Gameflow problems

[Bearson]

I am still doing my first playthrough and 2 things stood out to me so far.

 

First, AI (if you wanna call it that) is very basic and behaves not really strategically in strategic map too.

 

I have liberated all of the area north of the river and some area south of it. Legion has 4 towers left in the east and northeast. The problem is, game keeps sending attack squads over one route only, that is via the river. So I have one squad parked in the bridge sector and thats it.

No alternate routes, no tactic change, or trying to go on land. Its basically an easy mode to get rich, since you dont really get challenged. First mine did deplete, but the others do not show any sign of it. Also, there is an enemy squad just sitting in one port sector north of starting island also doing nothing for the whole game. I have few to none militia in towns, mines and towers nearby and no squads. They could be taking back the whole area before I get someone there but nothing happens. I know its only the first half of the game, but still.. I dont even have to train militia.

 

Beware, minor spoilers ahead

 

Second, which is worse in my opinion, if you happen to get to a certain Fort, before a certain event, you find there a certain colonel with his troops. You can talk to him, you can loot the area, you can even get supplies from his men. What you cant do is kill them.

What happens instead is very funny. I tried to melee him, expecting all hell to break loose, and hoping I will have to fight only those soldiers that are in close proximity. Well, you stab him once, you stab him twice, he falls down unconscious and.. then gets up, regenerates all his HP and nothing else happens. So I try to shoot him, I try to shoot his soldiers, try to blow them up and its all the same. They just shrug it off, regenerate and continue about..

I know that those soldiers are required for a certain major event in the game, but what the hell. I wont go into what could be done instead, but I think this is the worst route the devs could have taken. It takes you out of any kind of immersion hard, and makes you question what other similarly poor choices were made in the development process.

 

[D13]

3 minutes ago, Bearson said:

What happens instead is very funny. I tried to melee him, expecting all hell to break loose, and hoping I will have to fight only those soldiers that are in close proximity. Well, you stab him once, you stab him twice, he falls down unconscious and.. then gets up, regenerates all his HP and nothing else happens. So I try to shoot him, I try to shoot his soldiers, try to blow them up and its all the same. They just shrug it off, regenerate and continue about..

I know that those soldiers are required for a certain major event in the game, but what the hell. I wont go into what could be done instead, but I think this is the worst route the devs could have taken. It takes you out of any kind of immersion hard, and makes you question what other similarly poor choices were made in the development process.

 

Fully agree. After starting the game and winning the first battle, you get to "meet the client" at the villa. So I went there and immediately shot the soldiers guarding the villa (didn't want armed guys in my back), then went inside to shoot Ms Lafontaine (very suspicious character) and Ms Corazon (didn't want witnesses).

Everyone ended up covered in their own blood but otherwise unfazed.

There are also some other characters in JA3 who actually attack you but then when you return fire, at some point they become invincible so you can interact with them later. Definitely immersion breaking.

JA2 on the other hand allowed us to kill even Fatima and the rebels. Which would at the same time kill part of the plot, BUT made it clear that you had a lot freedom to make mistakes, that you had to be careful with friendly fire, and in a way made me feel like every character was equally "human".

 

[sandman25dcsss]

If AI was playing by the same rules, the game would be unplayable, we would lose the game during first week. You should treat those legion soldiers as stationary monsters guarding mines and loot in Heroes of Might and Magic and alike.

It is good that devs favor balance over realism or "immersion", I like how they protected the colonel from player's abuse.

 

Edited August 3, 2023 by sandman25dcsss

[Claypl]

I would welcome additional counter attack route through jungle in down south, perhaps after the refugee events.

Perhaps not difficult to implement and make defending bit more dynamic.

As it is, I dont think it is terrible as they have to come from somewhere and you suppose to proceed with your conquest not just park yourself in one spot.

[Attempt]

I really like that they added attack routes but I agree that the chokepoints feel a bit too powerful. After you take F7 the outpost at G10 covers Fleatown and Port Cocoa, D10 handles the north and once you have D11 (the bridge) you can just park all your extra mercs there and intercept all the action headed for the left half of the map. But in general I like the concept, it adds a little bit of depth and extra choices. You can leave the outposts alone to level your city militia faster (8 elite militia might have a chance in the post refugee camp events) or you can skip training militia in towns and maybe even outposts after clearing them because you rushed the D11 bridge. You lose out on loyalty for training militia but it seems there are still enough ways to get to 100%.

[Bearson]

38 minutes ago, sandman25dcsss said:

If AI was playing by the same rules, the game would be unplayable, we would lose the game during first week. You should treat those legion soldiers as stationary monsters guarding mines and loot in Heroes of Might and Magic and alike.

It is good that devs favor balance over realism or "immersion", I like how they protected the colonel from player's abuse.

 

I disagree, especially on your last part. Game should reward player from discovering the option to do something about that major event, and I would be pleasantly surprised and proud to have done it. It would offer better replayability, once you know about it you could plan to conquer sectors differently in future playthroughs. As D13 pointed out, you could do that in JA2 if you wanted, so why not here?

