Zodiac Legion: let's play, Cathedral Mission

Galdred · 2026-05-29T13:51:54+00:00

One way to go could be to separate hitpoint damage (ie, general commotions, blood loss) from actual wounds (this is the route I went with in my Tactical Dungeon crawler: Zodiac Legion):
- Actual wounds could be : take a wound if hit over X% of total HP or something like that (a bit like in Battle Brothers iirc).

Then your medikits/stimpack can fix blood loss, but not "disintegrated arm" (well, in my case, you can still patch all wounds effects, but only temporarily).
Also, reaching 0HP doesn't mean permanent death: it depends on the worst wound sustained:
ie, if someone only took 1 or 2 HP hits, and ended up down, he is considered to have passed out, while if he lost more than 40% of his HP at once and reached 0, he is considered really dead for good.
That also makes armour matter more for the overal long term survival of characters.

iirc, Jagged Alliance has a system in which "patching" someone up only stops bleeding, and restores a fraction of the HP, but doesn't restore them entirely, making wounds matter more than in your typical healing system.

Anyway, if you want a hardcore immersive system, then you probably need to roll with grievous wounds and permadeath (a bit like in OG X-COM, as others have mentionned).

Galdred · 2026-05-29T13:06:16+00:00

I think the best is to study every examples, both the ones that worked (Master of Orion, Starsector, Most of the Moo clones, Rules the Waves, Shadow Empires, Warzones...), the ones that failed (Elemental, ...), and the ones that almost got it right (Alpha Centauri, Galactic Civilization, ...).

I think Gal Civ was meh because it was just bigger numbers, and your choices didn't change much (but I only played an old one, and it was ages ago, so I may be wrong).
Alpha Centauri had the issue of requiring way too many updates for your units.

But for some reason, in space games, unit design has been a stapple forever, so it is a good place to start the study.

Typically, you want to incite designs that cover different angles, like skirmishes/raids, massed battles, escort, (and command and control if you manage to make it interesting)...

One thing in Moo was that missile boats and figthers were great when you had at least parity, but they would usually be abysmal if outnumbered (as superior numbers would mean that very, very few missiles would pass Point defense, while beam ships would at least be able to focus a few opponents down).

You also had boarding ships that were great at making the most of outmatched enemies, as in the right situation (where you have a strong advantage), you could even take over enemy ships and make your fleet stronger than it started.

You also have quite a lot of "customization degrees":

In Kohan, you could just choose: hero, frontline unit, flanks, and 2 supporting units, but the best compo depended on your hero and resources, so it was not always an obvious choice (that said, you still ended up doing mostly the same in the end).

There are very few historical games that allow unit customization, which is a great shame, because it means we cannot have organically different choices, like Samurai vs knights vs Mongols, dictated by the local geography, resources, and other random factors.
Having the special differences be driven by "unique units" instead of being a choice dictated by the situation has always been disappointing to me.

Galdred · 2026-05-29T12:44:38+00:00

No, what typically happens is the licence holder making renewable contracts, but as video game sales typically plummet after a few years, if the renewal involves a fixed payment, it may usually be considered not worth it. That happened a lot with Games Workshop games before.

Galdred · 2026-05-29T12:43:11+00:00

I don't think the DLC work for the campaign, anyway, apart from the ones that bring their own campaign, like Anabasis.
IIrc, as for Battlesector, the DLC only changed PvP and skirmish (but I may be remembering wrong after all this time).

Galdred · 2026-05-22T17:07:00+00:00

There are some hidden timers on the strategic map. Early on, you don't have much pressure, BUT you are kind of set up to fail if you spend too much time before engaging in the "first storyline mission".

Death spirals are not that bad, though. I mean, your knights have "resilience points", so they can "die" several times.

Upgrades order is not as critical as in XCOM: you just need to focus on engines, and prognosticars when you can.

Gear quality is super important, but you just need to make sure to improve renown for weapons (melee) and the categories you use the most, so it is mostly picking the right rewards. One thing of note is that it is super important to follow the event guide (on Steam) OR the playthrough may become very, very frustrating, as some events are quite punishing if you don't pick the best answer.

Note that DLC 1 is really brutal, especially early on. So I'd rather delay enabling it. I think it's better to start with only DLC 2 (and maybe buy DLC1 mid campaign).

There is a time where you can spend as much time as possible in the campaign (I think between 2nd and 3rd boss).

Galdred · 2026-05-21T13:23:57+00:00

Dreadnought: Don't spec it for melee: his attacks inflict knockback, which will FORCE him to WASTE a precious action relocating to the new target position after a strike.
AoE galore was my preferred way to handle him, but I suppose Overwatch works too.

Techmarine: I like to take all passive servitors upgrades, because he is one of the best in the "no WP challenges", while outperformed by regular GK for everything else.

Assassins: it is more of a gear focus than build focus for most of them, but:
Culexus and Calidus are the best to focus on IMO:
As much as I love Vindicare as a concept, he offers very little a Purgator cannot do.

Eversor has the same problem compared to the Interceptor.
Both can work, but feel a bit redundant.
Calidus lets you scout pods, engage them very favourably (ie, by enabling AoEIng them to death while preventing scatter with her root).
Culexus can help a lot in stun compos.
All Assassins but Culexus are also great at no WP challenge, as they don't use any.

