Opinions on the combat so far?

[Tavi]

As the title asks. Feel free to leave your thoughts and comments below. I've personally found it enjoyable, but tedious, yet I'd like to hear more from the rest of the community and get their opinions, perhaps even tricks and tips for anyone else struggling with it.

[Zachulon]

I would also very much like to hear peoples opinions on this!

[Jeslis]

One of my biggest gripes so far is that the defense towers have no purpose outside of incoming attack waves.. so I constantly have to go and unman them to get my people back after each attack. Same with the cannon? why would I ever keep 3 people in that.

Can defense towers/cannon double as places to hold artifacts? or provide some other benefit when manned? (extra lift? small research speed bump? propulsion? housing? morale?)

OR, barring that if you want us to juggle population.. can we have something like.. if I have a guard tower selected, hitting TAB cycles through all my guard towers so I can easily remove the workers?

[Tavi]

Firstly, I do enjoy the combat, I legitimately enjoy it. Airship combat is rare, and combining it with a city building is exactly why I was drawn to this project in the first place. However, a few frustrating issues have raised their heads through my first 16 hours of gameplay. And that being quite simply the sheer damage that the pirates can put out compared to your own defenses. Even with 8 defense towers covering the outer edges of the airship, and all vital infrastructure protected within said defensive ring, the pirates will without fail, dive bomb through the defenses, and still attack everything inside. Sure, they'll be shredded apart and die after the first pass, however it becomes rather painful to consistently lose a warehouse, a farm, a balloon, even a defense tower to a single pirate base with dozens of other buildings mildly to heavily damaged. Throw in the fact higher tier pirate bases will have multiple ground cannons that seem to have pinpoint aim, flame cannons, freeze cannons, tesla turrets that target and exterminate more vital buildings, it very quickly becomes a zero sum situation. I lose more resources, and alarmingly often crew on a single low level pirate base than I do against the larger sized random pirate raids or even a pair of destroyers. Granted, I acknowledge that I'm still in the 'early game' and haven't unlocked the better weapon systems available. However, I likewise counter that to reach the point where I can get to those better weapons, I need to slog and grind through small pirate base after small pirate base, losing resources, manpower, and vital resources, which I then need to grind again for until repeating the whole thing over again. I've already spent over an hour grinding out and refining resources to pay for new crew to replace the six or seven lost to a single pirate base.

Don't even get me started on the barrage cannon. Turning your entire city into an unarmored and often times slow bomber is an easy recipe for disaster that will leave your city crashing to the ground in a smoldering wreck. If there was a way to armor up buildings, or reduce the incoming damage to a notable degree than the barrage cannon might be fairly viable. However, as it currently stands I just don't see the point in it. Even as a building cleanup weapon the basic cannon is still several magnitudes better.

Now sure, I could use relics to help reduce the damage done, as well as workshops to repair and reduce the overall damage to the airship. However, getting the relics that allow you reduce damage is tedious and time consuming, not to mention expensive to even get the building that let's you deploy them, but so too is getting the workshop, requiring even more grind to get ahold of, and the research to a level that it's viable. Even a minor tweak of adding primitive armor or tweaking the AI to target turrets first rather than infrastructure would go a long way in reducing the level of frustration in combat. Plus, let's be honest. The relic doesn't reduce damage from pirates by a large degree, making it feel... redundant in a way? More of a time and resource sink rather than something to bolster your airships defenses.

All in all, I love the game. I loved the first iteration of it as well. And I cannot wait to see where it goes in the coming weeks and months of development. However, combat remains the most glaring issue so far. Either tweaks need to be made to the AI to make them target defenses before infrastructure, or better systems for reducing damage need to be introduced. Because at the end of the day I don't want to spend an hour of grinding out resources to sell off for new crew, a new warehouse, balloon and a pair of farms after a five minute skirmish with a low level pirate base with a single ground cannon and four fighters.

[Storm]

I like the combat, but I HATE having to figure out what went where to rebuild.

That's my number 1 gripe at this stage. It's really breaking my enjoyment of the game.

[Skali]

I enjoy it, but right now it lacks a bit of visual satisfaction, especially air defense. The towers for example don't seem to shoot projectiles, it would look awesome if they did!

These projectiles don't necessarily need to be tied to an actual hit gameplay-wise (like the manual cannon), just make the projectiles explode when damage is applied to the enemy.

When I created a small airship combat game in Godot (nothing public, just for me!), the implementation of visual projectiles made all the difference! It went from a numbers game to a cinematic battle with that single change!

