Okay, how the merry FRACK am I supposed to do the Artorius mission?
(This part rant, part cry for help and - seeing there is a "Campaign Review" thread - part feedback.)
I just bought the game recently (so the current version is the only one I've played) and only started playing at the weekend. I have been fine on normal until the last two missions. (After several tries, I set the Falnas mission to "Beginner" out of sheer annoyance.) Normal, is, incidently, as high a difficulty as I basically ever go on a game. I am, pretty shamelessly, only not a filthy casual in games overall because of the amount of hours I spend rather making that an unsuitable moniker, but I don't play games particularly to be challenged like a lot of folk. Which I say to help contextualise the following.
Artorius... Seems impossible. I made several attempts on normal, then tried on Easy and it made no appreciable difference. There seems no time to build up defences for the enemy dreadnought - let alone try and defend the generator, assuming that an incursion can even capture it (because on normal, Athena tends to grab and and immediately fortify it).
I rage quit out of the game on the last attempt when I just barely managed to destroy the level five dreadnought (level five, really?) and all its support troops AND the wave that attacked from the north, only to have one and only radioactives site (which, of course, I had no time to build any kind of defences for) almost instantly overrun by a third force and which was IMMEDIATELY defended by (3-4) enemy turrets (which I presume the AI was dropping in) that massecred what I had left AND THEN a forth attack wave attacked the generator (which again I had no time - because there wasn't enough time/resources - to build any defences or troops there either). And this was on EASY.
That attempt, I had captured the metal deposits to the east and south of the radioactives (plus the one practically on top of your base but no further north) - so a fair amount of inflow - but there doesn't seem enough time with the limited flow to actually build enough forces or defences to be able to stand the attack.
(I feel the pressure is a bit too much in Falnas as well.)
As I say, the difficulty curve on the prior campaign missions was fine, hitting the Starcraft II level of just slightly out of my comfort zone in putting me under pressure while not making too frustrated playing - like I am now. The spike in the last two missions seems enormous; if I have to drop two difficult levels (making the dangerous assumption that I won't have exactly the same on Beginner) seems like the balance is way out of whack for the lower difficulty settings.
I have no particular pride or anything, so if I have to stick the game on beginner for the entire rest of the time I'm playing on it, I will (if everyone says "no, you're just crap, git gud!" or whatever), but the spike just seems highly anomolous; and it seems a shame to have to drop to that level after the well-balanced first 3/4 of the campaign, and especially if, for example, it's just these two missions and thereafter I find it too easy or something.
(The lack of walkthroughs anywhere doesn't help, which is why I'm here; in something like Age of Empires of whatever, I'd have first gone found a walkthrough and had some idea of what to do. I can only find youtube playthroughs (which requires me to quit out of the game to be watchable as the music doesn't stop on a tab-out) and most of them seem to just be playing the mission, not actually saying anything especially helpful (like "you need to put some defences here for later in the mission" etc), and given that they are out-of-date on older versions, it really is making it difficult. Especially for a game that seems to have a fairly narrow range of ways to successfully complete the mission.)
You're not doing it wrong - the mission is out of tune. The delay you get until the dreadnaught comes on Normal is too short.
When I played through recently, Falnas seemed generally fine. I might have missed something. I'll give Falnas another pass.
I don't think the delay was much (if any) shorter on Easy.
So, then, the question remains - how DO I beat this mission at the moment? (Can I beat this mission at the moment? It's be very depressing to be stuck have to wait for a patch, because I was enjoying the game a lot until tonight.)
(What is is the difference between the difficulty levels? Is it just AI or are stats affected as well? It would hazard that the XP of my dreadnoughts seemed to shoot up much higher on beginner, but that's not much help on this mission as I don't have time...)
Tomorrow, (or Friday, if I don't have time) I'll have a shot on beginner, but if the timers don't change, I'm not sure exactly what it is I need to very specifically do.
What is it that changed so much to make the mission so much harder? Did they buff dreadnoughts or reduce the effectiveness of turrets or something? (Are we talking a C&C 3 issue, where they rebalanced the game for multiplayer and made several of the missions almost impossible even on easy (for a scrub like me anyway...!) because they were balanced around something they'd dramatically buffed?
I just went and did this on hard difficulty. Here are the tricks to this.
1. Rapid expansion. Take the 4 generators around your nexus as quick as possible. You can cap the one (with the radioactive nodes) just south of your nexus with your starting engineer. have that engineer build a factory right next to it while it is capping to do 2 things at once and queue him up to cap the nodes.
2. make sure you have a constant supply of engineers. Auto build them the whole mission. You can use some engineers to boost your nexus to make them build even faster, but watch your economy, as boosting will drain your resources faster.
3. as soon as you cap the 4 generators, take all of your frigates up the northwest path and cap the 2 generators there (Enemy will attack you, but if your 2 factories have been producing frigates the whole time, you should be able to defend just fine.
4. Also asap, have a group of 3 engineers start building 6 sentinel turrets just south of the west generator's bottom metal node. This is enough to protect your base from the incoming overminds.
