 This thread is for feedback for the following campaign missions, initially released Sunday 24 December 2017:
-
Arteri: Unlocks Jumpbot Factory, Constable, Pyro, Moderator, Toad
-
Lalata: Unlocks Jugglenaut, Newton
-
Nashpvos: Unlocks Trinity, Antinuke
-
Rockbar: Unlocks Scylla, Reef, Strider Hub
-
Pendust: Unlocks Shogun, Strider Hub
Useful feedback you can give us includes:
-
Did you experience any technical difficulties? (If so, it would be great to get infolog, screenshots if appropriate, etc.)
-
What difficulty level did you play the mission on? (The options are Easy, Normal, Hard and Brutal.)
-
How difficult did you find the mission? (On a scale of 1-10 or something.)
-
Were the optional objectives all too easy? Too hard? (The aim is for each mission to have some easier and some harder ones.)
-
What were your biggest challenges in completing the mission?
-
Were the main objectives, optional objectives, and hints clear? Were they useful?
-
How enjoyable was the mission? (On a scale of 1-10 or something.)
-
Any other specific feedback about the mission.
Other Feedback Threads[Spoiler]
Known Technical IssuesThe starting Reefs, Scylla and Trinity in their respective missions start with a maximum stockpile of zero. You can increase the maximum stockpile as normal (click on the stockpile button).
+1 / -0
|
All missions on normal: Arteri: The enemy jump bot com doesnt seem to to do anything besides standing still and jumping straight up when low on health? It feels like the AI knows where my defenses are before scouting. Difficulty: 6 Lalata: Again it's like there are hints missing, I never knew you could jump in the air with jumpbots to stop them from crashing.. Mission doesnt particularly show off jugglenauts well as I dont dare to use them since it may make me fail the bonus objective. Difficulty: 6 Nashpvos: Very fun mission. Ended up tacnuking the enemy super metal building thingy while nuking everything else. I tend to use shokley vs funnels, maybe there could be a tip about it. Difficulty: 7 Rockbar: Enemy AI absolutely covered his side in torpedo defenses making me eventually somewhat ignore detriments and cover the sky in likhos and ravens : P Planes go hand in hand with reefs anyway. Difficulty: 5 Pendust: Massively surprised how easy this one was compared to all the others. All you need is a little bit of scouting to find the super weapon and you're golden. Difficulty: 2
+0 / -0
|
I'll change the optional objective in Lalata to be "Don't lose any Jugglenauts before time X" and have a rethink of Pendust.
+0 / -0
|
First of all, I would like to say there is one major issue with any mission , where you have AI ally. While AI may be to some point able to find weaker points, where to attack, IT ABSOLUTELY SUX AT DEFENSE, meaning no matter what mission U play, you have to take care of the whole map, cuz AI is able to lose to a single unit, that is unable to counter. All missions played on Normal. Lalata: While in other cases, I may find mission hard because of absurd amount of micro/macro that is needed to win and then say to myself "well, maybe it just does not fit my playstyle", this is just badly designed. Starting with 2 EMPed Sumos, I guess the designed goal is the save them by pyros and stuff thrown there by Newton-ramp. Present that to any player, that never made a Newton ramp and he would not know, what to do. Then after few replays, he may be lucky and get there a con and a pyro... just at the time the first Sumo dies to FUCKING RAVAGER-BALL (about 30 secs in the geame). No way to prevent that in time, just purely impossible. Second dies just a moment later, so only option to protect the lab is to terra wall. Then yay, enemy brought arty, also Racketeers... sometimes these may be killed by fleas, sometimes they are covered by tanks, however there is Crabe a 2 Dantes lurking at the same moment near my base, so I have to split resources to protect it, Unable to make any progress near the lab. When it almost looks like the worst is behind me, shieldball of epic scale, Dante, Impalers, enemy com and whole lot of BDs are beating the shit of the few defences I was able to make near the lab. Now what allied AI does? Nothing useful, it is not even able to stop like 1 hermit and 1 recluse from pushing... :P Arteri: As I was not able to stop the cancerous spread of AI, I have just made insane porctress, some BBs and then two nukes to praise The Shiny One. I don't see a way how to win that with jumpfac. Rockbar: Only due to the crazy eco, it was possible to kill all the defences and made some progress against Detris with enormous spam of subs, then raping everything with nuxies. Reef EMP is quite useless there. Making it in time to get bonus objective takes some agressivity, but otherwise it is quite fun. Nashpvos: Yet another mission, where AI does not help at all and you have to maintain all the defenses. Mostly the funnels with Jack kills Moho on right and then there is no chance. When will be heavy defenses introduced? :P Also for some reason my commander loadout does not work properly, it should have a Lighting rifle and MG, but got only basic pew-pew instead of MG.
