Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
You can improve the stats of named "hero"-type characters with successful missions, which improves the stats used by that mission. (So sabotage improves espionage and combat.) However, only Luke has the special ability to "Grow Stronger With The Force" even when he fails.
The trick is, if you fail miserably (which you will against a massive garrison led by a competent general) then the results come back in a single day, which massively speeds up the process, and it works on all stats, which you don't benefit from when espionaging nearby neutral systems repeatedly.
Although it does work with Leia as well once she is Force-aware. (This means having Luke meet Vader, then meet back up with Leia so that she's told she's Luke's sister, and gaining force powers, too.)
If Luke encounters Emperor Palapatine (after the Empire recruits all their presonel, they are alarmingly blase about sending the Emperor into harm's way...) then he gets like +5 to every stat each time they encounter. (Technically, this is "growing in the force", which boosts every stat, not boosting every stat, itself.)
After taking over the whole Sluis system early on by exploiting the garrisoned systems being liberated by wide-scale stormtrooper genocide, the Empire responded by basically taking every ship it wasn't parking on top of Coruscant and dumping them all on Sluis, for a total of 4 victory destroyers, 2 dreadnaughts, and a hydra plus all the stormtroopers and TIE fighters that go with it. Being as it was still turn 250-300, and I was just rolling out my third nebulon-B in the whole game, and my mon calamaris wouldn't be ready until turn 400, I had basically nothing to stop this but to play "catch me if you can".
Anyway, my important (read: have 3 shipyard) systems were guarded by 15 X/Y wings plus shields, but the victory destroyer fleets just attacked the planets I hadn't garrisoned yet with dumping 6 stormtrooper regiments on two planets before zipping off to chase ships in another sector. For some bizarre reason, they sent Vader and Palpatine to suppress revolts and diplomacy the solid-red planets with no starship cover, so I just sent my hero-cheese covette to spam missions against Palpatine. Within a few missions, though, Luke was "strong enough with the force" that he became a Jedi Student. (Which, incidentally, is apparently when you hit 230 combat...) This automtaically injures Luke, and he runs off to Dagobah after he heals. (Which is annoying, because the instant his stats become unstoppably godly is the instant he leaves...) However, Han and Chewie managed to capture the emperor after a couple tries. By that point, I had 4 minor heroes and 10 infiltrators running cover, so nobody got caught. That said, I do have to wonder how Corellian Covettes are built that they can comfortably house 12 imperial high command prisoners plus the emperor (and seriously, if the "prison" for the emperor isn't "freeze him in carbonite, zip to the furthest corner of the rim, shove him out the airlock, send several droid-piloted ships or auto-turrets out to blast anything that might come for it, and preferably aim for the heart of a particularly violent pulsar," then Alliance prisons aren't doing their jobs correctly. Who thinks keeping this guy alive is a good idea?!)
Anyway, point is, gaining force and running into Vader/Palpatine is supposed to happen, and it's part of the game's plot (although, technically, you're supposed to challenge Vader...) but you can vastly accelerate the timetable by taking advantage of this trick, while also massively upping your territory in the early game, which has compounding advantages down the road as you vastly outpace imperial naval construction in the early game. (Even if it still takes you a while to reach parity in naval power... and no, you can't sabotage whole star destroyers, I tried. You can genocide the stormtroopers and TIE fighters, but not the ships, themselves.)
It's not the Jedi way!
Seriously though, there are indeed quite a number of ways to really cheese this game's mechanics that the AI simply isn't prepared to comprehend or do anything about. The only real risk to that is that Luke might get captured super early and be lame whenever he finally gets out, but he's not that likely to get captured in the first place. Not sure why you wouldn't be able to sabotage star destroyers/other capital ships though, pretty sure I've done that plenty before. Maybe they're just moving before your mission can complete? Other than there typically being a lot of detection around them, I'm fairly certain they blow up just like anything else, except better because the stuff on them blows up too.
