientists who knew of the facility perished in the assault. With our colony destroyed, we were unable to annex the landmark to investigate it further.Alright, let’s get things back on track. I’ll take command here. Pack up your settlement so we can redeploy it and set up a proper colony. Lieutenant Jiang, lead the way to the Voidtech facility. With that, we’re given another objective to move to the next sector over to explore the exodimensional observation complex. We also get a free colonist unit, and an objective to set it set up in the local sector. Warning: incoming graviton wave in 2.26 seconds.Gravitonic wave? Wha.. A gravitonic wave passed through the system, origin unknownWell it looks like we’re still all holding on to our atoms. Status report.Preliminary readings indicate the void anomaly absorbed most of the graviton force, keeping the planet relatively unaffected. For further analysis I will need to connect to the void tech facility. It contains advanced sensors that are attuned to the void anomaly.Alright we’ll move in and get you hooked up to the void tech facility ASAP.As soon as our troops move next to the objective, we get yet more dialog.  The damage you see on the structure is all superficial; all of the heavy fighting occurred on the outskirts.Aviva, can you access the facility and use its sensors to see what’s happening with the Void anomaly?Access to the facility is encrypted, Commander. Establishing a connection will require the void tech facility to be annexed to a colony so that I can link directly to their mainframe.We don’t have time to lose. We’ve founded a new colony nearby that we can annex the landmark sector to. Landmarks are special sectors with a single giant mostly intact facility taking up the entire thing. These sectors cannot be settled directly, but if they are annexed by a nearby city, the rewards are very significant. They normally have a significant guard on them, but in the tutorial this one is defenceless. Sadly, we won’t have much time to play with this one. Establishing database connection……Connection to Voidtech facility database established. Running analysis of Void anomaly...Report. What are your findings?The void anomaly has started to expand exponentially. There is a 99.07% chance that the planet will be consumed by the anomaly within the next three cycles.We should leave, Commander!Backup all data from the facility and get everyone evacuated. There is no time to waste!Backup Status: complete. Planetary escape vectors: calculated.Caution: due to Void disturbance, there is a 33.1% chance of catastrophic failure during gravity well escape. Safety margins need to be overridden before a course can be locked in.To hell with the safety margins! There’s a 100% chance we’ll die if we stay! Lock in the escape vectors and get us out of this hellhole! With that, the first mission is over. Well, the tutorial. Without even another faction on the map, comicaly weak independent units, and no side content, it's not much of a map. But, it does what it needs to do, introducing the player to the basic mechanics without much risk.  Well it looks like we’ll have plenty of time to sleep on this. The gravitonic force destabilized the Void Rift in this system, making faster than light travel impossible. We have to get home the old-fashioned way - it will take us close to 200 years to reach the nearest star union hub. I have ordered everyone to prepare for cryosleep. We will see what kind of world we wake up to. That concludes the tutorial of planetfall. From here we have three options []Continue with the story of Jack Gelder or his designated replacement on Leave 6 and the Vanguard, and perhaps learn how the apocalypse happened. []Go to Arcadia Celeste, and meet the Kir’ko, an alien race of bug people that had once been enslaved by the Star Union, and are trying to make their own civilization in the aftermath. []Go to Chimera Glacialis, with the Dvar, a bunch of post-apocalyptic vaguely Russian space dwarves, who are just trying to make a quick buck. mr_stibbons fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Jan 20, 2020 |
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Jan 20, 2020 02:13
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I was a big fan of the original Age of Wonders, but never got into any of the sequels, so I'll be watching this with interest. Assuming that was meant to be a thread vote at the bottom, I say go for Chimera Glacialis. Space dwarves are an archetype that's hard to mess up.
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Jan 20, 2020 02:30
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Cythereal posted:I was a big fan of the original Age of Wonders, but never got into any of the sequels, so I'll be watching this with interest. Yes, to be clear, that was supposed to be a vote request.
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Jan 20, 2020 02:31
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Space dwarves! Space dwarves!
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Jan 20, 2020 02:51
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Space Dwarfs, comrade.
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Jan 20, 2020 04:15
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SPACE DWARVES, YPA! Also, if and when we get to playing the Vanguard campaign, let's replace Jackie with a woman because holy loving poo poo is his VA the most boring voice on the planet.
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Jan 20, 2020 04:35
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CommissarMega posted:Also, if and when we get to playing the Vanguard campaign, let's replace Jackie with a woman because holy loving poo poo is his VA the most boring voice on the planet. If this is an option, seconded!
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Jan 20, 2020 18:23
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Voting Closed, space dwarfs win unanimous approval, and I will remember to replace Jack with a woman.
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Jan 21, 2020 04:41
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mr_stibbons posted:I will remember to replace Jack with a woman. Please, please do. I have no idea whether it's the fault of the VA or the voice director, but Jack's voice is physically painful to listen to, it's so boring. There's also one female default character whom I'd like to replace with a dude, but that's not because her VA's bad, it's just the male VA is so much better it's ridiculous. Not sure if I should mention the faction, since we haven't seen it yet, but I'll certainly mention it when it comes up.
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Jan 21, 2020 05:38
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Oh, cool, I never really managed to get into this game despite loving AoW 1-3 so it's nice to see it played.