+0 / -0
|
I've saved both Jugglenauts on Brutal, FWIW. I'll look into making it less punishing for non-Brutal. I wonder if the allied AI does a worse job of holding up its end on lower difficulties.
+0 / -0
|
Lalata reply: Aiming newton ramps is a pain but the nice thing with the jugglenaut objective is that you arent 15 min into the match when you fail it. All I needed to complete it was a single pyro as he disrupts the lightning spiders enough to wake one sumo so that sumo can save the other one. It IS a barely possible objective though. I barely noticed having an ally in that mission Arteri: Just early expand to all northernmost mexes and queue a medium amount of porc, immediately send your com to take down one of the two enemy bases and coms while sending reinforcements that will catch up with him.
+0 / -0
|
Upon starting Arteri the camera was zoomed into the middle of the map for some reason.
+0 / -0
|
|
|
No recent camera settings changes. I'm using COFC, but it also seems to work in other missions.
+0 / -0
|
Another issue with Arteri: my commander (outfitted in other missions with flamer and heatray) has the heatray replaced by peashooter. This doesn't happen in other missions, so i assume this is because of the jump module imposed on it.
+0 / -0
|
Rockbar (Hard): Took me two tries. First time i tried the suggested solution of spamming Reefs and disable-taccing the Detris. This dos nothing: the enemy has enough other things to kill the drones, it takes 4 Reefs to reliably disable the Det, and then it just walks away before i can deal enough amage. Second try i just used things i found in other missions: Ultimatum, Bertha and Terraform. I spammed Conches with abandon, and reclaimed; when detriments came, i just buried them and sent a lone Ulti to kill them by abusing ground penetration mechanic, then goto 1. Also lone ultimatums are an excellent way to get rid of enemy Shoguns and Reefs in this mission, because the enemy doesn't have that much anti-submarine weapons. I used Berthas instead of Scyllas to kill singularities, the nuclear silo (but only when i creeped forward enough that the ally anti stopped protecting me; until then it was a good drain on enemy resources). This is mainly because there was just too much stuff ready to kill a Scylla before it would get to singu taccing range, and also scouting took a while. And turns out there were many Singu. Bertha is just a safe bet at winning; it defeats everything the AI has short of Detriment, and in particular also a good way to get rid of capital ships. I did use the Scylla to destroy pylons and fusions on the conflicted islands and thus ensure my ally would be able to fight there efficiently. In general, the ally didn't do that bad in this mission. Fun: 5, Difficulty: 5 Suggestion: add some damage source to allow the first detriment to be killed if it is disabled. Otherwise i cannot afford enough Reefs to reliably disable it while also having enough DPS to kill it before it retreats (without terra).
+0 / -0
|
Arteri (hard): I decided to try again with more unlocks. One of those unlocks was the dgun. Also the unlocks plus jump, and weird zoom seem solved now. Turned out that if the enemy doesn't have that horrible drone commander which fields more battledrones than a bona fide funnelweb - because i dgunned it in the first minute - i can reliably raid out their bases (with the same dgun com), prevent them from using planes, curb their expansion, expand myself, and then win in whatever ways i desire. Fun: 4 (i really disliked the drone commander and non-strupidly-breaking approaches not working for me). Difficulty: 10, or 8 once i had the dgun. Lalata (hard): The ramp was finnicky to use. I also had to micro each launch, to the detriment of managing anything else, because the launch trajectories were somewhat unpredictable. Maybe the newtons could start with a pre-arranghed firezone and the first Constable could start with a walk orders into the ramp and a jump order to land safely. I also landed a Jack on the enemy Moho, blowing it up. I didn't kill the kinda vulnerable spider factory though; i guess i could, but it would require more annoying ramp aiming. Either way, i failed to save the Jugglenauts. The enemy just brought so much stuff before i could land all the pyros, especially seeing how for me they were landing in the canyon and had to slowly walk up. So i restarted, and just landed two-three Constables, then terra-walled the tech lab and built a jammer behind it. It was never attacked. I used the pyros to defend the lowlands, and then switched to the usual domi/shield/racketeer to defeat everything. I still failed the time objective though. I stole the enemy dante and walked it into their base, frying their incomplete Merlin. Maybe if they completed *that*, my domi ball would have met a sad fate. Fun: 5 (nothing really horrible, except the finnicky ramp) Difficulty: 5 (once i got the domis out it was the usual)
+0 / -0
|
