Improvements I'd like to see from a Galactic Conquest player

Hi there, long time lurker first time poster, I've been playing TA since before Starcraft1 came out, Supcom etc & now PA.

I think I play rather different to most of the crowd around here: I use minimal micro, mostly prefer to play vs AI.

I love the TA type games because of the unlimited build-queue & click minimising UI (I also am a big Total War series fan & play with minimal clicks) so I have a particular change I'd like to see that'd help my effectiveness significantly.

In PA I've pretty much exclusively played Galactic Conquest mode so I also have a couple of requests for improvement to that.


Build order platooning for area patrol/attack:
I mostly use factories to repeat build a small composition eg 2* Dox 1* Grenadier and set it to an area patrol on the entire planet, idea being to roam around scouting & denying expansion to the enemy, if my build rate is enough they'll eventually pen in the enemy to their base & even kill the enemy.
Its very efficient in terms of clicks but extremely inefficient in terms of units built as they will drip feed into more effective units & turrets one by one doing little or no damage.
At other times I'll set factories to area attack the entire planet or just the area of enemy base so the produced units will go kill whatever enemy gets spotted, again saves a lot of clicks but is inefficient in units.

What would really help me out is if the units in the build order of selected factories would go to initial rally & wait for the other units in the build order, then go off on their patrol/attack order in a single group formation.
That way I could do something more like 4* Dox, 2* Grenadier 1* Stitch & they'd be much more effective.
Similarly on Attack order I could build order bigger groupings to mass up firepower & then go out killing automatically.

From my understanding the AI is actually doing something similar to this when it builds its attack groups so I feel like it should be a fairly easy change to make that'd make my game experience so much better.
Maybe I'm wrong though, it could be really hard.

Related:
Attack order is a bit finnicky, units sometimes get stuck & don't go attack units that appear, I think its something like delay in updating the pathing? I'd like to see this improved if possible.


Galactic Conquest:
Maps -Mainly I'd just like to see a rework of the map pool, I'm pretty bored of the same maps over & over and a lot of them are not really fun to play.
There should be some actual Water planets (at least mostly water) too, all the Commanders have basic Naval tech (I think initially some didn't -> no full water planets) so none would be completely crippled by a water planet.

Spawn points -Especially the spawn points are very annoying, on the one hand if you hit a multi-planet spawn system without Orbital/Advanced tech it can be near impossible to get to other planet where the AI Commander spawned early enough to be able to successfully establish & lacking Advanced tech you can't just sit back & build Nukes to win from a distance, so from that viewpoint it makes sense that they have setup most systems with a single spawn planet or a high chance of enemy spawning same planet.

But when you actually have the tech & want to do some fun Orbital play there's nothing more disappointing than finding all the AI Commanders spawn on the same planet as you like 80% of the time.
Invariably in those cases its almost impossible not to accidentally kill the AI while building up the economy to pull off some fun game ending play.

Nearly always you can go fight elsewhere on a single planet/single spawn system instead until you get Orbital/Advanced tech.
So I'd like to see more multi-planet spawns & a significantly lower chance of AI Commanders spawning same planet.

Fightback -A thing that bothers me a lot about Galactic Conquest is how the AI factions never take back any lost territory.
I feel like probably each faction should take back a system every now & then, like maybe once every 8-10 map jumps, not enough that you can realistically lose or hugely slow down your progress but enough that you feel you aren't facing a completely passive enemy, giving some extra onus for killing off Faction Leaders & giving a penalty for faffing around taking long routes to avoid hard fights.


And thats about it really, mostly I really enjoy this game & I feel these fairly small changes could greatly improve my experience.

No comments?

Anyways, couple of other things I'd like to see:
In other thread I mentioned priority changes for Fabricators on Area Patrol, currently they tend to get bogged down with Assist Factory & don't get round to doing repairs/Structure Build Assist etc, I'd like to see it reworked so that they'd put higher priority to helping build structures, keeping the base healed/keeping economy running with Reclaim over Assist Factory.


