So... The campaign.

[Tricking Trapster]

I want to like the game and the campaign, I really do. I like the progression system put in. The one thing that kills it for me is the fact that you can't save and load. I've written a whole review about this so I won't repeat myself too much, but I don't mind the game being hard, I just hate it being tedious.

If you make a critical error, you can't go back 2 minutes and do it right, you have to do the whole map over again, even if you did everything else up until that point correctly. Which can take a lot of time and repeating yourself is tedious and annoying. I can't get over what a huge design flaw it is that there is no proper save/load system for an RTS campaign. Survival not being able to do that in? Sure, whatever, point of the gamemode. But campaign? Come on.

I want to like the game. Help.

[MeToLee]

That's why my experience with the game gone sour. At the start of the game and enjoyed it immensely. Now I hate it. Unfortunetely we wont get a patch that will allow us to qs ql or go back to the previous auto save for a 10 year old game. It is what it is.

[rdbury]

This is not a casual game and mistakes have consequences. The key is to make your base mistake proof. Post additional guards in case infected breach your outer perimeter. make your defensive walls thicker than they need to be, etc. The game can be beaten with enough practice, Everyone loses a campaign occasionally, if not it probably means you need to increase the difficulty. But when that happens you need to think about what you were doing wrong, not blame the game.

[Tricking Trapster]

'Not a casual game' is not a good excuse to be honest. If 'not casual' is the excuse for the game becoming tedious then I suppose math is also not for casual people. And it's not even doing the whole 'punishment' thing correctly. Your punishment for losing the map in the campaign? Oh my god you lose 10% of some kind of points that do not matter in the campaign itself, whoop dee doo. If I really want over an hour of progress to be lost to a single mistake I'll go play league of legends or dota 2 man.

Your advice is fine for a survival map but for a campaign it just doen't cut it, especially because the campaign maps are fixed. Zero variance. Fail the last ten percent of a map? Well lucky you, you get to do the first 90 percent all over again in the same way, adjust a little bit for that last ten percent, woops, wasn't enough, then do the map aaaaaaall over again, with the first part being the exact same AGAIN. Games are meant to be fun, not torture, right?

[Tricking Trapster]

Because I WANT to try and enjoy it. I just get angry that one huge, major flaw is ruining it so hard despite all the good qualities the game has.

[Silhouette Fleur]

Not worth arguing with folk who have no respect for other people's time.

Anywho, this game suffers from a few such things, being able to replay the first couple missions and build up some upgrade points would also be a nice feature.

It definitely doesn't have wide market appeal.

[Olinser]

Originally posted by Tricking Trapster:

Because I WANT to try and enjoy it. I just get angry that one huge, major flaw is ruining it so hard despite all the good qualities the game has.

Well the game isn't being updated anymore.

So, what's your point? This is the game's end state. If you don't like it how it is, it ain't changing no matter how much you whine.

[HeathenSW]

Well, you can make manual saves at least. When you save and go to the main menu, you can alt-tab/quit the game, go into the saves folder (documents\my games\theyarebillions\saves) and make a copy of your save. Then if things went bad you just replace the original with the copy, thus making the time lost minimal.

[Lanosa]

That game is supposed to be hard in the field of "you just have 1 save each colony, you lose the colony, you lose it's save". But, in the campaign, you can create backup while in map, so you can go back if you want keep your losses to 0.

[rdbury]

Originally posted by Lanosa:

... so you can go back if you want keep your losses to 0.

Not that anyone here would would exploit this idea to improve their score. It seems odd though that you can't replay attack missions once they've been won, so I've been using backups to work around this.

[Tricking Trapster]

I'll bet that if a mod came out that just added a convenient save/load feature it would be one of the most popular mods for the game.

[qwe229a]

I'm curious, what difficulty level are you playing the campaign on?

[Tricking Trapster]

It was my first playthrough, so the normal difficulty.

[lumina]

Well that part isn't going to change. You can manually pull files and re load them if you want manual saves. The developer didn't want you to save though and they aren't working on this game anymore. If that's a deal breaking and you don't want to do the manual process, then it's not a game for you.

But I never got into the campaign. But the other mode doesn't have saves either, so going there won't help you.

[MyUrp1]

But if you lose in survival mode, you don't have to play the SAME EXACT MAP again. You get to play a whole new map, it's different every time.

I've lost a lot of games. A LOT of games. I lose about 70% of my games. But it's still fun, because every game is different.

I gave up on the Campaign at the Highlands because I couldn't stand the thought of having to replay it if I lost. So I didn't even try.

[Tricking Trapster]

Of course, I have no problem with survival mode. A campaign is just such a big part of an RTS and when it's just this fundamentally broken by a frankly missing feature it hurts the game a lot.