Nashira, Alien Life, and the Eclipse

[KeenCritter]

I've played a few games now on Easy, which is (if you read the settings in the difficulty tab) basically where the AI has no advantages, and you have no disadvantages.) I like playing on a level field with the AI when I first start playing a game. Unfortunately, this basically lead me into kicking everyone's rear right off the bat in my second game once I figured out the mechanics for food , production, etc. and how to adjust my population more effectively.

I found that the alien life on medium was too easy to kill off, while the Nashira provided only a little bit of challenge. In fact, they were defeated by the colony AI's before I even saw a mothership.

Fast forward a few games, I've set the alien life forms to Very Aggressive or whatever. I like the idea of fighting off hordes of tiny aliens on a hostile planet, and anything below very hard becomes too easy very quickly once I've got enough fire troopers and some basic armor with adaptive bunkers in my cities.

Occasionally, I'll lose a few units, sure. But otherwise, it's not a big deal. Then, about 20 years after landing on the planet, a horde of Nashira show up. Suddenly, I'm getting my butt handed to me without so much as a fight, while the colony AI's don't even get a single city capture. Sure, the Nashira destroy enemy units, but they don't bother capping or destroying cities other than mine.

So what gives? Why do the Nashira show up withing 25 or so years? That feels a bit too fast for me. Why don't they raze AI cities? Who can really get established on a planet within 25 years? I mean, you can if alien life is set to medium. That's easy. I just feel like it's too quick, like it should be a mid-late-game 'oh crap' scenario with a need to ally with neighbors to stop them.

Additionally, I feel like the eclipse thing is a bit gimmicky. I like the idea, I just feel like maybe it should do more. Like maybe come around once a year, but for a shorter duration. It would be nice if it spawned new queens that could get set up in areas outside your territory, so you can't just destroy ALL of the alien life so easily. A small army of three or four fire troopers can demolish the nests with ease once the devourers are dealth with.

All in all, the game is still great, it just feels like the additional small scenarios added in with the Eclipse and the invasion are a bit rushed and come into play far too early for how little, or much they do.

I don't plan on stopping playing this any time soon, regardless of these slight annoyances.

[Ail]

First question: Are you using my AI-patch?
If you do, then I'd be really surprised when you say that anything below "very hard" is too easy.

Very Hard is like ultra-challenging. I simply cannot win there. And even on Hard I have a... hard time. With my patch that is, of course. Don't have much trouble beating very hard without it.

The Messari will always focus on the player with the highest score. As a means to make it more interesting for the runaway and give those who lack behind a chance to come back. That's most likely the explanation for why the AI doesn't lose cities while you are massively annoyed by the messari. You simply are too far ahead in score.

If you do it right, the aliens mostly are just experience-donators for your troops. In order to have them be meaningful I always set them to "Very High" aggression.
The Messari, especially the motherships can be really annoying.

But having them come within 25 years is impossible! Or wait do you mean the normal aliens? Apperently you do. Those actually should be capabale of razing other factions-cities. Have seen that before.
If you have the right research-order you shall be able do hold it off. The 8-strength-aliens leave you alone for about 40 years.

Also you can set up a game as observer-game when you click on advanced settings. Pick yourself the faction "Spectator" and look at how exactly the AI deals with the aliens. In my patch they are programmed to act quite similar to myself when it comes to that. You are aware, that you can refit your starting-unit to hardcounter the aliens?

[KeenCritter]

No, I'm not using your patch. Are you a dev? If you are, I'll use it. I'm a bit leery of using freelance patches for multiple reasons.

I've developed the skill to use the aliens as free EXP for the most part. Still getting that down, but I'm getting better at it.

