Same with space unit deformation. At a casual glance, it's kinda hard to tell what I've knocked off and what's still shooting at me.
I am not a staff member here, but I suspect this was a matter of not wanting to invest the time/work on a relatively minor matter so that it could be put to better uses. The health bars above ships will give a good approximate overall hp value for the ship, and if you need to keep track of individual subsystems, don't be afraid to pause the game to check what's still running.
The Airspeeder of the Empire of the hand is a good unit, but I don't like how it's too fragile/size varying. It looks very, VERY small, and the speed is very quick so how are turbolaser towers able to just slaughter them? Aren't they, in canon supposed to have difficulty hitting small, fast targets?
Send more than one squad and you'll kill the tower with very few losses - but the better tactic is to bypass the tower altogether with your air units and have them find/kill the generator. Also, both Eoth and NR air units suffer from bad AI pathfinding - micromanaging them to make sure they are actually making decent attack runs will more than double their damage output versus time over target, but will require your attention the entire time you're using them.
The Empire's droid tank seems to be way too good at it's job. Often multikilling a lot of my ground vechiles, shoots very fast and often kills even my megamaser and other tanks before they can get a shot off. Are they supposed to be that strong? Because from where I stand, they might be more cost effective then an AT-AT.
The AT-AT's advantage is in range, deployable stormies and perhaps even damage per second if not damage per shot (I don't know the numbers and I rarely play IR), but otherwise I agree, the droid tank is far superior. However, it sucks against massed air units and infantry, so use them to counter it. Worst case, it isn't a garrison unit, so on the offensive wait until you can use bombing runs/bombardments to take them out - on the defensive you're just screwed, but that's the way life is sometimes. Fortunately, the IR doesn't get it until later eras when it is already likely to be significantly weakened - another balancing aspect to them, now that I think about it.
I do REALLY like how the Empire of the Hand can combat SSDs and Viscounts all without having a SSD version of their own. It gives them their own actual strategy instead of just Tank to Era X, build Y, Win without effort. My only gripe with the Hand's space units is that they feel a bit too... I dunno, limited? It feels like once you have access to Phalanx class destroyers, you don't really need much else beyond them and the corvettes. One thing I would highly recommend though is that the Hand is supposed to be lead or organized by Thrawn, right? So why don't they have something like the imperial probe droid to gather intelligence and see what's on the planet before beginning an invasion? I understand that the info on this is coming from the books, but surely they would still have a bunch of off-screen tech and stuff, right?
For the first part... the IR can win with simply SSDs and a couple lancers, the PA and NR similarly. If you choose to play that way, well, your choice... but while it often works because the AI isn't very good, it is not at all the most effective strategy. To just take your example, while a Phalanx and a corvette will be fairly effective against whatever they fight, they wouldn't be as effective as a Phalanx, a corvette and a Chaf - which you can fit in nearly the same amount of space on the map, giving you a greater concentration of firepower versus area of space required for the ships (more importantly, versus number of enemy ships in range to shoot back). You can't layer Phalanxes on top of each other, but you CAN fit multiple smaller ships on top of a Phalanx, allowing you to maximize firepower in a specific location (like an SSD's blindspot to the aft). For the second, controlling Nirauan as any faction will grant you partial intel on all worlds you border. Canonically, the EotH didn't really have spies or droid sensor systems all over the place - it relied on information it could gather passively, which this system does a fair job of mimicking the pros and cons of. In some ways, the other factions' spy systems are of less use - they're great for gaining information about a specific target, but not nearly as good at giving you an easy and constant glance of the overall picture.
Also, maybe I just don't see it, but what does the Hand of Thrawn structure do? It just seems to be kinda... there on one planet not doing anything.
It provides extra income. Don't know that it does more.
Same unit voices. I bring the voices part up because as it stands, most of the Empire of the Hand's units (if not all of them) are recycled from the Rebellion and Empire. It's kinda... Underwhelming to be honest. I'm not sure how to fix this problem beyond borrowing from other games like C&C Generals or whatever... (Also, I gotta say, i hate the new Garm Bel Iblis voice. Personally, I preferred the FoC version.)
Understand that the team here is not made of professional voice actors with free access to studio recording equipment. It's good of you that you admit you don't know how to fix the problem, but without a suggestion that isn't just copying from another game (which this team, to their credit, seems quite unwilling to do), the criticism isn't terribly constructive.
Another thing I found is that the Pentastar Alignment is just dirt weak. Jerrec having horrible Auto-reslove stats is known (is there any reason why for that? It seems really weird.) But in all the games I've played, the Alignment tends to be the first faction to get wiped out. In my current game it was cut down to just one planet with Kaine and all that remained of his troops over it and in the previous one, I didn't even see him when I managed to fight my way there.
I recommend the 2.15 beta patch, available at
http://thrawnsrevenge.com/forums/index.php?topic=4976.0, which guarantees that all AI factions have functional AI but risks the need for using the defreezer at some point down the line (the other major change being the NR being playable in the Imperial Civil War galactic conquest). Quite often in my games the PA actually does quite well. They can also be very potent in the player's hands if used right - they're my 2nd favorite faction after the NR (particularly with Vulcanus's Balance and Flavor submod, available at
http://thrawnsrevenge.com/forums/index.php?topic=4920.0 - I highly recommend giving it a shot, especially if you like the PA).
Also, the build limit thing. I understand why it's there and why it's a good thing. To stop the player simply spamming masses of Executors and the like, but why doesn't the AI follow the same rules? Them having limitless Viscounts is bad enough, but just recently, I encountered a fleet that came from nowhere which had a Viscount among other units that just popped into existence. The planet in question was locked down with only two hyperspace routes blocked by my forces and the planet in question was a tier 1 space station only.
The AI will spawn units to at least some degree without regard for the stations available to it. My experience has fluctuated between it seeming to follow the rules after I've taken all its tier 3 planets and only sending frigate fleets at me, to later that same game somehow dropping three Sovs on me. I've come to think of it as part of the challenge.
It's actually because there was a bug with the NR version we didn't figure out until post-release.
And you have little idea how glad I am that you figured it out and released the 2.15 patch. That campaign as the NR is my favorite in the damned game.
Topic: Some Observations in Thrawn's revenge (Read 18287 times)