Bay 12 Games Forum

As someone who played Hazeron on and off for several years with various accounts I doubt I'll be playing Gravity Well 6.

I remember WAY back I played a really early version of Gravity Well where it was just lines shooting dots at other lines and I had some good fun with it but I'm not really drawn to the new one, perhaps the 3D turns me off.

But the big reason for me is that, loath as I am to say it, I don't have much confidence in Haxus to develop and manage this project. Hazeron was an amazing game, but suffered from a variety of longstanding problems that really crippled any hope of a large playerbase. Additionally, at least in my view, he made some questionable design decisions that angered a number of people and for visibly little gain.

In my opinion he hasn't shown sufficient capability to nurture this game to anything beyond a small community.

If he ever ends up reviving Hazeron I'll probably give it a fair crack simply because I desperately want it to succeed, but I'm not interested in a space shooter.

If it turns out that I'm totally wrong and this becomes a success, I'll gladly apologise.

and both weapons' ammo are notable heavier than standard ammunitions.

Once you hit lasers, the laser machinegun uses the same lightweight AA battery that all the other laser guns have

On another note, I'm now confident there's something hinky with the air combat autoresolve, I usually do it manually but decided to test the single foxtrot vs scout thing a bit more. Without even touching the keyboard when I go into the tactical air battle I win 100% of the time with no damage (alenium torpedoes hit before the scout is in range), but autoresolving results in serious damage (usually the plane is down to below 20% health) which leads to extensive downtime.

So I'd strongly recommend not autoresolving that particular matchup for the time being.

Well now my enjoyment has turned into frustration thats probably gonna make me abandon this island.

I started a new sandbox game and everything was going perfectly until I hit the cold war era. I'd had no issues with public opinion or happiness and I'd cruised through the other two eras but as soon as I hit the cold war I got about 15 rebels (out of a population of 500) and naturally they decided to try and attack me.

Now the rebel groups themselves aren't a problem at all. My military is far and away stronger and I inevitably crush them once my army actually decides to go over and fight them (seriously, my tanks drive PAST rebel groups ignoring them entirely because they will only fight at buildings that are under attack). The problem comes because the rebels can rise up at any building on the island at any time. Naturally this means that some plantation out in the boonies vomits out a bunch of rebels who immediately spin 180 and torch the place before marching into my army and getting slaughtered. For some reason the game counts the destruction of ANY building during a rebel uprising as 'the rebels breaking my defenses' which results in a significant increase in rebel threat. Combine that with the fact that defeated rebels rout rather than dying and it means that they end up attack me again in a few months.

It doesn't matter what I do I can't stem the tide of constant rebel uprisings. I have approval moving between 80 and 90, average happiness about 75, all my factions are 50 or above (most are far above and militarists love me). USSR is 50 relation and US is about 80, I'm running a noticable surplus and have a sizable army but these 2 dozen rebels are crippling me and I can't seem to stop them. I've run the amnesty edict whenever it's been available and it doesn't seem to affect the rebels at all because a month later all of them will explode out of a parking garage somewhere and take down a single building resulting in a big increase in rebel threat again.

I can understand the idea behind making the rebels bolder if they succeed during an uprising but I'm crushing them with my military every time and end up paying a couple thousand to fix a single building every few months when I'm making tens of thousands in trade. The biggest fuck you is when I slaughter their squads and I see 20 individual rebels walk home right past the soldiers they were just shooting at without anyone making any attempt to stop them, and then the same 20 rebels come back three months later and fight again. Oh, and if the rebels kill one of your soldiers, he actually dies rather than calling it a day and going home like the rebels do, so if you use high school education soldiers like me, hope you have a fuckload of high school educated reserves sitting around not doing anything (like, say, working in every single factory on the island).

Despite my usual reluctance to buy things before they're released, I decided to go for this and try it out.

Unfortunately I get 1-2 second hitches all the time making it pretty much unplayable. It happens everywhere, even on the main menu, seemingly at random but seems to also be reliably triggered by something 'happening', for example whenever I click a menu button, aggro an enemy or try to mine something. This would be bad enough, but it seems like it's just the display and input that freeze, the game itself keeps playing. This makes combat pretty much impossible since the enemy ships get free hits on me while the game is 'frozen'.

I'll keep an eye out to see if this gets fixed, can't really comment on the game past that.

Quote from: Zangi on January 03, 2014, 03:10:12 pm

Quote from: snelg on January 03, 2014, 02:21:55 pm

I liked that you can use suggestions instead of automating it as well, helps a lot when learning the game.

Oh yea, I totally forgot there was an awesome suggestion thing.  (When I think about it, I have it on, but ignore it most of the time.)

I usually have parts of it on even if I'm not using it much. It's good at reminding you of things you might miss and it's amusing to see what the ai comes up with from time to time. It does have a tendency of taking up a lot of the top right messages part of the screen but it's not that much of a problem.

I like to have the ship construction and colony suggestions on even though I control everything manually. Colony suggestions is especially great when you've got a whole load of other things you need to do and don't have the time or patience to review the handful of colonisable planets your scouts have found and from my experience tends to be relatively intelligent with planet selection. My main use for the ship suggestions though is just to get some insight into what sort of fleet size the AI thinks I should have. I very rarely accept ship construction suggestions straight up though since I've noticed the AI sometimes likes to run your economy into the ground by building a crapton of military vessels.

I especially enjoy when it suggests I declare war on my ally and trading partner of 12 years.