Says the guy who's been fighting a WAR this whole time. What did he think the other guys he was slicing in half with a lightsaber were just going to come back from time-out five minutes later?
Fortunately, at the time this game was made, that didn't exist! This game is mostly full of Expanded Universe cameos, instead. You just know that if a new one was made, Jar Jar would be a diplomat...
They didn't let me start a mission. When I clicked the star destroyer as a target, C3P0 just did that "May I ask WHAT IS GOING ON?!" thing again. Maybe I cicked the wrong icon or something, though, so I guess I'll try it from the fleet selector drop-down instead of the ship list?
The trick to preventing capture is having enough decoys. Infiltrators set to decoy for heroes are like dakka, you always need more. I tend to bake them in batches of a dozen because these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ die alot, but with even just two advanced training facilities, they take 2 days per agent. The only bad thing is you need to scroll through a ton of them EVERY SINGLE MISSION.
Protip: Take multiple ships with you (Corellian Covettes/Gunships are nice and cheap/fast to build, have infinite room for heroes, thousands of agents, and all the prisoners you can take alive) and sort who sits on what ship by job type if you're brining multiple agent types with you. (Or if you just want to make sure the prisoners don't get in the way and force a ton of control-clicks.)
As for tricks to the game in general, my favorite thus far by far has been the "playing footsie" with star destroyer doom squad. If you blockade a system, the Empire will invariably send just enough ships to wreck your ♥♥♥♥, even if it means sending them from the other end of the galaxy. Send out a decoy to lure the star destroyers in, then send in your real squad where the enemy fleet left.
In this game I'm playing now, I'm up to day 500 or so, and I'm starting to think the Empire had an economic collapse. I'm not seeing all those star destroyers they had a hundred turns ago, and I'm thinking maybe I cut off/sabotaged enough refineries that they are literally running out of supply to maintain them. The only fight I've been having has been sending corellian gunships, mon calamaris, and nebulon-Bs up against a dozen interceptors. (I "recover" my fighters immediately, but do have them.)
Amusingly, I initially had planned on pretty much just giving up Sesswana sector to the Empire, but they never did anything with it. I had just one minor hero kill a garrison with a ton of agent backup, and I went from one planet against Coruscant and another imperial-aligned planet that I was using just to buy time (and was getting regularly sabotaged to the point where I had to have my rim worlds mail a construction yard in to keep it in the game) but then the Empire lost interest in the area or something, and a single diplomat plus approximately 8 billion sullustans managed to secure the whole sector except for Coruscant, itself. (Seriously, is there ANY reason to use ANY ground troop besides a sullustan? They're cheap, have great detection, and even have decent defense. Poor attack? Who attacks before sabotaging everything, anyway?!)
And yes, I'm also quite certain that if the AI has maintenance shortfalls, it doesn't really know how to fix them and just will let its stuff blow up indiscriminately and not build anything because it can't.
I also love Sullustans, but I do believe that Mon Cals are better at actually defending against assaults or bombardments. I can't really prove it, but I strooongly suspect that 2 x 3 defense units is not as good as 1 x 6 defense unit, as an example. Sullustans have always just sorta disintegrated if they actually have to fight something that fights back, for me. They are ridiculously useful just for covert op prevention and sheer numbers/spamability, though. Colonizing with them is a breeze and so is preventing uprisings if you can keep from being attacked.
I eventually "found" all the missing victory destroyers. Vader decided it would be a good idea to invest in some rim planets in a sector I was already colonizing after I kicked them out of the Sluis sector for a third time and nabbed the emperor. I eventually found them on their next-to-last core planet to have any starship factories left after they were done babysitting Vader's diplomatic mission. (I went around sabotaging every construction facility and starship production facility to completely cripple the empire - Coruscant not only didn't have any, but was sending mines to fill up the last energy slots, too, for some bizarre reason.)
As for Sullustans, they fold like cards under attack, but that's not really the point. Mon Calamari are just as helpless against bombardment by star destroyer as anyone, and they don't land until after bombarding the crap out of my defenses. I find putting a single defense gun on a planet and then spamming Sullustrans is enough to both prevent sabotage and deter bombardment from all but the most determined enemy.
