Fallen Spire feedback

[Oralordos]

Is there any thought of adding optional campaigns for the Zenith or Neinzul in the future?  Neinzul could be to reunite the Roaming Enclaves into one hive mind and would be more dynamic/mobile gameplay rather than the static-point gameplay that Fallen Spire has (not sure how this would work), and Zenith Remnant may be something along the lines of opening up an Exogalactic Wormhole by somehow harnessing the various Zenith factions currently existing, and will focus more on providing excess knowledge (seeing as they don't have much of a military force left I guess, but tons of know-how) and maybe some limited ability to produce golems.  Maybe for the Zenith it could be a little stranger in that you need to actively protect Zenith Mining Golems from AI responses as part of it, to gather enough resources to construct a large enough power source to open an exogalactic wormhole?

I wants!

As for the Spire campaign, I think the main reason that it feels grindy is the repetitiveness of continuously doing the same things over and over. Perhaps if some shard finding missions were replaced with other missions.
Perhaps something like the Spire cannot always locate the shard precisely and can only give a range of planets that it "may" be on. The player cannot tell whether the shard is there until he scans the planet and either finds the shard or finds nothing. If this was the case the range of planets could be much closer to the player turf.
Of course this is still more of the same mission type but it is less repetitive if this is the case. Perhaps this could be for the early stages when the primitive human tech is scanning for the shards?

[TechSY730]

As great as generating a "storyline" for each expansion would be, I'm not really pushing for that.

I would like to see journal entries for the base game though. The journal entries really help the immersion and give me characters (the scientists) I relate to, and thus care about. It really makes me want to play well to see how the "characters" will be pleased and maybe even celebrate. It also makes me want to play well so I don't have to see those "characters" suffer.

This is the power of storytelling. Even simple stories with relatable or even understandable characters can get one engaged.

[Oralordos]

I don't think that adding a storyline for each expansion would be something to be done lightly too. Perhaps as an idea for another expansion.

[Tharrick]

I really enjoyed the Fallen Spire campaign. Made it all the way through to the end, as well. I love the way the balance of power shifts once you're far enough along the storyline, the spire ships are excellent
Only gripe being the reinforcement fleet that shows up to save the day has too much of a habit of taking out warp counter posts, then buggering off and leaving your planets defenceless - I had to make a real push at the end to take out both AI homeworlds before the rampaging fleets hit anything too important...

[iamlenb]

I'd like to see the AI take different tactics when dealing with Spire threats.  Haven't gotten that far in the campaign yet, but it's been feeling like "oh, another shard?  Grab my blob and escort it back through the neutered planets path."

I'm thinking that maybe something like Massive Starship Inbound warning but with a warhead instead.  A nuke.  Surrounded and protected by a bunch of deadly ships.  Will wipe out the planet the spire shard is on when it catches up.  Have to intercept the warhead in AI territory before it jumps in and merges with the shard.

To support splitting up forces protecting the shard with game mechanics, perhaps allowing any selected group of ships with the shard set as a destination can have auto group move.  Have the shard alt move menu select "Return to Human Homeworld: Neutered Path" or "Return to Human Homeworld: Shortest Route".  Let the player grab any ships blobbed with shard and move them around to a formation offset using shard as a base for a group move.  Have some ships with alt move menu select "Guard Wormhole and blow the crap out of any AI ships until Shard warps to next system, then rinse and repeat."  Let the Player set their own tactical

Ideally, there would be some mechanics in place that reduce the babysitting these shards require and allow the player to counter some definitive AI threat elsewhere.  A "Nuke Inbound", "Hunter Trace", "Carriers Incoming" or "Massive Golem Wavefront Detected" message in response to uncovering a shard should be exciting to deal with, hopefully not brown pants exciting, and different than the "Moar Ships!" response the AI currently employs.

[bongotron2000]

I recently played through the Fallen Spire campaign to the end. It was on a 50-planet X map, with 2 level 7 AIs (Vanilla & the one that uses Counter Spies). All in all, it was really good fun, the Spire starships are fantastic, especially the higher-level ones. I have to concur with the feedback about it being a bit 'grindy' as it goes on, and in some ways perhaps it was a little easy. However, I think some of this was down to the nature of the X map and the way I was playing it; choosing a home planet with only one wormhole, clearing out each branch entirely to make defence easier, and having an incredibly well defended central planet (funnily enough, called Murdoch) with a hub on it, and a Superfortress, and an Orbital Mass Driver, and a Radar Jammer mk II, and a Ion Cannon mk IV. Perhaps I'm ready to move up a level with the AI difficulty, but I was recently thrashed with a CPA on a regular style map, so I thought I'd hang back for a bit.

