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Feedback up through Chapter 2


pandakraut

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Played on normal difficulty Patch 0.5.2 rev. 32553 BB4

Intro battle: Feels like this is in a good spot.
Dinner for Admiral: Entirely dependent on what the AI does in that it can be very hard to catch up to them if they go to the right of the fortified island. Otherwise fairly straightforward unless you are going for capturing all 3 enemy ships.
Snakes and Powder: Very easy due to outnumbering the enemy so heavily even when only bringing 2 ships. Can basically just charge every unit you encounter.
Priority: Scaling seems quite harsh unless the idea is to just avoid and run away from the AI for the mission. Avoiding fighting and running worked fine though. Not being able to use full sails in most cases is a nice touch. If there isn't already a warning that capsizing can occur then it should be added.
Second Wave: Decent battle, though the least memorable.
Crossfire: Interesting enough, but the delayed ship reinforcements seem like overkill currently.
Fireworks: Good battle, fun to play.
Hunter and the Hunted: rushing boarding renders this a bit straightforward, but worked fine unless the enemy ship beaches itself while trying to deal with being surrounded.
Snatch: A good tough battle, though there are a few exploitable holes currently. The fortification at the mouth of the river not being manned allows the player to bypass all of the units that are supposed to spawn to defend a landing along the sea. Also the units that spawn to defend the Chapel can be spawn camped pretty easily by holding off on capturing the town VP.

Overall Campaign Comments:
- Unit and officer xp gain is very slow currently. At most one or two stats went up by 1 point after a battle. I didn't have a single unit with a perk by the end of Snatch. 1 point in crew training, so didn't focus on this much since I thought it was bugged until I compared exact stats pre and post battle.
- Having to scroll through all ships is going to get clunky late in the campaign. Would be nice to be able to see more of the fleet on screen at once or have some filters to display subsets.
- I wish there was an easy way to tell the difference between units from your forces and allied units in battle. Other than memorizing officer names there appears to be no indicator currently.
- Renaming officers does not rename land units in battle currently.
- More characters allowed for officer/ship names would be nice.
- The +money and +rep career point choices seem much better than any other option currently. When combined with infinite recruits and trade muskets any losses can easily be replaced. If units gained experience faster then I could see maybe going for other options. Bonus tech is also a strong contender to reduce the chance that something important doesn't become available.
- I found myself holding off on adding new ships so that scaling wouldn't go up. This meant I usually was only fielding 6th and 7th rate ships for Chapter 2. It didn't seem worth facing the larger ships to upgrade to anything larger. 
- The Points of Interest are a nice addition. They are a bit inconsistent on when they resolve, but once that gets cleaned up they should be fine.

While several of my comments mentioned that battles were too easy, they are probably around the right difficulty for normal. I am planning to go back through on hard where hopefully a bit more complex tactics will be necessary.

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Crossfire: I find that the reinforcements from crossfire was in part a leftover from how the first version worked. There you were counterattacked after taking a strongly defended position and the extra reinforcements could come quite in handy. Also, I find that it is overkill on the current version due to how the ai logic works. Instead of defending its position, it will instead decide to attack you where you can easily kill half of their forces when they charge over that bridge and get pummeled. If the ai were to instead play super defensive with 4-5 units of infantry and the 2 artillery support then those additional forces would probably be needed. I'd imagine in this case flanking left would be better which is normally defending by 2-3 infantry and an artillery. 

Hunter and Prey: I find this battle to be relatively boring especially since the wind being against the ai making it very difficult for them to run away or effectively fight you especially given how many ships you can bring. If you are patient and micromanage enough, it would probably be super easy to just sit there and kill off all the crew for very little losses. Scaling is also a little wonky as bringing a 5th rate immediately scales it up to a 3rd rate (done on normal. Not tested on hard as I didn't have a 5th rate though likely the same except 2 star). However, this is still easily countered by bringing in a troop transport. Also, if you were to just bring in troop transports then the ship would probably get downscaled to a 6th rate (not tested) and would most likely kill it with very few casualties when double boarding. As you don't get to keep the ship, finding out how to downscale the ship and limiting your casualties is really the only important aspect if you want to get multiple 5th rates by Snatch. Personally, I would change it so there are 2 or so enemy ships that are sailing with the wind to assist the ship you have to capture. If you are able to do it fast enough then you can still complete the mission without having to worry much about the enemy reinforcements. If you just try to troop transport spam, you might be too slow resulting in a much more difficult fight. 