Nashvpos (hard): Difficulty: 8, fun: 2 Both the nuke and the suggestion to make a silo were more or less red herrings. Also the Owls i was given i guess for the purpose of finding out where the enemy funnelwebs and strider hubs exist for me to destroy all, are useless because enemy has Artemises. The nuke is impractical in defense because, first, it fails to actually kill Funnelwebs, and, second, even if it succeeds, it's not the funnelwebs that are the major problem - but the dozens of jacks, massive attack groups on several fronts, and the inability of ally AIs to defend against that. Even if i accepted nuking jacks with the allies alongside, there are simply not enough nukes for that. Additionally, on the eastern front, my ally has two factories "defended" by a Desolator - but it's placed in such a way that anything that goes directly to the factories will not only not be fired upon by the desolator, but also be able to disable its power source. The nuke is still a very practical option to get permanently rid of the Berthas, though. So the way i finally was able to beat this mission after like a dozen tries was by realizing i only needed to use the nuke once. If i try to use it more than once, it drains most of my meager income, but if i only want to fire one time, not only do i no longer experience the metal handicap but also i have 5k extra metal if i reclaim it and convert it into domis. This also kind of seems to require something like a dgun commander to kill the funnelwebs and jack swarms cheaply. No way i can afford enough AA or conventional units to deal with this shit while also trying to not get whacked by berthas and everything and build a nuke. Several times my nuke was destroyed by Bertha which started shooting at it before the nuke was even completed. Restarting the mission because of a single failed something felt pretty annoying (especially since i used the commander to hunt funnelwebs, quite a risky venture). It would be okay if i could just go back to what i failed, but each time i would have to wait 4 minutes until nuke, perform the widow-sneaking all over, etc. Sometimes the AI performed moves which if executed properly would have been lethal. It has 3 funnelwebs and a fuckton of stuff to start with - all it needs is to walk into my base between the desolators, and it's gg. Suggestions: - Are jack swarms intentional? Maybe get rid of them or give the allies something to handle them (no idea what). - Adjust the eastern desolator so that it actually protects something. - Either the initial army size, or the economy superiority of the enemy could be slightly lower. Without the world-shattering power of a reclaimed Trinity worth in dominatrix, one of the ally fronts collapses extremely fast. - If it's meant for the player to follow a nuke strike on enemy Berthas with a lengthy conventional ground war, the briefing should not suggest using nukes defensively, because that doesn't leave any resources for an actual army. I doubt though that a conventional (= non dominatrix) army would work here because your 5-10k of army are to an enemy something akin to a small squad.
+1 / -0
|
Arteri has been revised to include a weak ally. The enemy unlocks and com modules have also been modified.
+0 / -0
|
Arteri (Easy): [Spoiler]This was a nice mission to introduce the Jumpbots. The Pyros were quite useful here, as they protected my constructors, and my ally, from attacks by enemy raiders, skirmishers, and even assaults like the Thug. Unfortunately, the Moderators saw little use in combat, as the enemy didn't have many riots with which to counter with Mods. In fact, I'd say that the Jacks, which were used to assault the southeastern base and commander (with some Pyros backing them up to protect the Jacks from the enemy Commander's drones), were more useful in this mission than the Mods.
Although I finished the mission in less than 15 minutes, using the Dantes to mop up the southwestern base and commander, I'm willing to bet that the mission could've been completed with just the Pyros and Moderators, plus Cloakbots and/or Shieldbots that could help shore up some of the Jumpbots' deficiencies, like Ronins or Rogues for better dealing with lighter skirmishers, riots, and assaults that the Moderators cannot handle well, and Knights or Thugs for breaking through the enemy's defenses more effectively. While I failed to grab enough mexes in time before 10 minutes passed, I believe it's more likely because I was keeping track of the wrong clock, and that it's an objective that I could accomplish with better focus.
Edit: And indeed, on a 2nd attempt, I was able to secure 24 mexes within 10 minutes by rushing my Constables to build a line of Pickets to keep out the raiders, before scrambling to capture every mex on the northern half of the map.
Nashpvos (Easy): [Spoiler]Did this mission twice before managing to complete all bonus objectives. Given how the enemy's 2 Big Berthas were both fairly close to my base, and given how they were also protected under an Antinuke, I felt that the best course of action was to build a missile silo, and snipe the Big Berthas with a couple Eoses each. Now, as for the Funnelwebs...
During my 1st attempt, where I successfully finished the mission, but couldn't defeat 3 Funnelwebs within 15 minutes, I tried to go for Likho spam to push the enemy's front lines back. However, the enemy had Artemis, which made the push ineffective. I tried to break the stalemate by creeping up another missile silo that could theoretically hit the Antinuke, but alas, the match took too long for my liking, and one of my allies managed to make a push up the far eastern side on their own.