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Jan 21, 2020 13:08
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Chimera Glacialis Explosions are the masters of creation. The Big Bang forged the universe, and the cataclysm carved the Dvar. Deprivation and seclusion did not hurt our miner ancestors. It only ignited the strength and craving for resources that still drive our kind forward. Nor, under the watchful eye of the Adamant Council, the Dvar consortia are locked in ruthless competition. Prestige and infinite riches versus poverty and eternal shame are our new stakes The council is demented! Those bumbling fools granted our claim to the disreputable Rassvet Consortium. We found this world. By traditional claimant rights, it should be ours. It’s clear to me that the council will never trust us, so we must carve our own path. They will not stand in the way of the Zhelezo, and neither will Valodny Rassvet! Welcome, to the Dvar campaign. The Dvar, aka the space dwarves are a subspecies of humans that were trapped on an inhospitable mining colony after the cataclysm severed FTL travel. Generations have left them short and dependent on their powered suits, but surprisingly prosperous, and one of the major factions that was in position to take advantage of the ruins of the star union after FTL opened up again.  Good, we have chosen a fortunate landing site. One of the mining complexes of our ancestors lies dormant nearby; it would be a shame to see their creation decay without purpose. We must assemble a force and reclaim that facility. With our prospectors deployed, we should see to it that they are put to work exploring and prospecting nearby sectorsOur second hero is Inessa, Korvin’s daughter and the official voice of reason for the campaign. Unusually for this game, if she dies, we will automatically lose the mission. To be fair, losing a plot hero in the first mission of a campaign would leave you in a very difficult position for subsequent missions, and would probably result in me immediately reloading a save. But in other campaigns you could, in theory continue on without your companions. We get two objectives on landing. The first is to head directly north to take over and imperial mining facility landmark.  The second objective is a prospecting tutorial. One of the unique features of the Dvar is that their scouts can can take a special prospect action when entering a new land sector. This ends their turn, but will give the nearest city a small amount of bonus production and their player a small amount of energy. It’s one of the main advantages of the Dvar faction, letting you build up early infrastructure and forces very quickly. Of course, if you’re scouts are spending time grabbing loot, they aren’t scouting at maxim efficiency.  The prospector itself is a rather unusual scout unit. For one, it’s only an amphibious all-terrain vehicle, instead of the more common flying scout drone. This means it has a shorter vision range and slower movement through rough terrain than normal scouts. It also make it much tougher than normal scouts, though the terrible 3 range on the operator’s stash of bombs makes it impractical to use in a fight. Of course, the ability to pry free resources from empty land makes up for a multitude of sins. The fluff text is very insightful into the particular self delusions of the Dvar. They don’t consider themselves warlike conquerors, even when they are in a game about military conquest. They think that they are trying to peacefully make money and defend their interests. But in practice, they are showing up on planets that other people were definitely living on and trying to extract all the natural resources they can. Perhaps they shouldn’t be so surprised that people keep trying to kill them.  While the two prospectors I start with head out and start prospecting, both heroes and our staring troops march north, to claim the mining facility.  Because we are about to receive an incredible amount of production between prospecting and the landmark we are about to secure, I opt to start our capital Atkan with a central science lab. This ends the first turn.  The Zhelezo Dvar found this world, Rassvet. The Admant Council disregards decades of tradition to deny our rightful claim. We need not fight – you were once family. I will give you a choice: withdraw now, or we will take our due by force. I will enforce the law of the council, my consortium relies on me, Korvin, and I cannot show weakness. Alexandra would never have wanted this.Father, there is plenty on this world for both our consortia. Cooperation is less expensive than war. I know Uncle will avoid hostilities in favour of profit, so we should be able to avoid bloodshed by plying him with the right gifts.And thus we meet our primary rival for this map, though it seems like there is more than a business rivalry between Korvin . One of the victory conditions is to either wipe the Rassvet from the map, or enter into an alliance with them. To facilitate that second path, we also get the start of quest chain to mend the rift between the Rassavet an us. But we also now know where he is if you want to take that first path.  The primary job of turn two is for our starting army is to clear the imperial mining facility and the site next to it. Generally I wouldn’t post these easy fights, but it’s a good opportunity to dive into the basic Dvar units.  Our first fight is against the now familiar overgrown beetle grubs to clear the secondary production site. Due to a lack of cover on the approach, we can take advantage of the Dvar ability to make our own.  Trenchers are the basic dvar infantry unit, armed with heavy riot shields and giant spike guns. The spike guns are medium range single action attacks, which ends up making these guys far more mobile than the name “trencher” might make you think. This is reinforced by their signature ability, to once per battle deploy a trench, which provides cover in all directions and providing bonus accuracy. Digging in is a “leave one” action, which means regardless of the amount of AP the unit has before taking it, they will have one left over. That means trenchers can move, dig in, and shoot all in one turn.  They can perform shield bash attacks, which trade half of the damage of the spike gun and all of its range to push the one square and stagger it. This is, obviously very situational, but in this case it’s useful to get mega beetles, who explode when they die, away from the units they’ve ran into melee with. But, trenchers can use it as melee overwatch, automatically smacking adjacent enemy units who do anything.  Our next opposition is a bunch of man sized lava bugs, another common and fascinating type of murderous wildlife in the ruins of star union.  The mining facility map is a bit of a nightmare, full of narrow catwalks without much in the way of cover. To compensate, we start applying some buffs, for what they're worth.  Foreman are the starting Dvar support unit, though they are more of hybrid support unit instead of a pure support. Offensively, they have a hand mortar that can launch a low damage AOE, and a single trigger power fist attack which has a chance to stun non-mechanical units. On the support side, they can boost the morale of a unit, or heal an adjacent biological or cyborg unit. These clowns are one of the worst units in the game, in my opinion. The first issue, is that we have seen all the biological units in the Dvar lineup already. Everything else is a machine, so foremen will cease being a relevant healing unit quickly. The second one, is that despite being an allegedly combat capable unit, Foremen have the worst single target damage of any unit in the game, excepting possibly some temporary summons. This, in a game where units are fully functional with 1 hp, is a bitter pill to swallow, and debuffs can’t replicate damage. I suspect that these units are weak on purpose. Because the Dvar have such a large boost to early production, they have been given the drawback of poor access to healing, slowing their ability to clear neutrals early in the game.  Now, I mentioned morale earlier. Morale in Age of Wonders gives units a chance to critically hit, causing some attacks to do extra damage, and occasionally granting increased stagger levels. Oddly, the crit chance is independent of the hit chance-a 10% crit chance means that 10% of attacks will crit, regardless of if you have a 90% or 10% hit chance. You do have to hit to trigger a crit though, and a 5% hit chance do will result if 5% of you’re shots critting, not 10%. It's rarely a critical factor of battle, but it's worth keeping an eye on. The stagger system is the one of the most important part of tactical combat system. Various attacks, primarily melee attacks and explosives, will stagger targets. When a unit is staggered, it is knocked out overwatch of defence mode, and it will start it’s next turn with one less action point.  After spikes and Inessa’s sniper rifle soften up the quartzites, Korvin decides to finish it personally. Sadly, his beloved rocket hammer isn’t going to get any use today, but his revolver is more than enough to finish off this squad of quartzites.  And then he gets to keep going. Korvin starts with an ability to take another action the first time he kills an enemy unit, which is quite potent with a pair of high damage single action abilities. He gets this because of his commander perks. Each HQ can choose from a selection of passive abilities, upgraded starting gear, or starting stuff. Korvin has spend a point on the rocket hammer, and two more on Military Tradition, giving him the free action benefit and faster research of weapon techs.  The last site in the Redcore Facility sector is a cosmite note, and while I originally thought it would be an easy clear, it appears that there are some hidden units, so I’m going to put it off while I build some extra troops. Lets back up a sentence. This is a single sector with a basic landmark, matching treasure site, and a cosmite note. This is one of the single most valuable sectors I have ever seen playing this game. Do not expect this to be normal. The reason this is surprising is that the campaign maps in planetfall are semi-random. Though the key features are consistent, ie, we will always start a sector away from a mining landmark, and the Rassavet are always a few turns to the east of us, the boundaries of the sectors and locations of resources change each time. Heading west, our roving prospectors find the borders of a new empire, and are contacted by their leader.  