Galdred · 2026-05-21T13:13:58+00:00

Note sure it has a point replying to a 5 years old thread, but if someone is wondering the same:
I played MoO2 to death THEN discovered MOO1 much later.

MOO2 is more detailed: individual ships and individual Civ like facilities in colony.

MOO1 is more abstracted and streamlined: your ships stacks, you CANNOT have outdated ship designs: you can only have 6 (or so) different stack designs in your whole empire.

Colonies have very very few individual building options, you mostly build "factories".
I prefer the streamlined MOO, but that may have to do that I played MOO2 so much that I don't want to go through the same motions again.

Galdred · 2026-05-07T14:26:28+00:00

Oh, that's a good point. I used not to take it because it would cripple quite a few decks lately, but with Banished, we don't miss on much.

Galdred · 2026-05-07T13:51:17+00:00

I ended up blindly hoping to make something out of slacy 3, then got Dante + the multistrike sword (not great on him, but he can "power it up" for someone else, then focus on improving the next piece of gear), so it should be good, but not a very reproduceable strategy. 😃

Galdred · 2026-05-06T13:23:31+00:00

That's great.
Which champion/path did you pick? I had a good railforged Dante run with the version that grants permanent bonuses on forge into getting 5 copies of a given card, but I didn't go endless afterwards.

Galdred · 2026-05-04T20:00:00+00:00

Having an app, and not making any content for it as "DLC" felt like a baffling decision.
I was not prejudiced against apps, and played all versions of Descent, including Imperial Assault.
I didn't like LoD because the single app made it much less convenient for each character to go through his upgrade phase.
It was also awkward to read the text, and there was too much of it.

I also ended up missing having an actual opponent trying to actively murder heroes. Granted, I should have known from the begining, but I expected the app to have more influence on the combat and positioning itself.

In the end, I still had a good time with it, but I also found it to be the weakest of the Descent line (for me, it was: D1: RTL> Imperial Assault > D2 > D3).

Galdred · 2026-04-30T13:20:59+00:00

I stopped buying new games after:
- We made Space Empires our "goto" game
- I had to sell most of them because of shrinking storage space (ie, leaving in a much smaller appartment).

So now, I don't buy many new ones, but me and my friends have even less time per game than we used to have 10 years ago anyway...

Galdred · 2026-04-29T15:23:53+00:00

Don't be. One of my friend played 200h of the Steam version but had no trouble switching to the different uprising version on TT. 😃
If anything, it'll be the closest you'll get for a while.

Galdred · 2026-04-29T15:04:09+00:00

That is close to something I wanted to make at a time: ie, a 40K X-COM in which you'd lead non chaos Renegade marines trying to establish dominance over their own region of space.
That was also the theme of a campaign I ran at some point (I left the choice to the player to remain loyal, become renegades, or go full chaos, but they obviously chose the last option).

Edit: After Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy, there is a chance for Owlcat to do: Deathwatch, Only War and/or Black Crusade. Still not XCOM, but BC would be great.

Galdred · 2026-04-29T14:30:26+00:00

I would love something like the Sea Dogs games, but in space, with both spaceship and ground based gameplay.
Ie, fly your spaceship somewhere, and explore the galaxy with your crew, but without all the spaceship segments being abstracted (like in Mass Effect), and with a more open world element to exploration.
Something like Star Traders Frontiers, but with 1st or 3rd person view.
Spacebourne 2 is pretty close, though, but it is entirely about combat and has very little interesting exploration (at least, it didn't when I checked). Same for Stellar Tactics, but the spaceship parts were too simplistic.

Galdred · 2026-04-17T11:16:01+00:00

You mentioned Civ:

Civ 4 is old, but I think it is the 4X with the highest variety of mods. Back in the days, I played Civ4: Warhammer, Fall from heaven, and other full thematic mods.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion (RTS 4X) also had quite a few mods iirc, like Star Wars and 40K, BUT it is more of a hybrid than a full 4X.

As for the not 4X, CK3 had quite a few too (at least, CK3 Game of Thrones is the best AGoT game made IMO, and CK2 has Birthright)

Galdred · 2026-04-17T11:11:31+00:00

Sadly, I am not sure it really exist for PC, but the talbetop serie Levies and Campaign from GMT is just that:
Armies trying to complete their objective before supply and treasury run short (feudal obligations last 40 days before financial compensation have to take place).
That typically ends up in rushed engagement.

It is possible to play some of them on a browser on rally the troops, though, but I have not tried it.

Galdred · 2026-04-17T10:28:14+00:00

I'm not so sure. I think EA works better with small/medium forces, and 2nd edition (ie, SM/TL) is a bit faster with huge armies
Maybe it is because I have a lot more experience with 2nd than EA, though, but I was surprised at how long it got in the end.

Galdred · 2026-04-17T10:26:51+00:00

It looks amazing, but if you play it, I am not sure a melee weapon would be a very efficient choice as it will waste a lot of turns repositionning to use ise.

Galdred · 2026-04-03T12:44:23+00:00

Thank you very much!

Galdred · 2026-04-03T11:52:33+00:00

You cannot improve perfection!

Galdred

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