If I don't have that much defense, at least Sullustrans are cheap and fast to replace, and I have made a habit of blockading with a Correllian Corvette stuffed to the gills with infiltrators to decoy for a couple teams of heroes. (In my current game, Luke has over 300 combat, although I'm using him as a diplomat now to convert conquered worlds with his 170 diplomacy. Chewwie, meanwhile, has 160 combat, and can single-handedly take out generals if given enough infiltrator decoys to overwhelm garrisons. A minor hero I had that turned out force sensitive (Roget Jaris) is also pushing close to 200 in espionage and combat.) In my current game, I made a habit of just letting the Empire take a world I couldn't yet defend, then moving a ship in another sector to blockade one of their worlds to get the star destroyers on a wild goose chase, and send in my genocide squadrons to systematically eliminate the garrison to bring the planet back into the fold. (Of course, if I had just sabotaged the star destroyers, that would have made this game a LOT faster...)
This is pretty much how you have to do all missions. Especially when you need to take Coruscant, or any other planet with two shields and dozens of regiments of garrison, there's no alternative to having a skilled agent with a billion decoys. It's just that this trick gains you more stats early on/triggers Luke's force training earlier.
Protip- Luke is always up top in the list, so just click the second character, scroll to the bottom, and shift-click that, and you can throw a pile of 50 guys on decoy at a time.
If running missions is tedious for you, then maybe you should play a different game? There's really no way around doing this.
If you've never used decoys, then I would have to presume you fail missions almost constantly or you only target empty systems.
Decoys are straight-up mandatory if you want to perform missions against anything being guarded by any sort of real garrison, especially one commanded by a general. (Rule of thumb, three decoys per stormtrooper regiment per "real" person on the mission. Multiply by 1/10th of the leadership score of their general if they have one.) Either you're playing against someone who has no clue what they're doing in multiplayer, or you've only played the very early game in easy mode in single player.
As for whether it's a cheat or not, if the developers didn't want you to have the capacity to sit in a ship above a planet and pull missions without the round-trip time, they wouldn't have prorammed in the "return to the ship you started from" code. Many missions, especially espionage have a very lengthy "on the ground" period of time (about 15-20 days for espionage) whereas sabotage takes only 2-3 days. It's 1 day specifically if you fail badly or there is some invalidation of the mission. (As in, the target moved/was destroyed by another sabotage mission/etc.) Considering how many planets I go through where I need to wipe out 6 stormtrooper regiments and a general, I suspect the low turnaround time on sabotage was quite intentional, as was being able to rapid-fire these things.
Frankly, if anything's a cheat because it's spammable, it's planetary bombardments, which negate most of the purpose of ground forces, and can be performed by the AI an infinite number of times in a row before the game bothers notifying you that it happened.
Huh? Could you please give a few examples using your formula? I remember reading that too many decoys could have a negative affect.
You read wrong.
Too many non-decoy agents have a negative effect.
Basically, every non-agent unit in the game has a "detection" value. Whenever an agent tries to do anything in hostile territory, their stealth is checked against the combined total detection of every unit in the system.
This roll takes place per non-decoy agent. That means that sending one agent gives all the enemies one chance to catch you and foil your mission. Sending two agents gives every enemy two chances to catch you and foil the mission. Three agents gives every enemy three chances, and so on.
Because of this, unless your target has a combat rating too high for your best agent to take on alone, you should never send more than one agent on the actual mission, as it does nothing but drag your best agent down to have anyone helping them.
Decoys, meanwhile, exist to help your agent not get caught - every time there's a chance they might get caught, the decoys basically add their own skill points onto the agent's stealth so that they can get through. Decoys only seem to work once, though, so to give the same amount of protection, you need twice as many decoys for two non-decoy agents, and you need three times as many decoys for three non-decoy agents.