We are not Rassavet. I am Korvin Zhelezo of the Zhelezo Dvar Consortium. We’ve denied no such offer. Perhaps we can come to an understanding where the Rassvet would not. You are bold, Korvin Zhelezo. I like that. We seek someone on this world, a man of our house named Mordechai Antares. He came here after witnessing a vision and he has no doubt gotten himself in trouble already. If you find him and convince him to return home, we will compensate you handsomely. This Mordechai reminds me of you, father. Regardless, we must be careful when dealing with the syndicate, they are rarely reliable.You are correct Inessa, but this House Antares seems to be driven by nobler motivations. Let’s find this Mordechai. We will need allies if we are to enforce our claim on this world.This side quest will require some more troops than a few scouts, so we’re going to turn our prospectors around until Korvin and Inessa can get themselves over here.  Going further, we wipe out the scavengers squatting on a wrecked research vessel, and end up with something much better than expected.  Inessa ditches her conventional sniper rifle for the fancy psionic shotgun, and also levels up, picking up more hit points and dodge, to deliver said shotgun.  With said gun, we head over to clear out a nearby pirate outpost. This is a marauder spawn site. It prevents anyone from annexing the sector it is in, and will periodically spit out stacks of hostile neutral units, so it’s best to clear it out quickly. Also, plenty of loot.  Clearing the site gives us a sniper rifle just as fancy as the shotgun. As much as the rocket hammer is a fantastic tool, it isn’t as practical as the sniper. Really this is one of the main problems with building a melee hero-decent melee weapons are much rarer than decent guns. So the best plans of being a melee hero get derailed in favour of taking advantage of the loot you get.  Starting turn four, we get our first new tech, along with frontier facilities, the colonizer tech. This isn’t a Dvar tech. Every player in planetfall has a secret technology in additon to their racial techbase. This represents some stash of secret star union tech or an esoteric tradition that provides some additional research options and units. This tech and Korvin in general, is from the promethean tech tree. The promeathan corps was an elite star union military unit that was formed to exterminate the various rouge bioweapons that kept showing up. By killing them with lots and lots of fire. Because there were various secret promethean bunkers hidden on various worlds, after the collapse various different groups have shown up with promethean gear. I’m probably not going to be exploring much of the promethean tech tree on this map, because both Dvar maps are a bit short and I want to explore the Dvar techs as much as I want. But this tech does bandage one of the primary issues with the Dvar, their lack of healing, with purification field mod. We also annex the mining complex, completing our quest. The creations of our ancestors have a certain grace to them do they not? Unburdened by the strife of the Cataclysm, the riches they obtained were almost beyond measure. We will honor their creation by putting this place to good use.Father, I have looked through the facilities lots, and it seems they were tampered with. Someone tried to obscure it, but an immense quantity of Cosmite was mined on this world. It may never have been shipped off world!Interesting... if this is true, recovering that shipment could well redeem this expedition, and get us back in the good graces of the council. This reveals the location of our next objective, just across the inconvenient lake of lava, and those suspicious sensor readings. Sadly, Inessa is mistaken. We will be resolving the matter with the Rassavat by the end of this map, one way or another. Which way? That is up to you VOTE Destroy the Rassavat. Befriend the Rassavat. mr_stibbons fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Jan 27, 2020 |
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Jan 27, 2020 00:01
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Fighting is an inefficient use of resources when alternatives exist. Befriend the Rassavat.
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Jan 27, 2020 01:10
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Agreed. Befriend.
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Jan 27, 2020 01:21
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Workers of the galaxy must unite! Agreed on the Foreman being definitely substandard, but the Dvar do get one of the best (if not the best) Tier 2 units in exchange, so it's not all bad.
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Jan 27, 2020 02:06
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Destroy. I like explosions.
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Jan 27, 2020 02:16
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Always make things go boom! Destroy them
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Jan 27, 2020 18:46
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Befriend.
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Jan 27, 2020 19:13
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Befriend! We must unite in the name of space-solidarity.
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Jan 27, 2020 20:07
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SIGSEGV posted:Destroy. Anyhow, they weren't really subtle about the names here - fairly sure "Zhelezo" just means "Iron". anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Jan 28, 2020 |
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Jan 27, 2020 20:36
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Befriend
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Jan 27, 2020 22:18
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Befriending is the most efficient option.
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Jan 27, 2020 23:11
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Friendship is Dvarven Magic
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Jan 28, 2020 02:56
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FRIENDSHIP Then we can use them to make beer.
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Jan 28, 2020 07:59
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Ok. Vote closed in favour of friendship.
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Jan 28, 2020 14:45
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Do the alien enemy units (hoppers and lava bug etc) have flavour text as well?
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Jan 29, 2020 19:22
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FairyNuff posted:Do the alien enemy units (hoppers and lava bug etc) have flavour text as well? They do. The policy I am going with is to show unit cards when I get control of said unit, unless I do not believe that is likely to happen at any point in the campaign. Low level bugs like the ones I've been fighting show up somewhat frequently as rewards from certain map locations, and there is another faction which can mind control them permanently. I don't want these first few updates to be a glorified wiki showing off a dozen unit cards.
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Jan 29, 2020 23:34
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I'm curious to see where this LP goes. I personally started with the generic human mans campaign, and never got around to the Dvar one because by map three or so I was just... really tired of Planetfall already, which is a shame because there's a lot of good stuff in the presentation, but their ehhhhh... idea of a campaign/story map has some issues.
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Feb 2, 2020 01:49
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Yeah, the biggest strength of Planetfall is in the random maps, if you ask me. That said, big oof starting with the Vanguard campaign; those guys are vanilla as hell, and Generic Commander Man is exactly what he says on the tin.
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Feb 2, 2020 08:25
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CommissarMega posted:Yeah, the biggest strength of Planetfall is in the random maps, if you ask me. That said, big oof starting with the Vanguard campaign; those guys are vanilla as hell, and Generic Commander Man is exactly what he says on the tin. What turned me off was less that(though, yes, the writing has its issues. It feels a lot, at points, like it was written by someone for whom English was not a first or even very experienced language), it was more that... the campaign maps aren't campaign maps, they're skirmish maps with some extra lore. One map I found myself winning without even approaching my objectives because another faction had knocked out a guy that it was my objective take out, and this sometimes also produced some weird-rear end glitchy results as I'd get the follow-up messages for completing an objective, without getting the first half of the messages, because I wasn't the one who'd actually completed it. Some of the diplomatic objectives can also more or less be resolved by just sitting very still for a while and not rocking the boat, so that also feels kind of anticlimactic. Several times I completed diplomatic objectives I'd completely forgotten about while I was trying to finish some other objective, which lead to several experiences of maps being finished while I still felt I was only halfway through the parts I actually wanted to engage with. It's real jarring compared to not just the former AoW games but also, well, games in general. It's like having multiplayer invaders in your singleplayer experience. The fundamental mechanics are pretty okay, about the only complaint I can come up with there is that I liked AoW3's more deterministic and less random mechanics more. Outside of I think status effects sticking, AoW3 almost guaranteed that the same action taken twice would have the same results. The UI also has some wonkiness in Planetfall, especially the city menus feel like they're cluttered, need streamlining, have pointless submenus. EDIT: Though it's worth noting that I played it immediately after launch, it's entirely possible they've patched some of this out and smoothed some of the roughest edges away.