Snatch: The ai loves its fortifications in the settlement as well (first objective) and will never leave no matter what. If you do it correctly then you only need to take down 3-4 units garrisoning the city to cap the point and ignore the remaining troops there. Also, while spawn camping is a very effective method for the chapel, by triggering in most reinforcement spawns, they will rush as fast as they can to the chapel and just sit in the middle of it. At this point it makes it incredibly easy to surround and just shoot/charge them to death without worrying much for your own casualties. In this situation, the ai should act like it does in crossfire and play a little more aggressively using the bountiful forest cover as an ambush point. The way the ai acts here is how it should be acting in crossfire imo.

For xp, the only unit where this isn't true would be for Nelson. However, I'm pretty sure his promotions are based on stage completion which is why he is a captain by the end of Snatch.

I don't really think you need an indicator that differentiates between allied and your own seeing as how you can rename them (as you mentioned not currently implemented). However, if there was an indicator I'd probably do something similar to what they did with the gold band for the hero unit except blue for allies.

I disagree slightly with the sentiment of only using 6th/7th rates. While most battles will scale up with the 5th rates, such as in Hunter and Prey where you can see a 3rd rate, many do not. Fireworks and Second Wave don't get affected nearly as much from scaling and as they are the two largest naval battles, 5th rates can be quite useful there. Earlier battles, such as Dinner for Admiral and Priority will never be affected by 5th rate scaling as you probably won't have one. That really just leaves Hunter and Prey and Snatch. As mentioned, HP is pretty straightforward and scaling is kind of irrelevant here. On Snatch, the 4 ships you fight are scaled so that one is the same rate has your highest rated ship and the other 3 are a rate below it. The difference between 5th and 6th rates is quite substantial as witnessed by how effective the HMS Romulus is in Fireworks. By having 2 5th rates in Snatch, I was easily able to destroy the enemy fleet and capture one or two of the ship. 

One note from Hard(Currently on Snatch but can't progress because of the two game breaking bugs atm): Because of the large difference in having 28 guns to 46 guns (6th - 5th rates), it would make hard incredibly difficult when having to constantly deal with multiple 5th rates when you only have 6th/7th rates. Due to this, the scaling seems to remain untouched and I believe the strength applies to veterancy. On average, you can expect to see 2 star ships for the most of the enemies and high xp 1 star ships that have the chance of promoting mid battle. While I feel veterancy makes ships stronger than their UGCW counterparts, the ai is still easily out played by the player making the additional buff meaningless. However, the meta of boarding everything you possibly can is challenged a little. Due to the additional stars, boarding is much more difficult and the recruiting cost to replenish the far higher numbers definitely start to rack up as you have noticeably less funds. Though this deficiency can still be overcome by creating more dedicated boarding ships with good equipment as the ai even on hard still seems to rely heavily on the Spanish 1717 which is a relatively weak weapon. This coupled with another combat ship with dedicated shooting guns and canister shot would help to make quick work of the crews. Naturally as this is only Chapter 2, it makes sense for the ai to have basic equipment however, the player seemingly has easy access to most weapons from the game within a couple stages even if a little expensive. Presumably, in later chapters the ai will have better equipment however, your ships will now be starred up once again overcoming the deficiency. The only thing to note for land on hard is that it feels similar to MG in UGCW except on a smaller scale.

 

Edited by WilliamTheIII
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27 minutes ago, WilliamTheIII said:

Also, if you were to just bring in troop transports then the ship would probably get downscaled to a 6th rate (not tested) and would most likely kill it with very few casualties when double boarding. As you don't get to keep the ship, finding out how to downscale the ship and limiting your casualties is really the only important aspect if you want to get multiple 5th rates by Snatch.