Generals, commanders, and admirals meanwhile, multiply the garrison/fighter wing/fleet's detection rating by a fraction of their leadership skill, thus making garrisons vastly more effective with a general, and forcing the player to consequently multiply the number of decoys to compensate.
Because of this, the strategy is simple: Your best guy does the mission, everyone else is a decoy. If you have a lot of agents, the best plan is to first send in the best agent with everyone else as a decoy until you destroy most of the garrison or capture the general, and then switch to running multiple missions at the same time as the defenses are breached. There's rarely a need for more than one non-decoy unit on any given mission unless you're capturing Vader or some similarly super-high-combat-rating character that requires stacking tons of combat against him.
Decoys
1) What do you mean when you say decoys only seem to work once? Simply that 1 decoy will not add its points to 2 agents, right? If I stack 15 decoys on a mission with 1 agent EACH of their individual +Espionage ratings be accumulated and added to the real agent? Basically you can brute force through any defenses with enough decoys?
2) Real characters (personnel) vs. special forces (commandos, espionage droids etc). Is there any benefit to using real personnel as decoys for missions? If all the decoys do is add their +Espionage would stacking 2 Imperial Commandos (55 Espionage each) as decoys have the same effect as a real imperial officer that had 110 Espionage? If so I can't ever see using real personal as decoys as being anything but a waste of their talents and putting them in harms way?
3) Does any stat but Espionage matter for decoys? Combat I think comes into play if the decoy is detected to determine if they're killed or captured, right? This is kind of irrelevant though if you're just using disposable spec forces for decoys and not real personnel. Leadership has no use I imagine nor decoys, or diplomacy of course.
Real Agents
You mention that on a mission where stealth/detection is involved that each real agent's espionage rating is checked separately, whereas espionage ratings of decoys are added on to a real agent. However, later on you mention that a mission vs a high combat rating character may require stacking combat against them.
Combat Rating:
4) Does this mean that the combat rating of all real agents in a mission are added together and then checked against their target? In my game Vader currently has a Combat Rating of 239. Does this mean if 3 real agents were sent against him and their total combined Combat was 250 ... AND they had enough decoys for each of them to not be detected that they would be successful?
5) Does having more personnel on a planet or ship provide any defensive bonus ASIDE from a detection bonus from their Leadership stat they bestow when assigned a General/Commander/Admiral? For instance, if Emperor Palpatine and Vader are both on Chandrila, and that task force is sent to capture Vader.. do Palpatine's Combat or Espionage stats have any bearing on the success of their mission?
6) Once you've passed the detection checks what role does Combat play in Sabotage, if any? Regiments, Facilties and Defense Structures don't seem to have any common stat.
Regiments have ATK/DEF STR, Bombardment Value and Detection. Defense Structures have Weapon Rating, Shield Strength and Bombardment Defense Strength. Facilities simply have Bombardment Value.
Does Combat raitng matter towards any of these stats or is simply.... IF your Espionage rating beats Detection ratings THEN target = destroyed.
Diplomacy Rating and Research:
7) If stats on real agents stack (aside from Espionage which you say is checked in separate rolls) does this mean that 2 Diplomats on 1 mission will have their ratings combined and have the same effect as if they were on 2 separate mission? Basically.. if you're trying to convert 1 planet as quickly as possible is it better 2 missions with 1 diplomat or 1 mission with 2? I've wondered this for a WHILE.
8) Same question as above but applied to research. Separate missions or combined? I think I remember that the amount/quality of facilties you had made a difference on research results.
Thanks in advance!!
I'm not entirely sure how it works, having not looked inside the game mechanics, but I have my guesses based upon trial-and-error gaming of the system. But basically, I think it works like this: Either every possible detector adds up all their detection skill to have one big roll against the stealth value of the mission (non-decoy) agent, and this creates one big random event, or it's done individually, with every single possible detector having an individual roll, and a ton of small chances to detect your agent add up to an overall chance of success that can vary wildly.
