Having problems registering on Coin Return? Please email support@coin-return.org, and include your PA username and PIN.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
Posts
Because if IP scaled linearly with GDP starting with the USA and then taking China would be the only viable strategy. Thematically its harder for you to leech resources from more developed nations, its basically collective action working against you.
Also, it is a genuine economic sink for one country to absorb another. This is why nobody really wants to unify South and North Korea.
I can look and see some stats compared to the AIs and they seem good. I suppose. I'm not sure I want to spend the next however-many hours figuring out if I have lost or not.
It really reeeeaaallly doesn't help that the AI will take countries and then abandon them, which leaves their icon on the nation but they aren't getting benefits from it. This leaves the world map a hideously messy splatter of nations the AI groups have and don't have, so it becomes all but impossible to know at a glance where an organization might have focus.
Theres very few circumstances you can't come back from in TI, if you are playing on normal. Unless the aliens have conquered a majority of Earth, nuclear war has killed off 50%+ of humanity, or global warming has gone above 4 degrees(F) you are probably fine. The global tech system means you can't really fall too far behind and the fact that a lot improvements are linked to countries means that, with enough work, you can always steal a country thats doing well if the ones you have aren't.
It's also very strange to look at places like say, India, which is under the control of the Servants who have it set to full spoils, boost and military. No economy or knowledge at all, and see its economy growing whereas I have my nation's with 3/2/3 in economy, welfare etc and specializing with a couple of pips in military or boost and Indias economy is growing faster than Indonesias (my main nation)
The game desperately needs history graphs for support, gdp etc and ways to understand WHY things are happening. Like, the EU and the UK both declared war on Australia. Why did they do that. Is it my fault? How can I stop them? Is fermenting a coup really my best plan? That's not a fast strategy there! The EU is under the initiative, who are evil, but the UK is under the "meet the aliens as equals" squad who seem to like me (resistance)
Another issue is split control of countries. If I'm the resistance, and I have 75% support and three control points in a nation but you have the executive then I should be able to create massive unrest if you use your executive control to make decisions I don't like. Sure, you are in charge, but my control and support should mean that ignoring me means civil war. I made a huge push on China, gathering 75% support and taking control points and then the servants snatched up two points and secured them, giving them executive control. And China is enormous, so taking secured points is really hard. I feel I have the support of the people and much of government, more than enough to stop you doing things I don't like, but I didn't really have any options to stop the servants here.
The game paradoxically gives too much information and not enough information, too much control and not enough control. Why is my economy going up but my GDP going down? Don't know. Here's a notification that your approval suddenly dropped a lot. Why? Not going to tell you. Do you want to assist your allies in their war? I didn't realize I was allied with anyone and it was certainly not something I did or knew about.
And it is also bad about not telling you why something doesn't work. I spent a lot of time with councillors telling me I had enough boost to build an orbital hab without the ability or even the required UI element visible to indicate how one might do that. I'm still not sure which research finally allowed it since it's not explicitly mentioned anywhere. I had to visit a 3rd party site to even learn about the missing UI. Or how I had a councilor that couldn't do missions in various countries and the game just beeps at you that you can't do it. Until I dug into their traits and discovered they can't do missions in rival countries. Which countries are those? Who knows, well the game obviously knows, it's just not going to tell you so have fun with trial and error.
PS: It feels weird to be starting a space tourism industry in the middle of an alien invasion where one space station has already gotten blown up.
There's always the "four of my friends died doing it this year. It's awesome." extreme sports crowd market.
Most descriptions of this game I've heard describe the UI as a 2010 Paradox game, before they realized how much making good interfaces opens up their games to more customers. That's definitely bad.
Edit: The good news is that the AI seems dumb enough to allow itself to be held off indefinitely by a single point defense array.
Speaking of the defensive modules, As of the latest patch, PD arrays, Layered Defense arrays and Battlestations will now all have three weapons rather than two; a laser, a kinetic and a point-defense. Previously they would have a PD and either a laser or kinetic, which lead to some jank when the AI had to pick which was the "better" weapon to use. So now there's some incentive to use all of the weapon types rather than bee-lining straight to one end of the tech tree.
Just as a tip, you can deal with aliens running by surrounding them. Or rather, if a fleet evades another fleet it's put on cooldown for a few hours to represent firing its engines, and if you intercept it while it's on cooldown it can't evade. So divide your forces into two fleets, set them both to intercept the alien at roughly the same time, have one fleet pursue with a couple kps, and the second one should get the fight.
The downside to this, of course, is that you need at least twice the firepower you're comfortable fighting the aliens with to do it, because if the first fleet isn't powerful enough they'll just kill it.
In my restart (going much better, on the whole) the US still has no one muscling in on its CP and it's become an authoritarian state with like 8 unrest. I'm going to put EU expansion on hold (France, Germany, Benelux, and Denmark already unified, Poland and a couple other minors getting integrated in a few months) to try and snag the US or at least as much as I can and pull it out of the death spiral, but is a US-first strat effectively required to keep it from going batshit?