In the end, I'd captured every planet except for the two home worlds, and put hubs on all 5 'central' planets (you'll know what I mean if you've played an X map) covering the wormhole back towards the home planet. Capturing some of the later shards was pretty intense, in a good way though, and the AI did make some limited inroads at times. After getting 3 of the hubs it would have been probably reasonably easy to take the homeworlds, but I was curious to see how the Spire campaign played out. I do wonder though what this would be like on an 80-planet map, where the capture everything strategy is less workable due to AIP.

Maybe make it so that the Galactic Capitol is buildable with a lower number of hubs, and the shards beyond that give something other than more Spire colonly ships; e.g. special ships or defensive structures, extra unlocks for the Spire starships, or allowing the hubs to be upgraded an extra level with more shipyards, habs & reactors. This could cut down some of the grind, but still allow access to some of the advanced Spire stuff. You could introduce a shortcut to the end of the campaign (but only after a certain milestone), so there would be the option of getting further normal shards, or go straight for the final shard that brings in the Spire fleet with all the extra risks that brings.

I loved the idea of using the standard unlocks for things like laser turrets and beam turrets on the Spire Destroyers and above. That really opened up a lot more options, and it was good to unlock and use some things that I'd normally not bother with, mainly the higher-level beam turrets that just obliterate AI fleets, provided that they don't get overwhelmed. The Spire ships were really good fun and worth the effort and time to get them, and in some ways a lot of getting the later shards was because I wanted to see how the story panned out.

The campaign isn't at all 'broken' in any sense as far as I can tell, but could possibly do with a few nudges in certain directions.

[Sunshine!]

I loved the idea of using the standard unlocks for things like laser turrets and beam turrets on the Spire Destroyers and above. That really opened up a lot more options, and it was good to unlock and use some things that I'd normally not bother with, mainly the higher-level beam turrets that just obliterate AI fleets, provided that they don't get overwhelmed.

Seconded.  This was an amazing mechanic.

[BobTheJanitor]

I'm a bit confused on the modules for fallen spire ships. Is there something I'm missing that indicates what limits the number you can use? Like on a cruiser, I use a shield module and then some of the higher tier gun options disappear. But I don't see anything that says that a given ship has say, 10 invisible slots, and the shield counts at 3 slots or whatever. It seems like the only way to know what you can build is to mix and match and see what disappears when you click something else. And unless I'm figuring something wrong, you seem to get more firepower out of it by loading up on the lower mark modules rather than using the limited number of higher powered ones. But that might be wrong because I'm not exactly sure what items exclude other items when you equip them. They still chop through fleet ships either way, but it's confusing me. And I get all OCD if I can't figure out how to properly min-max in my games.

[keith.lamothe]

I'm a bit confused on the modules for fallen spire ships. Is there something I'm missing that indicates what limits the number you can use? Like on a cruiser, I use a shield module and then some of the higher tier gun options disappear. But I don't see anything that says that a given ship has say, 10 invisible slots, and the shield counts at 3 slots or whatever. It seems like the only way to know what you can build is to mix and match and see what disappears when you click something else. And unless I'm figuring something wrong, you seem to get more firepower out of it by loading up on the lower mark modules rather than using the limited number of higher powered ones. But that might be wrong because I'm not exactly sure what items exclude other items when you equip them. They still chop through fleet ships either way, but it's confusing me. And I get all OCD if I can't figure out how to properly min-max in my games.

I suggest using the Ship Design tab on the Controls window to visualize what each slot can hold.

[Draco18s]

I love story-based campaigns, but I admit this one felt kinda grindy to me (though not so much that I wouldn't play it again).

I'd say it felt like that for a few reasons:
1) It was largely the same cycle of steps repeated numerous times: fight your way deep into AI territory, flee back to your territory with the shard, fight off angry waves, build hub, fight off angry waves, rinse, repeat.  After the 4th or 5th one of those, it felt pretty "samey".  8 or 9 of these same type of missions is too many.

This.  Thisthisthisthisthisthis.

The other problem I had is that it took 2 or 3 of these before you even got any candy at all.  If we could ditch the "find a shard and turn it into a radio" mission, that would help immensely.  Sure, less awesome story, but god, the giant radio is a pain in the ass from a playability standpoint.

My suggestion: Eliminate som of the deep-territory shard recovery missions (or make some of the actual shard retrievals trivial), replace with a variety of other mission types, and some increased challenge in other aspects.  Some ideas:
- mission: city hub (not shard) discovered on (nearby, not too deep) planet, must be rescued and defended in place (like a Human Colony Rebellion) since it cannot be moved.
- mission: knowledge-raid a particular AI planet to learn the location of a shard (or shards) the AI has hidden somewhere (perhaps even on a player-owned planet).
- mission: take out a series of special structures on one or more AI planets that are masking the detection of the shards or preventing the building of city hubs, etc.
- mission: AI has a captured spire artifact that allows it to warp gate in waves of ships directly to ANY spire city hub.  Capture (or destroy) this artifact.
- mission: AI sets up a massive ambush on the player using a fake shard signal as a lure (with something like a hidden black hole gen to prevent player fleet escape).
- when the Capital is built, the AI sends a half-strength Avenger (no planet nuke, though) directly towards it.