Unless they changed it scaling is based on all ships that are available to be deployed so you'd have to drop the crews on your other ships to get downscaling with the transports to kick in.

I was able to keep the ship when I played it on the prior patch, not sure which is intended. Either way, double boarding with a third ship nearby to provide musket fire support seemed far more efficient than actually trying to grind the crew down at range.

I never found it worthwhile to field a 5th rate prior to chapter 3. I always tend to chase low to minimum scaling with my play though, I'm sure just maxing scaling out can also be done by someone who is better at naval battles than I am.

31 minutes ago, WilliamTheIII said:

At this point it makes it incredibly easy to surround and just shoot/charge them to death without worrying much for your own casualties. In this situation, the ai should act like it does in crossfire and play a little more aggressively using the bountiful forest cover as a could ambush point. The way the ai acts here is out it should be acting in crossfire imo.

A comment on both crossfire and snatch regarding defensive AI. I do think there is a fine line with making the AI overly defensive. Anytime this is done and sufficient time is available to the player you can just bombard them out of the position. Whether that's with artillery, mortars, or just moving your infantry so that you can hit a single target with 3-4 and roll up the entire line.

But making them overly aggressive results in what you see at Crossfire where you can just hold the bridge. Though if the AI were to bring up the units holding the ford further down the river that position would get pretty precarious. I'm interested to see how Crossfire works now that canister for land artillery is being implemented. If charging artillery actually becomes dangerous that will change things dramatically. 

35 minutes ago, WilliamTheIII said:

For xp, the only unit where this isn't true would be for Nelson. However, I'm pretty sure is promotions are based on stage completion which is why he is a captain by the end of Snatch.

Once unit experience becomes meaningful I think it completely changes the campaign. The difference between a well managed army in UGCW and one that is just thrown together is huge and currently in AoS recruit spam seems to be sufficient to solve any problem. I hope when I get to try the hard difficulty it will no longer be the case.

37 minutes ago, WilliamTheIII said:

I don't really think you need an indicator that differentiates between allied and your own seeing as how you can rename them (as you mentioned not currently implemented). However, if there was an indicator I'd probably do something similar to what they did with the gold band for the hero unit except blue for allies.

Renaming would largely solve this issue. I just miss the extra info from UGCW where a unit was part of X army and Y division or the like. Not really sure how that would work with the smaller unit breakdown here though.

39 minutes ago, WilliamTheIII said:

I disagree slightly with the sentiment of only using 6th/7th rates. While most battles will scale up with the 5th rates, such as in Hunter and Prey where you can see a 3rd rate, many do not.

I had a 5th rate available to purchase around priority and I think every battle I checked adding it improved the AI strength considerably. I never had any issues using just 6th and 7th rates so I didn't feel like I was ever missing out by not fielding the 5th. Maybe this kicks in more on hard. Once players get good enough, maxing everything out to maximize what you can capture will probably be the best option unless scaling is made very harsh.

44 minutes ago, WilliamTheIII said:

it would make hard incredibly difficult when having to constantly deal with multiple 5th rates when you only have 6th/7th rates.

Are you encountering more 5th rates on hard compared to normal? I don't think I faced a single 5th rate outside of maybe priority with the ships I was fielding. Even hunter was only some special variant of a 6th.

47 minutes ago, WilliamTheIII said:

While I feel veterancy makes ships stronger than their UGCW counterparts

I wonder if this is due to all player recruits currently starting with 1 point in each stat. I feel like the entire stat and xp system is still in progress so mostly waiting to with hold judgement here.

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1 hour ago, pandakraut said:

I'm interested to see how Crossfire works now that canister for land artillery is being implemented. If charging artillery actually becomes dangerous that will change things dramatically. 