Also, making the crashing animation of enemy planes three times slower could look awesome. Let them struggle, I want to watch them slowly loose the battle against gravity! :p

[Ilikerice]

You can increase armor via the relics, I have all my armor and attack relics in front of my city with about 10 defense towers and a couple cannons. As long as I can position to take the attacks head on I can tank multiple cannon shots and destroy all aircraft before they get to the "city" portion of my base. In later areas the enemy aircraft try to skirt around the front of the base but with a quick turn my towers will take out anything, even the dreadnaught things. Honestly the volcano is the only thing that has gotten past my defenses so far.

[Vengeance]

It would be nice to create a button/an upgrade to unmann or man directly all defence towers/cannons as well something like "rebuild everything"
'
This mean less micromanagment and more fun!

[KDR_11k]

Certainly feels messy and like I have little control over the damage I take. Since everything is air based those attack planes can attack any random spot in your city so there's no feeling of having to build the city in a certain way to mitigate damage or any actions you can take mid-combat to prevent things from being destroyed. I always feel like my only option is to destroy enemies as quickly as possible because I can't do much about their attacks and pray that no building takes two hits instead of one (and thus gets destroyed instead of being repairable).

A big lumbering city certainly doesn't leave you with many options for combat interactions. The closest I could think of is Starsector with its shield mechanic (shields work kinda like blocking, some attacks will consume extra "stamina" and you should drop your shield and take those to the hull/armor if you don't want to end up stunned), that makes even fights between huge battleships have moment to moment action. No idea how anything like that could fit into the AE setting though. Perhaps generally something like putting your population into combat mode and being able to issue commands like protecting specific areas to reduce damage taken or messing with enemy targeting. Possibly some distinction between protecting against air and ground attacks.

[Rage]

rebuild function so when heavy damage is taken and massive parts of the city are gone i can just tell things that are at the next avaliable space can be repaired, so its a slow queue of rebuilding if say a part of the city falls, you could tell it to repair the grounding then slowly pick and choice to repair the lost houses this way its not a game of rebuilding my layouts every time i make a slight mistake

[peaslee]

It annoys me. I've now died three times. I never crashed in the original version.

[BlackTemplar]

The idea itself is good, but I got killed 4 times, and I quit playing. I'll wait for some kind of fix.

I launched the game for the first time. A bunch of pirates swooped in, destroyed the city.
A pirate destroyer flies after me, as if on a leash, across the entire map. A raid by pirate fighters, a damaged propeller, the speed drops - oh, the destroyer destroys the city with its super-long-range guns.
A raid by pirates. I overtook them, repaired it. Immediately - another raid. I barely overtook them, at least fixed something. Third raid - the city is destroyed.
I move at a snail's pace, constantly turning the camera in all directions. I installed more or less normal propellers, 4 towers, even upgraded it. A raid - I repair myself, fly away. Immediately another raid, and another, the speed drops, out of nowhere - a destroyer, shoots at the towers, the game is over.

Incredibly "interesting", especially compared to the truly interesting first part.

[Zaris]

Combat in the early stages was annoying because of the lack of people i had to shift from production / research buildings towards combat buildings and after that shift back (shifting people around for a more efficient / minimized playstyle)

Now i'm in the lategame with nearly everything unlocked, 300 people, all buildings max staff and 30 for gathering. At this point combat is just flying over the enemies base, 2 barrage shots and for the flying bigger ones the 2x attack hangar. Ressources are no problem after getting most buildings (farms + water condensators with minaret bonus). Food / water is self produced and i lose only 1 wood instead coal.

For early / midgame it would be great to have some kind of hotkeys for:
- remove / put max people in combat buildings / workshops
- remove / put max people in production / research buildings

On top of that the buildings should automatically rehire free people from the idling pool when the staff is set at i.e. 3/3 and maintain that number. Currently if you get attacked somewhere the buildings lose people because they're injured and the idling ones aren't used so you have manually refill them. That's especially annoying when they hit your combat buildings like cannon / hangar and the reload times get longer because of that and that crap happens after every single enemy cannon hit.

[veevoir]

Yeah, a red alert button would be nice, so towers get manned as a priority (starting with free workers, then other buildings designed with survival priority something like research<--production<--workshops)

[Beloved Stray]

Originally posted by Zachulon:

I would also very much like to hear peoples opinions on this!

I absolutely hate the fact that the pirate destroyers follow you across the entire map and hit you with pinpoint accuracy. I keep dying because, even if I'm outrunning them, they just NEVER stop.

[andrewtimmins]

I found the best way to destroy the destroyers is to fire the freeze canon followed by the canon after it take effect and it takes them out in 1 shot rather than use 2 fighter hangars, with 5 fighter upgrade, to do the same job.
Why are the pirate canon able to have such long range? When even after the upgrades I still only 60% of their range, so you get hit from 4 canons even before you can fire. Add another upgrade to increase allow parity.
Could you add 2 upgrades for the Academies, I have 3 so I can reduce the time research takes.
Love the game and looking forward to the updates.