Basic (RTS) strategy tips

[SyntaxError]

Hi,

let me preface this by saying that I play games to relax and with a very non-competitive mindset. I like to take my time building stuff (so I tend to turtle), I like RPGs, and honestly, I don't really care much for 'testing my limits' or for 'winning against terrible odds'. So that said, I'm playing this on easy.

However I'm getting absolutely STEAMROLLED during one of the early main missions: the one where you get your first dwarf base, have to open a magic barrier, find a secret backdoor and then wipe out a load of enemy centers/towers. My army is getting decimated by freakingly huge armies including 4-5 fire golems, dozens of dwarf archers (that deploy into artillery mode immediately) and a few of those super duper melee tanks. My heroes either stand back chucking spells that could just as well be wet noodles at single targets, or (in the case of my tanky-built melee heroes) get obliterated before they even reach the enemy front line.

I remember in the original SF3, I could pretty much solo the maps with my heroes as long as I didn't start the quests straight away, but this is not an option here, because of the barrier. Plus, heroes feel decidedly weaker this time around.

I think I'm making some massive mistakes here, on 'easy' this game really shouldn't make me want to tear my hair out. So I suppose I shouldn't explore/research/build and just beeline towards the enemy outposts, throwing basic units at them? Do tank heroes even work? Does it get better when heroes make it past the initial levels?

Honestly, at this point any advice would be welcome. Please no 'u suck'/'git gud' posts -- I already know I do, and I try.

Thanks!

[SyntaxError]

I really don't see why you seem keen on turning this rather peripheral tangent into a question of honour or w/e, but it's your time and nerves, knock yourself out. I might still learn something from it. You'd probably want to make sure that you are indeed operating under the same basic conditions, i.e. let the game run unattended for an hour or two while you sit behind the wall (watch a movie or something). Otherwise 'it was different for me' will be a very valid objection that you won't be able to handwave as 'moving goalposts'. (And the objection could still come anyway, as we are operating with a game that is a black box for us. For example, if your game doesn't throw those massive 10+ golem and 20+ soldier waves at you in 2-minute-intervals, then something else is off. Could be a weird spawning algorithm condition we're not seeing, could be a bug... who knows.)

Edit: Thinking more on this, I think the debate shows the result of imprecise communication. We have two claims here.

Thesis A: When the player starts the invasion after some time*, the game throws frequent*, massive* waves at the player invasion force. (*: operationalise however you want, my suggestion would be a generous floor of 2 hours; 1 wave / 2 minutes; 4+ golems, 24+ footsoldiers each)

Thesis B: These waves overwhelm player forces and repel the invasion if the player operates out of the bases to the south of the wall exclusively and leaves neutral/enemy bases to the north of it untouched before initiating the invasion.

A is easily observable and independent of player skill, B requires A and does depend on player skill. Which is it that you feel needs correcting?

[PFN_LIST_CORRUPT]

Originally posted by Raf:

Yeah it's OK guys but then again, no need to prove anything.
I think there's still something we are missing there, a mechanics that changes how enemy behaves or something, because form you experience PFN_LIST_CORRUPT, it doesn't seem that you had tidal enemy raids (10 golems and something like 50/60 other troops) to both of your regions every 30 seconds, looks like it was rather piece of cake so, question is, why did I (and others) get that?

Let me explain a little bit more then.

I've played this map twice and the last one I recorded took the tunnel shortcut, but the first time I play when at the time the game just release, I took the whole map.

First, there will be some enemy forces that is with the already established enemy outpost roaming on the map and they're really fairly powerful and relatively close to the sector that you occupied. Then there's enemy character leading a band of regiment that will come to harass you. It is possible that you were being confronted by 2 forces at the same time which I don't recommend you to sending your army to defend the location. Best you find a choke point and fight smart.

If you had already prepared the production pipeline in the first two sectors where the enemy won't come through the barrier if you didn't ask certain dwarf to dispel it. You should have your military powerful enough to defend and repel to enemy character and his warband alone. Once you killed their character, I think it would be a good time to make a push, to see if you can take 1 or 2 more sector or so. But since there're units guarding the locations, you shouldn't fight them if you reckon the enemy force cannot be taken out at ease, or say you won't have enough force left to defend yourself. Because what happens is that AI had most of the area captured and they could probably replenish faster than your army could, had you not take half of the map that is. You fight a battle 80 vs 80 you and AI would both lose military strength, whereas the AI army would likely be coming back sooner than yours.

While you're mustering you military, you should deploy some of your regiment at the gate where the barrier was dispelled, and hold on to it til you have enough military strength. That is a good choke point where the enemy cant outflank your army. After you occupied some of the sectors, you can use the godstone to transport your army to defend, very convenient. And the rest of the session you can just snowball with additional stone hall and granite hall and hitting the population cap.

[Raf]

Originally posted by PFN_LIST_CORRUPT:

Originally posted by Raf:

Yeah it's OK guys but then again, no need to prove anything.
I think there's still something we are missing there, a mechanics that changes how enemy behaves or something, because form you experience PFN_LIST_CORRUPT, it doesn't seem that you had tidal enemy raids (10 golems and something like 50/60 other troops) to both of your regions every 30 seconds, looks like it was rather piece of cake so, question is, why did I (and others) get that?

Let me explain a little bit more then.

I've played this map twice and the last one I recorded took the tunnel shortcut, but the first time I play when at the time the game just release, I took the whole map.

First, there will be some enemy forces that is with the already established enemy outpost roaming on the map and they're really fairly powerful and relatively close to the sector that you occupied. Then there's enemy character leading a band of regiment that will come to harass you. It is possible that you were being confronted by 2 forces at the same time which I don't recommend you to sending your army to defend the location. Best you find a choke point and fight smart.