Nice ideas.  I like 1, 2, and 4 particularly.

I also encountered a...bug at one point where I was somehow unable to continue the spire quest.  I forget the exact details now, but I think it was "get shard, build colony ship, colonize hub, wait 5 minutes......where's my new shard announcement?"

Either that or the shard/colony ship was destroyed by the AI and a new one was not reseeded for me to find (despite claims that it would happen).

No idea if the bug is still around.

Edit: Fixed quote box issue.

[TechSY730]

If I understand this properly, you don't need to recover a shard for each hub. After you have built a certain number of them, you can just build a hub builder ship directly, allowing you to get a new hub without the need to escort a shard. This should cut down on the number of shard recovery missions you need to do. You still need to do what, 5-7 of them to get to the point where you don't need shards anymore. That number may need to be brought down.

[keith.lamothe]

The first five hubs require shard missions.  Once you have 5 hubs you can build a capitol, which in turn lets you research the tech to just build colony ships from spire shipyards.

I'm intending to cut the number of hubs required for a capitol to 4.  Maybe even 3.  I don't want to cut it too much because I don't want FS to be a way to win the game fast... though I guess that wouldn't be the end of the world either, eh?  But not "fast" as in 2 hours, maybe more like 8 instead of 12.  We'll see.  The changes involved in reducing the number of missions are significant and don't really fit with the schedule right now.

As for the "build a radio out of a shard" mission, yea, it's not strictly necessary.  It's intended as a sort of tacit 'tutorial' so you have a relatively easy run to learn the ropes.  Hopefully it doesn't actually take much time.  But I'm considering cutting it.

Does anyone here actually want the first shard mission to not get cut?

Does anyone here actually want the 5th hub mission to not get cut?


Like I said, it'll be a while before I can perform the necessary surgery.


On the other hand, one thing I don't really understand about the "it's repetitive" issue is: is it significantly less diverse than the process of taking a planet?  Or is it that it just takes so long?  Or what?

[Sunshine!]

Planets are less repetitive because of the battlefields within battlefields philosophy.  If it's a difficult planet, then there's often some kind of unique approach to dealing with a planet that requires some thought but is worthwhile in execution.  If it's not a difficult planet, all it requires is sending in a cap of mk1/mk2 fighters (and maybe some support), giving them a pile of sequenced orders, and then going off to do something else.

For the first mission, it's probably important for new players to see what happens when dealing with a shard, otherwise their first experience is going to be the Spire Refugee ship, and they may not realize that collecting shards is a whole different beast.  As it's two hops at early AIP, it's not much of a problem.  I haven't made it to a 5th shard yet, so I can't comment on that in detail, but part of the issue is probably the having to babysit a shard across 8 planets, because it (probably) requires constant attention without there being a neat (cleverly rewarding) method of retrieving the shard or dealing with the onslaught.

[Draco18s]

If I understand this properly, you don't need to recover a shard for each hub. After you have built a certain number of them, you can just build a hub builder ship directly, allowing you to get a new hub without the need to escort a shard. This should cut down on the number of shard recovery missions you need to do. You still need to do what, 5-7 of them to get to the point where you don't need shards anymore. That number may need to be brought down.

You are correct, however I never got to the 5th city as I experienced a bug.  I couldn't build the Capitol and was unable to recover shards.

[TechSY730]

The first five hubs require shard missions.  Once you have 5 hubs you can build a capitol, which in turn lets you research the tech to just build colony ships from spire shipyards.

On the other hand, one thing I don't really understand about the "it's repetitive" issue is: is it significantly less diverse than the process of taking a planet?  Or is it that it just takes so long?  Or what?

Maybe not cut down on the number of shards to get the galactic Capitol, but instead cut down on the number of hubs needed to build spire colony ships. After all, you still trigger an AI wave when you start building a new hub, right? That would keep it from becoming too easy, especially given the AIP by the time you would gave gotten to at that stage.

As to those last two questions, yes on both counts. Each planet is diverse, with different ships, guard posts, and sometimes even heavy defenses an planetary buffing structures. Also, unless it is a high Mk planet, you can typically clear it pretty quickly.
In contrast, the shard recovery missions are all the same. This would not be so bad if the shards weren't so agonizingly slow.