I've done a little testing on this and canister will immediately rout smaller units and shatter most skirm detachments (If I'm wrong about canister already being implemented then I'd imagine it would be far more devastating). With regards to crossfire, the initial artillery battery is easily baited into chasing your skirm unit if you have it flank wide while you simultaneously engage the unit guarding them and the artillery. For the later pieces in town, I use the artillery battery given to you plus the one I captured earlier to be used as counter battery. Using a skirm detachment will allow you to spot most of the settlement while you keep most of your forces out of sight and only move up when they attempt to cross the bridge. If you do it right, you should have around 1:30 left with around half the enemy forces defending the settlement dead and the artillery destroyed making the final engagement quite straightforward. In essence, even with canister, it still seems very doable to charge the artillery so long as you distract them a little.

1 hour ago, pandakraut said:

currently in AoS recruit spam seems to be sufficient to solve any problem. I hope when I get to try the hard difficulty it will no longer be the case.

In hard, consistent charging and boarding does take a more severe toll on your forces and due to the reduced reward gain it is definitely more costly especially since the recruits do lower your average stats while still being expensive. Though normally, you can get a 20% reward modifier so money isn't so much of an issue if you manage smartly. In practice, it means I had to make a choice between focusing on big hitting 5th rates or better melee units. Due to the meta, it was a pretty easy choice and 5th rates can be captured.

1 hour ago, pandakraut said:

I just miss the extra info from UGCW where a unit was part of X army and Y division or the like. Not really sure how that would work with the smaller unit breakdown here though.

Instead of using divisions, you could use the ship the units originate from. So it would be HMS Walpole with Chamberlyne and Campbell under it in the ui. Though this might be messy with the smaller 7th rate ships only having 2 slots. Would probably work much better on the bigger troop transports.

1 hour ago, pandakraut said:

I had a 5th rate available to purchase around priority and I think every battle I checked adding it improved the AI strength considerably. I never had any issues using just 6th and 7th rates so I didn't feel like I was ever missing out by not fielding the 5th. Maybe this kicks in more on hard.

Your strategy is perfectly viable and probably better however, I do get some joy out of seeing big ships duke it out. On hard, 5th rates will always appear on priority (2, 2 star and 2, 1 star) however, by sending the alert you can downscale them to 6th rates and use your vastly superior speed to bait the ai away from the Walpole (as it seems to focus on the nearest ship). The only real ship you need to worry about is the back one however, clever steering will prevent you from getting boarding and even if you do get boarding it is absurdly to easy to disengage. I don't recall if the lead ship in Second Wave scales up to a 5th rate so I apologize for that. On fireworks, the ai will receive 2 5th rates (I was using a 6th rate, a Snow, and a troop transport) where the 2 5th rates being 2 star and the 2 6th rates 1 star. The 3rd rate will also be 2 star. On hard at least, I find it best to focus on gaining high rated ships from captured units as having ~40k in the bank is much more difficult with melee spam. 

1 hour ago, pandakraut said:

Are you encountering more 5th rates on hard compared to normal? I don't think I faced a single 5th rate outside of maybe priority with the ships I was fielding. Even hunter was only some special variant of a 6th.

I just went through each main sea battle and will give you the details:

Note: I'm not great at knowing what the ships are by just looking at them but I'm comparing with the ships I have in the harbor and giving you my educated guess.
Dinner for Admiral:

  1. Player: (1 6th Rate Sloop-of-War and 1 7th Rate Troop Transport)
  2. AI: (2 7th Rate Brigs both at 1 star, 1 star Walpole)

Priority:

  1. Player: (1 7th Rate Sloop and Walpole)
  2. AI: (4 5th Rates Diana all 1 star)
  3. Scaling did NOT change when I added in the 6th Rate Sloop-of-War and the 7th Rate Brig
  4. No 5th Rate in shop so I couldn't test

Second Wave:

