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Oh yes, this is so good. I loved this game as a kid, and I haven't found anything similar since then. The way the gameplay opens up the further you get into it is pretty unique, imho. I'm very excited to see you LPing this, Strategic Sage.
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Oct 23, 2020 15:07
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Good update, and devoting such a large share of the video to colony/empire management gives LP watchers a good impression of whether fighting space/ground battles or caring for all your worlds will devour more time in the game, especially as you get promoted further. I never considered demolishing buildings, especially not the space port and research facility. I'm very curious to see whether you build a new one to equip your fleets, or wait for... expansion... to get another one. But of course, the basic thinking behind your decision is obvious, population growth roughly compounds, so this seems like a really clever way to massively improve your finances early game. I'll have to try that out next time. As for the combat side, I never play without range indicators, but to each their own. I don't think hyperdrives can be destroyed, otherwise the ship would be stranded in space and would have to be disbanded? You can only change out hyperdrives by equipping another one, I think the ships get blown up before the hyperdrive can be lost. But still, I like the overall capital ship equipment system, even if there are some balance issues. I find it especially interesting how shields are handled, but we'll get to that later. I love that the message of the colonel denying you reinforcements kinda abruptly ends, nearly cutting off his last word. It was like this in the German version that I played as a kid as well, so this must be intentional. A nice little detail. Edit: Yes, rushing promotions can backfire a lot, as I found out once. I'll talk about that a bit more later in the LP. Also, is this really a Hungarian game (too lazy to google)? Because the buildings that have their energy turned off display "aus" i.e. the German translation of "off". Coupled with the German writing on the box art, this makes me wonder. If you're curious: "Das Universum Gehört Ihnen... Wenn Sie Es Packen Können" roughly translates to "The universe is yours... if you can seize it." Torrannor fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Oct 31, 2020 |
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Oct 31, 2020 21:00
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I think some of your earlier ideas are very much worth trying out, but that much amount of colony micromanagement would quickly lead me to quit the game. I'm fairly sure that you had control of the lone pirate vessel defending against the other two, you could have sent it flying away to guarantee that your destroyer gets the kill. I'm honestly also unsure whether it's really worth it to feed the destroyer those kills, but I did only two full playthroughs of this game, both times on normal, so maybe this is required on hard. I never saw those early loss scenes, it's cool that you are showing them off. By the way, are we ruling over humans or insects? 6000 people growing by 60 people every 6 hours is... slightly unrealistic.
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Nov 6, 2020 19:56
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Oh, they did Haegemonia, too? Now that I think about it, there are some similarities between the games. I'm also a big fan of that game. As for keeping fighters alive, there are some situations early on where your ability to get new ships is pretty limited, big losses at that stage can leave you in a position where you can't possibly win against upcoming story mission fights. So I also always made sure not to lose any of my fighters.
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Nov 7, 2020 12:07
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Yeah, I saw that video, thanks, youtube algorithm. And it went black right where the plot thickened. I'm very glad that you can recover your vid  Also, seeing the Thorin's interior is really cool, considering what happens later.
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Nov 13, 2020 23:38
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It's quite cool seeing you really abuse the game mechanics, thought I could never bring myself to do so. Just switching the space port on as needed is so obvious, I don't know why I never thought of it. Still, it's too cheesy for my taste. At least the lack of radar coverage, which is low key driving me insane, will soon be remedied by the game. The population loss is such a bullshit, but thankfully, there's a cheesy tactic you can use (and which I definitely abused horribly) to prevent the enemy from ever starting ground assaults on your planets.
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Nov 21, 2020 19:57
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Gothsheep posted:So with that guaranteed population loss, is it a viable tactic to send your own invasion forces in one at a time with the cheapest ground force possible, with the goal of dealing no actual damage but bleeding the enemy's population to nothing? No. Most planets have space defenses to protect them, and space battles are usually tougher than the ground battles. If you can actually invade a planet, you're better off just taking it. Even if you don't succeed at the first try, you can just resupply at the nearest base and try it again. I've never failed to take a planet in a second invasion.
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Nov 22, 2020 07:15
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Did you know that you can just press + and - to cycle through your planets, Strategic Sage? I found this especially useful in the early stages when you have few planets, because it's quite fast. You can... fail the test? Mind blown! I think the 24th/34th century thing is a mistake by the developers/script writers. Randalor posted:Do the inconsistencies like that actually play into the plot? Watch and find out
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Nov 28, 2020 19:54
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Strategic Sage posted:Nope. I need to get used to doing that. I thought there was probably some control along those lines but didn't know what it was. The way this works is actually a bit funny. By pressing +, you go to the next planet further "down" on the galaxy map. Depending on how big you are, this can mean going from a planet on the left side of the map to one on the opposite end of the map, because that planet was a just a few pixels down. You can use this on any colony screen. It's not so good on the colony map itself, because the game needs to load the map, and so it's rather slow. But you can use it also on the colony overview, and the buildings overview. Late game, I used it to see whether there were any yellow or red numbers in the overview, and reacted accordingly. I'm really impressed by your colony micro, but I imagine that will become hell with bigger empires.