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Feb 2, 2020 08:41
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We begin our game, with a rather unusual transmission Greetings, machine, we are the Zhelezo Dvar. We lay claim to this world’s riches. Database update: Zhelezo Dvar. Autonom must learn through interactive queries. Current knowledge acquisitions inconclusive. We seek understanding: datadisk recovered, requires categorization. Autonom analysis ineffective. Biological analysis deviates from autonom thought patterns. Request assistance with identification. This is the autonom, a collection of former star union emergency service robots that have developed sentience and decided to perform an independent robot collective free of humanity. Probably by murdering a lot of people 200 years ago. And, in a lot of games, they would probably be the bad guys who need to be shot on sight. But here, they’re not monsters. They have their own goals, but they can be negotiated with. There’s a reason I named the thread after the minor factions. In a world where lots of sci fi revolve around guilt free extermination of faceless monsters, planetfall is a game where you can have profitable negotiations with everything and everyone. Even the monsters. Anyway, this results in a new quest which takes up our society research slot to crack the data disk  Last update, I left this cosmite node uncleared. Now that we have some extra forces, it’s time to deal with that  What is cosmite? Physically, its the spooky black crystal that, when broken, turns into a black smear of impassible nothing, and inflicts dimensional instability on anything that’s standing too close. Narrative, it is the result of another dimension, often called the void, mingling with reality, that provides a bevy of useful yet undefined properties. In game, it’s a resource needed for all mods and most high tech military units and all mods. It is, in all a pretty arbitrary game play conceit, but it’s given enough narrative justification to not be silly.  So, getting control of cosmite nodes is pretty necessary, which means defeating this collection of renegade syndicate and dvar troops. To do so, I’ve brought some bularks.  The bulwark is the final starting dvar unit, a one man robot mounting a pair of gatling guns. It is, obviously a repeating fire ranged unit, like a bigger, mechanical vanguard trooper. It’s primary claim to fame is Agile Overwatch-it always enters overwatch as if it had 3 AP left, no matter how far it moved. That gives it a degree of mobility that units like vanguard troopers don’t have. It also has a fairly situational stun ability, which is fairly short ranged, only stuns for one turn, and does no damage, but there are times when locking a unit for a turn is the best move. Like the troopers, these are your primary damage hoses early in the game but despite the name, these are pretty fragile- they have less armour then trencher squads, cost twice the price, and you cannot heal them easily as the dvar. You need to keep them behind, and ideally keep the enemy to staggered and stunned to meaningfully counterattack.  Don’t, for instance, send them unsupported into a fair fight against men with lightning guns. Emergency shielding is one of the basic promethean operations, and both hilarious and useful. Granting ten points of armour is massive in planetfall, that’s more than some top of the line modded up units will have in the very late game. Whatever you put this on is almost certain to survive, the next few turn, but being unable to move makes it hard to abuse the operation. A savvy opponent will just hide out of range until the operation runs out.  After the node is cleared, my troops head east to do the quest for House Antares. We also pick up perimeter security, the initial tech on the Dvar branch of the military tech tree. The tech itself is a bit of a mixed bag. Nothing is jaw dropping, but everything can be useful, even if only later in the game Fortification tools is a mod that makes Trenches heal the units standing in them each turn, and is yet another reason foremen are unnecessary, but it can be hard to reliably get healing off them unless you stunlock a single surviving enemy unit. Ironbreaker modifications causes the units melee attack to ignore three points of armour. This can be quite good, but is a bit awkward to use with core dvar lineup. The dvar have many units with secondary melee attacks, but not many real melee units. General alert protocol is a tactical operation that, while useful later in the game, is a bit weak in early game. This puts all friendly units in the into defence mode even if they have sprinted or attacked. Early game, with small armies and tight energy budgets, it’s a bit questionable to use what is essentially a buff operation, but in larger battles you can get a fair bit of value out of it. Next turn comes around, and I’m blown through my backlog from the last update. So lets settle things with our brother in law.  We accept this gift as a step towards peace, Kovin Zhelezo. I have ordered my forces to stand down and cease all hostilities against Zhelezo assets, so I suggest you do the same. Over time, with the right incentives, you might just earn my trustI see now that I misjudged you. I have by no means forgotten you transgressions, but my resources are best spend elsewhere. In the name of my late sister, let us bury this pickaxe.Valodny, we still have a grudge to resolve. I challenge you to a Settlement.Though I’m disappointed to hear this, I can’t say I didn’t expect it. Dvar custom demands that I accept your challenge. Prove your worth, fulfill your burden as challenger. Build the Settlement Arena and my champion will come to face you.Hmph, using a champion is your right, and nothing more than I expected of you. Send your best – I intend to settle this decisively.Father, this project will require a significant investment of our resources. If we truly wish to go through with this, we will need to turn our colonies’ production towards this project. Paying the Rassavet off improves our relationship, but also gives us a quest to begin trial by combat. I find this idea that the challenger must custom build a giant arena for said fight both clever but hilarious-certainly a good way to keep the nobility from murdering each other over petty slights without having to outlaw it and stir up the traditionalists. I’ll be putting off this for a bit, to build more troops while my troops clear some local objectives. For instance, doing the quest for House Antares  You there, stay your weapons.You must be Mordechai. Malal of House Antares bids you return to your house.My sister can wait. The heretics calling themselves ‘Redeemers are enacting vile rituals nearby. I cannot allow them to desecrate this world any longer. The Abyss’s grip on this place tightens with every passing minute. I have already suffered losses and prospects were looking grim, but with your forces at our side we may be able to strike them down. I see no reason not to let someone else stand in the way of bullets instead of our troops. Glad to accept your help, Mordechai My daughter speaks true, and there is wisdom in your words as well, Lord Antares. We accept your aid.Excellent! Let us not delay any longer. We await your signal. By the light of Antares, we will purge these abominations.As the dialog suggests, Mordechai joins us here, but he will not stick around after killing his targets. We could, theoretically, never complete this quest and keep Mordechai with us, but we will try to keep to the spirit of the quest. Just remember to not give him any loot, he will flounce off with it.  