Is affinity 4 still possible pre-t100?

[Lucius_]

I feel like this patch over-balanced.

Trade routes were nerfed 3 ways, autoplant quest, yields, no buying depot.

Likewise, affinity 4 units were nerfed 3 ways, though less obviously than the trade routes. Their combat strength was reduced, obviously, but the other two ways were their timing. Sponsors' free techs were eliminated so no slingshots now. Additionally early quest affinity XP was reduced.

So is it even possible to get early affinity 4 units now? They were uber OP at turn 100 or earlier. The thing is though, at turn 140 they were a lot less OP. I feel like their combat strength was nerfed hard but the developers didn't consider their timing. A 24 strength unit would still be very strong on t90. Not so much 50 turns later when cities aren't 23 strength anymore.

 

[TLHeart]

I still get lvl 4 units around turn 80... they can still take cities, just need a couple of ranged units with them.

 

[Esperr]

Well, in my first post patch game I got cndrs at turn 100, but they were much less effective then they used to be. And the kicker is, by the time they had taken there first city I was at Supremacy 6, and had marines that had 24 strength anyway. So its definatly possible, its just not as backbreaking as it used to be.

 

[Onylra]

I still get lvl 4 units around turn 80... they can still take cities, just need a couple of ranged units with them.

This basically applies to everything that melees from Marines onward? Hardly the most ringing endorsement. Maybe with their new buffs you could cap a gutted city with an Explorer, I gotta try that.

 

[Carl_Bar]

This basically applies to everything that melees from Marines onward? Hardly the most ringing endorsement. Maybe with their new buffs you could cap a gutted city with an Explorer, I gotta try that.

You allready could do this.

 

[Gort]

Yeah, this was the case in Civ 5 as well. No matter how high its combat strength, if a city has 0 HP when it is attacked by a melee unit it will lose.

You'll see stuff like a horseman taking a bombed-out city in the industrial era and taking 99 HP damage doing so.

 

[Lord Yanaek]

Was very fun in one game where i could get a scout to level 3 and take the +1 move promotion. 3 move scout that ignores terrain cost and a bunch of composite bowmen was all i needed to conquer my neighbor
Sorry for off topic post

 

[Yucatan]

Well, in my first post patch game I got cndrs at turn 100, but they were much less effective then they used to be. And the kicker is, by the time they had taken there first city I was at Supremacy 6, and had marines that had 24 strength anyway. So its definatly possible, its just not as backbreaking as it used to be.

Did you get the might +1 aff virtue or just the quest + research ?

 

[Onylra]

Yeah, this was the case in Civ 5 as well. No matter how high its combat strength, if a city has 0 HP when it is attacked by a melee unit it will lose.

Yeah, it never occurred to me to use Scout/Explorer for the job, but that's kind of neat (and also a bit broke, my kind of strat). Thank goodness they only get two moves, though something like 2-3 Explorers working with an Orbital Laser/Carver and Phasal Teleporter could be a legit deep-infiltration strikeforce. Rough going in the target area? No worries, sats smoke the city and you just swamp it with explorers until one gets through!

 

[sprang]

Yeah, it never occurred to me to use Scout/Explorer for the job, but that's kind of neat (and also a bit broke, my kind of strat). Thank goodness they only get two moves, though something like 2-3 Explorers working with an Orbital Laser/Carver and Phasal Teleporter could be a legit deep-infiltration strikeforce. Rough going in the target area? No worries, sats smoke the city and you just swamp it with explorers until one gets through!

I took out stations this way pre-patch. Two gunners, one explorer. Bombard down to zero. Explorer takes station, then builds expedition! Very efficient.

 

[Gort]

If they really can't code it so that cities can be taken by ranged units, they should just make them surrender to the attacker when they hit 0 HP. At the moment you still get lots of times when the AI forgets to bring a melee unit to a city fight and takes a ton of casualties as a result.

 

[DarkestOnion]

The Soldier Unit Line is now more efficient than the Base Affinity Unit Lines until the first upgrade of the Base Affinity Units. Additionally, the Combat Rover Line and the Missile Rover Line losing their defensive terrain bonuses makes taking cities with more than 30 strength (or with Tacjets) a tactical nightmare even if you can field a good army before T100 on Soyuz or Apollo. The patch skipped right past making the game harder and made things annoyingly harder imho.

 

[pwoz]

I'm not sure it's really much harder. Definitely different.

It can be harder sometimes in the vanilla Civ 5 sense where there were some games you were just going to lose. With how little affinity points quests give now, if the AI chooses to gunner rush me, I'm doomed. Only so much my rangers can do against that. I just make it a policy now to have enough energy per turn to keep everyone in constant wars.

