Love the concept of Conquest, but defending is not fun

[wayne]

Attack missions are pretty good. Take an enemy position with limited resources. It ends as soon as you capture their control points. It works well with the over arching campaign resource management, evolves over time and demonstrates that progression. It's not perfect either, but whatever.

Defending feels like a detached mini-game. Their losses mean nothing, they're hurling ridiculous amounts of ♥♥♥♥ at you, and they do so for nearly 30 minutes. Regardless of how you perform. There is no means for decisive end to battle (for the defenders), and if you ♥♥♥♥ up and lose, you could be losing 20+ minutes in with almost no way to react or adapt. Not to mention, when you're winning it's usually just a matter of staring at the screen while your tanks blast everything.

At the very least, please make these quicker. 1k points? 500 would still be too much with how boring these are.

I'd suggest making it so holding 2 points very challenging, but holding them ends things especially quick. This could be done by automatically placing all your AI defensive units on one point, and/or having the AI act as 2 teams, each focusing specifically on one point. Something like that anyway.

[kensai606]

If you're going to have strong gripes about the game, and then share them, you could at least think a bit. From my viewpoint it's like you've barely scratched the surface.
An observation: the enemy scales its forces according to yours. Field the biggest force you can, so will the AI.
Field 1 man, a sniper, and watch what the AI does. Gone is the overwhelming army. If it uses 8 men, you get them drip by drip.

It's a key point that really rewards careful planning. Just what do you NEED to use? Less is more, but what and how?
I use a very mobile defence which I find fun! I've had epic battles with a lone sniper. I've used a single Kubelwagen, driving, ambushing and then running back to drive and do it again. Then I might use 3 Tigers supported with everything!
I'm currently fighting in the factory, basing everything on a flamethrower!

It's not perfect. But it's immense fun. Real world tactics work!
I even make notes and plan things on my tablet during the day.
Now back to my flamethrower....

[⇓S'lakk⇓]

Originally posted by wang:

Attack missions are pretty good. Take an enemy position with limited resources. It ends as soon as you capture their control points. It works well with the over arching campaign resource management, evolves over time and demonstrates that progression. It's not perfect either, but whatever.

Defending feels like a detached mini-game. Their losses mean nothing, they're hurling ridiculous amounts of ♥♥♥♥ at you, and they do so for nearly 30 minutes. Regardless of how you perform. There is no means for decisive end to battle (for the defenders), and if you ♥♥♥♥ up and lose, you could be losing 20+ minutes in with almost no way to react or adapt. Not to mention, when you're winning it's usually just a matter of staring at the screen while your tanks blast everything.

At the very least, please make these quicker. 1k points? 500 would still be too much with how boring these are.

I'd suggest making it so holding 2 points very challenging, but holding them ends things especially quick. This could be done by automatically placing all your AI defensive units on one point, and/or having the AI act as 2 teams, each focusing specifically on one point. Something like that anyway.

Keep in mind that the conquest we have now is not the final version. The developers plan to do a massive overhaul in the future, so try to bear with until this happens! I'm sure you and many other users suggestions and concerns will be rectified.

[Moisesjns]

I will say, I hope in future we have some kind of settings like he said where we can change the length to be 500 points, etc. I also think being told upfront about the enemy reflecting your force being in the game somewhere. Cause i was not aware of that. And now i finally see that they do indeed mirror.

[wayne]

Originally posted by kensai606:

If you're going to have strong gripes about the game, and then share them, you could at least think a bit. From my viewpoint it's like you've barely scratched the surface.
An observation: the enemy scales its forces according to yours. Field the biggest force you can, so will the AI.
Field 1 man, a sniper, and watch what the AI does. Gone is the overwhelming army. If it uses 8 men, you get them drip by drip.

It's a key point that really rewards careful planning. Just what do you NEED to use? Less is more, but what and how?
I use a very mobile defence which I find fun! I've had epic battles with a lone sniper. I've used a single Kubelwagen, driving, ambushing and then running back to drive and do it again. Then I might use 3 Tigers supported with everything!
I'm currently fighting in the factory, basing everything on a flamethrower!

It's not perfect. But it's immense fun. Real world tactics work!
I even make notes and plan things on my tablet during the day.
Now back to my flamethrower....

My issue was the length of these battles, more than anything. I thought I was clear on that.

Besides that, what you're suggesting is not exactly a matter of 'thinking' as it isn't intuitive at all; there is no reason for me to try fielding less (especially after getting swarmed) and to assume it's dynamic-- why would it be? Anyone would assume the enemy forces would be tied to the stage of the war (the campaign).

I don't doubt it's more fun that way or anything, so good suggestion I guess. Either way, apparently it's still a WIP as mentioned above.

Originally posted by Mosesjns:

I will say, I hope in future we have some kind of settings like he said where we can change the length to be 500 points, etc. I also think being told upfront about the enemy reflecting your force being in the game somewhere. Cause i was not aware of that. And now i finally see that they do indeed mirror.

This makes more sense than any specific suggestion, really. More options, and more info.

[kensai606]

I'd also point out that if you shorten the battle, then for the AI to get all it's forces in you're going to get a flood coming at you. If you can beat that, then what's the point of the rest of the game? You've already shown you can beat everything. Where's the challenge?

The AI at the moment might mass attack you, but it might not. It has finite forces, predetermined. Altering the time limit inevitably alters everything.
I find some of the battles extremely difficult, and I really mean 'extremely'.
I know the battle will last 30 minutes, accept that 1 detail and move on.

Completely breaking the core mechanics purely for a shorter battle isn't something that should be done without a proven replacement.

[Carnifex]

I agree with the op that the defense mission length/pacing is poor and I hope this gets looked at when the devs do the overhaul mentioned above.

[Flying Birdy]

I think it only feels boring because the AI is not making good tactical decisions. The only real strategy the AI deploys is pure human wave tactics; endless waves of tanks and squads to hopefully overwhelm defences. Thus, from the player's perspective, defence battles often just feel like "staring at the screen" while tanks are shooting.

Rather than making the defence battles shorter, I think the better direction would be for the AI to have better or at least more varied tactical decision-making. Devs should just make the AI attack from different angles and attack different control points. Right now, so much of the defence battles are just the AI constantly sending everything into 1/2 of the control points and often from the same angles of approach. There are no attempts at infiltrating and attacking from behind using infantry or alternating attacks towards different objectives.

Another solution could be for the AI to use much more indirect fire weapons like mortars or howitzers on offence like how the AI does in MOWAS2. The AI in conquest does use mortars and howitzers right now, but not nearly enough or well enough for it to have a noticeable impact. I imagine it would be easy to give the AI more mortars/howitzers and doing so could completely change how defence missions play out. There would actually be back and forth and counter attacks if the AI had to tools to displace an entrenched opponent.

[kensai606]

I agree that any improvement in the AI would be great, but let's be honest, it's getting better as we move along.
The AI does use ranged attack, mortars are a real pain. Sometimes you can see the enemy crawling as they attack, so they do try to infiltrate. The improvement I'd like is how the AI reacts to what I'm doing. I'd like to see them load up with anti tank if I go tank heavy. It would be a new dimension.