Well, yeah, the "benevolent dictator" is a humorous representation of the player, aka myself when I play. It's not meant to be insulting in the slightest, but rather a tongue in cheek thing. Also, story-wise the brain damage and all that does explain a lot of things about your character and why they have to rebuild anew. The Tales of Woe story takes it to another level and makes your aliens outright stupid for comedic effect, but in reality in the story they are damaged goods and doing a very good job of working around that. Using a mixture of human tech and their own tech, as it were.
Hahaha, I got that. I actually thought the comparison was hilariously funny with how the redshirts are liable to muck things up in the beta. Except there's not likely to be much benevolence in our games. Lots of big red buttons though.
Awesome intro and video! I can't wait to see the rest.
Did the Co-optional Podcast animator to it?
Thanks very much! And yep, Julian GD is his name and I was really lucky to nab him for these. He does commissions for various things as well as doing the Co-optional Podcast videos. We've been working in secret since January, haha.
Looking good. A question about the barracks part of video. Is selecting your barracks each turn tedious for situations that are already optimal? Kind of like how civilization 4 can't seem to carry out the attack strategy without ordering the units every single time, every single turn. Maybe okay for one or two armies, out of control for larger maps. Just curious. I suppose we'll find out shortly anyways.
I haven't found it to be that way, personally. One of the things is that you don't have to reselect your barracks each time -- it keeps them selected if you already had them selected. Though if you're switching between barracks, helipad, missile silo, etc -- and usually you should be -- then that might get annoying depending on how you placed your buildings. I'll have to add hotkeys for switching between those, but that's not a big deal.
The chief difference here from other 4X games, though, is that there is no "optimal strategy" that remains in place. In other words, kind of like how you don't just put Chess on autopilot for 5 turns, you would never want to do that here either. I can't think of a situation I've ever been in in the game where I thought "these guys can just take it from here."
The key thing is that there is a system of "interceptors" on the enemy side, and so your order of operations matters a fair bit. The AI is capable of calculating all that, yes, and does -- against you. But when you're playing, I think that's honestly part of the game (so if the AI did it, it would be "the AI playing the game for you" in a literal sense) and there are multiple ways to go about it. Which interceptors you target first, or which you "cook off" first, can matter a lot. Then which other buildings you target can matter a lot, and can change from turn to turn. The AI is constantly building new buildings, repairing existing ones, etc, same as you. And your power availability is an important thing that fluctuates some if you are constructing new generators or new buildings during turns, too.
So there is a fair bit of mental wrangling that can go on there if you want to play truly optimally. I'd never let the AI do it for me, honestly. Though with Civ I never did have that feeling, if that's any indication -- there I absolutely did have the feeling of "you guy just keep attacking that until it's dead." With AI War, too, I have that feeling -- hence FRD and attack-move and so forth. Don't bother me with details! But here there is a kind of midlevel intimacy to the fights, where they are small enough in scope that you want to manage them, but large enough to feel impressive, without being tedious to do so thanks to the (if I do say so) really novel and improved control scheme compared to other games of its sort. The lack of any units and instead focus on buildings makes all the difference there.
Anyway, your mileage may vary, but that's the feeling I have when I play. Plus I
like the fighting. I like pushing the button and seeing the bars go down instantly, and then hearing the booms. It feels really kinetic. AI War has that sort of kinetic feeling in a different way, but it's similar in many fashions. TLF is a
lot more removed from the action, and with Civ I don't personally feel any connection to the action at all. There I feel connection to my empire, instead. Just my opinion, and we'll see what other folks think soon.
Also, I thought the animated short was very good. Excellent humor.
Thanks!