The other annoying thing here is you are forced to wait until turn 100 to complete quests because the later quests seem to never appear for some reason. Even doing that affinity is still quite slow. It's a bit goofy to be queuing up techs solely because they have affinity points while not needing their other benefits. That's not a very interesting choice. Pick Red/Yellow/Blue.

After that, tech to highest level combat rovers (Purity preferred here with +50% city attack), spam, then conquer everything. Losses don't matter since you can build them so quickly.

 

[Gort]

The Soldier Unit Line is now more efficient than the Base Affinity Unit Lines until the first upgrade of the Base Affinity Units. Additionally, the Combat Rover Line and the Missile Rover Line losing their defensive terrain bonuses makes taking cities with more than 30 strength (or with Tacjets) a tactical nightmare even if you can field a good army before T100 on Soyuz or Apollo. The patch skipped right past making the game harder and made things annoyingly harder imho.

I didn't have a great deal of trouble taking out Rejinaldo's strength 30 capital on Soyuz difficulty with a mixture of gunners and armour units. It was even in some bad terrain with a couple of channels leading to it filled with hills.

I did take a bunch of losses though, especially once his tacjets appeared - I started losing an armour a turn across the four-turn battle.

Seconding pwoz's comments on late-game combat rovers - an avalanche of Purity's top-level combat rover with +50% city attack with no regard for losses whatsoever will defeat many threats.

 

[RedRover57]

Just wondering if any of this discussion is relevant to Apollo difficulty. I find it hard to believe that one can consistently achieve 4 affinity before turn 100 on Apollo, primarily because of how much more difficult it is to get your science rate high enough to grind through the affinity techs. Other sources of affinity points are hit-or-miss, such as getting a free affinity point from a progenitor ruin or getting un-bugged quests (or any quests for that matter). Is the Might tree required (for the free affinity virtue and increased points from techs) for such a quick run to 4 affinity?

A common scenario for me in the few games I have started on Apollo post-patch is that I maybe have enough space for 4 cities at the most before the AI heavily encroaches and if I'm lucky I am able to bribe aggressive neighbors to war with other AI before they DoW me. However, an early DoW is still more likely, which ends up having to focus on some military while ignoring the ever important infrastructure (science/culture/healthiness buildings). Plus early DoWs generally wreak havoc on your external trade routes.

As an example, in a recent game on around turn 130 I still only had 1 affinity point due to really bad RNG with respect to quests, ruins, etc. and an early DoW by the Slav Fed (whom I had bribed even earlier to war with the AU, but they made peace later and then almost instantly backstabbed me). The SF had 5 affinity (and battlesuits) already and weren't even the leader. Hutama was a runaway on the other side of the continent and already had 13 cities and 7 affinity in Supremacy! So yeah, even though I was able to defend against the SF I quickly fell further and further behind.

I would definitely be interested in hearing what strategies people are using successfully on Apollo post-patch. Pre-patch it was a joke, but they really tweaked it up. Interestingly, Soyez still seems quite easy - it's just Apollo that got a huge boost.

 

[Gort]

Not sure what changed between the patches, but the big difference between Apollo and Soyuz difficulties seems to be the extra Colonist the AI starts with.

 

[RedRover57]

Yes, but they also receive other boosts on Apollo since they clearly aren't affected by unhealthiness. There's no way that a human player could spam out 13 cities before turn 130 and not be crippled by unhealthiness post-patch. In addition I believe they receive more units as they are very good at quickly clearing out all of the resource pods (and all of the aliens, making the later quests that you get that require killing aliens and nests even more difficult to complete).

 

[Xenotitan]

I believe the AI gets 3 rovers on Apollo now regardless of planetfall time.

 

[Severion]

Plus, they all seem to start with Planetary Survey - so on an island map they're well into exploring outward before you even get off the island. I've *definitely* seen a huge dip in the availability of resource pods and aliens to kill. Plus, they fixed the bug where if an AI sits on a dig site, you can't sit next to them to make them move. Once they've squatted, that site's gone. With three exploring combat rovers plus their cadre of explorers, this combines to only ramp up the AI game at the expense of the player, ***when they already are served by huge starting advantages***. I'm not sure how others are doing on Apollo right now, but my feeling is they overcompensated with the patch pretty heavily.

Btw, I'm not complaining about the bug fix (it probably needed to happen anyway) - but together with everything else, I haven't seen a way yet to get a leg up on the AI. I'd love to hear from some of the more devious-sorts out there if they've come up with any ways to level the playing field.

 

[Gamewizard]

The couple of Apollo games I have played post-patch are similar to RedRover's. Hutama expands non-stop and always has alot of affinity points.