Bay 12 Games Forum

I'd say I usually get a positive outcome from inoculation events, and since that's permanent but the negative is temporary, I've always been willing to give it a chance.

Yeah, that's the stuff I was talking about forgetting. I'll try to remember, but some forgetting is more-or-less inevitable after several months of playing nothing but Guild Wars 2 and Satisfactory - I might have slightly burnt myself out on SE [and other 4x/wargames] between our game and (mostly) the beta testing.

Remembering to attach them to brigades was one ah-ha moment, as was making sure the brigades were in a posture like Blitzkrieg for Attack and AP bonuses. Not taking them back out between turns even though it made them safer was another - that costs you a lot of readiness. For the first 10-15 turns, I was shuttling around one commander in Blitzkreig to be present at every nuke launch regardless of whether they were on the north or south front, but then I'd detach the nukes during your turns to make them safer and make it less obvious what I was doing b/c you didn't seem to be using similar postures for your artillery. That not only denied them the AP bonus from the posture, but also cost them readiness from detaching and attaching the subunit - and IIRC readiness directly translates to a modifier to your attack value, so the difference b/tw 20% readiness and 80% can easily be "I killed one guy" and "I killed one stack". Besides not swapping in and out of formations, just taking a turn off was often useful for actually being able to hurt my targets. Nukes weren't getting full readiness recovery between turns, but (if I can be forgiven for using made-up but broadly indicative numbers) regening 20% per turn from, say, 10% to 30% each turn meant the unit was never going to be worth a damn but if they took a turn off, gained 20% while using none, and then and then regened 20% from 50% to 70%, they could maintain the same rate of fire while being twice as strong. Again, these numbers are made up but the idea holds - and this really compounded with the aforementioned lost readiness from constant reassignment.

At least one later ah-ha moments was the depressing realization that unlike real heavy artillery, the best kill ratios in SE come from areas where troop deployments are very thin. Concentrated troop deployments protect the troops from getting hurt by spreading out progressive defense decay as non-lethal hits wear down surviving units rather than being spread across the many troops piled up within the blast radius. This is 100% a factor of how SE treats artillery as a series of weaker successive attacks that randomly hits something in the hex each time rather than a strong AoE attack that hits everything there (or a portion of everything there) with a single blast. That arguably makes sense for artillery, up to a point - artillery operates in barrages even if this still makes bigger stacks safer from artillery than small ones. However, nukes are just one really big blast, so  this doesn't even work conceptually. This inspired me to stop trying to blast large stacks of troops unless they had something really weakening them, b/c otherwise I'd barely scratch them. The units with compositions I wanted to blow up basically laughed off nukes in my tests, while the units I did vaporize would either be really weak, momentarily vulnerable, or only a couple of troops. It's why the times I managed to sneak a nuke into range of your HQ units they were vaporized - well, that, and the fact that HQ units don't get the leadership bonuses their subordinates do, so their subunits would be like 10x weaker than subunits in the line units I couldn't scratch. You may have noted I had all my command units in huge piles, often with pure garbage militia, but also line units held back from the front - this was why. Soaking up artillery subattacks made the concentrated stack harder to wear down - and keeping the line units there helped avoid cascading failures as readiness/morale/fortification/etc were gradually reduced, subunits died, and the remaining attacks were concentrated on fewer and fewer, weaker and weaker troops.

The last ah-ha I can remember was that nukes in particular aren't great for weakening entrenched units prior to an attack - but they're absolutely devastating in wiping out routed units after a victory, even if the victory basically just pushed the defending stack back w/o killing much of anyone. The loss of fortification combined with morale and readiness loss would be the difference between a nuke killing 1-2 subunits and then the conventional attackers pushing them back with slightly fewer losses taken and slightly more inflicted but most all of the defenders alive to fight another day... and the conventional forces needing to fight harder to push the unit back but the nuke then destroying 80-100% of the retreated troops. The nuke going first makes conventional hits more likely and nuke hits less likely, while reversing them swaps those - but of the two, only nuke hits have an autokill chance. This is also why making a bloody but unsuccessful push with conventional forces followed by nuking the victorious defenders usually worked better than softening the defenders with a nuke before attacking.

Put together, you end up with some really counterintuitive outcomes. Nukes are terrible against massive formations of fresh troops in fixed positions... but they're great at wiping out small, sparsely-deployed formations or large amounts of scattered, mobile troops. The same things are true of artillery & aircraft, but they don't feel quite as ridiculous b/c those are at least multiple munitions over a period of time causing multiple strikes within the AO.

I'm pretty sure I've forgotten at least one other tricky bit gleaned from testing & in-game experience, and verified by subsequent usage. If it randomly comes back to me, I'll pass it along, but I'm not optimistic.

We're living in the Golden Age of plastic waste. If I still did tabletop miniatures, I could probably find no less than one novel-shaped piece of junk plastic packaging that could readily become terrain, vehicle add-ons, or suchlike per week for the foreseeable future, without even looking. E.g., there's a type of Swedish ginger snaps I like whose tins come with an interior plastic sorter-thingy that I could see making a decent vaguely-gothic firebase if I cared to reinforce, base, decorate, and paint it as such.


Which is just to say, don't limit yourself to balsa wood and cardboard. There's SO much fairly-durable but easy-to-cut plastic packaging, bottles, etc. out there - much of it with odd and interesting shapes when paired with 28mm heroic-scale miniatures - that there's no reason to deal with materials that are harder to assemble or might warp when painted, etc.

"Hate" is perhaps a strong word, but I certainly didn't think I'd rack up hundreds of hours playing Satisfactory. I'm not sure* it'll have replay value unless it gets a lot more content between now and when it's "done", but it's surprised me with its ability to make me want to do operations-research-lite as a "game". It being rather pretty and having a nice world to explore certainly helped, but I doubt that would do it if not for the, well, satisfaction of making complex systems operate smoothly.

*As in, I really don't know - part of me is very convinced I could stand to do a playthrough where I'm a lot more deliberate and don't have industrial machinery built in open fields, or crazy spiderwebs of conveyor belts, even if I know how everything will end up and have a pretty good grasp of what all is in the world, and where.

It may be worth noting that Looter armor is a full diving suit as well, albeit a walking suit with limited field of vision. It's honestly the most versatile armor you've got for a lot of the game and lets you sneak ubers with a pile of gear slots into some missions that otherwise only allow humans or very limited armor types.

My experience is that if you pick a direction and fly in it at max speed as soon as you're attacked, they won't be able to catch up and meaningfully attack you before your impulse engine comes back on line. Admittedly, I generally shoot them down whenever I run into any (regardless of what kind of ship and armaments I have, but I've got ~800h logged so it's probably safe to say my time wasted translated into some competence at space combat), so if it's changed recently and you can't outrun them any more, I might not be aware of that. I DO know that "pick a direction and fly for your life" still works on Sentinel interceptors, though. I'd also add that in my experience, this works if you're starting to lose as well.

One question, perhaps insultingly obvious, but since I never knew to do it for a very long time it seems worth asking... are you recharging your ship's shields during combat?

It's a decent little game. I haven't played it in years, but I remember it being a very fine example of the "coffeebreak roguelike" genre...