This is the main reason I've turned off all the other suggestions. I got well and truly sick of my advisors recommending I initiate trade sanctions on absolutely everyone or telling me I should send all my spies on year long missions to steal operational maps that will expire before being of any use. Not to mention the ship suggestions alone get spammy by midgame and tend to consume my notification bar thing.

I played Enemy Unknown to hell and back so this was an easy buy for me.

Just finished my first full playthrough. Played it on normal so I could explore and experiment without risk, I'm gonna go again on classic now. My thoughts after finishing (Wall of Text ahead):

The new enemies are nice, it's great that they found a way to keep sectoids semi-relevant in the later months and the seekers are pretty scary early on, trying to pick off isolated squad members.

MEC troopers are great fun, but don't feel as useful as a regular soldier, I'd rank them above a SHIV but below a major/colonel of another class. Even with all their tankiness (my heavy MEC ended with 30hp) they seem to be too ineffective at range, my MEC missed about 65% of her shots (though that could just be Hidden Potential boning her out of stats) and their weapons run empty far too quickly. In melee they're a different story entirely, and the kinetic strike alone is enough to consider bringing a MEC along.

Gene mods... I didn't use them as much as I could have, partly because I don't usually have 15 days of downtime to give my A-Team soldiers so they can get modded. More than that though the gene soldier armor is atrociously bad looking and I couldn't bring myself to have all my people running around with those stupid sleeveless armor pieces. On the soldiers I did mod though the mods themselves seemed pretty nice. I especially love the leg mod that lets you jump high and the mod that gives a bonus when you kill things.

I've got mixed feelings about Training Roulette. On the one hand it let me get a super assault with sprinter and the jumper mod who could cover half the map and still unleash 30 or more damage on things. On the other hand I had several heavies who had savior and the triple medkit ability.

On the ability changes, I'm happy with most of them. I now think that snapshot is superior to squadsight because of the reduction in aim penalty and the no-crits on squadsight. I had a snapshot/in the zone sniper who was taking out multiple enemies per turn during the base defense. Close & Personal is amazing, but I think it's further unbalanced the classes. Assaults were already premier damage dealers late game and now they can move AND put 3 shots on a single target in one turn. Covering fire is still, in my opinion, hot garbage. One of my uber assaults got whacked with covering fire in the major slot and used it precisely once. Overwatch is great for stopping people from moving around the place, especially if they're coming from out of sight, but if I wasn't comfortable with shooting at something before, why would I want to take a shot at -20 aim? I'll admit this could just be my playstyle, I prefer hunker down to overwatch in a lot of cases.

I didn't really use many of the new items. Flashbangs were great against thin men early on, and midgame pre-titan respirator implants were stock standard for everyone except the medic. I don't like the idea of the needle or gas grenades, and I don't use stealth so the ghost grenade wasn't important to me. I can't really see the point of the mimic beacon and I was starting to pump out lasers by the time I got reaper rounds.

I was initially a bit disappointed by the new voice languages. I was hoping that there'd be more variation (I.E british/canadian/australian for english), but I'm not really bothered by it. It was nice to have soldiers speaking languages appropriate to their country, even if I couldn't understand 80% of what they were saying.

EXALT. I'm not really sure what to say about EXALT. They were dished up as the big new threat but they never really materialised as such in my game. I ran one, maybe two scans per month and did the covert mission and they never once did anything outside of the scripted action they take when they're first mentioned. Eventually I just raided and destroyed their base with little effort since by that time I was toting plasma and they still had lasers.

The base defence mission was great fun, if a little protracted. The first two waves were the hardest for me since they drop a whole bunch of units on you while you're out of position, and the cyberdisk wave was much larger than I expected, but after those I kinda rolled through it and finished with no casualties since it gave me my 4 biggest badasses and some rookie grenade launchers for backup. I'm guessing it'll be harder on classic.

The Progeny missions were boring, barely worth my time. Slingshot was interesting because it had some new mission types in it and at the end you were rewarded with some badass technology. Progeny has a stock standard VIP recovery and two timed 'reach the end' missions. In the case of the latter two they were barely even a challenge and I blasted through the last one so fast I thought I had missed half of it. And at the end of all this you're given four low-medium rank untested but guaranteed psi soldiers.

The Newfoundland mission, man that was scary on my test run (I played a quick slog before doing the full playthough), I got it the middle of month 2 just as I was getting laser rifles out. Hoooo boy it was close. On my full run I got it about 3 weeks before I did the temple ship so it wasn't really much of a challenge.

Quick notes:

I didn't experience a single instance of the teleport bug which is nice since I always used to have that at least once per playthrough in EU.
I like most of the new maps, I only got the narrow rainy highway of doom map once and didn't get the teleport-glitch prone graveyard at all.
Lead By Example (the new OTS upgrade) is spectacular, my 135 (165 with psi armor) colonel turned even chucklenut rookies into psionic resisters with it.
The new armor customisation is cool, I'm undecided on the weapon coloring though.
Sectopods are much more tanky now, perhaps a bit too much so.
Finally, medals. They're a nice little bonus but not really much of a big deal.

That's pretty much all I can think of. I like EW and it's about what I expected, definitely worth the price of admission. I'm off to start again on classic.

That makes pursuits significantly easier, thanks. I had absolutely no idea that even existed, although I was curious as to how the AI's fighters always seemed to spawn so close to me in enemy pursuits.