Just one detour, though.  See, while we do have the official plot quest with autonom, they are still on the map doing normal minor faction things, including giving out quests to any normal faction they don’t hate. Mordechai won’t mind. Our troops can’t reach the quest target this turn anyway  Roving north, we see the edges of new faction’s border. Sadly, they don’t seem to be as friendly as House Antares.  I see our unwelcome guests have arrived. Just as she said you would. I am Mephilas the Redeemer, and I will lead my kin to salvation from these prisons of iron and flesh. Rejoice, for your fall will herald our salvation!That would be those cultists Mordechai was talking about. This is concerning. We get a quest to kill four assembly units, though for some reason that doesn’t need to be Mephilas’ troops. We can just murder random unaffiliated site guards.  Let us hope so. Not as useful as I would’ve hoped, but maybe we can gain their trust, regardless of the disk’s contents. Lets’ share what we know with the Autonom.Processing... analysis inconclusive, require further data. Stated terminal; Stadium Arcadium. Recover original imprint of data. Source code might provide solution to inquiry. Next turn we finish cracking the datadisk, and have a followup quest to go hunt for an orignal copy. Since a roving prospector is right next by, this wont be a problem.  Mordechai’s quest just needs us to kill these three psychic cyborg death cultists and their ghost buddies.  The bulk of the infantry, along with the Zhelezos move up the edge of the ridge around the shrine, before blasted by psionic doom beams.  On the other flank, our bulwarks gun down a squad of cultists, but said cultists’ tortured souls return to continue trying to murder us. Now, in a perfect world I would be able to have this foreman unit drop their mortars right between the ghosts and the other cultist unit. But foremen continue to be living failures, since they are one of the only units in the game that can’t freely place their AOE attack. The mortar has to be centered on an enemy unit.  The next turn things get slightly worse, with Inessa getting mind controlled by the leader cultist while the other cultists throw more debuffs across my troops.  After trenchers soften up the cultist leader, Korvin runs in to finish him off with a rocket hammer and following up on the ghost they leave behind.  Mordechai should have been able to finish off the last of the cultists, but too much bad mojo has left him at terrible morale, and he fumbles all his attacks. Not that it matters with this few enemies left.  Goodbye Mordechai. Next turn we get our long delayed second economic tech.  While the bulk of the economic tech tree is the same for all factions, there is a single line of techs that are unique from your race and secret tech. These techs provide mostly doctrines-passive empire wide buffs. The two dvar ones are revised safety regulations, which reduces the production cost of all buildings, and native displacement act which makes it easier to convince minor factions to give up sites they’re sitting on. In general safety regulations is a more generally useful options, but there are times when the other can be considered  Confirmed acquisition of uncorrupted data. Subject analysis inconclusive. Examining new data. Zhelezo Dvar is proven cooperative. Dispatching ambassador for field analysis. Completing the quest gives us a special campaign unit. This specific unit has a unique and non-removable mod, the ancient datadisk, which gives it its name. The base unit is an autonom monitor, the unit that the autonom gimmick revolves around. This unit has the ability to network all mechanical units together, providing stacking buffs based on the number of times the network has been established. Then there are various ways for the autonom faction to further buff all networked units-for instance, the second ability on the monitor, transmit repair nanites, which heals all networked units slightly Otherwise, this is not a combat unit, it’s a global buff that can be shot at, with awful health and poor damage for a tier 2 unit. Keep it well back from the fighting.  Anyways, having cleaned up the initial plot quests, it’s to be a bit more pragmatic, and find some places to settle new cities. The Remnant of Serenity forest looks promising, with an autonom controlled cosmite node that we should be able to buy with all the favours we have been doing. There are also some assembly marauders which will let us finish the assembly murdering quest.  We are also going to take advantage of the Rassavet’s goodwill towards us, and settle our first new city on their borders. Stepping through his plotline steadily improves his opinion toward us, so we should be able to get away with it. Not that his patience is infinite, and you can blow the chance of peace if you are sufficiently annoying to him.  Next turn we complete the research of our first new unit, and clear the marauders.  The second generation is nothing like us, Dvar. They are tools. No true life was ever breathed into them, no soul. I do what I must for the redemption of my kind, a plight I’m sure you can sympathize with.We are nothing like your kind! Our ancestors carved out new homes from the barren rocks of the harsh frontier. Pride and reverence are the least they deserve. You and your abominations on the other hand have not earned your place in this universe. We will purge you with fire and melt your metal constructions into pick axes and mining carts. Mephilias is going to be a problem. While his defeat isn’t a victory objective on this map, he does behave like one, having a “plot grudge” against us-our opinions of each other are defaulted to -800 the maximum negative value, and we each have unlimited causus beli against each other. War is inevitable. But dealing with him will be for next time.
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Feb 3, 2020 01:46
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Ah, the Bulwark, easily the most powerful unit in the Dvar roster. Certainly the most useful, at least in my experience. Their Agile Overwatch allows you to perform a slow but steady kind of offensive defence, where you edge forward with your longer-ranged Bulwarks and just mow down approaching enemy troops in a defensive alpha strike. And against enemies that focus on close combat, a group of Bulwarks can hold out all day. RE: The Autonom, on this map your primary goal should be to build up influence with them until you can get a certain mod (is this spoilers? I don't think it is) that pairs very well with Bulwarks. Put your heroes into said Bulwarks, pop that mod on, and it will carry over to future maps that feature those heroes 
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Feb 3, 2020 06:38
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I enjoy the independent factions a lot, but it always disappointed me a bit that the diplomacy system(at least on some maps, I forget if it's a global thing) kind of forces you to pick one to be friends with and to be hostile or at best neutral with the rest. I want to collect 'em all, like pokemon.
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Feb 3, 2020 08:52
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Eh, I didn't find it any trouble as long as you keep your influence production up. Just buy a unit or two from a faction after you do a quest for another, and you should be good. It's even easier in the expansion, now that there are more ways to increase said influence production (not gonna go into the details, in case of spoilers).
