How the hell do people defeat the first Invasions mission?

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Nussor

Lt. General
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May 17, 2016
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Seriously, something is off. I'm used to defeat extreme AIs left and right, but I can't for the life of me get past this mission. I've already lowered the mission difficulty to medium, but the two ELOP players always crush me.

The starting position is also godawful, with no food available to pump into your early development. I'm not sure how you are supposed to beat this mission. Your sharade never lasts long enough to make meaningful progress with the reactors. At this point I feel like I'm wasting hours on a mission that is fundamentally broken. Its certainly not "2 Stars".
 
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It was pretty fine for me on Medium difficulty, I was able to sabotage 4 of the 5 reactors, when a bug stopped me. The army I need to cast the operation on and kill afterwards spawned not on the quest marker but beside it, so casting the operation on the army did not count for quest progress. But I agree when I tried to go the forceful way afterwards I got crushed pretty hard as well. Your eco can just not keep up even when using research & Energy steal all the time
 
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It was pretty fine for me on Medium difficulty, I was able to sabotage 4 of the 5 reactors, when a bug stopped me. The army I need to cast the operation on and kill afterwards spawned not on the quest marker but beside it, so casting the operation on the army did not count for quest progress. But I agree when I tried to go the forceful way afterwards I got crushed pretty hard as well. Your eco can just not keep up even when using research & Energy steal all the time

Yeah, I encountered that bug, too (now on easy).
 
I saw the snowy start and immediately set the challenge to easiest. Beat it on first try and moved on. I've played out way too many garbage snowy starts on civ5 to tolerate it any longer. The only right answer is to just well, expand into the fertile lands. But since this is AOW3, start the slaughter asap. But as for how I beat it, I just did the spy missions and finished it. How did the stack get pushed off the quest marker? Was your stack occupying the hex at same time? Seems like I got lucky and doged that by sticking mostly into my lands to stay hidden so they won't know i'm really not amazons.
 
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The bug seenms to happen as long as the sector is in player possession. I had to load an old safe and raze a size 16 city to make it work. Aside from the bug I had no problems on medium. I finished fighting neutral and quest armies only. As far as keeping covert goes, make sure to give the correct interrogation answer. The wrong answers result in +10% (or +20%?) to the "blow covert" counter.
 
It seems that, after I spent some time thinking, this particular campaign mission is going to trip up many players because they'll be used to trying to expand as fast as possible playstyle. I only expanded to three cities and their population count was sorta small. Capital was just barely hitting 16 pop by the time I finished the map. I only sent units through lunascent city. Never stayed in it. Because I was doing my best to stay hidden. Striking from the shadows kind of thing and focused on doing the missions. I left the island that I landed on mostly uncolonized. All because I was trying to follow what the lizardlady was saying to the ELOP AIs.

Let's be honest. The start sucked for growth. It did everything it could to discourage me from expanding xD

I think you could get away with just two cities, it'll be a little bit taxing on energy but, seems might be doable. Three is preferable.
 
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Yeah ice and mountains and ruins all together is just ugly. Hard to move around and you have poor growth.

Though I am curious, what all do the dialogue choices do? OR are they just fluff?
 
Yeah I think the people who say this mission is too difficult are missing that bit: If you pick the "correct" option at each interrogation question, your cover-blown does not rise at all, meaning that with the 2% per turn rise you have a full fifty turns from first contact. And the AIs are scripted to never declare war on you until you lose your cover, so you have fifty turns to do literally anything, including run around with only 6 units...

There are two main strategies, one with full stealth and one where you plan to declare war. Both will require you to pick the right choices, but you can just save/load to check.

1. Stealth (easier)
The AI will scout you within the first 10 turns even if you try to stay out of contact. So your time limit is 55-60 turns to complete the story quests up until you blow up all 5 reactors. It's not that difficult when you consider that neither enemy will ever declare war on you and you can use that to your advantage by fully devoting yourself to expanding and doing quests. Once you blow all 5 reactors, the cover-blown will stop rising, the two will declare war on each other and you have free reign to do anything you want.

Note that the quests might be unprogressable if you triggered them before the bugfix. Try not to colonise the sectors involved to avoid triggering this bug.

2. War
The arctic start, with low energy and close to zero food, would be very harsh on a normal game. But with 55-60 turns of guaranteed peace? You can completely ignore that and become the god of research (and cityspam until your continent is full). You don't need to make the quests a priority, but they aren't that hard and sometimes give something useful as a reward.

Expansion-wise, it's actually not that difficult. Central Biofarm + Economist + 4 food workers is more than enough food for any city to reach 16 pop in a timely manner, and this is ignoring the abundance of aquatic sectors, which are fantastic since the buff, and exactly what an arctic start needs. A level 1 aquatic sector, with no upgrades, gives 30 yields (10/10/10) including the food and energy that will be scarce for you. Compare that to a fully upgraded land sector which also gives 30. The specialisations don't give any special abilities, but they give a lot more raw yields than land sectors too: 2 level 2 aquatic sectors with specialisations give 118 yields baseline and 10 more for each food/energy/research land sector, i.e. the equivalent of 4 fully upgraded land sectors with no specialisation. Add to that the Reef/Tectonic/Sunken features, which give even more free stuff.

So the plan here is just econ the crap out of the first 40 turns, plan your research to hit specific units/mods and get your doomstacks up and running (production is easy with arctic mountain sectors) before war hits. Conversely, your opponents are stuck sharing a continent with poor research prospects - you should faceroll them when the time comes. You can econ/research even faster by infiltrating the Dvar and grabbing Factory Overdrive and Mountain Breaker.

For doomstacks, I recommend a 1:1 ratio of Refractors (Sequential Kill and another damage mod) and Tacticians (Nanites and Xeno Defense). That lets you pop 3 super AoEs on turn 1 which should wreck most AI stacks and militias. Your heroes can be included in the stack as they can fill either the Refractor or Tactician roles. 2 stacks of these should be able to wipe the map clean with no losses.
 
If you take the wrong dialog option the detection percentage goes up by a lot so you have to choose carefully when trying to win with infiltration
Yeah, I apparently picked all the right ones without realizing it up until just about the end and wondered why I jumped way up. Reloaded and picked a different option and realized what was up.


As for difficultly if you manage to keep your cover it ain't too bad. But the timing feels fairly tight. If you don't know the research you need in advance you can eat up a number of turns just trying to get the two ops you need. This is one of those maps where knowing what happens can make it significantly easier. Thankfully though they aren't high level hard to get techs. Also I bet the random events have a big impact. The first time I tried I got wacked with the mountian producing earthquake pretty much right away. I don't even want to remember how painful that was on my movement. By turn 30 I could tell I wasn't going to make the stealth and it was not at all fun crawling around my two cities with it taking 4+ turns to move between them. So basically my first attempt felt horrifically difficult. Second attempt was a walk in the park almost(despite having not got far enough in the first time to realize I would need the infiltrate operations op. That took me about 6 turns to open up after I found out). Heck it took them to turn 14/15 to discover me. So I got a bit more breathing room there than I think is normal(probably made up for not being anywhere close to unlocking the op when I needed it). So I think luck can make a big difference in this map.