Bay 12 Games Forum

Also: mechanized artillery. For posture purposes, is that an artillery, or is it mechanized?

Finally got around to testing. Mech arty and its more-advanced cousins all count as Mechanized. The only things that count as Artillery are artillery, anti-tank guns, and flak.

[Necro'ing this thread since there was never a dedicated SI thread aside from MP/LP ones, and this was the most recent of those.]

So the people who made Armello are, in their words, "re-imagining and modernis[ing]" Solium Infernum. Not sure how I feel about that.

It sounds like there will be less - possibly no? -flexibility with Avatar customization. Don't like that.

OTOH, given how they did Armello, I suspect they may make MP more playable by shifting from strictly PBEM to an online server model. They suggest both blitz and drawn-out MP will be possible, so I suppose we'll see what we see when we see.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1893810/Solium_Infernum/

Hornstein seems to be trying to encircle me, but they're not doing a great job - their supply lines are stretched thin by the terrain so it's been pretty easy to prune back the overextended would-be flankers. They've managed to get one or two breakthroughs, but they've been on the edge of the front rather than in the center, so they haven't been able to reinforce & exploit them and get killed off fairly quickly. They were doing better at the start when I had mobilized fewer regulars - they outflanked and overran my half-militia battle line, pushing me back to the hex adjacent to the zone capital, but at that point I managed to I stand up and deploy two full Long Term Planning Workgroups (with defensive postures and a literal handful of my most modern light/medium tank units in support slots). Their advance stalled and I managed to gradually build up enough regulars to start pushing them back after that. They tried to push through my lines a couple of times, but had heavy losses every time they did - my (now-last-gen, but at the time modern) troops outmatched theirs, and we were numerically equal, so it went rather badly for them. They also stopped trying air attacks after I deployed small amounts of AA. They're switching to light & medium armor formations, but the LTP unit model has done fine handling those too. I was worried a couple of turns ago when I first saw they'd started deploying poly-armored tanks, but those haven't fared much better. Oh, and they've also deployed a couple of indy buggy brigades - those haven't held up well against concentrated attacks, but have probably done more casualties to me per buggy lost than their tanks have (mostly b/c they're hitting my flanks where they're only fighting 1-2 BNs at once).

Overall, I'd say they're very cautious - they don't want to attack if it's gonna get them killed, and I haven't given them a lot of openings where they can avoid that (mostly b/c I've felt like any recklessness will cost me these isolated two zones). They're not folding like majors used to; the advances I've made have been after pushing back their lines (and they pushed my advances back once or twice in the process). The biggest avoidable mistake I've seen is a failure to use postures well - the AI sets postures on its units and never changes them, so I've been able to use troops in a defensive posture safely & effectively in offensive actions b/c Hornstein troops are defending in an offensive posture or even Field Training.

You've also got solid low-tech troops who will be getting laser rifles in a turn or three. You're only one turn behind WC on getting High Tech off the ground as well.

I'd also give you pretty good odds against Hornstein, especially with them being bogged down and bleeding resources against my two SE zones, and when war breaks out in the north, I'm not going to be able to push further into their territory. Your relative remoteness compared to how the two of use are nose-to-nose will give you a bit more time to breathe so long as you can bolster your economy a bit. If one of us has grossly underestimated the other and gets steamrolled, that won't help much, but as long as we have a protracted, bloody campaign (and I think we will, which is why we've been waiting to catch up/overtake each other), we should grind each other down noticeably.

That would hurt, yeah. The biggest advantage of my Archive stratagems giving me the not-immediately-useful techs of Nuclear Plants and Rad Cleansing was that it made it possible for me to ensure that High Tech was the only econ tech available to discover after I finally got Heavy Industry. You're still, what, 8 turns minimum from finishing your first High Tech plant?

Anyhow, those are some nasty troops you're fielding. In increasingly large numbers on my border. I'm sure it's going to be fine.

Not a problem if someone needs more time, but it feels like it'd probably be good to check to see if someone forgot to send the turn.

They're better than they used to be; they used to be on the level above lasers, AND had worse FP. Moving them, regular gauss, and GP weapons down a level at least made them usable even if they're distinctly "meh".

They're mostly useful if the RNG doesn't like you. That, and for cost-efficient anti-infantry aircraft - charged gauss does okay for strafing. I suspect they're okay for defensive turrets on bombers, but like lasers that's a case of "if you can't afford the production/operation costs of missiles".

I expect the real reason they exist is rock-paper-scissors endgame tech - they're not weak against Liquid Armor like lasers are. The problem is that they're just weaker overall, and they're anti-infantry weapons anyway. Now, if they unlocked (or were a pre-req for) cannon-replacing mass drivers to defeat liquid armor, that'd be another story. I could also see giving shields a weapon-matrix advantage against energy weapons that ballistics could ignore... but all of that is so late-game that it's not worth having a lot of development time devoted to it.