Another thing is Area MEX builds:
Currently if you have say 2 Fabricators and you give them separate Area Builds for MEX they'll both generate the same build-order & just leap-frog past each other, its very inefficient.
Selecting several and issuing same build-order does get them all doing the same thing quicker with the build power stacking.
But if the build-order takes them into the enemy I just lose all my Fabbers & MEXes near my base may be left un-built.

What I'd like to be able to do is have 4 Fabbers (or 4 groups of 2 or whatever) each given separate full-planet Area Builds with the 2nd+ recognise the already existing orders and go off in different directions with build-orders that minimise the chance of running into an already built/building MEX.
There are ways to sort of do it like give smaller Area Builds in each direction then queued full-planet Area Builds but its more clicks & a slightly smarter build-order generation would make my life easier.


Galactic War faction colours:
I find it hard to distinguish between the Red & Orange factions on the map.
I am a bit colour blind with some shades of blue-green but not red-orange & this is the only game I can think of where I've had this kind of issue.
Just a small shade/intensity change should be enough but maybe consider changing it to a different colour outright?


Couple of unit things
Lob:
This bot unit cannon always seems to shoot significantly shorter range than the displayed range.
May be a planet radius thing? I recall that being mentioned for cannon but I'm pretty sure displayed range on normal cannon & lasers more closely matches than for the Lob.

Leveler:
I understand it was done as a unit balance thing but its silly that the turret turns so much slower than the hull, watching them go into battle they actually tend to put out pretty low amounts of firepower due to it.
Would like to see reduced damage with a more sensible traverse rate.

SXX/Omega/Helios Area Attack priorities:
I feel these should have equalised ground target priorities set.
Currently SXX on Area Attack will kill the base & other units before they start attacking the Commander while the Omega & I think Helios will go straight for the Commander if spotted.
Probably should prioritise killing Umbrella & the ground units with missiles.

Majority of your concerns are responded to around different threads in general, mods and balance.

I'd recommend trying to get involved with PvP, it is a whole new world compared to galactic war, much more interesting and presents an actual learning curve.

if by minimal micro you mean no dox wiggling and no use of pelicans for drops than you are clearly not alone

area attack on a planet from a factory is a bad idea as that way you split your army and at worst bring in units one by one and not bring you full on firepower, so instead use chains of attack move or chains of smaller areaattack moves

so basicaly what you want is ashes of the singularitystyle attackgroups

not realy as similar as with areacommands that generates a number of orders that may be heavy on the CPU ..

might better to show a video for clarity .. sometimes when i use a move order chained to a attackarea order to further move or attack move my units stick to the first attackareacommand ..

planets are randomly generated in galactic war, i do agree though that random planetgeneration needs to be improved as well as symetry .. naval however imo has the problem that it also pretty limited when it comes to multiplanetplay so i would like to see improvement there as well

you have always the astreus and iirc sputnic to get to other planets ..
invading early and reliably is just a matter of learning the economy and production well ..
though there could be a parameter for GW that once you have certain orbital tech that AI on multiplanet is more likely to spawn on a different planet ..

@Quitch made a AI mod but i don´t know exactly if it works well with GW ..
other than that what difficulty are you playing?cause the AI on easy doesn´t do much and normal is also fairly easy to cripple on a big attack ..

helios is not realy a combatunit it is primarily a mobile teleportexit to bring in other units and by itself does poor dmg against structures and is pretty vulnerable against umbrellas so it makes sense that it rather prioritises other units for selfdefense ..

the omega is similar as it is a unit that fights primiraly against other units not against sturctures as again its antigroundweapon is rather weak if not massed ...

the ssx is a pure antiground heavy alpha dmg unit with a big splash

so yes the priority rules for these units make sense ..

I agree that live FFA & Team games are where the excitement occurs, but if the Galactic War is where your heart is, check out the following mods

Galactic War AI Overhaul
https://forums.planetaryannihilation.com/threads/client-galactic-war-ai-overhaul-v0-6.72360/

Shared Systems for galactic war
https://forums.planetaryannihilation.com/threads/rel-shared-systems-for-galactic-war-1-2-0.71533/

Bigger Galactic War
https://forums.planetaryannihilation.com/threads/client-bigger-galactic-war-v0-1.72818/

No, I mean area attack planet as a factory command.
I know its really inefficient but I don't really have/want to use the apm to do things more conventionally.

