Planetary Supremacy Feedback

[S-Tier-Andrew]

The main ways I think the game-mode needs to improve would involve expanding the strategic complexity of the battles as well as the overworld map.

My issues with the battles can be grouped into issues dealing specifically with neutral battles, the battles in general, and battles against specific factions.

Neutral Battles: Currently, I find the neutral battles boring. They are way too easy. All you have to do is sweep over the map keeping your units together and you’ll easily crush all the smaller groups of enemies; this is also pretty tedious as the AI in the back doesn’t start coming for you until turn three. Turtling up at your deployment zone also works because the AI groups don’t come all at once such that you can easily kill each group one at a time. This could be solved by tweaking the AI. First of all, all AI units should have the objective to rush towards the player’s deployment zone from turn one. Secondly, if two groups of units are close enough, they should be able to join up and move together as a bigger group. This way, the AI will be able to pose a greater threat and players will be incentivized to play actively to prevent the AI units from grouping together into a swarm.

General Battles: This refers to any kind of battle that can be fought in the ps campaign. My main gripes are that the AI can’t use its units intelligently and the randomized maps leave much to be desired in terms of uniqueness and strategic nuance. Considering that the AI in the main campaign is designed to control much larger forces than the player uses, it makes sense in that context for the AI to be unable to fight efficiently to compensate. But in planetary supremacy, the AI will mostly be fighting you with an equally sized force. With these differences in mind, I think it would be best to make a much more intelligent version of the AI that can be toggled on and off in the planetary supremacy campaign. Currently he AI’s biggest weakness is that it doesn’t understand how to safely space its own units from the player’s units before attacking. In PVP, spacing and positioning are the two most important strategic concepts for any player to understand. If units are poorly positioned, they won’t be able to get into combat effectively and any attack you might launch will fail. If you don’t space your units from your opponent’s frontline safely, a skilled player will stomp you. No matter which faction you play or are up against, if all of your opponent’s units get to attack, you could potentially lose 50-75% (sometimes more) of your army in one turn. Good spacing is shown by positioning your army such that if your opponent attacks, they won’t be able to do critical damage and you can counter-attack and get the advantage the next turn. For example, if the plasmancer uses an action point to move a space further and has the movement buff from the lord, then they can use their orb of destruction ability on anything in a radius of nine tiles, meaning that you have to keep super expensive units like sanguinary guard, or big swarms you might field as tyranids out of that radius. Jumpack blood angels have a charge range of 8 tiles, krak grenades have a threat range of 9 tiles, a gargoyle swarm can threaten things from 9 tiles away etc. The AI has to know which of your units can pose a threat when they move into range such that they can take countermeasures such as overwatch. And the AI should never position themselves too close to your army without being in attacking range. For example, no sane person would never put a lone tyranid prime three tiles from a frontline of Assault marines. The AI does this. Melee units should not move closer you than they need to make it into melee on the next turn. A tyranid prime should stop five (or six if it can charge) tiles from my army no matter how many movement points it has left if I have units that can attack it on my turn. I understand that improving the AI is a tall order which will take time, but I think that allowing it to consider spacing and positioning is the most important step you can take towards making it competent. I think the first step to enriching the randomized maps would be to add destructible terrain and unique hazards to every map. This would add more elements to each battle and generally make each map more distinct.

Faction Battles: this refers to battles between the other factions. It is notable that the AI does not know how to create an effective army list. For example, in my final battle against the necrons in one campaign, they spammed warscythe lychguard and gauss reaper warriors, neither of which are ideal units for the necrons to use. Some random elements are required but there should be more intelligence going into how the AI makes its armies. To solve this, the AI should always draw units from each unit type (core, fast attack, heavy support, etc) The AI should also avoid certain loadout choices and units which at the moment are not very good. This would include gauss destructor destroyers, melta-pistol anything, duplicate hqs that aren’t specialized for combat (Lieutenant, broodlord, sanguinary priest, tech-priest, etc), aggressors, thornbacks, genestealers without broodlord, warriors with devourers, tomb-blades without tesla loadout. For this purpose, it would be prudent to keep an eye on the meta and modify how the AI makes its lists when balance changes.

The Overworld Map: This is the weakest aspect of the campaign. The map itself is bland. Each faction approaches the map in the same way. There is no strategic nuance to it outside of aiming for tiles with certain bonuses and timing when to use an action point for upgrades. And a faction is usually defeated in one battle. I understand that the full vision for the map can’t be realized until more factions are added, but I do think the aesthetic style of it needs to be overhauled. Rather than looking like a gameboard, it should look like the surface of a planet. Each faction should have different economies rather than all of them using requisition as they do now. And with that, there should be unique ways for each faction to build on each tile, modifying it either for economic or fortification. Your army should be represented by your main hq unit that stands and moves on the board; besides adding more strategic nuance, this would also add more aesthetic value to the map. I personally don’t like having to spend action points to access upgrades—it slows the game down—instead of that, there should be something else to spend hq tokens on such as unique actions for each faction that might give certain economic or military boosts; this way, rather than limiting the players options, it expands them. It should feel different playing each faction; this would do a lot to give the game more replay value. There should be more complexity to the way you fight factions such that you don’t just immediately stomp them if you win one battle. Maybe make it so that they start with a reservoir of units they can use to bolster their army during base battles that get depleted when you kill them. This would make it much harder to beat an enemy base in the early game or steam roll them after winning one battle.

With everything said here, I don’t mean to be negative. The gamemode has already made great strides towards improvement with siege battles and the tech tree. I just think that the current system is still super barebones and there are so many ways it could keep getting better. Out of any Warhammer 40k game, I think Battlesector has the most potential to become something really special. Keep up the good work.

[LordTen]

Superb suggestions and thoughts. I completely agree.