If you had already prepared the production pipeline in the first two sectors where the enemy won't come through the barrier if you didn't ask certain dwarf to dispel it. You should have your military powerful enough to defend and repel to enemy character and his warband alone. Once you killed their character, I think it would be a good time to make a push, to see if you can take 1 or 2 more sector or so. But since there're units guarding the locations, you shouldn't fight them if you reckon the enemy force cannot be taken out at ease, or say you won't have enough force left to defend yourself. Because what happens is that AI had most of the area captured and they could probably replenish faster than your army could, had you not take half of the map that is. You fight a battle 80 vs 80 you and AI would both lose military strength, whereas the AI army would likely be coming back sooner than yours.

While you're mustering you military, you should deploy some of your regiment at the gate where the barrier was dispelled, and hold on to it til you have enough military strength. That is a good choke point where the enemy cant outflank your army. After you occupied some of the sectors, you can use the godstone to transport your army to defend, very convenient. And the rest of the session you can just snowball with additional stone hall and granite hall and hitting the population cap.

Makes sence. In my case I opened the barrier and settled in the first region just above before having a fully fledged army. I then tried to take the shortcut zone on the other side of the tunnel three times to no avail (enemy had a huge army stationed here and he was replacing his losses almost immediately). I then change plan and started to expand at the barrier, at this time the enemy had time to take additional regions.
I then took the second region after thr barrier towards the north, it's here that thr enemy went mental throwing at me all he could. I made it eventually but that was extremely hard, like probably the hardest RTS game I had ever played (not a newb as I spent countless hours on Dune 2 and C&C when I was a kid).
As it's been said on the post above mine, I guess what determines the difficulty here is the time at which you open the barrier.

[XartaX]

So you don't want a video then? Whatever. I'm not gonna waste my time recording if you're just going to move the goalpost and find a new excuse why it's really impossible although other people don't have that problem.

[Raf]

Originally posted by XartaX:

So you don't want a video then? Whatever. I'm not gonna waste my time recording if you're just going to move the goalpost and find a new excuse why it's really impossible although other people don't have that problem.

Well, I never said that was impossible, in fact I did it... But after 3+ hours of intensive non stop combat, in other words, far from being the "easy RTS phases that can be done in 30min max" described here and there.
So no, don't bother, I believe you, it's just that, at least on that mission (had no time to play other missions yet), there is some trigger that makes it not easy at all.

[XartaX]

Originally posted by Raf:

Yes, you can repel them for a while with the help of towers but then you will very soon run out of Iron and Charcoal which means that you will be limited to standard soldiers (can’t remember the unit name) while the enemy will have resources to continue their pressing for hours and hours.
In that case, good luck to conquer anything, it’s just not possible for the simple reason that you won’t have the necessary force.
Damn, it’s not advanced physics we’re talking about here but a simple video-game, let’s stop with that being a good player or not thing. Give a bicycle instead of a F1 to Schumacher he won’t win a race, it’s the same here.
But still, if people claim that’s it’s possible to turtle with the first two regions for a while and then to successfully conquer the enemy regions (without the Necro exploit), it's easy, first mission, normal difficulty, record it and put it on YouTube to show how it’s done.

This is you literally saying it's impossible and demanding a video because you refuse to believe it's possible.

[SyntaxError]

'Impossible' and 'autowin' are just two values on one continuous scale. Raf is literally saying that it IS possible (s/he did it), but that it was pretty far away from the 'easy' end of the scale (that s/he picked in the beginning) -- an experience I most certainly share, otherwise this thread wouldn't exist.

It gets far better if you follow advice given in this thread, I just believe a couple of basic strategic tips should be spelled out somewhere in the tutorial, the 'click button here then click there' stuff is hilariously trivial by comparison. Something like 'The enemy also captures bases over time and exploits resources, so to avoid getting overwhelmed, early expansion is strongly recommended. Turtling too early will get you killed.'

On another note, I still do wish you could turtle better, but there are several issues that make it pretty much 'impossible' (see the scale thing again... subjective statement, obviously):

- towers should not bind valuable civilian population. Make towers a bit more expensive resource-wise to compensate.

- towers should be made of stone / hardwood, not paper. Some enemy archers just sneeze in its general direction and it crumbles... ridiculous.

- we need walls and gates.

- pop caps -- ugh. I'm not sure the enemy is even subject to this c[r]ap, but it significantly impedes the player's ability to build an overwhelming force behind their walls. (It's a pet peeve of mine, like any sort of 'pop cap'/'command points' mechanic. If I have the resources, let me build it. Don't gate it twice. If you feel it's necessary, make it a cap that can be extended (virtually) indefinitely by building stuff, e.g. farms (in that case it's space that's the limiting factor, but it's more acceptable to me than some abstract number, and visualises clearly the limits of turtling).)

[XartaX]

Did you even read what I quoted? He literally said it was 100% completely impossible and no person on earth could do it.

That he changed his mind later doesn't change that fact.

Turtling isn't any less viable in this game than a game like Starcraft/Warcraft as long as you at least expand to get the resource types you need. Which is usually 1 or 2 additional areas (depending on the map, although you should take more of course). It's just that the campaign AI actually punishes you (a little bit, not as much as a real player would) for it here unlike those games. In multiplayer (where the enemy is actually intelligent... most of the time) you will get utterly destroyed if you turtle in either game.

Towers are garbage except for stalling for time / tanking.

You can max pop cap with relatively few territories and have a good amount of workers in your main area as dwarf. The race you should be playing anyway if you want to turtle because their units are made for holding/controlling areas.