Loading...
  OR  Zero-K Name:    Password:   

Campaign Feedback - Planes, Artillery and Scorpion

81 posts, 6401 views
Post comment
Filter:    Player:  
Page of 5 (81 records)
sort


This thread is for feedback for the following campaign missions, initially released Sunday 17 December 2017:
  • Fel Diacia: Unlocks Airplane Plant, Crane, Swift, Thunderbird
  • Leopard: Unlocks Vulture, Raven
  • Onsally: Unlocks Phoenix, Raptor, Airpad
  • Bavhakya: Unlocks Likho
  • Old Kam: Unlocks Missile Silo, Eos, Inferno, Shockley, Quake
  • Ungtaint: Unlocks Cerberus, Big Bertha
  • Karuwal: Unlocks Scorpion, 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]
+0 / -0
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.
+0 / -0


6 years ago
Circuit does not like to suicide its scouts for information. I guess it should be more willing.
+0 / -0


6 years ago
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.
+1 / -0
FIrankFFC
6 years ago
Building 3 berthas bonus objectives is broken.
+0 / -0
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).
+0 / -0

6 years ago
Scripting is fine, a single, complete scout run of the enemy would be enough to reveal the static artillery targets that serve as the missions objectives.
+0 / -0
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.
+1 / -0

6 years ago
I had a quick look and the win-by-time objective in Leopard (unlocking Vulture/Raven) claimed to be 10 minutes but was actually 12. I'll fix it in the next stable. Let me know if you find anything else (or any other feedback).
+1 / -0
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.
+1 / -0


6 years ago
> most competent non-cheating RTS AI ever included with a game
> complaints about it being stupid

:'(
+0 / -0


6 years ago
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
+1 / -0


6 years ago
Now that Ungtaint is automatic win at 30 minutes and allies are allowed to have DDMs and such, i found Fel Diacia also winnable because the opponents have no spiders or superweapons while i have walls and cerberi.

+0 / -0
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.
+1 / -0
Karuwal seems to be impossible. There are too many Banthas and the AI is just suiciding the own base with the Merlin rockets against fleas...

Also at one point, there were 3 Paladins attacking at once.
The Paladins are faster than Scorpions, so you have to know where the Paladins are at all time.
This mission is very frustrating even on normal difficulty.

Ultimatums are one shot by Paladins as well but not the other way round...

In my opinion, this mission needs better balancing
+0 / -0
I think Karuwal has been beaten but it's certainly quite hard. I'll take a look at potential changes.
+0 / -0

6 years ago
I've marked it at difficulty 9, the most diffcult mission so far, if I counted the bonus objective I might have said 10. Beat it by quick raiding to reduce enemy facs early and overwhelm the cluster of catapults later, so yeah scorpion is slow but I had to have a few around atleast to protect the trinity base. Southern ai base can survive on it's own after a little upgrade to their porc.
+0 / -0
6 years ago
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.
+0 / -0


6 years ago
Bavhakya (hard):

I tried the suggested approach of spamming Likho and blowing up the shieldballs. Shieldballs tank the shots with their outer shields, and then Circuit has those roaming packs of AA and commanders which can tank 4 Likho bombs without pausing. And Grizzlies. And they just keep coming. And despite my air support the allies kept losing all the fronts.

So i restarted, kept the initial Likho as an emergency response, terra-closed ally factories, and just spammed shield-domi-racketeer (occasionally wasting a thunderbird so i could capture small squads of 4-6 disabled grizzlies).

The amount of stuff the enemy had was such that i had to circle the map twice with my ball of yuries before the enemies stopped fighting back.

Perhaps if i used the planes more creatively (using TB to first soften shieldballs for example), i could have done it with just planes and berthas. But it's very demotivating to see my allies fail everything and everywhere.

Fun: 5, Difficulty: 5
+0 / -0
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.
+2 / -0
Page of 5 (81 records)