Age of Wonders: Planetfall SG

[MJW (ya that one)]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/knd6mtr9nujq8o...d.ASG?dl=0

Just end turn if you feel like it. I mailed in the last turn because it was the last. You will get attacked once but you can just win by auto-resolving. Win at start of turn 81.

Only needed a single turn to get enough stuff to make peace with automons. After that got attacked by 2 stacks of vanguard units which I easily beat. (you can see my battle if you use the events tab, very lazy because it was last turn) Did nothing else with my units (expect two easy quests and pulling back to the doomsday sites). Still took a bit due to the city micro/other stuff.

After I won I reloaded and used the barentz cheat to see the other leaders stuff. They had slightly better stacks but they would be roadkill because our superweapon would work against them.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I thought about it and now I'm sure I won't play another AoW s.g.

[Bobchillingworth]

Nicely done, team.


Since starting this game I've won two more SP games on the second-highest difficulty; I've got a much better idea of what I was doing wrong (spending way too much cosmite on high-end units, not early enough on mods), but the game does start to get kind of repetitive once you know what you're doing. It's still pretty easy to die in the first 30 turns even if you're playing well, but after that it's mostly a comp stomp, as MJW noted. The AI's aggressive and pretty clever at moving its troops when it isn't being pulled in too many directions from being in a state of permawar with its neighbors, but it's really let down by being such a spendthrift with its funds and blowing them on mediocre mods. We'd have been in serious trouble if those Vanguard Infantry had had disintegrating scatter lasers instead of basic assault rifles.

Edit: to elaborate slightly, of the approx. 30 Vanguard units I killed during my turn, almost all of them had three Tier 1 mods each. Even assuming a low base cost of around 15 energy and 6 cosmite per mod, with three mods per unit you're looking at over 1,000 energy and 500 cosmite. Granted, the AI is surely benefiting from some combination of reduced costs and free income, but even still, given that it regularly fields armies of 60+ units by turn 70 it's no wonder it can't afford to expand past a half-dozen cities or produce more than a tiny number of cosmite-intensive T3 or T4 troops. Add to that that the map generator loves sticking cosmite nodes in coastal tiles guarded by elite naval units even human players struggle against, and that the AI needs cosmite to expand to claim more cosmite even on land.

Were it up to me, I'd introduce a third resource, only for Colonizers and T3 / T4 units, and leave cosmite solely for mods and doomsday projects. The AI is never going to be able to prioritize its spending nearly as well as a human.