№57810
>>57804>At about 30 weeks into the gameThat reminds me of another massive problem in the Empire at War mod community in general. They have zero sense of good pacing and have next to no respect for the player's time, and slow the game to an absolute crawl. It's crazy how the base game manages your time better than pretty much every mod. We need less Star Wars nerds that want to roleplay over the course of 700 real life days with 9 different factions, and more video game focused people that can nail the basics. There's a reason old RTS games are loved and newer ones get ignored. They keep piling on several different niche and unintuitive mechanics that are required just to play the game and not get steamrolled by novice tier AI.
№57830
>>57810I understand what your saying but the problem is that its a Star Wars game first and foremost. The amount of people who play it for strategy or maybe just because they like surface level Star Wars is far lower than the people who play it because they want a Star Wars roleplay experience before a strategy game.
Thrawns Revenge for instance is an extremely time consuming mod. It has plenty of battles which I enjoy but winning it is almost impossible. The game will either hit a point where it crashes or the framerate drops to the point of unplayability. It also adds unnecessary mechanics to the game which ultimately add nothing but meaningless complexity. For instance it changes a good portion of how the base game works such as proton torpedoes no longer penetrating shields which makes starfighters of all types useless in most battles. Their solution to this was just making the cannons on ships significantly more powerful which makes the battles just about as short as a base game battle despite having 10x the units on the field. Because of this actually managing units becomes extremely challenging and ultimately you just end up turtling your units or just sending in SSDs to do work instead of actually attacking or defending.
№57846
>>57830>adds unnecessary mechanics to the game which ultimately add nothing but meaningless complexity.And this is why I say most of the mods are pretty much for losers. Layering more crap on for the sake of having more crap is a lot like what the AAA industry is doing these days. It just pads out development time and splits the focus down a dozen different paths that make the game needlessly, exponentially more complicated to develop and play, instead of focusing on the basics and really honing them. Scope creep is really bad in Empire at War mods, and that's why they take forever to come out despite being a fairly strong mod community for a 20 year old game.
№58742
>>57846This is straight from the Empire at War remake and it describes the problem with mods.
>The 4.0 Update is a total overhaul of the entire game, leaving nothing untouched. Forget everything you know about vanilla, and the previous versions of Remake, because it's a whole new beast.The base game is exactly what the game should be. You assemble massive death stacks and have big space battles without having to worry about stupid mechanics excluding the pop cap (which is there to limit AI). The base game land combat for instance is extremely straightforward and isn't very bad at all but many mods try and overcomplicate it.
№58763
>>58742Yeah, the base game land combat isn't half as bad as people make it out to be. It just falls a little flat because the space combat is so good in comparison. Nobody will pretend the base game is perfect, especially since Rebels can just spam Nebulon-Bs and B-Wings, and the Empire can steamroll with a 100 stack of TIE Defenders. And the Corruption mechanic is game breaking once you have a dozen or so planets. But all that being said, Empire at War is still Star Wars, which was meant to be dumb fun from the very first day. Throwing in a ton of mechanics and micromanaging genuinely takes away from that. This is why the Rogue Squadron games are still remembered immediately when Star Wars games are discussed, but Squadrons is more of an afterthought despite being 15 years newer. One is dumb fun, the other takes itself a bit too seriously. I appreciate how dedicated the modding community is, but Empire at War mods should have focused on refinement of the base game instead of complete overhauls from people that worship the Andor show and SNCA Imperial Warlord micropolitics that briefly showed up in a comic 30 years ago. The playable aspect of the video game is kind of lost on the modders.
№59040
Playing the 5.0 remake, and this might be the longest mod I have ever played. It's been almost 5 days and I am barely out of the starting sector I've started in. Outside of the stupidly slow building time, the population cap has absolutely cucked me. I'm the richest faction in the game with an insane 1.6 MILLION credits yet I'm militarily one of the weakest because just about everything in this mod costs popcap. Space stations cost pop, construction yards cost pop, income buildings cost pop, if it can be built, it costs pop.
I'm playing as the Zann Consortium (the yellow faction in picrel) and the only ship I can field that can fight a Star Destroyer head to head is a Keldabe-class which costs 45 pop (which is 25 more pop than an ISD), which is more than most planets give you. By comparison, to my CIS Holdout starting neighbors who seem to be able to pump up Luchrehulks nigh endlessly in the early game, are able to hold up any expansion to the west because you'll end up in a war of attrition that drains you of credits in a portion of the game where you can't afford one.
As far as my standard fleet setup goes, its 1 Keldabe, 2 Aggressors, and either a small carrier (solely because of its repair ability) or a Vengeance class. I have no carriers that actually carry enough starfighters to fight off the endless hordes of enemy fighters, though the starfighters I get from the aforementioned ships are of high quality so they tend to hold up well against the shittier enemy fighters. Now that the Alliance has become a significant enemy my fighters are getting steamrolled and they basically own all the airspace. I just get endlessly whittled down until I either win the battle or I'm forced to retreat. As for bringing my own non-carrier based fighters, that's impossible because of the shitty popcap (a single fighter unit is 4, and some of them cost up to 11). In space the pop cap is a maximum of 100 for ships. My flagship costs 45 plus an extra 44 for 2 destroyer escorts, because anything less and my Keldabe gets overwhelmed by enemies and I have no ships capable of carrying a good amount of decent fighters plus being able to brawl.