It's taken me a long time to think about this tbh. A lot of the changes made with the updates and patches have been such massive steps in the right direction that I earnestly love the direction the game is taking. I love the faction design and the mod system and food import/export is a system that honestly kinda ruined Civ for me. There's so much good here. So much that I honestly hope becomes industry standard.
And yet. I don't feel particularly compelled to start up new games. Not in the same way I did for AoW3. And it's been weeks now where I've not been feeling it. So I started looking over the AoW3 wiki and such and trying to figure out why the game, when it's so good in theory and has so many mechanics I honestly love and is only getting better and better with every update, doesn't feel compelling for me to start a new map.
I think, it might be because of how the game's opening turns play. Looking over the elf units reminded me of how I ended up at some point being carried by all of them, and the other factions units in that I have been vexed in some way by all of them. More over, I remember starting with weird combinations of just about all of them. And that there were a LOT of them in the starting pool. In every game I play in Planetfall, I start with basically just "A combat unit" and "A scout" for units I can build, and my army is nothing more than some T1 combat units, some scouts, and one T2.
Back in AoW3, you had up to as many as 6 possible T1 units (Archer, Melee, Spear, Irregular, Scout, Class) with any given race/class combo. In planetfall, you have 2. Looking at how my Planetfall games have started. I can't actually tell them apart all that much in my head. I can't picture scenarios that were vastly different from eachother because.... they weren't. As the games went on I absolutely can. That time I had a solo commander in a wraith tank rampaging. That time I had the perfect production center for churning out super-Enforcers. That time I taught the Psi-Fish religion and spread it through the planet. Games branch out into wild and wonderful directions. But the first 20 turns can take a long time to play through, and they don't feel remotely distinct from playthrough to playthrough. It just feels like fighting the same battles every game with no real variance because I have the same units every time and you can only overwatch bait so many hopperhounds before it just feels the same.
AoW3 eventually closed to just T4 spam vs T4 spam, which was the weakest part of the game, but at the start, you'd have relatively mismatched armies of archers and cavalry and whatever else you could throw together, buy from inns, capture, or generally have. Planetfall starts with T1 spam vs T1 spam and stays that way for a decent enough chunk of the game that at this point, I think we need some extra unit variety in the T1 roster for every race, or possibly even a T1 producable unit for every secret tech. Just adding one additional T1 unit to every race would probably do wonders for improving the earlygame's variety. Because once the game moves past that initial lack of variety, it's absolutely excellent, and the changes to improve the midgame and world all feel excellent to play.
And yet. I don't feel particularly compelled to start up new games. Not in the same way I did for AoW3. And it's been weeks now where I've not been feeling it. So I started looking over the AoW3 wiki and such and trying to figure out why the game, when it's so good in theory and has so many mechanics I honestly love and is only getting better and better with every update, doesn't feel compelling for me to start a new map.
I think, it might be because of how the game's opening turns play. Looking over the elf units reminded me of how I ended up at some point being carried by all of them, and the other factions units in that I have been vexed in some way by all of them. More over, I remember starting with weird combinations of just about all of them. And that there were a LOT of them in the starting pool. In every game I play in Planetfall, I start with basically just "A combat unit" and "A scout" for units I can build, and my army is nothing more than some T1 combat units, some scouts, and one T2.
Back in AoW3, you had up to as many as 6 possible T1 units (Archer, Melee, Spear, Irregular, Scout, Class) with any given race/class combo. In planetfall, you have 2. Looking at how my Planetfall games have started. I can't actually tell them apart all that much in my head. I can't picture scenarios that were vastly different from eachother because.... they weren't. As the games went on I absolutely can. That time I had a solo commander in a wraith tank rampaging. That time I had the perfect production center for churning out super-Enforcers. That time I taught the Psi-Fish religion and spread it through the planet. Games branch out into wild and wonderful directions. But the first 20 turns can take a long time to play through, and they don't feel remotely distinct from playthrough to playthrough. It just feels like fighting the same battles every game with no real variance because I have the same units every time and you can only overwatch bait so many hopperhounds before it just feels the same.
AoW3 eventually closed to just T4 spam vs T4 spam, which was the weakest part of the game, but at the start, you'd have relatively mismatched armies of archers and cavalry and whatever else you could throw together, buy from inns, capture, or generally have. Planetfall starts with T1 spam vs T1 spam and stays that way for a decent enough chunk of the game that at this point, I think we need some extra unit variety in the T1 roster for every race, or possibly even a T1 producable unit for every secret tech. Just adding one additional T1 unit to every race would probably do wonders for improving the earlygame's variety. Because once the game moves past that initial lack of variety, it's absolutely excellent, and the changes to improve the midgame and world all feel excellent to play.
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