Ok, so I did a play-through of _Essence of War_ as New Republic and these are my comments. While I don't intend to insult your intelligence by saying so, understand this is meant to be constructive and I understand your work is voluntary; I enjoyed the mod thoroughly regardless. Also, according to Corey, I may be missing a patch (which I can't find), things may or may not have been fixed already, so take it with a grain of salt..
Outside of some unknown bug regarding Palpatine/Corellia/Kuat, I already posted about, the game run was challenging, fun, but not without issues. I didn't take exact notes, because I wasn't planning on doing a bug-report, but I enjoyed the mod so much that I wanted to contribute in some way.
I suppose I'll begin with what I seem to recall was an issue were there were two different level-two space-stations that DID NOT spawn the required reserve units. As I understand the mod's mechanics, a L1 gives fighter/bomber squadrons, an L2 gives additional corvettes, an an L3 gives a Frigate. This didn't occur everywhere. Specifically Niraun. I recall expecting corvettes to spawn in reserve, not getting them, and being sad. I also want to say this occurred in Corellia or Duron.
Another grievance was pathing. Not the ubiquitous combat pathing we're all aware of, but fleet movement pathing. To illustrate my point:
No idea if this is a mod issue or a game issue; but in native, pathing was pretty logical.
This is only a minor irritation, but being that the player is at already at a disadvantage on the galactic map dealing with fleet composition and maneuver (gui manipulation/inability to restructure units during pause; vs the computer's ability to manipulate it's entire military force in one compute cycle), it'd be nice to see it fixed to facilitate a measure of autonomy.
Regarding the different unit's effectiveness over the different tiers, I very much liked this approach vs the standard 'tech level'. It really did give a 'feel' of era supremacy to certain units/tactics. I.e. capital ship swarm loses some effectiveness and by the end of the game I found myself building more corvettes to combat enhanced enemy fighters to facilitate my space strategy. My only critique, I suppose, is that in Era 5, in ground combat, NR has no answer to anything IR or Hand can deploy, and is wildly unbalanced. The xr-35 is essentially a mobile-structure that can 1-shot any ground unit, and the Hand's ground-fighters essentially do the same. The exception of T3-Bs, which take 2-shots (and perhaps t4-Bs which I find entirely useless in every category. Slow, terrestrial, crap rate of fire, and rockets are seemingly useless in this mod against anything except infantry squads and non-shielded buildings. Not impressive). I found the only thing that was in anyway effective was to just send swarms of V-wing ground fighters at everything, concentrate fire where able, hope for the best, repeat. It became a bit repetitious where I'd use Luke to capture RP's (because he can hide) or Corran Horn for force detection, and fill the other slots with V-wings, swarm an area, repeat. But if it's a canonical issue, then I guess that's that.
Also, while on the subject of V-wings, there seemed to be some maps where they have trouble targeting civilian structures. The maps for Kuat and Corulag, which i think are reused a few times, leap to mind. There were a few structures I'd tell them to attack and they'd just circle above it continuously, giving a shot every third or fourth pass. I literally just called in some t-3b's, moved them there, and had them take the structure out, otherwise it'd have taken 3-hours. The other maps didn't appear to present any issues. Except Coruscant, which put both my GPU and my OCD through their paces. So whichever of you masochists made that map, I think you shortened my life by a few weeks. ;p
This next bit took a fair bit of time to research, and trouble-shoot via deductive reasoning, and put in to words the proper solution. So I beg that you pay particular attention... Read the following very carefully.
Other unit issues, and i'm not sure if this is a flaw or by design but it is annoying, is with the Nebula and the Endurance. In the unit selection dialogues (reinforcement/fleet dialogues), the Nebula is shown as a gray war-ship with pronounced red markings and is listed as launching a squadron of 5 Defender flights and 2 K-wing flights. In combat it spawns as a gray war-ship with white (silver?) highlights and it launches a squadron composed of 2 K-wing bomber flights and 2 E-wing fighter flights. The Endurance, in unit selection dialogues, is shown as a grey-warship with white(silver?) highlights, yet in combat it spawns as gray with pronounced red-markings. It is supposed to launch a squadron of 2 E-wing fighters and 3 K-wing bombers, instead it launches a Defender flight and a K-wing flight. So basically, something's not adding up here.
