[GALACTIC WAR] remove AI Comdrop

OK i can ramble on for an hour about why, but my blood is boiling so i'll keep it succinct.

i haven't played PA in a while. Today i tried Galactic War. I like it. I liked FTL and it's campaign. I hated it because my galactic journey did not prepare me for the Endboss. Time and again i'd kick everything's *** on the way, show up at the endboss and die because it uses missiles yet barely any other enemy does.

Fortunately, Galactic war is fun and cool and does prepare you for a fight. It's all better now.


BUT FOR GOD's SAKE. i just lost my first match because one of the three AI commanders, after i conquered no less than 3 planets and spent 1+hour on the match, decided to drop his commander on the south pole of a metal planet.

there it was, stuck. I could send a fighter, except the tech limit means i don't have one. I stared at the screen for five minutes trying to come up with something, then quit and found that quitting means my galactic conquest is over.


I hate losing the game to a bug and wasting a fuckton of effort over nothing.

i can be patient and wait 5 extra minutes to load my game, i can click 3x and carefully hack the pathfinding so it does what i want. I don't care if a tank misses too much. BUT NOT THIS.

so remove the AI's comdropping for galactic war untill it's reliable.

before others fall victim to the same bug and waste hours.

Yea, Stuff like this happens

Thank you for reporting this issue, I don't think we knew about it. We knew it sometimes happens at the beginning of the game, but we can expand our mitigation plans around this circumstance too.

So sorry you lost your Galactic War over this.

I had that exact same bug happen in the same "spot", looks like a small variable just needs to be changes with the metal planet procedural generation

no no no,

it happens at the END of the war, when an astaeus drops a commander into an undroppable place.

it sucks extra because i had already been in an 1h+ game, won the entire war but couldn't win the match because the last enemy commander was inaccessible.

So it's about the astreaus commdrop

I've actually had both - I've had the AI drop the comm into that spot and get stuck. But yeah it's two separate issues. The com dropping AI is definitely bugged, every time I've had it happen their com just builds like 1 power, and lands in a terrible spot and never does anything

I know game designers don't like saves and restarts, but consumers love them and they help avoid myriads of issues exactly like this. Implement a proper save and allow restarts in battles, and you can avoid BS like this.

guys use this : http://pa.lennardf1989.com/Tracker/

FYI That's exactly what they're doing, they're in the process of making it so that you can click at ANY point in a replay, and continue right from there. Basically they're doing it so much better than other games, which is why it's taking a bit longer and not out yet.

Did you try dropping infernos on him? If he can drop then likely so can you? I've found if you think creatively about it for a while you can often come up with some weird, unusual, inefficient ways to win.

Also if you quit PA and restart you can continue your game from the previous planet.

Personally I think the GW needs a mechanism that allows you to concede a match (and a system) without loosing the war.

As it stands, the first game you loose = game over. There should be a way of getting out of there- this would also permit the option to replay a game that is not winnable in a situation like that. Imo the war would be a lot more engaging if you could loose systems as well as win them.

There should be a retreat function. Remember in SC how the comm would teleport into the match? Well let's bring that animation into the game again, and allow teleporting out. No more DEL key suiciding for the comm (replace surrendering in multi), and give a retreat option that takes a long time of standing perfectly still to charge up (2min+) and allows you to leave the battle as a loss, move your GW position to the previous planet in the chain, and make the decision to invade again, or go somewhere else. Sweet teleport animation for drop, sweet teleport animation for leaving. The timer and stillness requirement would prevent you from escaping certain, oh wow look at that blob doom, but would let you get away if you bit off more than you could chew, or lacked a certain technology to actually defeat a comm on that planet (water world or something).

That's something that came to my mind, too.
Ability to retreat from a battle, maybe in that case the enemy also conquers one system on another edge of your dominion to make it more punishing (except for the "lost" playtime).

He didnt drop there by an dropship or somethin, when i play, units get pushed over that edge all the time.

With no air and space tech, no. I even tried to pick up the commander with my astraeus but it didn't work. building anti-air, trying to make an umbrella fire at it, sending in AA units it all didn't work. I wish i could nuke him.

EDIT:

Ok i checked and to my surprise i couldn't find this bug. Does that mean it's been fixed in the meantime and now is reappearing?

you can better alert the devs that way, I'm surprised metabolical didn't know about it. it is probably missing form the bugtracker.

All hail the retreat button!

Can you be more clear about the location of the commander? Did he actually drop onto the surface of the planet? Because there was a bug (possibly fixed now), where they wouldn't actually drop. You always have access to Astraeus (if you have engineers).

You could try dropping an engineer and reclaiming the Astraeus in orbit.

You could try dropping infernos onto the commander if he had landed.

Sorry, i did check and couldn't find the bug. So i reported it anyway. I do distinctly recall this happening before, so this might be a reappearing bug.

Sorry i don't have a screenshot, i was too angry. The commander model floated in orbit, but was untargetable. the astraeus that carried it floated at air level. So i am not sure if it counted as landed. Both were on the north side of the metal planet, on the superweapon part. I am fairly confident i can't drop units there. The ground certainly didn't look like it could have units there.

you would have found the [resolved] bug thread. this means it was never reported.