Sometimes I do make an attack blob & manually control it but mainly with Orbital units.
And fairly often I do limit area attacks to known area of an enemy base rather than full planet.

Haven't played that.

When its working correctly a unit comes out of a factory & immediately heads off to attack the closest known enemy, if there are no known enemies they just hang out outside the factory (& ones that had moved away return to factory) until an enemy is spotted then they all head off to attack it.
But sometimes it gets stuck & they just sit there even though there are a bunch of known enemies.
Generally selecting the stuck units & giving a new area attack order fixes it and sometimes they do start the attack after a delay which is why I think it might be a pathfinding update thing.

They were initially but one of the changes to GW made the Systems randomly selected from a quite limited pool of pre-built setups including non-random planets.

With T2 &/or Orbital tech you have a bunch of options but not when you have only T1 tech & no economy boost tech. (quite possible for a BACON commander for eg)
Dunno what a Sputnic is but building up enough Astreus to carry enough units to land enough T1 to hold an area, build a Teleporter & flood through a bunch of units against an entrenched AI can be pretty much impossible.
A tech-based parameter that affects AI spawn location chances would be great yes

I'm talking about on the Galactic Map, AI never retakes Systems, just passively sits there waiting for my attacks. If they occasionally re-took a system it'd feel more like actually fighting rather than systematic extermination.
I play vs Absurd AI.
I did play & from time to time struggle vs Easy for a long time but one of the patches gave the lower AI levels a big nerf & I quickly moved up to Uber.

I just find it really weird when I have a bunch of SXX, send them to area attack the enemy base & they kill everything except the Commander but Omegas go straight for the Commander.

Thanks, will do

OK these are pretty awesome

Now seeing a much better variety of systems, some properly water planets (some islands but mostly water)
More multi-spawn.

1st battle against the Casual AI was a scary one, arriving on other side of 2-planet system with enemy spawned on other planet (yay!) swarming through what I thought was plenty of T1 (only basic bot tech) only to find an enemy sporting some T2 & building Anchors was scary but I did eventually overwhelm them.
Subsequent single planet battles with a bit more tech were more comfortable though so moved on up after a few.
Even that Casual AI has some impressive new moves compared to the stock Absurd AI.

Biggest setting of the map is really really big lol
Gonna end up with all tech & max sub-commanders well before the end...

So last night I had an amazing thing happen:
Map with 6 or 7 planets, at least 5 spawnable and smashable with 2 Halleys, me & my sub-commander spawned different planets, two AI commanders on other planets.

I pushed a quick economy expansion, got a Teleporter to an empty planet pretty early, sent through a bunch of Advanced Fabrictors to build Halleys & smashed it onto one AI commander
Which in itself is a minor miracle, I'm used to accidental wins before I've got enough economy to get Halleys up on the few maps in the stock set that even have a smashable planet.

Then I decided to go for Unit Cannon kill on the 2nd AI, was in process of quickly building a bunch of Unit Cannons when my sub-commander started up Halleys that he'd built on my planet!

AI nukes pretty often, if left alone on an Annihilaser planet it'll start building Catalysts & I've seen it occasionally start Halleys but I've never seen it actually build up enough to start a planet smash so I was utterly gob-smacked.

I needed to get my Commander off-planet ASAP!
But my Teleporter was offline because the other end had been on the smashed planet, no Orbital Fabbers ready on other planets, in my panic I forgot I had a Launcher already built but my commander was with the blob of Fabbers building Unit Cannons so box select most of them, build Launcher, zoom out to try to see how much time I have, zoom back in to find I'd shift-clicked & everyone still building Unit Cannons
Corrected that, queued an Astraeus and immediately sent it off to some other planet without my Commander...
Build another!
This time got my Commander off-planet with like 10s spare

I'm really having a good new experience with these mods