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Feb 3, 2020 09:38
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 Welcome back, to the adventures of the space dwarves. When we left off, we were trying to convince some rouge robots to clear out of the Remnants of Serenity Forrest. To do this we need to spend the third resource in planetfall, influence. This resource is primarily used when dealing with minor factions, and though you have a small trickle of it, it is awarded in large amounts when completing quests. You still get loot from diplomatically clearing sites, and we gain a large amount of research from the psi-shine. This means it’s time for more techs.  If you can infer the existence of energy development 2 from just this tech’s name, give yourselves a pat on the back. This tech lets you further upgrade any production sectors, providing both a generic upgrade to all sectors in a city and the ability to specialize a sector for either military or civil production. Production is, of course, hard to say no to. All of these techs encourage specializing cities as much as possible, to reduce the amount of sector upgrades to do in one city.  Enhanced payloads is technically not a Dvar unique tech, but as no other faction has the explosive tech line, it is. This provides the flash payload mod, which makes explosive weapons inflict blind, reducing the targets accuracy by 40%, and is one of the key early mods for the Dvar. Because explosive are already primarily used for their stagger effects this seriously enhance the utility of anything with explosives. Troops down an AP and hitting half as much as normal aren't much of a threat.  Drudges, though technically from the military tech tree, is an economic tech in disguise. It provides two strategic level operations-deploy trenchers can spawn a trencher unit anywhere on the map without using a city’s production at twice the usual cost, while factory overdrive enhances the production of colony at the cost of of energy per turn and the happiness of the city. Overdrive is probably the better operation, but I am too much of a softy to intentionally do bad things to my nonexistent digital citizens.  On the next turn we get a demand from the autonom. This means that they either want us to immediately pay up some resources, and gain some approval, do a quest for no reward, or take a relationship hit. As we are losing money, however slowly, I decide to take the quest. It’ll be a good chance to show off some new units.  This quest spawns a new pirate camp right outside our capital, with ten turn to clear it. Not a problem. More Techs!  Colony infrastructure is one of the most important early game economic techs, especially after the changes in the most recent patch. Gaining this tech immediately improves the speed of all units in friendly territory by a significant amount. In addition, it provides two buildings that only can be built in your capital, which provide a flat income of cosmite and influence respectively. The only way to get more cosmite without access to cosmite nodes or influence period, are these chains of capitol only buildings. Though everyone will probably grab this tech quickly, because the speed boost is incredibly valuable, later techs are an important way to compensate for a lack of accessible cosmite nodes.  The pirates a pretty outmatched, with a smattering of rogue vanguard units. This is primarily a field test.  Purifiers are the first Promethean unit, fanatical troops with giant plasma blasters. Their primary attack is a highly damaging plasma blast that has a chance to light targets on fire, but they also can spend 3ap to use their grenade launchers to do aoe damage and light the entire area on fire The claim to fame of these units is that they have more damage than any other 1ap attack on their plasma blasters, at least among t2 units. The flavour text is interesting, as it contains one of the only references to any sort of religion, the concept of purifiers bringing holy fire, that can be unambiguously dated to the old star union-as the xenoplague first appeared pre-collapse. In general the old star union does not seem like a spiritual culture, but this somewhat implies that the state, military, or technology itself was deified. However, from what we saw of the vanguard, there isn’t any religious overtones. As an aside, the lack of dates on these lore entries makes deciphering the world of planetfall much more difficult. Many entries could either be pre-or post collapse, and some characters are known to have lived from long before the collapse to the present day. Not that that is a bad thing, I appreciate a degree of mystery to the lore.  Now, the interesting thing about purifiers, and all secret tech infantry units, is that their are subtle variations depending on the faction that builds the unit. Dvar Purifiers have borrowed entrenching tools, letting them act like an upgraded trencher unit. They are much more fragile for their cost then trenchers are though, and I feel like the units overlap too much to be a high priority for Dvar Promethean's to research early.  Of course, purifiers aren’t the only new unit we’re testing out here.  A ramjet is a rare type of jet engine that is most effective at supersonic speeds. It has nothing to do with this unit. This is a jet that rams things. It is also my favorite Dvar unit, bar none. Not surprisingly, this is weird unit, and a first glance, it might not look that impressive. It has a long cooldown on the rockets, it can’t make opportunity attacks unlike most melee units, and it doesn’t do that much damage. But the numbers are deceiving- the ram attack does more damage depending on how fast you move, and every other turn you can engage the afterburners, upping speed to fast and providing even more melee damage and dodge. A full charge into a flank can one-shot many t1 units, especially with ironbreaker modifications to ignore armour. The primary problem is keeping this unit alive. Being a flying unit, ramjets cannot benefit from cover or hide behind intervening units, so it can die very quickly if the enemy focuses fire on it. It’s often better to hang back and soften up the enemy with your rockets first, unless you can provide some extra debuffs. This in mind, I’ve also added flash payloads and purification modules to this one to help keep my beloved flying battering rams in the air.  Though the Autonom aren’t handing any prizes out for the quest, we can still loot the pirate camp, picking up a pretty sweet pistol, which I promptly forget to equip. Techs for the Tech Throne!  D-VR Mark 4 upgrades is a bit of a filler tech, as neither mod is particularly unique, even though they are hilarious. Advanced Target Recognition, in addition to some stat and accuracy buffs, lets units spot hidden units on the strategic map. Every faction has a mod like this, though the passive buffs vary, but none of them are really attractive unless you expect lots of stealth units. Explosive resistant armor is funnier mod, providing resistance to stagger and +8 resistance to explosive attacks. As explosive attacks aren’t terribly common outside the Dvar and vanguard, the primary reason to use this mod is because you expect to be hitting the unit it’s on with your own explosives. Had we some melee infantry from a different secret tech, then we might get more use of it. The primary melee unit I’m using on this map, ramjets, doesn’t have to worry about that problem though. But wasn’t there a deathmatch we had scheduled?  I had no part in what happened to Alexandra! Someone had a hand in her death, but it was not one of us. You forgot you are not the only one she was stolen from.Her death was no coincidence! She was murdered by cowards who feared her words, while you stood by and did nothing! I never stopped looking for the ones responsible, but you were so quick to abandon her memory. Your consortium were fools, unfit to protect her! You might as well have killed her yourself.It is you who is the fool! You fight phantoms and make enemies where there are none! We are not your enemy, Korvin. You are too stubborn to see reason, so let’s settle this your way: in the arena.  Upon the completion of construction project, a stack of Dvar troops that are technically marauders, but theoretically Rassavets representatives spawn by your capitol. There is nothing stopping you from dropping six stacks of troops atop them, but for the sake of non-existent Dvar honour, I’m going to keep this relatively fair.  As is tradition, the defending troops get the high ground, and punish our initial advance, a bulwark stunning one squad of trenchers, while the others are knocked around by ramjet rockets.  We follow with an explanation of the flaws of ramjets, as our heroes and the non-stunned trenchers manage to down it, and Korvin, now wielding screech, follows up and lands a lucky panic on the bulwark.  With the initial rush beaten back, the Rassavet hero makes a risky charge down the ramp, attempting to hack our new unit.  Huzzah, finally a Dvar unit that can repair . . . 15hp. Yeah, that's still a bit sad. Somewhat more useful is it’s Nitro Battery buff which increases the speed and damage of mechanical units. This is useful because like many heavy units, the Baron is Cumbersome, making it move at slower speed in combat. At launch, this was just a flat slower speed, but the prospect of slowing down your armies strategic movement was so unpalatable that many high tier units were never produced, so in a recent patch this was made to only apply in combat.. In addition, the rotor cannon on the battle suit does a good impression of a bulwark while also staggering light units, which can certainly do work as gun platform The flavour text is a good illustration of how the Dvar want their society to work- everyone, even the super rich capitalists, are working together for greater profits. Idealized early stage capitalism, great when the economy is booming and there are plenty of new worlds to plunder. But Planetfall isn’t quite willing to let anyone off without scrutiny. They aren’t the only capitalists in the setting, and the other examples show the end results of the path the Dvar are on.  The enemy baron unloads some staggering fire onto Inessa, and I immediately realize that I should have given her some form of pistol instead of her default grenades.  The disruption device is the last ability on barons, an AOE which does lightning damage, and applies a pseudo-stagger effect to vehicles only. This does mean that it ignores stagger resistance.  After tanking a reduced hail of fire to the face, Inessa hits the trencher unit with a stunning sniper round and Korvin runs behind the Rassavet lines, finishing off the bulwark.  At this it’s all over, but the Rassavet do gun down a misplaced foreman unit before being blown apart. Enough. We concede defeat. What are your demands?I demand an explanation, the whole truth. Why did you give up on her?I’ll tell you what I know. Alexandra was killed while visiting us. The escaping assassins eluded our best security. It all happened too quickly. We confirmed her lodgings were obliterated by Dvar explosives. I knew the Council took over the investigation and Dvar weapons were used, but the assassinations swiftness and the council’s cover up point to conspiracy. The Assembly on this world have been hunting us since we touched down, spouting something about how they were warned of our arrival, yet you remained unscathed.Yes, the Council warned us of the Assembly. They told us not to interfere. Perhaps the Adamant Council and these ‘Redeemers’ are in league together?I’m certain they are. Standard operating procedure dictates the elimination of competitors. The Council’s neglect of these ‘Redeemers’ proves to me that they had something to gain by their continued survival. Now, you might have seen this strange hatted individual hanging around in some of the shots. This is our first mercenary hero, who will offer their services on this planet for a small fee. None of these guys are coming with us in any future maps, but they are quite potent. Things are looking up for us  But the cyborg lunatic decides to rain on our parade. Just a little though, we are more than prepared. Next time, crushing cyborg death cultists!
