Slitherine

Besides removing the threat of emerging Messari units there is not really an incentive to destroy the portals. After some time you even like the Messari units as your troops can gain experience from destroying them.

So why not grant the faction that destroys a portal a special technology? Some special unit or a special building? Or some technology? This would lead to a race of reaching each portal as first faction.

I agree, will see what we can do!

void wrote:I agree, will see what we can do!

Excellent to hear!
You guys are doing a great job with this game!

Good idea. I support it!

Is the portal frail? I don't know who destroyed it, maybe me with only 3 orbital bombarments as I was rather aiming the 3 just arrived units in (1 infantry and 2 armors) which then hurried at my nearest town without repairing from the bombardment.

Portals could get charges, if they charge up they could then spawn 10-20 units at the time, reducing charge to 0 and then starting the coundown again. All of this while their normal operation of spawning units is working

mrowka wrote:Portals could get charges, if they charge up they could then spawn 10-20 units at the time, reducing charge to 0 and then starting the coundown again. All of this while their normal operation of spawning units is working

The original version of the invasion event was like that numbers wise, needless to say Togra university was the last man standing, just for conveniently being farthest from a portal.

I only had few games with them, but they are very weak, its preety easy to wipe them out even with end tier of first era. On one of the game i was playing pangea and i didnt even seen messari since ai did wipe them out so fast. Messari in defence act like aliens and just leave the portals unguarded so even if you have problem with them you can simply use atvs to destroy unguarded portals. It would be nice if the portals would have very heavy defence, that would also spawn in time to resupply dead units in garrison. Only benefiting bonus for player that i would add from destroying portal would be a advencement to get rid of infestation.

mrowka wrote:I only had few games with them, but they are very weak, its preety easy to wipe them out even with end tier of first era. On one of the game i was playing pangea and i didnt even seen messari since ai did wipe them out so fast. Messari in defence act like aliens and just leave the portals unguarded so even if you have problem with them you can simply use atvs to destroy unguarded portals. It would be nice if the portals would have very heavy defence, that would also spawn in time to resupply dead units in garrison. Only benefiting bonus for player that i would add from destroying portal would be a advencement to get rid of infestation.

Its quite funny you mentioned this.. because I managed to lose a game to messaris a couple of days ago.

There was like seven portals on the island where I am.. with my six cities up. I smashed one portal immediately and there was only two portals on where all the AI human factions was. They all got wiped out by the messari somehow. (probably because they stayed at war with each other and killed each other with messari swooping in and killing them all, I saw alot of radioactive fallouts. So there was alot of nukes used.)

Were you far ahead of your AI rivals? What was their diffivulty lvl? The Messari are meant to go for the strongest faction. Maybe that's why they concentrated on you.

Zak0r wrote:Were you far ahead of your AI rivals? What was their diffivulty lvl? The Messari are meant to go for the strongest faction. Maybe that's why they concentrated on you.

I had an isolated start so the island I was on is half empty and recently cleared off of bugs mostly with a couple of hives left in southernmost reach. Meanwhile all the AIs was clustered together on other continent. Then after waging a war against hordes of messari on my island I couldn't go after the rest of the portals because AIs did precisely jackshit. XD
They was too busy killing each other then losing cities to messari after their stack of dooms got depleted.

Then I got a certain piece of good news from my fellow military advisor telling me that I have mightiest military on the planet which basically told me that I'm doomed.

Military Advisor: GOOD NEWS! IMPERIUM HAVE THE MIGHTIEST MILITARY IN THE WORLD!
Me: THAT'S BAD NEWS YOU FOOL!

Showing the locations of portal on my islandish.
I think i missed a couple more in my island.



Alicia Food city.
Natalia Worker city.
Retia Mineral city.

Alicia is the newest city and it was the first to go which put me into permanent stagnation due to lack of food.
Then Retia was second to go permanently halting my mineral growth.
And Natalia/capital survived until I quit.
All other cities got razed.

