Rhaeg wrote: ↑Sat Jul 18, 2020 8:34 pm
Well, I finished the dlc so I might as well write down what I thought of it after having played it all. Sorry for the long post if you don't like reading through these, but hey, you can always decide not to read
While I always want a perfect score, I think fair is fair. The reports of various issues do knock it down a bit.
To address some points:
1.Always super happy to see people enjoying the minor story elements of Stefan and Ana Sofia. Such characters and drama won't ever take over the campaign design, but we hope this positive reaction means we can continue to use it to sprinkle personality and flavor on future content to come.
2.Non linear scaling scenario difficulty is indeed intended and carefully baked into historical context and campaign difficulty curve. It's nice to have a rest between the big crazy stuff. Pure escalation bigger and bigger and bigger... is fine in a small campaign. But if the Axis Operations reach the size of the Grand Campaign at 10 DLC and 144 scenarios (or bigger)... pure escalation is not appropriate to content on such scale. There are breaks between DLC, and there are breaks within the DLC as well.
3.Well Battle of the Ebro sounds perfect from your description. It is quite daunting.... but that is why it is a one of a kind battle. Both historically and within the content. Imagine if every scenario was on scale of Battle of the Ebro in terms of unit count, right from the start of Seville? Bigger is not always better.
I would expect each DLC to have at least one of these 'epic' battles, but making sure they are rare (1 out of 16 scenarios) is important to keeping them epic and not just a never ending chore to see scenario after scenario after scenario.
4.We actually have many plans to deal with experience:
At the start of the campaign, it tells you what the experience cap is.
DLC campaign also have a slower rate of medal awards (anyone notice it takes forever to earn a Steamroller award?) and also slower experience rates.
There are also future plans for experience that I can't talk about, because they are new features and mechanics we haven't seen in a Panzer Corps game before... Suffice to say, we are acutely aware of this particular issue, and have an arsenal of tools and ideas to address it.
5.As for heroes, this has been asked repeatedly, so I will repeat my position on it, which is just let the player decide what they want to do with their glut of heroes:
Plaid wrote: ↑Mon Jul 13, 2020 7:18 am
Generally speaking one hero per map is too much.
Player will be swimming in super-units of all sorts by mid-war.
Each individual campaign has to be playable by itself. Which means the 1 hero per mission rule must stand.
But perhaps imported COREs should be limited to 1 new hero per 3 missions? That kind sucks, it's like punishment for importing.
What's wrong with continuing to give the player heroes, and letting them decide for themselves to continue to power inflate their force, or to voluntarily choose to opt out by disbanding/ignore new heroes?
6.There are no plans for a CORE shrink, a la DLC 42/43 West. Proper utilization of the reserve system plus non-linear content difficulty scaling should be more than enough to prevent the need for slashing the player CORE down to size.
7.Prestige is meant to carry over. But each DLC has that 'destroy fraction of your prestige' event. So.... the more you carry over, the harder it will hit you when losing half or even 75% of your prestige will hit. As before, my opinion on these matters is always to just let the player choose.
If someone wants to never invoke the prestige sink event in any DLC and they just inflate their prestige levels into practical infinity... more power to them. Freedom of choice includes the freedom to choose a non-optimal path. Fun for them is perhaps different than fun for me. For the rest of us, generous prestige amounts to make sure players are never starving (on default difficulty,if people opt into Rommel mode thats their business) and occasional % prestige sinks should be enough to ensure every DLC has enough prestige inside of it to see the average player through to completion. No more hoarding from 1939 to survive 1944.
The reason prestige was a problem in late Grand Campaign is because sinks didn't exist. We couldnt give large prestige numbers because prestige was the primary driver of balance in original Panzer Corps. Now in Panzer Corps 2, slot limit is the primary driver of balance and we also have prestige sinks. So we can very readily not be so damn stingy with prestige rewards (again talking about default difficulty mode) and we have the tools to make sure it's not just scaling to meaningless infinity.