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Feb 9, 2020 22:02
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I look forward till we see the independent faction I got a decent bit of mileage out of while playing Vanguard. I feel like they might synergize decently with the Dvar.
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Feb 9, 2020 22:28
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Last turn a cyborg death cultist declared war on us. He will, in short order, be Dealt With, but first we have preparations to make First, techs. Subjugation ordnance. This is the basic firearms mod tech, providing the ability to inflict bleeding with your guns. It isn’t a very high priority, because damage over time effects aren’t very good in game with units this fragile, but there aren’t many other damage enhancement mods for firearms available if you don’t use the firearms tech tree.  Secondly, we’re going to be chatting with our robot friends. They have a new research quest for us, which should be easy enough to complete  But we are also friends enough that we can start buying some swag from them, including new units and one of the best mods the Dvar can buy. The Autonom Self-repair system gives any mechanical unit regeneration, which singlehandedly solve the Dvar’s healing problems. 12 hp per turn is huge when we are normally healing 15hp per battle with a baron. Possibly more important is automatically healing to max at the start of every turn. We’ll be putting this on anything we can afford.  We are also going to solidify our relationship with the Rassaavet. Doing the friendship questline improves his opinion of you, but it won’t change his diplomatic state by itself. You will have to actually ask him for a defensive pact, then an alliance through the diplomacy interface. Alexandra was right about you. You’ve proven yourself willing to reconcile and make amends. Our forces will come to your aid should you need them.Then we share our steel again, just as we once did. We stand stronger together With these preparations, our forces head north towards assembly territory. Most of Mephilas’ troops cluster around his capitol, with only a few scouts on the mountain ridge keeping an eye on us. Since he isn’t interested in a battle right now, we might want to take a diversion.  In particular, we got the objective to secure the governor’s palace a few turns back, and the bulk of our troops are right beside it. The governor’s place, like all higher level landmark, doesn’t work like normal combats. Only the six units directly on top of the landmark can fight the guards, no swarming the defenders with thirty six units at once. While this one isn’t super heavily defended, for most you will need a stack of modded up high tier units or levelled up heroes, essentially tech-gating the ability to loot and exploit these relics.  The defenders are mostly the basic Autonom sentry bots, along with some fancy flying units. We have brought mostly bulwarks, as well as a ramjet, the Autonom ambassador and a new unit.  The Autonom Golem is a unit with some pretty obvious flaw. It has no ranged attacks, standard movement speed, and no tricks to get it into melee any faster. To compensate for those flaws, it’s a pile of pure stats that will make a mockery of most other melee units, and has a useful self AOE, with the Body Originating Mass Blast, at least when it first comes out. That does bring us to the second problem, it is only T2, and your enemy has access to a proper T3 melee monster, this retrofitted street sweeper is going to feel very obsolete very quickly. Interestingly, all it’s attacks count as explosive attacks, so if you are Dvar, and only Dvar, you can mod up it’s melee attacks. The best is really a counter-charge unit, using it’s innate stagger resistance to bully faster melee units that try to rush your gun lines, rather than trying to close on your enemies lines itself. In other words, I really shouldn’t have brought it against a bunch of flying units and overwatch units.  As per the normal, the ambassador establishes a network and the bulwark squadron move up behind cover and enter overwatch.  Then said bulwarks get warped out of cover. This could get bad.  Our first priority is to get rid of these flying teleporters. Thankfully, Ramjets exist, and hit like trucks.  The other flyer is taken down with concentrated bulwark fire. Then the abducted bulwark falls back to a more defensive position. Now, the issues with golems start popping up. Without guns, or a way to speed itself up, the only option really is to sprint headlong into melee, threatening opportunity attacks on the sentinels if they take any actions.  Then we get shot at from orbit.  Yeah, this was a pretty stupid mistake. Some sectors of the map have defensive installations in them, which will shoot at you if you get into fights in said sector. There is no good reason for me not to have taken control of the orbital defense uplink that just painted me for strikes before trying to take the palace.  Over a couple turns, the golem manages to beat up its smaller cousin, and continue running to the next target, with the help of the much more glamorous ramjets  In the end, we take the palace without casualties  CORE? Old records speak of such an entity, but it fell with the Cataclysm. The drones that guarded this place must have acted on orders over 200 years old; they are only machines after all.That is not even all, father, look. These seem like blueprints for a structure, though damaged as they are, I can only make out its name: “CSF Vault-05”. A vault! The shipments must have gone there! This gives us a quest to go exploring in a nearby mountain sector. Conveniently, a drop pod of trenchers was just ready to deploy, so we can get on with this. Seismic scans indicate there is indeed a structure deep underneath the ground. That must be the vault!Hmm... there seems to be no way in, it is completely isolated. We should employ our newly acquired Earth Crusher to break open a path down into this vault. The last dialog line appears to be bugged, as we don’t yet have an Earth Crusher. However, one is the quest reward for resolving our dispute with the Rassvet, and Valdony is willing to sign the required papers. Korvin Zhelezo, at long last the rift between our Consortia is mended. The Rassvet will stand at your side once more. In memory of Alexandra, we will work together for the future of all Dvar.Korvin Zhelezo, I heard you need an Earth Crusher. In light of our reconciliation, I will lend you ‘Old Thane’, one of the finest Earth Crushers in the Rassavet Consortium’s arsenal. Bring her back in one piece At the end of turn, we finish teaching the Autonom the meaning of love, which surely won’t go badly  We also get a new upgrade for our explosives, gaining a fire damage mod. There are 5 damage types in the base game of Planetfall, and this mod switches our explosives from kinetic to thermal damage. Thermal damage doesn’t have an obvious advantage over kinetic damage, but as all Dvar weapons do kinetic damage by default it is fairly likely for an intelligent enemy to focus on kinetic damage resistance. This also adds a burn effects to the explosive, but damage over time is bad.  Skipping ahead, we pick up the Deep Detonation tech, another dead end operation tech that provides strategic operations. Land torpedo is the first of many strategic damage operation. These all will take 20% of the health of a single stack when used, with a chance of secondary effects. Land torpedo is more useful than most because it reduces the movement speed of the target, but it’s also on a dead end tech. In general I don’t feel any of these are particularly useful, though I haven’t really been playing with many of these. Mountain breaking is a more interesting operation. This turns a regular mountainous sector into a field sector, or turns an impassible mountain sector into a normal mountain sector. That second effect is very intriguing, as normally impassible mountain sectors cannot be settled or exploited at all-this effectively creates a brand new sector to expand into if you are feeling cramped.  