For my 2nd attempt, I decided to spam Dantes to break through the enemy's lines to the far eastern side, close to where the Funnelwebs were being built, but away from the Desolators overlooking the cliff. That attempt was much more successful, as my Dantes could easily handle the enemy Funnelwebs thanks to their high rate-of-fire countering the swarms of drones that the Funnelweb sends out. However, I think I got lucky in finishing that objective within 15 minutes, as the 1st 2 Funnelwebs that attacked pretty early were destroyed by an allied Krow, while a 3rd Funnelweb was encountered while my Dantes were breaking through the eastern edge of the enemy's defensive line.
As for how useful the Trinity was, I'd say that, while I didn't feel the need to build multiple Trinities, I used it to devastate the northwestern corner of the enemy's base, where one of my suicidal Owls located a Strider Hub next to a Geothermal Generator and some factories. (Another Owl was sacrificed to reveal the locations of the Big Berthas, and attempted to reveal the enemy's Antinuke.) Oh, and all those starting Cloakbots? Since I wanted to focus on assaulting the enemy base with Dantes, I gave my Cloakbots to the allied player to the west, so that they could be put to better use while my attention is focused elsewhere.
+0 / -0
|
Rockbar (Easy): (Note: Includes design nitpicks!) [Spoiler]In battles this massive, I only had to pay attention to where the enemy's heavy defenses and striders were located when repositioning my Reef fleet. (Building 8 Reefs was way too easy, as I had built over 20 of them!) I still need to work on building more builders for reclaiming, as so much wreckage was being left behind after both my striders and the enemy's striders were dying left and right.
Anyways, as for the mission, while I did use my starting Scylla to nuke some Pylons and Antinukes, so that my Reefs could safely advance without having to fear getting shot by Desolators or Lucifers, and so that I could launch nukes at the enemy base with a Trinity (that I probably should've built early in the mission, seeing how easy it was to quickly reposition the Scylla close to the enemy's antinukes), I think the Reefs were largely the stars of the mission, as they were needed en-masse to deal with not one, but multiple Detriments, which they do well in numbers of 8 or more, with at least 3 disarm missiles stocked up per Reef. I tried to support the Reefs with Aspis and Iris to improve their survivability (like in Hibiliha), though I fear that might've done little to help. (That, and the Reefs were so massive that they couldn't fit within an Aspis's bubble shield.) I also tried to supplement my Reefs with Likhos and, later, Ravens, but the enemy anti-air manages to shoot them while they're rearming at the Reefs.
One annoying feature that seems to crop up is that I'm unable to set a default stockpile size on units and structures that spend metal to do so, such as Reefs, Scyllas, and Trinities. Since I'm quite concerned about spending too much metal on things that probably won't have a chance to be useful, I sincerely wish that you're able to set a default stockpile size for these units within the options menu. Likewise, since I'd like to try to make sure that every Reef has at least 3 disarm missiles stockpiled, that every Scylla has at least 1 or 2 tactical nukes stockpiled, and that every Trinity has at least 1 strategic nuke stockpiled, all at given times, I wish there was a way to tell the game to automatically restock them if their stockpiles go below a certain number.
Also, sometimes, the Detriment seems to submerge so deep underwater that it's impossible for me to use my Reefs to attack it, while the Detriment can still use its Gauss guns to shoot while underwater. What do you expect me to do about this? Throw hundreds of Seawolves at it? If I wanted to suggest a balance change for the Detriment, it would be to force it to surface in order to fire its weapons, much like the Grizzly.
Pendust (Easy): [Spoiler]I may have been able to take out the Zenith early using a Scylla, but I have no clue as to how I could do this mission within 20 minutes. After all, the enemy had factories so far inland that I had to start spamming bombers to reach them.
+0 / -0
|
Pendust was designed around a considerably stronger version of Shogun, although I think the mission was pretty easy then. Perhaps it needs tweaking now.
+0 / -0
|
Perhaps, though since I found the Scylla to be very useful in Pendust (what with being able to snipe the enemy's Zenith, along with other high-value targets), perhaps this would also be a good mission to introduce it alongside the Shogun? (Granted, the Scylla did also see some good use in Rockbar, with it being able to snipe the enemy Antinukes so that I could use my Trinity against the enemy's base.)
+0 / -0
|
Lalata mission is awfully made So badly made that not even building walls around you can protect it, spider always go there, even with cloak/jammer. Side mission, to protect 2 units, they start stunned and die that way (fast with 10+ tanks by their side), if i send the little fire guys, they get stunned too, on air, while jumping. Dantes can easily destroy your base because you need resources to protect the objective somewhere else. And as always the "ally" is useless even to protect itself in the first minutes. I didnt just try 2 or 3 times, many times the "gravity jump" destroys your units before they land (yes, i'm confused too). Zero Fun ...
+0 / -0
|
if you would be more specific, this could actually contribute to improve the mission. starting with stating the difficulty level.
+0 / -0
|