  1. Player: (1 6th Rate Sloop-of-War, 1 7th Rate Brig, and 1 7th Rate Troop Transport)
  2. AI: (1 7th Rate Brig 1 star, 2 7th Rate Snow (1, 1 star and 1 2 star) plus the 2 transports with 212 men each and 1 being 1 star and the other 2 star)
  3. Downscaled to 1 7th Rate Sloop 1 star and 2 7th Rate Brigs (1, 1 star the other 2 star) when deleting most of fleet and going only with a 7th Rate Sloop
  4. Did upscale when using a 5th Rate Hermoine (Sold most of the fleet for it so not sure how it would affect scaling with more ships). AI received 1 7th Rate Snow (1 star) and 2 5th Rates (Not sure what type but not the Hermoine version)(The initial one was 1 star however it immediately jumped to 2 stars after a single volley. The other started as a 2 star). The troop transports were unaffected and are probably hard coded this way.

Hunter and Prey:

  1. Player: (1 6th Rate Sloop-of-War and 1 7th Rate Troop Transport)
  2. AI: (1 5th Rate (The non Hermoine type) at 2 star)
  3. Downscaled only when selling most of my fleet to a 5th Rate Hermoine at 2 star (Trophy ships that haven't been added to fleet yet do not affect scaling)
  4. Only a 5th Rate seems to upscale the ship to a 3rd Rate. Unable to confirm with more than 3 6th rates and some smaller ships due to monetary issues

Fireworks:

  1. Player: Irrelevant as scaling does not matter! Note: Unable to test with 5th Rate as I didn't have access to one however, could not force a downscale nor an upscale by getting several additional Cerberus'. This leads me to believe the battle is coded to always have the same ships
  2. AI: (1 5th Rate (The non Hermoine type(the better one)) at 2 star, 2 5th Rate Hermoine at 1 star, 7th Rate Brig at 1 star, and 1 3rd Rate (unknown version) at 2 star)
  3. I normally win this battle pretty quickly and never see any of the veterancy levels increase

Snatch:

  1. Player: Only highest rated ship in the battle matters!The type of ship does matter (6th Rate Sloop-of-War vs Cerberus) Example: Best ship in battle is a 6th Rate Sloop-of-War
  2. AI: The AI will have 1 ship that is of equal Rating and type while the other 3 will be the best type of next Rate down .Example: 1 6th Rate Sloop-of-War and 3 7th Rate Snow at no stars
  3. Max downscale is 1 7th Rate Snow and 3 7th Rate Brigs with no stars
  4. Max Upscale is 1 6th Rate Sloop-of-War and 3 7th Rate Snow with no stars (done with 5th Rate Diana)

In conclusion, it does seem that having 5th Rates by Fireworks and Snatch can make the battles significantly easier assuming you can manage the finances. However, unlike you I have not been able to play Chapter 3 so am unsure how they will affect those missions.

 

Edited by WilliamTheIII
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13 minutes ago, WilliamTheIII said:

In conclusion, it does seem that having 5th Rates by Fireworks and Snatch can make the battles significantly easier assuming you can manage the finances. However, unlike you I have not been able to play Chapter 3 so am unsure how they will affect those missions.

Several of the later battles not scaling much certainly changes the equation. I only briefly started the first mission in chapter 3 and it seemed like fielding a 5th, 6th, 6th resulted in no scaling changes.

One thing to follow up on at some point, is what happens to scaling when units are assigned to PoIs? The fleet naturally has to expand to fulfill those while also fighting battles, so if you can dump high rate ships in there to lower scaling while increasing chances of success that could be very useful.

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18 hours ago, WilliamTheIII said:

Dinner for Admiral:

  1. Player: (1 6th Rate Sloop-of-War and 1 7th Rate Troop Transport)
  2. AI: (2 7th Rate Brigs both at 1 star, 1 star Walpole)

If you field a captured 6th rate sloop of war and a 7th rate brig you can scale up to 2 6th rate cerberus here.

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Were you able to complete the rum mission? That one and isn't ending for me and the other mission, an intercept will not allow me to start the mission regardless of the composition of my fleet.

*just received update, I'll test and get back to you

**mission "clash" is fixed, I'll test rum after

*** rum mission is fixed- these guys are fast!

Edited by Afghanicus
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