There was an Messari mech on Alicia, Natalia, and Retia. All three mech died, the one hitting retia is last one of the triple attack.
My improvements got pillaged and formers killed.


After the fourth Barracuda finished I normally go hunting for Aspidoths or leviathans to kill to grab their advancements.
But instead I used them to smash a portal immediately and destroy it.
It ended up being the only portal that I know if that got razed to the ground.


I managed to get a colonizer out and resettle to get my science city back and then another colonizer to get mineral city back but then I looked at this piece of good but bad news at same time.


Then at this point I just decided to quit. AIs still murdering each other and letting messari wipe their cities out.I still had world's mightiest military at this point. Cannot do anything worth a damn when human AI factions dick around My capital got pillaged heavily by portals that spawned in AI's island. I kinda hoped that the AI would take care of two portals in their island but they never did.
On otherside, I really hate Ion Storms. Messari very good at using it to deny you repairs. See those three ion storms? Yeah thats where my Goliath mechs was at Sit to repair, ion storm dropped, move and sit move sit move sit for like three turns in a row then I quit.
I'm wondering, will Area Aid let a unit of yours repair even when there's ion storm going off in same hex?


And Difficulty level was Hard, Alien aggression set to very high. And frankly the AI human factions is the one who's far ahead, not me. I always lag behind the Hard level's cheats despite my best efforts.

First faction to die out was the solar dynasty then Divine ascension. Divine Ascension was probably the strongest cuz divine ascension wiped the solar dynasty out. Then after messari arrived, divine ascension died to them first cuz they concentrated on southern continent. Then everything spilled over to me and remaining AIs. Although it didn't feel like that because I felt the full brunt of messari assault but I didn't see a single mothership show up though except for buncha of mechs. I was hit immediately on turn 2-3 after messari landed and set their portals up.

On the turn when Messari landed, my military was rated at 2-3 stars as in solid forces capable to dealing with aggression to might not withstand an invasion. And I killed so much XD Its just that the other AI human factions didn't do their jobs and so we all died together.

I really like the idea of the invasion being potentially devastating. Obviously this could break the game if it was overly frustrating. The idea I suggest would be to introduce a new unit device that is discovered once a Messari unit is defeated. It would provide a heavy defensive bonus against invading aliens, but only defensive. You can make up some cool scifi name for it too.

Another idea could be a new advancement. You could use a name from SMAC, "citizen's defense force," though it would function differently. This advancement would grant a bonus when your back is up against the wall. Upon completion, it wouldn't do anything immediately. The effects would be triggered when you're down to X number of cities ("X" would depend on map size). It could grant you a few emergency units and +200% power for all units for a limited time. The specifics of the advancement could be debated, but the principle is that when you start to lose too much ground, you have a chance to get back on your feet.

I like the idea of getting a useful tech for killing Messari. Or make three, a weak for the normal Messari and two strong ones for a mech and mothership kill (similar to the techs you get from the normal aliens).

Some time ago we were also talking about receiving a bonus for destroying portals. I hope the devs still remember that.

Personally I don't think the Messari are too strong. They scale with alien aggression and also AI strenght because stronger AI builds more units which again increases the invasion strength. So if they're too hard you can easily scale them down and even switch them of by modding the invasion.xml. But I really think they are just fine right now. In the tournament we also had them attacking in the end game while we already had nukes and one player even got to black holes by then although all but one human faction where at war for the biggest part of the game. Even then the Messari are not too easy and they can have impact on current campaigns and on how you use your operations. So they're doing exactly what they were designed for: change the balance a bit but not decide the game.

Logged onto the forums to also suggest a bonus for clearing the messari portals! (again... I've suggested this before).

I just wanted to note that getting tech from the portals is a great idea. The AI is realy aggressive about hunting down the Messari, this would be an excellent way to reward it and turn some of its often huge military strength into useful tech advances.

Well... there was a nice reward for destroying portals between 1.6.4 and 1.6.5 but Sephirok removed it because I had simply used the same popup that ruins used and he thought that this didn't look professional enough.