Those working on this mod do so in their own free time and for no pay.
Show your support for them by enabling ads on this site!

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Topics - Annimagus

Pages: [1]
1
Ascendancy Discussion / .95 Feedback and minor bugs
« on: March 24, 2015, 03:58:23 AM »
Just played through a solo round as the New Republic against the Empire on the Corellian 3-player recommended map.  The Empire fought tenaciously, but lost in the end.  I loved it; the game is beautiful and plays like a dream.

Now for the feedback!

First, the fixes to the Golan defense stations and the addition of planetary shields made for much more defensible borders.  Once I had a nice choke point, I just built up defensive stations, placed a fleet in orbit, and had a grand time farming capital ship XP as the Empire launched wave after wave of attacking ships at me.  It got hairy once when I forgot to upgrade my fleet capacity and they showed up with damn near the game's maximum number of ships, but their assaults weren't lightning-quick bombing runs to deny me planetary control this time; they were actual assaults.  Stripping control of a planet takes a lot of time and effort, regardless of how well defended it is, which I like.  So, thanks!

One odd thing about Golans, though: even playing as the Republic, I was building TIE fighters and TIE bombers on my Golan IIIs.  Was that intentional?

Also, when the MC80 colonized a planet with a ranked-up Colonize ability, it would spawn an extra constructor (as intended), except that instead of a tug, it spawned a Vasari construction vehicle. On the plus side, tugs spawned properly after the first colonization (ie, with appropriate planetary upgrades), and the Vasari constructors would eventually just disappear.

There were several ships and technologies available to the New Republic BEFORE their research in the tech tree. Assault Frigates start out constructable, despite not being researched. Force Pull and Force Push both have research points in the tech tree, but both abilities are available without doing the research, and neither research seems to unlock anything. Are these researches simply to improve the ships or abilities in question, or are they supposed to be unlocking things?

I liked the split between civil and military stations.  One thing, though: When playing multiplayer, will teamed players with disgusting amounts of money will be able to construct stations over each others' planets, as in base Sins?  If so, it's still possible to get all the station benefits on one planet: simply build civilian stations over your own planet (for the government-in-orbit, max-allegiance-increase, and trade), and military stations over your ally's planets (to actually blow stuff up). If you trust your ally (or have locked teams), then you get all the station benefits over your most important planets.

I'm sure you know this part: The Viscount Star Defender still only has one ability to select at levelup, which is sad. I had 4 points just sitting there, unused, taunting me every time I looked at my fleet composition.

I turned the Galaxy Gun off for my playthrough, as I hate racing to destroy them just to preserve my planets.  How does the Galaxy Gun interact with planetary shields and health upgrades?  Is it an instant destruction, or does the projectile have a damage value that can be mitigated?

One last thing, an issue I ran into during a playthrough just before this patch: My roommate and I were playing NR on a galaxy-spanning map, with a team of enemy NR computer factions and a team of enemy IR computer factions.  The IR factions were building Galaxy Guns like crazy, but neither of us could get a fleet out there to destroy them: the enemy NR had us hemmed in, and trying to trek through their territory to destroy the Guns was a great way to lose fleets.  Our ships were defecting left and right to the enemy NR factions, which kinda sucked.

Don't get me wrong, I love that passive (10% chance for ships to defect when they leave your gravity well), as it forces the enemy to engage you one planet at a time.  But when strategy demands a lightning strike deep in enemy territory, it's just too damn powerful a defense to overcome.  Even three planets in and it can strip an invader of half their fleet.  Great when they're defecting to me; awful when my ships defect to someone else.

Can Fleet Commander auras be made to lessen the defection chance?

Again, many thanks!

2
Ascendancy Discussion / Planet Defensibility
« on: February 06, 2015, 11:48:21 PM »
My friend and I just had to cut short a multiplayer game as he had a work meeting.

For our first map, we started off with the full galaxy map on 2v2v2v2v2 with locked teams, large fleet sizes, and fast resource generation.  Perhaps not the best of ideas, but we survived until he remembered his work meeting (a good... what, 5 hours later, I think), so we did OK.  Even if our Sins experience didn't directly translate, it carried over moderately well.

Let me start this off by saying that the mod is wonderful.  The models and effects are gorgeous, the gameplay is engaging and fun, and we greatly enjoyed watching Viscount-led fleets come face-to-face with Executor-led Star Destroyer squadrons.

We eventually ran into an issue with planet vulnerability, though.

Enormous enemy fleets would hyper into planets with maximized Golan defenses and planetary defenses (HP) but little to no waiting fleet (as our fleets were, if not completely concentrated, then at least clustered; I had mine broken into three groups of about 10-12 capital ships apiece plus support).  These enemies would proceed to ignore the Golan defenses, bombard the planet, and flee, all before forces even one jump away could get there to defend.  The Golans would inflict minimal losses and take immense damage in each action, and any infrastructure damage to the system would be irreparable until we could get a colonizer back in-system.

The real problem, however, came after a planet fell the first time.  After a planet fell once, enemies would continue hit-and-fade attacks with their enormous fleets.  Any time you colonized the planet, a swarm of Star Destroyers or Mon Calamari Cruisers would return, nuke the still-regenerating planet with its reduced HP cap (since you lose all researched defenses every time the planet bites it), and retreat again.  Eventually I was having to push PAST contested planets, forcing the contest into enemy territory just to be able to colonize planets at least one jump behind the protection of my fleets.

What this all boils down to is that planets are ridiculously vulnerable and difficult to defend, as compared to base Sins.  With no available static defenses that can effectively fend off enemy fighters and bombers (IE, no hangar defenses), no planetary shields and no planet-hardening upgrades, the fight between us and our neighbors became a roiling furball across two or three uncolonized systems; colonizing them before we drove the enemy at least two systems away was a complete waste of money and time, so we just made sure that our enemies COULDN'T hold them and then just drove deeper.  My strategy of advance for base Sins was always far more deliberate (move into a system, destroy the enemy's defenses, take the system, build my own defenses, and THEN move on) than this state of affairs allows for.

I know you wanted to reduce fighter/bomber spam from regular Sins, and as a Unity player I can appreciate why.  A full Unity fleet deploying all its strike craft at once will make even extremely powerful graphics cards overheat.  I don't cry for the loss of hangar defenses, except insofar as they offered ways to defend against enemy strike craft (I believe the TEC hangars had flak cannons as a researchable thing, and the Vasari hangars had... something).

The Golans are awesome, but do not have the firepower to make up for their much smaller numbers (as compared to base Sins' Rail Guns (TEC) or Beam Turrets (Unity).  When building planetary defenses, we were ringing our planets with Golan 3s, and filling in with a Golan 2 to hit the tactical slot cap, and it just wasn't enough; the enemy would come into a system with enough ships to outnumber our stations 4:1 or 5:1 and just ignore them.

The Defense tree for the New Republic was rather sparse.  Perhaps adding flak cannon upgrades to the Golans, and borrowing the "stations can engage multiple targets at once" upgrade from Sins' space stations for the Golans could help make up for this.  In addition, methods of planet-hardening would be nice.  Planetary shields, bombing damage reducers...  Something to bring planets back from the ragged edge of vulnerability we found them at.

Thanks!  And again, despite all those critical words, we really did enjoy ourselves.

Pages: [1]
Those working on this mod do so in their own free time and for no pay.
Show your support for them by enabling ads on this site!