 

15 minutes ago, Claypl said:

I would welcome additional counter attack route through jungle in down south, perhaps after the refugee events.

Perhaps not difficult to implement and make defending bit more dynamic.

As it is, I dont think it is terrible as they have to come from somewhere and you suppose to proceed with your conquest not just park yourself in one spot.

 

If I can see something that will grant me strategic advantage over the enemy, should I not take it because it makes it too easy then?

Its nothing terrible, but the game should be more dynamic and try to be more impervious to stuff like that.

[sandman25dcsss]

@Bearson Nothing prevents you from capturing sectors in different order. What you are suggesting is closer to theoretical lottery game where winning numbers are the same every time and then after checking those numbers in first game (where you didn't guess them) you want to start second game and "guess" all winning numbers this time. This would be an exploit and I am glad devs put the protection. "It was in previous JA" does not matter, even if there was an exploit in previous versions, it still should be fixed here.

Edited August 3, 2023 by sandman25dcsss

[sandman25dcsss]

For replayability we would need the responsible person be random so it is colonel Fosho (spelling is wrong, I know) in K10 in one game, nameless soldier in I12 in another game, Pierre's father Luke in Ernie in third game and so on. Then yes, it could be possible to kill people in different sectors without a reason trying to guess who is the bad guy. And then there should be a chance the event does not trigger anyway so player is just psychopath killing innocent people.

Edited August 3, 2023 by sandman25dcsss

[D13]

But it also "protects" us from acting on our suspicions without fully understanding the consequences (which can lead to interesting ethical decisions, which I greatly enjoy in games). And by making some characters invincible the game is giving away their relevance for the later plot, and forcing the lottery numbers to stay the same instead of allowing for very different campaigns. In my opinion they did not make certain characters invincible to prevent exploits, but to ensure the campaign would follow certain rules/storyline.

Anyway, for me it would be enough if mercs refused to shoot at certain characters. Maybe with a comment like "No, Emma is our client", or "I don't think Emma would appreciate us killing Corazon" or "Why shoot the soldier/colonel and make more enemies than we already have".  But spilling their blood and nothing else happening is a bit silly and immersion breaking.

 

[sandman25dcsss]

@D13

Do you think it would change anything? People would still complain they can't attack some characters. Those messages are extra work for devs and are not visible to 99.9% players, I think devs reasonably implemented the protection in the easiest way they already had in code, after some testers killed the characters too early and ruined own campaign.

Edited August 3, 2023 by sandman25dcsss

[Jaywalker]

It is a weakness that the story requires those people to be invulnerable, but at the same time this is decidedly leaning more into the RPG aspect than any of the previous games and judging by those merits it is definitely acceptable that you cannot ruin said story by knowing it beforehand.

There is only a small amount of cheating involved, and other than Ernie you can at least defend everything else you hold if you're in the area to react quick enough.

[D13]

28 minutes ago, sandman25dcsss said:

@D13

Do you think it would change anything? People would still complain they can't attack some characters. Those messages are extra work for devs and are not visible to 99.9% players, I think devs reasonably implemented the protection in the easiest way they already had in code, after some testers killed the characters too early and ruined own campaign.

For me it was a bit of a letdown early in the game, but I will admit that in this regard I'm spoiled by JA2 which was full of small things that most players would never see, and I often could not believe Sirtech had thought of.

That being said, JA3 has certainly bigger issues than this one (and who knows what game breaking issues they actually managed to fix in time!), so I agree they were right in not spending limited resources on allowing for a slightly more flexible game world.

[Melliores]

The strategic AI using the river and fastest route to it target is actually fine. Chokepoints are also great to have on a map, you can see it being part of any war in history - rivers, ridges, cliffs and the like were used for natural defense and you would only need to defend a small area.

The Diamond shipments actually use different routes, even sometimes passing through difficult terrain like the jungle. So the code does exist to plot different types of routes. The AI also does go out of its way to attack certain targets like Outpost. I have had the AI send an attack to Camp du Crocodile instead of Chalet de la Paix.

What the AI is lacking is organisation - they always attack with one squad. One time both a diamond shipment and an attack squad arrived at the same time and now that was a challenging fight against 17 enemies.

I would like to see the AI gather 2 or 3 squads in an Outpost before launching the attack. They first reinforce the staging ground Outpost and once they hit a desired number (could depend on a number of shields for example) they will send 2-3-4 squads as one attack force. This way you will need to proactively defend and even intercept AI before it reaches its target.

Another issue to be resolved is that when the AI retakes an Outpost you have conquered, that outpost no longer will generate new squads from what I have seen. We need the reconquered outposts to start generating defenders first and then new attack squads.

I would love to see AI squads with other missions than simply attack - for example, laying mines in a sector. Or just patroling, akin to that one squad around Camp du Crocodile that was on hunting duty for the Les Cadavérés.