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Nov 29, 2020 09:23
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You can fully cycle through your planets, pressing + while having Naxos selected will select Centronom next. It loops from the planets furthest "south" to the one furthest "north" on the map. Or the other way around if you use -, of course. This is a real dick move by the game, and can be quite tough. A pretty stark contrast to the non-existing difficulty of the "mission" just before it. I found barracks or their upgraded forms quite lacking in general. If you don't cheese away the attack, you always want to fight off the enemy in a space battle, where you don't lose a significant amount of population even if you defend successfully.
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Dec 27, 2020 23:46
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It's probably a fail safe to avoid a failure state where you can't take planets, and also don't have enough planets to invent ways to take more.
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Dec 29, 2020 20:02
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As you said, this mission is of course a lot easier if you don't disable your radar coverage, as you can then easily intercept incoming traders away from the planet, and have more time to run after outbound ships. It also doesn't result in that much clutter, making it less difficult to select your fleets. I do think every single trader ship will try to land on the infected planet once the event pops, which is kind of a dick move by the game. The Garthogs will infect your planets again and again if you don't ask the colonel for help. I'm not sure whether you can cycle through your fleets with +/- as well, but I do know that a simple right click will order a fleet to move to a certain position, while a ctrl + right click will order it to attack. In case you get tired of manually selecting the commands.
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Jan 4, 2021 23:17
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Strategic Sage posted:I've tested out the virus infection issue ... and I'm going to stand corrected on that, at least partially. I know I got my planets infected a second time in my firts playthrough because I didn't call the Colonel, but I think I contacted him then. So it's very plausible that you can have two infections, but get a game over if you get a third for any reason. I'm also reasonably certain that my two infections were on different planets, but I'm not 100% sure on this.
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Jan 6, 2021 19:23
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Now it's just waiting time, building factories, ships, and research centers. I actually don't remember the mission that leads to our next promotion, but I can remember the first two missions of our next rank. So I'm actually pretty curious about what happens next.
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Jan 11, 2021 09:21
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Strategic Sage posted:
That's no transport, that cutscene clearly showed a Flagship 1, while Admiral Benson's cutscene showed the "armed" transport, imho.
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Jan 17, 2021 20:16
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Poil posted:Is our doctor a garfhog spy? Or maybe she was just going through our browsing history to blackmail herself a new summer home. Don't be so close minded, perhaps she wanted a nice ski resort on San Sterling?
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Jan 17, 2021 23:05
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I'm 100% certain you can research destroyers 2 right away, provided you build the development centers. There are no plot hindrances at all. Spoiler for the second mission I actually used a couple destroyer 2s in the mission that gave me the destroyer 2 research as a reward. I was about to point out the Zeuson thing, but somebody beat me to it 
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Jan 24, 2021 22:35
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You don't need to pump up the importance score of items you build, unless you're building more than one kind. 100% of your capacity will be used when you produce something, the importance score is just for when you build several items simultaneously, and want one particular thing finished first.
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Jan 31, 2021 23:32
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You are so incredibly fast, I took much longer when I played to invade the Garthogs. There's quite a bit of snowballing possible, I'm very curious to see how your galaxy looks like once you get full access to it.
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Feb 7, 2021 22:32
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Strategic Sage posted:It is quite a difference from if you take longer, starting pretty much right where we are now and going through for a while. The first time I played through I was a lot slower as well, and I think particularly for the rank following this one it made a rather huge impact. Yes, that's what I thought would be the case. I'm very much looking forward to seeing that. I think there's also a very interesting gameplay choice that may put you at a disadvantage in the short term, but pay off a lot long term, but we'll get to that when we get to that. The game clearly has some issues with it's cutscenes and messages making little sense/being outright wrong, and I think you're right that they were supposed to go to captain rank. Especially an upcoming mission would make much more sense at captain rank, now that I think about it. But I guess the devs felt that commander would be too bare-bones with your only goal being to conquer the Garthogs? Or that captain rank outstayed it's welcome?