Both of these games have been on Normal, and it's very bizarre to me that the AI has completely ignored prime real estate like the US to fight me over, like, Slovakia.
Unification also requires research into specific techs for that country (Except EU and Russia), so it's predefined on what you can do, which is an odd design choice frankly.
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/45066600#Comment_45066600
There are loads of hidden tooltips.
Thanks! This has actually worked really well. I do usually take about 50% losses and I did have a bit of scare when it looked like an alien dreadnought might actually tank my entire load of missiles, but I have once again cleared orbit of any alien scum.
I've gone back to using the starting rockets for my defense fleet though because they just have so much more thrust than any of the advanced fission drives I am developing. And like 6 dv is enough if all you need to do is shuttle around low Earth orbit. So after messing around with larger destroyers with advanced drives and laser cannons and as much armor as I could fit, I have gone back to making a swarm of the smallest cheapest possible escort class that is just a mass of missle racks strapped to a giant rocket with no armor to speak of. At least these ones can actually turn and maneuver in combat.
I forgot to grab screenshots but the EU produced 1300 science, $400, and about 22 boost per month but the real jackpot was the 210 mission control. Funfact, each unused mission control point gives $10.5 and 3 science per month. I had about 20 MC in use so all that extra MC was giving me an extra 570 science and $2,000 per month beyond the EU's base numbers. About the same time I was finishing up unifying I unlocked mission to the inner planets and tier 2 habs and so set about turning all that sweet cash into science stations around Mercury. By 2033 I was producing 13,000 science per month and I am now flying through the research tree.
I believe the aliens are going to be in for a rude surprise near the end of the 2030s.
Just found out two fun new features. First, you can’t declare a defensive war to help an ally, unless your country has naval access to the country they are at war with. Second, the securing interests mission happens faster than the crackdown mission, so, there’s pretty much now way back vs a large nation with a lost control point other than sabotaging it to the point where natural unrest allows a coup.
Two massive whiffs on game mechanics.
You can crackdown/purge a secured point. Check your counselors' stats; those missions use Espionage and Investigate, and it's labeled which stat is responsible for which mission if you hover over the mission. There are a *ton* of orgs available which boost those so just stack on the relevant counselor, dump some influence into the rolls, and kick them out.
Both missions are also effected by public approval so keep running campaigns while you try to crackdown.
85% public support, investigate 22. Control of multiple control points in neighboring nations and 3 domestic points. China and India is just too big for the calculations to work. With the population as high as they are, with a protection active you have like an 8% chance to breach it. Everywhere else it just about works, but China and India are pretty broken in the calculations. They should make the public approval boost a function of population, since increasing public opinion is harder in larger nations.
Anecdotally it seems like there's a hidden penalty to CP-related missions if you're over cap or if taking that point would put you over, so if you're devestating a couple small nations for spoils you might want to consider abandoning then until you get the stuff you really want. The AI seems to try to stay pretty close to their own cap so there's a good chance they don't even take them from you.
So 3 more investigation and another 5% public support would bring your chance up to ~20% which is certainly doable. Otherwise you can murder/detain the servant's councilors who are capable of doing the 'defend interests' mission when the defense is about to expire, likewise murder/detain councilors who have high administration to lower their defense, or steal their +admin orgs to lower their administration that way. There are also techs that improve your chances of succeeding a crackdown directly as well as techs that increase the amount of influence you can spend to increase your success chances in general.
edit: Oh, or depending on what their CP usage is like murder their councilors to make them go over their cap which would give you massive bonuses to crackdowns. Murdering your enemies is pretty effective in general really.
I agree that if they are riding the CP line, detaining or killing their councilors to push them over is a good way to get them to have significant penalties to maintaining control.
What strikes me is how good the writing is; I'm excited to replay as other factions just to see their stories. (Playing as Resistance first).
I guess what I'd say is that maybe they need a 'disrupt' action, where you can deploy your own person using like Operations or something as a resource to disrupt enemy actions like protect or set government policy.
Disrupt would be a waste of a team member turn, and a function of command and support. And all ot does is prevent you using a resource. I think it would be inherently balanced. It also plays nicely into the other agents. If you think your opponent will disrupt, then don't use the protect, have your person surveil instead and then assassinate the disrupting agent.
China is always rough no matter what though; I was only able to take it by maxing out PR and then taking 8% shots over and over until they succeeded. Note also that you don't necessarily have to take a nation's CPs in order; you can click the CP in the nation pane to go for a different one instead. I.e, you might want to take the "Mass Media" point of a nation first, as it usually gives you a bonus to taking other points.
Protect is an incredibly common action, I have 4 councilors with it. I've seen at least three Servants councilors with it, and despite two team members running an investigate/assassinate squad the last 5 months I've only killed 2 and imprisoned 1 of their team.
Detain is specific, track down an elite agent with strong skills and remove them. The protect action doesn't even require a roll. It just happens, often without their agent even being visible.