I am aware I can update my units. The issue lies in the fact that despite my score being the lowest on easy, which means I suck at this game a lot more than I was initially lead to believe, because some AI that didn't suck was on my landmass with me on my first game. Despite the fact that I was the worst player on the planet, after looking at the scoreboard and checking out the graphs over time, I was still focused on with three drop-pods of non-stop alien annoyance. I really find it aggravating that they can just spam the EMP constantly. The Defense Network does absolutely nothing to counter this power, which is disconcerting at best. I apparently need to change my strategy, because this thing is harder than Xenonauts in terms of micromanagement and unit strategy.

Additionally, I've noticed that the first-tier, purple aliens don't seem to want to attack my cities directly. Ever. Unless they're EMP'd, and empty. That really messes with my strategy, and makes bunkers almost worthless. Why would I build defense networks if they do absolutely nothing to counter a legitimate threat?

As for 25 years? The purple ones pop up a warning at about what...2123? Then they invade by 2125 or 2127 or something. Is there ANOTHER group of aliens I need to worry about somewhere up the road? I do know that shortly after they appeared, two factions got wiped off the map. Soemthing like 2 or 3 years later. Then they just spammed artillery, in conjunction with the EMP, until I died.

Really needs to be an EMP countermeasure or something that works directly against small-tier, non-WMD, powers.

[Zak0r]

AIL is a freelancer dev who works on the game in his free time and he does magnificient work - I can tell, I have helped him a bit. But his improvements are approved by the original devs (who are tied up in their next project) which you can see from the fact that an earlier version of AIL's work is already available officially in the beta branch. It is highly likely it will also be accepted for the release version soon and the latest work will also be officially approved.

As for the Messari issue: This is also a thing that AIL's patch did fix. In the older versions the AI was spamming the planet with cities so often there would be no free tiles for messari portals to land nearby so the portals would land next to the player almost all the time. And then even while the player is not strongest it would be the nearest to attack. AIL's patch has taught the AI to not spam cities that much (which actually weakens them economically) so your experience might get better. However, on the higher difficulty levels the game might be already over by then because the AI now acts much better in its economical development.

As for Messari not attacking your cities this is probably because your defense is too strong. They will walk around and plunder your lands instead of dying senselessly at your walls. They might attack when all your terrain improvements are gone though.

With EMP you probably have the Ion storm in mind (there is also an EMP weapon in the game). Each Messari portal can spawn one each turn on a tile visible to Messari units. It does 1.0 damage to all units on the tile each turn for a few turns and it costs all movement points when you walk in. Unless it is in your city simply walk out. If it's on your city only move out weak units that could die from the continuing damage.

After the Messari there are no additional aliens coming. To survive them you should have units with at least ~15 strength and something to bombard them (artillery, orbital strike, nukes). Also make use of terrain and flanking when you're attacking them.

[76561188078797539]

IIRC, the Messari spawn code prioritizes unclaimed tiles to spawn the aliens.

I've learned that the hard way when I started isolated on a large land-mass I couldn't colonize before the invasion. Almost all alien drops were right next-door to me.

Not sure if this is something Ail's patch changed or not, but after several attempts to figure out how to defend, I just decided to play something else for a while out of sheer frustration.

Having some sort of cap on number of spawns on a single landmass would have probably gone a long way in preventing similar situations.

[Ail]

I haven't done anything about the Messari in my Patch.
But I doubt that with my Patch the Messari would be your biggest problem. ^^
When I'm still alive once they arrive, I usually have the means to fight them off.

If you don't like them, you can disable them by going to the file: c:\SteamLibrary\SteamApps\common\Pandora\Data\World\Invasion.xml" and set the values for durationToImpactMin and durationToImpactMax to arbitrarily high value. This way the game will be long over before they can arive.

Other than that, the means of how to deal with them have been described by Zak0r.

[76561188078797539]

Ah, good to know. Thanks.

It's not so much that I dislike them - in fact, I think the invasion timing is pretty well set to keep the game engaging through sheer pressure.

But the implementation, as it stands, makes it feel like an overly unbalanced feature due to reliance on map layout.

Which is why I think putting in a safety net in terms of hard spawn caps depending on number of discrete land masses would be really, really helpful.