Galactic War is bad, it's making people feel bad, and it should make Uber feel bad.

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198056519967/recommended/233250/

I don't care that it's part of the design of the Galactic War, it's poorly done and it's making people rage-quit the game.

When people go to an RTS game, their first thought is

"I have no idea what I'm doing!"

Their second thought is

"I should play the campaign to help ease in to it and figure out what everything does."

PA is a game that currently takes people that think that way (which is most of them) and drops an anvil on their heads. I'm not sure that the game would be worse without the galactic war, even after the GW update. It's simply unfun to the number one demographic for playing it, which is new players. It is hurting the game badly.

What to do about it?

For starters, prevent early AIs on Normal and Hard from building any air until the player has gone through a few battles.

I would not say it's poorly designed. Some part of the players just is not looking for any form of challenge. At all.
Making a super easy "you absolutely can't lose" mode would be not bad I guess.

Though I don't get why anybody would complain about "asymmetrical" balance in an SP campaign. Isn't that what single player in RTS is all about? If you want a perfectly even playing field play MP...

I certainly can remember how I was annoyed at the Supreme Commander campaign for similar reasons. It's why I tend to play MP.

Either way the real problem is that steam "reviews" provide a way for people to vent their frustration when they lose. Because losing in a game is a horrible thing and the game is bad because of it...

seriously why do people expect games to be easy. WHY. Something somewhere has gone terribly wrong. Put them in a room with TA without any manual and only let them out again once they have finished the campaign....

The AI loves to spam air.

When you're new, you don't really know how to counter air, especially without having air yourself.

It's just frustrating, especially if it's the first match that you've played and you just get pwned by air spam.

Galactic War is simply too unforgiving for a new player's mistakes and full of too many non-obvious reasons for the AI having an advantage over you to function as the introductory mode currently. That's not to say that it cannot, but currently it does not and is hurting the game as a result.

The SupCom campaign was as dissimilar from PA as possible. Encouraging turtling until you had enough stuff stored up that you could just roflstomp over the triggers for everything... PA is a game where if you don't have constant aggression, you lose. This is very hard for new players to deal with.

TA has an 'easy' difficulty where you can practically sleep walk through it because the AI takes 30 minutes to attack you for the first time. It also has missions of progressing difficulty, and an easier Arm campaign.

So ironically, you are touting the very thing stuart98 is recommending: A tutorial phase.

No, Dementiurge, Core campaign was better for new players because it started you off with metal anywhere and eased you into expanding to get more metal.

Just to add my two cents, when I first started playing PA, I was used to the Command and Conquer series of RTS-es, where there were finite and few resource locations, and turtling was a pretty safe way to play... at least against AI. So the aggressive, constantly expanding gameplay that is required to even keep up in PA, threw me for a loop for quite a while. So I would tend to agree with stuart98 that even basic levels of AI in GW can seem overwhelming if you don't know how PA's style of RTS works.

That being said, I wouldn't go so far to call it outright bad. The different tech tree starting options forces you to try different things, and the various modifications provide for some nice bonuses to get your badass feeling on once you've gotten several good tech upgrades.

Another idea:

Unlock all of the Basic Vehicles, Basic Bots, Basic Air loadouts from the beginning to give people some choice. Then make the later loadouts simply objectively better to give a better sense of progression among galactic war players.

It takes balls to say this kind of thing. I'm speaking from experience. Thanks stuart for taking one for the team.

I agree with this way too much. I'm planning on writing an article on this topic.

What would happen if...

The techs your enemy owns, would actually be "downsides" of the techs you own yourself?

The first time you get a specific tech, your the corresponding counters techs are permanently unlocked for your opponents as well.

• You get air, they get anti-air.
• You get orbital, they get anti-orbital.
• You get Infernos, they get walls.

Or to put it more general:

• You get defensive tech, they get an offense tech on the target layer.
• You get an offensive tech, they get an defensive tech against the same layer.
• You get an auxillary/eco tech, they get one too.
• Your get a game ender tech, they get the same one.

They can not own a tech which you haven't encountered the corresponding counter piece for yet. However once you have encountered a tech (even if discarded), you must be prepared for the corresponding counter being used against you.

This should actually slay BOTH issues of Galactic War at once:

• You can not be steamrolled by a tech you can not counter.
• You can not steamroll an enemy just because he lacks the counter.

Et voilà, suddenly Galactiv War actually works like the campaign of any other game you encountered so far. Tech progressively unlocks in a fashion were the tech you are newly introduced to, is guaranteed to be of relevance.

Thread for that specific approach --> Galactic War - Slay the demon which haunts PA

the answer is simple .... tutorial ...

Random thought: Galactic War should clearly be labelled as a "challenge mode".

Challenge.

I'm curious if that's the general impression from new players who were unfamiliar to the game, or if it's only a conclusion arrived at by players who already understand how to take advantage of the Core Prime tileset.

Regardless, the Arm campaign has deliberately easier missions. Having unlimited metal towards the end is even a part of what makes the Arm campaign easier to complete than the Core campaign.

....... ....... errr ...... no ....

i mean you are conquering a galaxy in it ...

challangemode rather sounds like having a set of missions with set challanges like having to solve puzzles ..
like "hey you have combatfabs only ... go defeat the enemy commander " ...

which GW simply isn´t it is a series of systems to be conquered with tech you gather along the way ..

Personally I don't think it's far off being a challenge mode. I would have preferred a fully made challenge mode instead of this GW stuff...

Are there any benefits to working throug GW, do you unlock anything extra, it just seems to me like an utterly pointless waste of time when you could just do a skirmish with all bots. There doesn't seem to be a story to it.

Agree.

no, I don't want the AI dumbed down just because people can't git gud from the start
you are right that GW needs a major overhaul though, it hasn't got enough depth

Just add 1-2 difficulty modes and make "normal" in the campaign easy or very easy.
I think there should be a intro tutorial before you start the campaign.

Regarding the people that say the game is to hard...well that is the kind of people that will complain they got rushed when you attack them at the 10 min mark.

There will always be a certain mechanical skill set that you need to play "most" rts games be it SupCom,C&C or Starcraft.

I will not deny that PA is not the best choice for some one with no RTS experience at all though.

I will agree that GW is still kind of boring...but that has nothing to do with the difficulty.
GW is basically just a series of skirmishes with random tech drops nice idea but really not something that I would put a lot of time in.

This is how I feel, I can beat the AI with just tanks even though it has planes etc (I mean just build AA tanks /faceroll) but just... What's the point? I imagined that Galactic War would be more of a galactic war not a series of specfic completely independent scenarios. Unless I'm missing something.

For GW, my strategy is to build ~40 Infernos, ~4o Bolos, and ~20-30 spinners, then roll the AI. If he's on another planet, I build slightly more spinners and send them through the teleporter first. It is very, very easy.

story and classic campaign that is skripted was not in the scope of uber .. it could have cost double the budget

that´s why they went for something simple such as GW for people who simply want to play against ai with a sense of progression ...


what you can only unlock through GW are different starting loadouts and that´s it ...
GW is simply about conquering similar to a game of risk .. there ain´t story behind it you just fight ..