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Feb 8, 2021 08:15
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Fire range juggling is a big thing in this game. I found it very helpful to turn "orders" on, to see all move orders of all my ships. Then when I select a stationary enemy, I can see at a glance whether any of my vessels are moving too close to them. Commanding big groups of tanks is a hassle, since the backlines plot an instant course to drive all the way around the frontline of the tanks, making them take big detours unless you manually correct their orders. It's a bit user unfriendly. Fortresses must be overwhelmed. That said, they do get less efficient without energy I think, which is why I always blew up every power plant I could safely reach if a planet has several fortresses. As you have shown off, non-human planets are never as good as human planets. That said, how can those planets not be profitable? You can get taxes from them just fine, just at lower rates than you can get from your human planets. It's simply a matter of time, since I don't think you have any running costs in Imperium Galactica. Of course, if you're speed running they might not pay off your initial investment before you win... It's also very cool that buildings have very different shapes from species to species. It makes planet build up a bit more involved, since you can't simply use a standard layout for every colony (even apart from the issue of terrain making this impossible for some planets in the first place, see San Sterling for example.), you can at most have a standard layout for each race. Some buildings are like 7x7 big for humans, are only 3x3 for other races, and some buildings are the other way around. It's a very cool factor of the game. Also, some species have really cool looking buildings. Unfortunately, the Garthogs are imho not one of them. There's a toggle in the game options to automatically repair all damaged buildings, which I always turn on later when I have much higher income, because I simply can't stand having any damaged buildings around. That's obviously not optimal gameplay, but feels much better. And I don't think a person who never played the game can appreciate how insanely fast Strategic Sage is taking these Garthog worlds. Like holy poo poo, his fleet was barely damaged and he can take the next one in just a day or two. I actually never took any of their worlds before the story missions ran out, and I was too wasteful with my bombs to avoid getting at least a little bit shot up. He was somewhat lucky in that few of his bombs were shot down, but it was still really good work. I'm metaphorically on the edge of my seat, waiting for the promotion to next rank to see how the game plays out when you're this fast. Can you actually get promoted before finishing the last story mission for commander? StrategicSage did sort of promise in the OP to break the game (because Imperium Galactica really does deserve it), and it's already glorious to see. This is so insane, I can't wait to see the full galaxy. You're doing such an amazing job with this LP, I can't stress how much I love it. Poil posted:Wow the Garfhogs really love nuclear power plants. Planetary shields and planetary guns consume a lot of energy, the number of nuclear plants was likely proportional to the (much higher) demand before StrategicSage's invasion.
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Feb 14, 2021 20:20
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maninthesuit posted:Finally, I'll echo the comments on the speed-running. I don't think I ever even entertained taking a planet until I could comfortably knock out that patrolling Garthog fleet and have a second, fresh fleet to deal with the planetary defenses. I'm a turtling player myself, but Imperium Galactica cleverly encourages you to be more aggressive with expanding, since research is limited by the number of development centers, i.e. the number of planets you own.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:47
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I think I got another tech through invasion, but it might have been some freaky circumstance with the AI suffering a nuclear accident, so the planetary shield was depowered. Which meant I didn't need to destroy it in the assault and got the tech after I took the planet.
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Feb 21, 2021 20:36
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Mighty Steed posted:You're leaving that roaming Garthog fleet alone, which makes sense, but interested in what it actually does. If I'm understanding Strategic Sage right, you will see that fleet in action in the very next episode
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Feb 22, 2021 09:40
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Randalor posted:If you knew that the ground attack probably would have failed, could you have made a second fleet with the sole intention of bringing the second wave in directly behind the first, or was it just because the time to fly back to a planet, restock on tanks and then come back is negligible? And does it stay like that through the game? Capital ships are pretty expensive at this point, and the aim was to speedrun through this part of the game. But yes, he could have done that. As the game goes on, things change a bit. Distances in some cases become quite a bit larger, but fleets also become faster. Getting a spaceport up and running was usually a very high priority in the campaign from the next rank forward, and many alien planets have their own spaceport. I did use a second supply fleet on some occasions, usually sending them in first to bomb the defenses, then retreating and having the main fleet take out any space stations in orbit, and then commencing the ground attack. If that failed, the second fleet would finish the job. It speeds up the process a bit, but not by that much, since I still found myself limited by my ability to crank out replacement tanks and bombs for large parts of the game.
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Mar 7, 2021 17:29
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These cutscenes are funny. Those was I think a class 3 space station, and a class 3 destroyer. Why don't we have those? Also, the Thorin is not 3 times as big as the current flagships.
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Mar 14, 2021 15:00
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maninthesuit posted:Those multi-head missiles look "fun". I wonder if they still explode if they get popped by defensive fire. They most certainly do, and they are actually a great tool to shred your own ships when electronic counter-measures inevitably send some of them your way, and they explode in your formation.
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May 1, 2021 11:35
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