Campaign Feedback - Planes, Artillery and Scorpion

Ungtaint takes a really long time to win. Defennding is not terribly difficult with the artillery options, but it takes forever to bombard the enemy into submission. The objectives imply that after you deal with the Shoguns, you should take out the geos and factories, but your ally never scouts. This leads to guesswork and smoke-spotting to figure out where the geos are built. If your ally just did a single complete radar plane flyover, none of these structures move, and this whole problem would be avoided. All but one of the factories I think is within range of your bertha hill too, which is a little frustrating. I ended up with 8+ Berthas, and even they were really not effective in turning the tide of the battle when firing at the front lines.

It's also quite possible to get to this mission without any AA, which means you just lose your Berthas and makes this mission impossible. It's a good excuse to go back and get AA and maybe we should expect players to lose and realize they need to go do this, but if defending against bralwers with Defender is a big ask.

Old Kam is similiar. You get a radar plane flyover here, which is so immensely helpful, but then it's about squinting into the darkness (fog of war may be too dark on some maps, or honestly, too dark generally). A lot of my time was spent blind-firing at terra platforms, and I totally missed some of the Cerberuses and had to triangulate them from their projectiles. That's like, a useful skill but more something you should do in a mission more dedicated to it, with less noise going on. It's just a little too frustrating here.

On the whole, having artillery focused missions without a good way to scout. Even the sniper mission is a bit this way, it tells you to scout with cons, which is a nice tip, but kind of hard to do but it'd be really nice to have.. maybe the AA bot to scout here? Another chance to get AA.

Missions could have such behaviour scripted. Alternatively, Circuit should detect it's in a clusterfuck late game and send waves of Swifts or Owls to scout every few minutes or so.

quote: Building 3 berthas bonus objectives is broken.

Thanks, will be fixed soon.

As for the scouting problem it's difficult for me to make the AI scout within the mission framework (potentially possible, but it would be very clunky).

Wrote a review of the missions over a few days but lost everything I wrote. There was atleast one bonus objective timer that was incorrect.
Edit:
Karuwal: Ai Ally will gladly destroy its own base with catapults to take down fleas, destroyed his trinity that way, another fun thing he does is start reclaiming it instead of building, and when he gets it complete I am less than impressed by his choice of targets. In a lot of my tries the enemy would suddenly attack with 4 or so banthas in one push which I could never deal 100% with. This was a fun mission despite its frustratingness.
Difficulty: 9 The bonus objective of complete victory by 25 min seems quite hard.

I've reworked Ungtaint (the Bertha mission) so that if you survive for 30 minutes, a bunch of allied striders appear which should be able to clean up. Berthas are indeed not a great game-ending tool without support. The enemy also gets less gunships.

Being better than the other sad boys doesn't mean it's not lacking critical tools required for some tasks that humans take for granted

Berthas are an absolutely fine game ending device if you have a good target which they can actually see to snipe. The Missile Silo mission does the same thing: Give you a perfectly achievable mission of sniping out a series of specific targets, but gives you no way to scout them so you're left squinting into the fog of wr.

If you can just see the enemy geothermals, or have them marked out (Geothermal locations is public knowledge anyway... and if you know where they are you can snipe them by spotting the gas), it would help so much. If the geos are the only objectives needed and you don't need to kill all the factories (You're running Berthas, so killing the factories is mostly a matter of grinding them down and watching your allies win). More organically, you could make the geos the only energy source they use, so they dissolve the moment the geos go down.

I think Karuwal has been beaten but it's certainly quite hard. I'll take a look at potential changes.

In karuwal the enemy seems to have a crazy economy advantage. How are you supposed to beat 4-5 palladins with a few scorpions? Your allies are also really good at dying here.

Onsally (hard)

Hawks do nothing, because the enemy has two Harpies and a Nimbus for every hawk you can field. Also because Hawk loses to a Nimbus 1v1, so you need a local superiority. Also because you need them to protect your bombers, but Hawks cannot attack Lucifers.

Phoenixes do nothing, because the enemy has a ton of redundant pylons. They cannot harm the enemy grid enough to shut down their defenses, they cannot spread to attack wind clusters in low density because Lucifers shoot them out of the sky, and they cannot do economy damage to enemy wind clusters en masse because then Lucifers multikill them (while Hawks do nothing and while my ally suicides into porc).

I tried an alternate approach where i ran to the hill and placed a Desolator on top to have some kind of a bulwark from which to destroy the enemy with Cerberus or with cruise missiles, while using initial Phoenixes as a defense force, and making the requisite 12 Hawks to shut down enemy air (including a Krow).

However, then the Jacks came in small squads of ten to twenty, enough to kill a Desolator by attacking it directly. That's when i realized that maybe fuck this.

Suggestion: maybe less superheavy defenses. It's cheaper to build a missile silo and tacnuke everything than to send Phoenixes, because only half return on every bomb attempt. Not to mention that my ally is braindead, so whenever i achieve any local tactical wins, it squanders them by walking into superporc. Alternatively: maybe some superporc on the player's side.