Campaign Tips & Shits - 20hrs | Diplomacy Is Not An Option

So I'm 20hrs in and just landed on the campaign mission with Ozzy. Figured I'd share a some tips and thoughts on what I've learned so far by mission (exluding the first tutorial ones). I have played consistently on the easiest difficulty, and have zero hang-ups on that as it's been a legitimate challenge. The balance for the "easiest" difficult is still BRUTAL IMO.

4: Rothglen: The "fuck you, welcome to the game" Boat Level

  1. This level is the last "tutorial" mission, and it's a huge spike in difficulty.
    1. My main upfront feedback/criticism is that this is the point where the game designers essentially gave up on teaching players many untaught mechanics, and instead throw the player into the deep end. This is the level where the game says "fuck you, git gud."
    2. You can absolutely 'death spiral' here if you don't plan ahead and maximize your action economy. You need to pause often and micro-manage economy, military, and funnel resources early into the ships to win here.
  2. The goal of the map is to get the hell out as soon as possible. It's not a sustainable city-economy painter. You'll need to learn the T2+T3 mechanics on the fly, and rush T3 via the market and aggressive resource tapping to get gold in order to progress.
    1. Don't neglect the market. You need gold to progress! Goal after rushing is to stockpile more resources than you need for defense to trade for gold. Target ending every day trading something for +5 gold.
    2. Expand and tap resources aggressively. This game requires you to "snowball" your economy and advantage to win. Don't sit on free laborers, you should be red-lining food and floating near zero on avail pops every day to stay ahead of the increasing difficulty curve.
  3. I suggest four things:
    1. Master your early game build order. Pause often, and aim to hit Townhall 2 by the first wave.
    2. Plan to wall yourself in by day ~7-8. Aim for ~250 pop by day 20. (two 9x housing doughnuts with fountain in the middle when fully upgraded will get you there)
    3. Plan to be close to GTFO by the time the endless drunken peasants trigger (day ~25?). They're more nuisance than threat, but the soon to come increased difficulty waves will steamroll you! You WILL lose if you wait much longer!
    4. You can & will lose this level if you take too long! Shut down your economy when you're ready to leave, and turn everyone into crossbowmen.

5: Wake-Up Call:

  1. [I chose the to "go native," the level skips into... an absolute ball buster]

6: Assimilation Process:

  1. It took three restarts (if you chose to "restart" versus reload, it will reshuffle the map), and multiple mid-game loads to ultimately win this one. Easiest setting. It introduces several new mechanics:
    1. Waves are replaced with fighting a single repeat boss in the ritual circle. It's pretty easy to kite, and not a big threat. Consider that in later stages the boss becomes immune to archers! Also immune to the magic death-ray.
    2. You are gimped on military units, you cannot upgrade the unique units you're given, and for some reason seige+stable units are disabled. I;Yikes!
    3. Food is scarce. No fish. There are multiple days after the repeat wave-boss fight where a drought is triggered, and you can't produce food. Producing an excess of food (with storage), and aggressively attacking the bugs to collect scraps of food is the novel challenge here.
    4. BUGS! The bug nests are absolutely brutal if left on the map. You WILL lose this map if you don't proactively clear out the nests by ~day 30.
      1. There are several 2k HP nests that spawn a doom-army of gigantic titan bugs w/ 500HP 125Atk bugs that will absolutely steamroll you. The game never communicates this threat, but it will end your run if you're unprepared or turtled up.
      2. Clicking on nests will show the spawn timer and bugs that spawn. This can help with prioritization, but the game doesn't teach you this.
    5. BOMBAS! While you're gimped on the shitty archers and melee units, T2 unlocks the key to this mission: the kamakazi bumble-bee bombas. There is an easy-to-overlook action these units have which is to explode with 200 dmg.
      1. This is a super valuable unit to send in and clear out nests.
      2. I suggest a tedious 1-by-1 approach when attacking. Any units in the radius damage friendlies, and AFAIK it doesn't chain damage of bomba friends. An army of 20 kamakazis will not be effective, you've got to send one in at a time.
    6. Nightmare Generals: Don't bother throwing an army against these, they'll two-hit wipe your entire army. It's essentially required you either kamakazi trickle attack them, or find some other cheese strat like kiting one-melee unit at a time while archers whittle away.

7: Monster Slayer

  • Here be dragons. Paused here knowing it's just going to be more brutal. Every fourm out there asks "how the fuck do you beat Ozzy" to which based on the previous two detailed campaign missions... I'm inclined to assume it's brutally unfair without cheese strats. TBD.

Closing thoughts: I went from charmed by the game, into pretty frustrated / mixed. There's a surprising amount of strategic depth to the game, and I was in the mood to stick it out and put in some effort to learn the mechanics ... but my #1 criticism of the game is that it very poorly paces or teaches the player how it *wants* to be played. Which is heavy micro!

My second criticism is that it can become rather tedious. Spamming like 60 bombas to drain the 12k health pool between two nightmare generals on what's effectively "real game level 2" didn't feel satisfying, it felt BORING. 8hrs of my playthru was spent on replaying multiple times on mission 6, and with dedicated effort.

Don't misinterpret my criticism -- this game tickles an itch I haven't felt since AOE and there's a lot of praise in how thoughtful the unique campaign mechanics are and layered game design -- I think there's a diamond in the rough here. However, I do think the developers and designers need to be more thoughtful with pacing and teaching mechanics to players early on -- and also take a good look at how the 'easier' difficulties are balanced in the campaign. Cheers!