I'd have argued it's obvious based on the hard-points alone on the models, that the red-trimmed ship (that is the ship that actually appears in combat with obvious, red markings) is supposed to be the 7-pop, anti-capital, and that the silver-trimmed ship is supposed to be the 4-pop, carrier/anti-fighter, but according to the manual, that'd be incorrect; as the carrier is supposed to have the higher pop-size and the anti-cap capital has the lower. While it appears (based on referencing the manual) that the correct hard-points are on the correct population-size, name and model; and that the correct pop-size/model (based on combat appearance) spawns the correct TOTAL (initial) squadron-size of single-seat ships (S3s), they each spawn the wrong type of FIGHTERS (according to the in-game, hover-over descriptions); and that in the unit selection dialogues, the wrong image is on t6he opposite ship. One ship's image is obviously more red than the other, yet it spawns a ship with a demure livery, and the more demure image spawns the obviously more prominently colorful livery (this despite the fact that while both have red markings in the manual, for game clarity, one's livery being more pronounced is helpful). Also, in the hover-text description for the Endurance (what is supposed to be the carrier), the sentences "launches two squadrons into the fray" is, presumably, supposed to be on the Nebula's as it is in conflict with the manual, the actual unit and single-seat ships that spawn in combat, and the role/purpose of the ship.
So, my solution is to 1) switch the unit-selection dialogue images; 2) move the sentence 'launches two wings into the fray' from the Endurance's description to the other ship, or delete it entirely; and 3) depending on which is more canonical, either invert the FIGHTER type that each ship spawns, or invert the text in each ship's description regarding the type of fighter it's supposed to spawn.
This one is entirely based on personal opinion and balancing and isn't a factual, error correction, but, 4) and i suppose this is dependent on which is more durable, but consider inverting the pop-size of the two ships. The Endurance's 8-hard point count and 4 single-seaters being 7-population just seems ridiculous when compared with the Nebula's hard-point count of 14 and two reserve fighters. I get that it fields a greater amount of fighters simultaneously and has a 'deeper bench' but one is obviously more survivable than the other, and I don't find it's additional 2 single-seater flighters particularly justified against Nebula's extra 6 hard-points. Particularly when something like the Bothan Assault Cruiser, which is less than half as expensive, fields just as many reserves (simultaneously, though not progressivly), has three additional hard-points, and, yet, is only 3-population points. So... if I only had 7-pop to work with, I could deploy 1 Endurance and get a moderatly durable anti-fighter/support and 4 reserves; or I could field two BACs, which would give me 4 additional single-seat ships, 6-extra hard-points (which depending on how you look at it, could either mean 6 extra points that go pew-pew-pew, or 6 extra points that decentralizes enemy fire while another ship is shooting them), and include a single corvette which would undoubtedly screen more enemy fighters than the Endurance's entire hanger actual could. And have like 600 credits left over. It just doesn't seem to be balanced for price or population-size. And I admit I didn't thoroughly test how it's shields hold up versus the Nebula, which I'd argue would have to be significantly more durable and meat-tanky to justify its use.
Speaking about carriers, I'd like to point out also during a run through with IR, that despite the earliest fleet carrier having lasers, mine never actually fired. At anything. I don't know if this was intentional or not.
There's also an issue in which Leia, after repeated attacks on the world she was trapped on, instead of spawning with two Nogris, two Leias would spawn with one nogri. I had issues with Erisi in the IR doing this as well. No idea what causes it.
That's basically what I can remember off-hand, or think is pertinent. Thanks for the mod.
Topic: My review after play-through as New Republic (Read 2163 times)