This is the basic energy tech, which can be specialized to either reduce the upkeep of units produced in this city, or to reduce the cost of rushing production with energy in this city. Neither of these are very high priority-reducing upkeep costs is only great if the city has a ton of production already, so probably only useful for your second or third sector, and buying out production is something I’m not in the habit of doing. Anyway, after a few turns of consolidating forces, advancing slowly, then turning around so Old Thane can catch up, it’s time to deal with Mephilas. Now, this is a good example of one of the core dynamics of late game combat. I have four stacks, and the enemy has four stacks. But only seven stacks can be in a single fight. This gives a huge advantage to the attacker, who will probably have the extra stack, unless the defender can find a convenient chokepoint.  The other way for the defender to get and advantage in these situations are to hide on cities, which will provide a stack of militia to the defenders.  Also, the map for attacking cities is fairly advantageous for the defenders, though probably not as advantageous as a sensible military wold probably like. On the left flank, Blackheart and a pair of kitted out ramjets, along with some troops. This going to be the roughest flank, as none of the really heavy hitting units are over here.  In the middle, we’ve brought old thane over to play. This is also where the fourth stack spawns, so we have double the units here.  Earth Crushers are the Dvar tier four unit. That singular unit is important. One of the major risk of the model, that Age of Wonders 3 suffered from brutally, is that because the number of units in one fight is tightly capped, if the games goes long enough then the optimal strategy was to build nothing but the singular t4 unit that was available to you. Which is, technically speaking, boring as hell. That’s the context for why this game seems so scared of tier four units. The main drawback to these super units is that they have a cosmite upkeep cost, where all other units only cost energy. In a world where even an expensive unit costs a few dozen cosmite, every tier four unit you build needs to be on the front lines every turn to earn their massive keep. As a unit, the earth Crushers is a one of the more badly designed. That it to say it’s bad, but that it’s unique abilities are not what it’s being used four, which is a shame considering the potential. While you can attempt to instant kill small units in melee, drag enemies closer to you with the tractor beam, or get into melee and hit everyone adjacent at the star of every turn, you probably won’t unless you’re goofing around. The practical option is to just hang back and spend every turn firing the defense cannons, which not only do excellent damage, but also have range 9 for no real reason. Considering that your bulwarks are probably looking a bit obsolete by the time you can produce Earth Crushers, they do fit in the dvar lineup quite well, and do the job, but they do lack that wow factor other t4 units have.  On the right flank the Rassavets and a new Autonom unit. But also Inessa has picked up a new toy.  One of the somewhat common drops for heroes is a drone deployment kit, which lets them deploy these drones. They also can get deployed by certain vanguard units and operations. End of the day, assault drones are a fairly damaging flying unit, but they die to a stiff breeze and can’t use cover.  The main thing the assembly forces have in their favour is they are well prepared for the defense, with a large amount of snipers which have the ability to stun targets. This hampers my initial advance.  On the right flank, we open up with some assistance from our new autonom unit.  The Autonom tier 3 unit, and is an archetypal artillery unit-every other turn it can launch a full action, nine range AOE missile, for plenty of damage and stagger. Most factions have some variant of this, or another way to launch long ranged AOEs. Now, the interesting thing about the Justicar is that it doesn’t have a proper secondary weapon, instead only being able to debuff enemy targets, making that target easier to hit, take more damage, and more vulnerable to other debuffs. This isn’t particularly optimal, especially if things start going badly and there aren’t any other units to take advantage of the debuff. If this sounds a bit disappointing, well that is a common problem with minor faction tier 3 units. As demonstrated by this game, it’s vastly faster to butter up an NPC faction and buy a tier 3 from them then it is to research and produce a normal tier 3. Thus, they the NPC units are often lacking in flexibility or stats when compared to normal units, but they will be the heaviest options available in the early to mid game. Now, from a lore perspective, this is horrifying. Why on earth do the police need an artillery piece?  With the damage done, a trencher squad manages to take down Mephias himself with a lucky crit.  Slightly miffed that the grunts stole his glory, Korvin goes to town on the rest of the troops that had been softened up by the missile  On the left, ramjet rockets break down the center left fortification, opening up lines of fire for old thane and its support staff.  On the left, the widespread distribution of purification modules clear up the stuns, and an overly aggressive foreman unit moves up to finish off some softened up cyborgs.  Sadly, the are outflanked by more cyborgs and cut down.  On the start of turn 3, Mephilas’ right flank has all but disintegrated.  The only remaining pocket of resistance are a collection of snipers and heavy weapon troops on the far left. A volley of plasma grenades is launched to dig them out.  Conveniently, ramjets don’t care when the ground is on fire, and can charge right in to disrupt the surviving troops.  And with that, the battle comes to an end.  One short battle against the surviving stack of troops that hadn’t been dragged into the battle ends the career of Mephilas the redeemer Do not mistake my defeat for your victory. You may not realize it yet, but you stand alone, Zhelezo. We will meet again, and when we do you will understand the meaning of my words.Tune in next time, for the wrap up of this mission, as well as the beginning of the next Dvar mission mr_stibbons fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Feb 18, 2020 |
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Feb 18, 2020 05:13
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Looks like a couple of your images died. Also yeah, city sieges in Planetfall are one of the notable disappointments compared to AoW3. They're more like normal battle maps where one side just happens to have a height advantage, where storming the walls of a city in AoW3 could be borderline impossible if you didn't bring the right troops to fly over or bombard the defenders.
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Feb 18, 2020 08:12
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PurpleXVI posted:Looks like a couple of your images died. Images revived. Thanks for the heads up. I don't really expect a medieval siege from a sci-fi game, so I am not too broken up about the more normal siege maps. Personally, I got a little frustrated at the amount of sieging one was doing in AOW3, especially throughout the campaign.
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Feb 18, 2020 14:57
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I think the changes to siege battles were for the better, personally. In AoW3, you might need to raise entirely new armies to siege a city, which either slows down your expansion if you're doing well or makes for a major and unnecessary hindrance if you're losing. You could try to get the best of both worlds by making armies that could do well in both field and siege battles, but that'd lock you into a playstyle that might not fit your faction's strengths or personal tastes. Sure the sieges are easier here, but it's a lot more user-friendly, and I think that's what counts. Anyway, mr_stibbons, how far have you played into the game? Big update and big changes dropping in a matter of hours. I don't think it'd change the LP itself much, but the changes to the economy and tech tree could really impact your usual gameplay plans.
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Feb 18, 2020 15:08
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