Age of Wonders: Planetfall - Dev Diary #55: Exploits!

[NINJEW]

Sorry but I doubt cramming a unit full of critical mods is considered "using it well". What some of you guys are doing to the game in D&D sessions would be considered going 'munchkin', IE trying to maximize everything everywhere and looking for loopholes in the rules. Casual players will not do that.
Electrocutioners were always pretty great, especially with Arc Extension and Stun Module, which I don't need to be an expert to realize work very well on them.

actually all that anyone did was go "hey, vorpals get an inherent +crit bonus, i wonder if stacking that with similar bonuses is any good?" there was no complex arithmetic being done and it was the sort of thing casual players easily could have (and did!) stumble onto, unlike the engulfer issue which is much closer to your characterization of things. fireburst vorpals allowing players to aoe concuss and bypass accuracy was a similar deal, anyone willing to experiment a little could stumble onto that particular combo, and once someone did it was quickly spread through the magic of "some people are part of large discord servers."

in fact, i'm pretty sure all of the vorpal problems were casual players first and foremost. the "competitive" mp community didn't really exist at the time of critstacking vorpals, and the present day community probably wouldn't even find them all that impressive (on top of probably still not beating engulfers, vorpal snipers perform poorly in autocombat, and the current large mp community allows players to hit autobattle for pvp). the issue was easily demonstrated in casual pvp but i'm sure most of the people taking advantage of that combo were sp players

 

[Round_Dice]

What about Promethean Plasmoid with Backlash Projectors, self repair mod and something that boosts damage like Superheated Plasma Actuators? Or Reactive Shielding instead of autonom mod if you need that extra shields? At Prime rank the bot also ignores Overwatch.

Dvar Phoenix Walker with 3 specific T1 mods.

 

[Fluksen]

I still blame multiplayers for the Vorpal Sniper nerf... I found the unit perfectly balanced in singleplayer, since I was not piling critical chance increase mods on it

Yes you were not piling crit mods on it, but you are apparently doing this:

Electrocutioners were always pretty great, especially with Arc Extension and Stun Module, which I don't need to be an expert to realize work very well on them.

Which is good and how the game is meant to be played imho, it's part of the fun to try finding cool synergies between units, mods and operations (like e.g. the arc extension and the stun module on the Electrocutioners!).

The problem is if you find a mod combination that is much stronger than pretty much everything else and doesn't really have counters - like constant crits from a unit with range 9, that have AoE, hit like a truck and ignore cover (before the change). Then the game becomes somewhat stale because you found what Tombles called an "I win button" and the challenge is somewhat gone. I think this is not only true for multiplayer, but also for single player.

What I'm trying to say is that once you'd have figured out the Vorpal sniper crit. chance trick for yourself and played a few games with it you would have wanted to nerf it too. The only regret I have when stuff like this hits is "damn I wish I had tried this exploit to see just how broken it really was when it still was possible, now I'll never know ".
But take it from someone who heard about the Engulfer strat from Satonir and tried it in single player before the nerf - it really was broken and absolutely no fun because after a very short time in which you are happy ("Cool! I found a pretty dope unit/mod synergy") the game becomes a series of meaningless clicks to auto-attack everything until you get the win screen...

So good job Triumph - and super interesting dev journal!

 

[Zaskow]

Dvar Phoenix Walker with 3 specific T1 mods.

Too late, too expensive.

Ah, Tombles have forgotten about one really nasty early exploit. Kirko + Brood building + mass food = 1 pt production price for a lot of units.

 

[HousePet]

Note that the computer does not tend to use unintentional exploits.

In my experience, this does happen. However the player community immediately changes their view that something they considered to be an 'Emergent part of the gameplay that they should be free to abuse against the AI', is suddenly a 'Bug that should be fixed immediately or they will ragequit'.