New Steampunk Advance Thread
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Agree with your ideas
It's very difficult to "balance out" imbalanced things (like some countries are stronger, some have unique units) but the imbalance is what makes it so fun. It's very hard to not throw out the baby with the bath water when balancing things.
But assassins are disgustingly broken. 5/0 with 2 movement for 2 IPC, and all you can throw at them is infantry...plus they have militia. And their primary target is Austria, which already has about as much chances of surviving as France does in most WW2 games. It's unplayable. That's my strong argument. My weak argument is I personally don't enjoy the assassin play, it's not "fun" to send assassins in to take territory.
There are many ways to balance, and I would defer to a more fun option, but the most straightforward way is to just remove assassins and give Austria more units. 10 infantry + a leviathan
Maginots are ok as-is. Germany has a counterplay but it takes a while to find. More troubling is that St Petersburg can't be saved, it needs some units too.
edit-reworded, I don't know AI dev. So I don't know that a revamp is necessary. So I'll just say that the AI doesn't currently do well in large maps, where it has to plan to attack a territory many territories away.
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@rogercooper Yeah I generally agree especially with Martian landings and Stronger US
US being Stronger would make Germany decide to play safe and go to get Latin American lands or play risky and hit the US. It's not really a debate as of now b/c you get immense value in invading it
Martian Landings would help the Martian Player a lot b/c currently your relying on quickly rushing to California from Alaska in Turn 6-7 when Germany is in a stalemate with US
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@abendigos Yeah the lack of Nemo Pirates makes The Alliance easily focus on stomping Austria
I agree that if your quick enough you can basically capture Washington D.C easily from the US or basically make it be around 30-40 IPC making them irrelevent
however it's not as OP as the kill russia in Turn 2-3 b/c you can position your Zeeplins in a way that by building max transports on Turn 1. You can naval invade St.Petersburg with Air Support and take it easily or take it next turn. It's one of the few ways as central powers you can survive against the Entente before they crush Austria
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@board-3659 The new isAI feature might be good way of helping powers that are hard for the AI to play like the Nemo Pirates.
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@rogercooper
found the isAI thread. interesting. looking forward to 2.6 later this year!https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/1976/isai-condition?_=1707405304500
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a huge issue with 4 player games is how hard it is to playtest. Like you can't really use AI here but getting 4 players isn't easy
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@luhhlz Imo Assassins make more sense as a sort of defensive unit similar to torpedos in Civil War: A House Divided but they can move around.
I also think part of the reason Alliance is so strong is the weak Nemo Presence in the Pacific (AI sucks using navy obviously) allowing them to put everything into soldiers
@abendigos @RogerCooper I think Martian Landings should be random similar to how Barbarian attacks in 270 BC are done to make it interesting. I also do believe that US should be stronger economically ... cities need more IPC's. I also believe that Germany should just have all of Mexico in the start of the game (or most of it) in exchange for Mexico City being reduced to 4 IPC's and maybe even US having a factory in California.
The manual does make the idea of a German-Mexican invasion of US to be a daring thing so it should be a quick attempt to take D.C instead of being slow crawl there like it usually is (part of it is turn 1 literally being a dud)
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@board-3659 Those all sound like good ideas. Trying creating your own version of the mod to implement them.
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@rogercooper been doing that ... I just don't got time lol ...
I am also planning on eventually doing a 2nd American Civil War thing based on an ahistorical ISOT/Isekai scenario in AH.Com -
y'all seem to agree that washington and st petersburg fall to easily which i've not found... although in the case of washington that's prob b/c for years i always play this map from a saved game where i added a bunch of units + techs including giving usa many factories...
the capitals i find super easy and quick to take are london (graf dropped airborne) and constantinople (pontoon bridged militia + artillery) - the ai can't seem to defend itself against attacks from across the sea; especially by air. [first noticed this on the great war map where the ai builds an aagun at every factory in range of a strategic bombing zeppelin except in britain b/c they can only be attacked from across the north sea.]
in my mod i've made things worse by making tokyo very likely to fall first turn to nemo... maybe i'll reinforce it with maginot.i've never liked suicide units... so i dropped assassins and penal units in my mod.
when i started my mod i just meant to correct some missing connections and add some units to mars to make them playable... and then it snowballed. i added some units and objectives and gave the fiction based islands bonuses (+tech or +free units) and messed with the techs...
i suppose now that 2.6 has rolled out i'll have to make yet more changes...i've only just started playing it so i'm not sure how much i've messed up the balance... oh yeah, this map was never balanced.
don't know if anyone else would be interested in my mod or how we're supposed to share such things anyway...
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@cameron Washington D.C is easy to take from the AI if you just rush in and put resources into Mexico as Germany. Even if you can't, your still going to keep them at 30 IPC at most. As Martian, I been able to do it multiple times since AI can't react to the rush move half of the time.
St.Petersburg is basically building transports to bring Snipers + Infantry along with Graf's to attack the city. Hard for Russia to do much against this Turn 2 kill.
London and Constantinople is interesting. I never thought of quickly taking them but good on you ... I will take note on that.
Now I like suicide units and they fit the game IMO. I just think that Assassins need to be defense-minded. Penal's are fine since Russia's low production prevents spam
Martians IMO could use more units (A human mercenary troop could be cool IMO and help them be less weak to gas) though the big thing is that they should get random landings before their turn starts to make them a world threat. Now in terms of winning, I have won as all 4 nations with the hardest being Central Powers and Nemo Pirates
To Share the mod, try asking someone. I would be curious to see others focus on working on this game.
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@board-3659 You can e-mail your mod and I will turn it from a tsvg to a proper mod. rogercoop@aol.com
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@rogercooper I made a mod of it but it's unfinished. I think you meant to pin cameron since he made his mod
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i think the main reason i added a bunch of factories to usa, especially washington dc, probably was that they fell too easily. mainly b/c the bot would almost never reinforce washington dc. although i feel like over the years as the AI has improved the bots do actually build factories now. the AI really has come a long way from when i started playing triplea!
sounds like you do to st petersburg what i do to london.
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@cameron yeah though you do need to send a cruiser to block a British attack on transports and send the fleet to wreak Russian in turn 1. It's not too hard though and once you do it's pretty easy to take turn 2 or 3
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I think the difficulty in having 4 players to do a playtest is hurting the ability to balance the game
While there are obvious things we can fix, I think it would be helpful if we can somehow be able to get a playtest going
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Guys would a play by forum style game work?
Who's up to playing -
i've not actually played tripleA against humans in many many years...
although play-by-forum would prob fit my playstyle of doing little bits at a time inbetween the rest of life...now that i'm more or less finished my steampunk mod i'm kinda focused on playing that a bit. keep on finding things i missed...
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if anyone is interested in my mod here it is:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14_SlLRB_PrJOzgdd64bsXoz32eMJSYzt/view?usp=sharing
hopefully it's not too much of a mess. i think that it's playable at least. although i need to learn about the new isAI feature to make the bots less daft.
edit: bah. more things not working...
edit 2: updated link
edit 3: updated link again
edit 4: updated link again
edit 5: updated link again
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@cameron I am receiving the message "File is in the owner's Trash"
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