In the former case, I think decoys are simply split up, and have a fraction of their stealth value added onto the stealth of every mission agent, with every additional mission (non-decoy) agent diluting this protection.
In the later case, I think that decoys only work if the agent would have otherwise been caught to essentially give the agent a reroll.
Either way, I know that with enough decoys, I never get foiled, which means that it's possible to simply stack the deck so heavily that I have a 100% success rate, while it might otherwise be something like a 50% success rate. Because of that, however, I heavily suspect it's the former possibility.
Well, yes and no. No, there's no special benefit to using a named agent versus a purchasing a generic agents for decoys, and in fact, that's pretty much the primary reason to buy generic sabotage or kidnapping units. Yes, in that every point of espionage helps, even if your decoy unit only has 14 in espionage, so if you have nothing better to do with the guy, you might as well send them along for the ride, as well.
Practically speaking, only espionage matters. Maybe combat helps with them not being captured, but if you're worrying about whether or not they'll be captured, you should be sending more decoys, anyway.
Remember: If your agent fails the mission part of a mission, they never get captured or injured outside of events like Luke fighting Vader. The only real risk is in the infiltration portion of a mission. Enough decoys, and you can fail hundreds of missions in a row. (That's kind of the basis of the trick that started this thread...)
It's random, and again, I'm not entirely sure of the mechanics of stacking, but you likely are going to fail in that case, although that's mostly because the rules give an advantage to the targets so that you have to overwhelm them with far greater combat skill to have a good chance to capture them. (So try again with a combined total of 300 or 350 combat...) Again, though, I find that there approaches a point where you can achieve 100% success rates, so I think there's some point where if you have, say, 1.5 times the combat value of the target, you gain 100% success rate.
They are generally useless deadweight or mere targets unless they're assigned to be a General/Commander/Admiral. Remember: sending units on missions unassigns these things and it isn't reset until you manually reassign them as G/C/A.
HOWEVER, there is a special rule for jedi units, where jedi doing missions against planets with other jedi are almost always detected because of the force. Hence, Vader just sitting on his ass picking boogers out of his respritory machinery can detect when Luke comes on a mission, and force an event to be triggered.
Combat is the only thing that matters in sabotage once you're past the detection/infiltration phase. It's basically a dice roll between the mission agent(s) total combat versus the target's combat.
I've noticed that garrison units seem to have a combat rating based upon their "assault" value, or whatever it is that is used for capturing a planet, not their defense, since war droids and wookie regiments are the units that take the highest combat ratings to sabotage. I guess they just have an effective combat rating of ten times their assault value.
As for buildings, I've got no idea, but I think they just have some hidden default value, and it's not terribly high. (I'll blind guess that it's something like 50.)
You probably want two missions.
The reason is, missions are basically pass/fail, so having two diplomats with good diplomacy skills will simply result in overkilling the diplomacy mission, whereas two missions can gain twice the successes in the same time... if they succeed.
(I should point out, however, that several types of missions have two layers of success; Espionage missions, for example can get a basic success and reveal information about the target system or get a large success and reveal the target and a random other enemy-held system. Likewise, there are two levels of foiling: Simply stopping the mission, or killing/capturing some of the agents in the mission. That said, anything beyond this "big success" point is wasted overkill, and I can get the two-system "big success" with just two Bothan spies, so it's still a reason to split forces.)
The thing is, however, even decent diplomats fail an awfully large percentage of the time, and you can probably stack some weak diplomacy characters with good ones to boost the chances if you have nothing better to do with them.
Always separate with the exception of Bevel Limelisk(sp?) (the Imperial all-research-fields guy with crap stats in everything). Success at a research mission basically just subtracts an arbitrary number of days off the "time until next unlock" variable that otherwise ticks down on its own. "Overkill" on research missions is meaningless.
As far as I know, amount of facilities has no bearing on success, although you need at least one facility to start. I simply chain my researchers to my most secure facilities and tell them they can't leave until their tech tree is complete. Moving them around just wastes research time (but so does being blockaded). Just drop them in your headquarters and forget them.