TL;DR recommendations: A) Have a time limit for Galactic War battles or the ability to withdraw. If time runs out or you decide to withdraw, the overall situation stays the same, or implement a small penalty. B) Warn the player if a map is going to have areas unreachable to him but reachable by the enemy commander. C) Unit caps? Resource caps? (Optional, of course) D) Better commander health warnings (maybe associated with the speed at which its health is going down). E) Vehicle-built torpedo launchers mostly fire in the ground. F) Ability to save the game from inside a mission Full version: So, yesterday I decided to play what I thought would be a quickie Galactic War battle. The first one in a new Galactic War (usually, for me at least, these last about 30 minutes or so). First observation: most of that planet is water, and I only have vehicles. So, many places on the map can only be reached with my commander. There is a small moon with no water. After a little while I try and fail to colonize the moon. Should've committed everything I had to it, because it was pretty much essential considering I had no water unit. I was playing a Normal, which explains why the AI was not mopping the floor with me. But the water area made all his structures nearly impossible to attack. To attack the water areas all I could do is rush the beaches with my units and, while they got slaughtered, built torpedo launchers with my commander. Any attempt of having vehicle fabbers build torpedo launchers would end up with these launchers' torpedoes ramming the ground. Eventually I gained some ground in the water, but I assumed the enemy commander was on the moon, so I started to hoard up transports to make a landing. After 3-4 unsuccessful landings (each taking 20-40 minutes to prep) I finally made a successful one with about 200 landers carrying 200 tanks, arties and transports. After securing a landing zone I built a teleport which allowed me to rain hundreds of units from the main planet. After four hours I was pretty confident in my victory. While I was managing the moon battle, the AI hoarded up ships and gunned down my commander. Never saw it coming. Didn't receive any special warning outside the typical voiceless "commander under attack" warning I'd get once in a while. So after planning a 30 minute battle before bed, I ended up spending a bulk of the night stubbornly trying to win this, only to be robbed at the last minute. All of this put together created a rather frustrating experience, which I feel could be improved with the points above. In all fairness, most of these issues exist since the old Total Annihilation, which I was a huge fan of. But my own life has changed now, and being able to plan for time is a bigger priority than it used to. Thanks for reading!
Hmm, this is actually an interesting idea, and I have an idea for what kind of penalty there'd be. SCREENSHOT! Let's say you're red in this scenario, and you want to attack that orange one next to it. You attack, however for whatever reason you need to withdraw. Upon withdrawl, you move back to the red system on your left, and the orange them take the system you attacked from.
All good points and suggestions. However, usually there is noise alerts at first damage and 1/3 health.
As far as Commander Health is concerned, the level of alert you need isn't only its absolutely health, but the speed at which it is decreasing (the ETA to gameoverland). So if, all of a sudden, the commander starts to receive an average DPS that will kill him in the next 5 seconds, you need a big alarm, regardless of its current health. During that mission, the commander's health would often move slowly down, when it reached a bit less than half I would withdraw him for healing. But this last ship rush took him out in maybe 10 seconds or so. That's when I needed the biggest warning. The audible warning never occured during that attack, but occured a few times before during the mission. tehtrekd: Sounds good but I assume it would be harder to implement because the game has to remember your entire path since the beginning in case of repeated losses. Here's throwing a few ideas around: - lose a tech of your choice (or random): simplest to implement and understand, I think. But it hurts a lot. - How about instead of losing that planet, your next battle is to defend it. You can't withdraw in that one, and if there's a time limit, you only have to survive the battle in order not to be game over.
All good suggestions. I have a couple suggestions of my own: - an option to choose the maximum number of planets per system in galactic war - an option to choose the maximum number of AI players per system I want these implemented because some of us have limited RAM. My PC crashed when playing a 3 planet battle with 3 AI opponents. I would upgrade, but I'm on a laptop
I'm beginning to think a better solution would just be to have a way to win the game. I like the idea of withdrawing (and currently you can accomplish this by simply force quitting the game) but being unable to win a game because there are no game enders like nukes and halleys and laser platforms available to a player....
These are good ideas! We're able to mod the game to change things like this, but there's no way to do it just through the game itself.
