AI terrible... again.

[BloodyBattleBrain]

Best course of action? Is to immediately flee to the nearest friendly retreat side of the battlefield and wait for your allies to show up and refuse engagement. This would be very easy to achieve.

Imho this is a detail that can be worked out.

The reinforcing armies can show up later, and can also have maluses attached to represent a forced march to relieve the attached forces.

Total War approach is not really 100% ideal for planetfall.

I never said or implied it was. I use it as an example because it works quite well.

There is zero risk in this, simply because there's no very long ranged shots in planetfall like 20+ range. And if such a thing shows up, then superior tactic would be to whittle down the defenders with long ranged shots while maintaining range.

Tactical operations have unlimited range, yet have enough limiters that they don't unbalance things.


Look, none of these ideas are perfect, but using them I think would help the problem highlighted in the OP.

If you attack an army that is in a 3 hex line, currently you only have to fight 2 of them. That's a bit abstract anyway. Under the proposed change, you would fight all 3 armies, but there'd be a delay on the 3rd one showing up, so you'd be considerably more careful, as a Human player, trying to split stack the AI.


And I don't think it'd make much difference to Human on Human conflict.

By keeping the economy as tight as it is now, you'd very rarely get very large armies (and if you did, they'd self balance to a degree by being all in one place.)

In total war, soldiers if they see friendly soldiers fleeing the battle, they get morale debuff and would want to flee. This would transfer to like -600 morale penalty to reinforcements who is trying to support the army stack that got raided in planetfall.

Planetfall doesn't have a morale mechanic like this, so this simply wouldn't happen.


By raid, i mean things like, going back to our army in a 3, or even 4 hex line, one of those stacks has a high value target, e.g. a leader or hero.

Currently, you can try and split stack that, and destroy it.

Under the new proposals, you can't "split" the stack, but there is a delay for reinforcing stacks.

So you can still try and assassinate that high value target, but the tension is higher.

It's worth mentioning that the 2 ideas I highlighted earlier were originally suggested in the context of redesigning AoW3, and also included things like army supply, leadership value and logistics, all as soft counters to massing huge armies.

 

[Ericridge]

Hmm okay. I'm still confident that raiding won't work though. Because every time i think about it, the correct response is to back away and there is going to be at least 1-2 turns worth of space needed to reach and shoot at the enemy units in battles. Its going to be crazy difficult for raiders to catch an stack by itself like this. There is at least one unit type that would get screwed by raid mechanics, the cumbersome ones, they can't move very quickly in battles. They'll be forced into a choice to try and flee and get shot at even more or fight on the spot. Which means at least the raids can try to isolate the cumbersome units and smash them before they get supported.

I should know, several of my walkers was destroyed this way in my first 24 hours of aowlanetfall xD I won the battle but all my walkers went bye bye.

 

[BloodyBattleBrain]

Its going to be crazy difficult for raiders to catch an stack by itself like this.

In which case, problem solved surely? see below quote.

A t1 unit was left at a single stack under the red arrow while their Commander stay right next to that unit (Green arrow).

incidentally, I think this is why Total war introduced the lightning strike perk.

You could develop a whole layer of strategy around stack movement and denial, e.g. "poison" actions that affect the whole stack, "assassin" as a strategic option, terraforming to force stack dispersal, attrition and supply (which become more noticeable and important the larger a stack is.)

The biggest problem imho would be communicating this in a way that makes sense via UI, and getting the balance between it being a meaningful system, and not too important (by which |i mean one good thing about PF is you can have fun and play the game without needing to understand every mechanic fully)

 

[Hamster1810]

I have one idea for simplify the solution: Have a penalty movement after a combat.

A stack that has been engaged in combat will have only 1 movement point... no matter how much it has, and this trigger only once each turn, though the reinforcement still always possible. This shall bring more strategy and thoughts once you try to atk the enemy and surely prevent such tragedy for the AI.

This mistake can also happen with players too, just like playing chess. When you realize you make a terrible move, this I think, give the player another chance to recover instead of game over.

This might slow down the game, indeed, so we should add more options for strategy movement. Here some my ideas.
1) A strategic op that recover 50% movement of every stacks around one hex in strategic map. This help fasten the army movement across the map. The Str. Op can only be used once per turn and not affect the already combat stacks.
2) Allow retreat option. At current updates, retreat still available with the cost of all strategic movement. With the new penalty movement, the retreat now provide one point for repair your mistake. Like, at least have your armies stay close for set up the defense.
3) The penalty not applied to defender. You better pick your right target.

 

[Iguanaonastick]

Another idea: how about letting players (and the AI) CHOOSE whether the adjacent hex rule applies?

So if there's a group of 3 stacks and a dangling tier 1 unit standing next to one... On the pre-battle screen there are checkboxes next to each stack. and when the enemy attacks your dangling unit, you just un-check your leader stack. The enemy now fights and kills the tier 1 unit. And then has to fight your full army.

Now, of course, for this solution to work, the AI has to be able to make smart decisions. But it should be doable to program in a decent algorithm that can detect whether it's smarter to join the fight or not. (Something like: if battle odds are much smaller than the battle odds if the AI stack were attacked directly, do not join.)

The advantages of this option over the other proposed solutions would be that it can be added in the existing game, without reworking everything from the ground up, and should not give any undue advantages or disadvantages to anybody.

 

[Sandman25DCSSS]

Another generic solution is to allow disabling adjacent hex rule in game setup. And then stack size if adjacent hex rule is disabled.

 

[Iguanaonastick]

Optionally disabling the rule would be a bad idea. The game balance is designed around it, all the fun battles happen because of it. It would reward doom-stack building to a huge degree.

Letting players only choose whether their own stacks get pulled in the fights prevents abuse, since opting out just means the enemy can gang up on you. So it only makes sense if you want to avoid your settler joining a fight, or to prevent a dangling unit from being exploited. It would not otherwise break the balance, and in 90% of cases the game would work the same as it does now.

Increasing stack size could only be done in a future game since it would fundamentally change everything. If it is done it should not be a start of game option. The entire game should be designed around it.

(That said, AoW1 and 2 had 8 strength stacks + adjacent hex rule. I liked those.)

 

[Sandman25DCSSS]

Fun is subjective. I asked for "no adjacent hex rule" mod in AoW3, unfortunately it is not possible in planetfall either. It does not matter if we have adjacent hex rule or not, doomstacks are still a thing, they just consist of 18 units instead of 6. For instance, yesterday I had a battle where my 18 units were attacked by AI in the open and killed 24 AI units with higher total power without losing a single unit.

 

[BloodyBattleBrain]

I was thinking of this thread in my most recent game.

I now have about 600 hrs of game experience, and have gotten another level deeper into understanding the game, and the possibilities, synergies and depth of the game are unfurling.

And the game is deep, really deep.

We have 6 base factions, and another inbound, plus 7 secret techs. 7*7 gives you 49 base pairs.

That is huge and doesn't get the recognition it deserves in the mainstream press (unlike how prominently Humankind is being touted for having "a million" factions or something mad like that because you have 10 beginning civilizations and ten phases, and at each phase you have ten choices, or something like that.)

That the Ai can play the game at all is actually a wonder imho!

Given that the industry standard is Civ 6...well sure, PF AI is not perfect, and we can all suggest improvements, but I think it is very solid.

 

[Ericridge]

Yes BBB, that's the number one reason why I have left the civ franchise completely. Devs in firaxis don't put in enough effort to improve my gameplay experience so I left. I don't even buy their games anymore.