5. Make sure you build amplifiers on all of your generators. Keeping up economy is the key to victory in any map.
6. Build 1 smarty and 1 anti-air at each generator. This will discourage enemy incursions, which are incredibly annoying.
7. Have a group of 2 engineers build a bunch of quantum generators south of your base, out of the range of the dreads that come up.
8. When you build your sky factory, have it auto-build bombers and set the waypoint to the turinium generator. As soon as you have the orbital fabricator and enough quanta, send an incursion to the turinium gen and an engineer drop. Have that engineer just build a ring of smarties around the generator. Build a 2nd sky factory next to the first to add even MORE bombers. Once you have the smarties all built, you can send (what should be at this point a massive group) the bombers up north to kill the defenses around the enemy generators. Make sure to precision target his anti air defenses. you can kill the nexus if you do this right. Taking all these northern bases will give your economy the boost that will make this easy mode from here on out.
9. One of the weaknesses of the AI is that it will always chase your engineers. You can use this to exploit the enemy to go right into your defenses by kiteing them around with an engineer. This even works on enemy dreadnoughts.
10. Remember all production buildings can be boosted with engineers which will make them produce units faster. The more engineers, the faster units come out, but resources will drain faster.
11. You can win this scenario on any difficulty using only frigates, but it is useful to build 1 armory somewhere so that you can upgrade the smarties.
Hope that helps.
So noted. Thank you - that's exactly the sort of help I was looking for. I will try that when I next take a stab at it.
Which mission in which campaign is this?
I can assure you it's definitely very doable, and lowering the difficulty does give the player bonuses to make it easier. However, it's not intended to be that difficult when playing on lower difficulties. This mission got a rework a few months back and sometimes missions don't get balanced properly at low levels since I can't just pretend to play at a beginner level. So thanks for the post, I have adjusted this mission so that the Dreadnought comes at the player later on when playing difficulties below hard, (to varying degrees), giving you more time to build up. Not sure when the next update will be that includes this change, so here is a link for the file that you can manually install. Place that file in Steamapps\common\Ashes of the Singularity Escalation\Assets\Campaign\Episode1 and overwrite the file. It You will have to start the mission again from scratch though.
Wow! I am a little taken aback! You are indeed a true gentleman and scholar, sir! That is above and beyond the sort of help I was expecting!
(And this sort of thing is why I have a great deal of time for you guys at Stardock - your customer service is always exemplary! I wish everyone else would take a few cues from you!)
Seriously, this has made my day! (Especially coming back from a day where there has been some discussion not-at-all good family-related news, this was indeed a welcome surprise!)
I will most certainly do that, and try on normal, and report back how I did in due course. (Probably tomorrow, since I am having myself a little couple of day's holiday to celebrate having the house to myself for a bit!) I'm happy to have helped, in some small way!
One thing that helped me get through this hard was to wait on taking the turinium generator. It takes awhile for the enemy to completely cap this, so I don't even try for it until the enemy is past the halfway point in capping it. This let's you spend your early time and resources on capping nodes and building defenses around your base and get some quanta upgrades. Once you have enough qanta saved for at least 2 back to back incursions, then hit the turinium generator, drop an incursions, the engineer, then 2nd incursion and build your smarties and keep building sending bombers as they will significantly thin enemy attacks and will kill the dread when it shows up.
Main point of that wall of text (lol) is don't go after the generator early, get economy and defense in place then you can flood the generator with units without worrying about your base.
I gave Falnas another try on Normal, and it seemed OK to me. The trick to it is to cap the plateau pointed out to you early with a scout unit you start with, and to have a factory pointed at that plateau w/ repeat build queue'd of ~ 3 Brute, 7 Archer, 1 Medic. This pretty much keeps her at bay while you deal with the closer enemy first.
Right! After a bit of delay (faffinf with Crusader Kings 2 and the next patch and then sorting something Pokémon related), I had a stab at Artorius again.
That was muuuuuuuch better. The strategies definietly helped, but the extra time allowed me to get my defences actuall up in time, and to reinforce my positons. It was still a little close - Athena's last minute dreadnought rush on the generator cost me all of my bombers (since early attacks wiped all my frigates defences at home base, I'd had to keep the bombers close by for bit longer), but they did enough damage that the defences I'd put down were able to stop it.
For the sake of arguement, I'll have another stab at Falnas on Normal, now I have some idea what to do.
Edit: Considerably later... I managed it on normal - thanks to the advice as to what to do and now knowing which node to be able to cut off from Relias, though it was a bit of a slog, especially because Athena absolutely spammed quanta, so with the mobil nullifiers being not much use, I was basically having to advance under cover of engineers building a nullifier, movinf forward with four dreadnoughts and repeating (and I reloaded several times when the dreadnought - even at level five - were taken out by their defences).
I guess I should learn to spam quanta as much as they do, since either the plasma storm does nothing like the damage, or the orbital damae gets boosted by the damage buffs...?
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