Sorry Don’t mean to spam…but got another bug now…When I start the game it says:
“Ship Hull not found->LegiosDebellator Cruiser:…\src\SIM_Shiphull.cpp 489”
Erm…eh?..
I don’t think its a bug with the campaign, but i would say its an error to do with the Legios Mod you have installed (or may have removed and still have a Debellator Cruiser in your fleet)
it could be a leftover ship design, or even a deployment saved for a scenario that used that design.
I’ve gotten the “random text in cash and maintenance” fields before. It went away after I scrapped all my ships and reloaded the campaign.
The thing that’s getting me now is a bug where if I have multiple campaigns saved, when I load some campaigns it randomly adds maintenance cost every time I load the game.
Brand new fleet on one, maintenance costs suddenly jumped up from like a couple hundred to 1400+, and then every time I would load the save it would add a bit to that amount (got it up to 1856 without taking any turns).
If I have more than one campaign going, it seems to do this to all of them except for the oldest…
I’m playing on a single campaign now, and it looks like there’s definitely another couple of maintenance bugs – sometimes your maintenance costs can suddenly double for no reason, and it seems to add to maintenance costs when a fleet retreats.
I’ve been scrapping ships to see what it does to the maintenance costs… I currently have a fleet with one 909 credit frigate in it, and the maintenance cost is 1,290…
Here’s a list of issues I have with the Campaign mode. I apologize if they are repeated elsewhere. In order of the egregiousness of the design flaw:
1.) As far as I can tell, you can only have one saved game at a time. You can’t have multiple saves. It saves over one slot automatically. Which means if you send your fleet to a uncharted world (see #2 below) and you are outmatched, you die. And since you spent all your starting resources building that fleet, you might as well start over. Extremely annoying.
2.) There is no way to see what fleets are at other planets. In similar strategy games (Risk, etc.) you can tell where your opponent is stationed and plan accordingly. No such luck here. I imagine one of the devlelopers saying, “Attacks can come from anywhere at anytime, so GLHF suckers HAHAHAHAHAHA!” Sure, you can send single fighters to “scout” other planets but games are supposed to be fun and that’s a PITA.
3.) The difficulty is unreasonable, IMHO. Playing at medium difficulty, I could not manage more to own more than 2 planets at any given time. The fleets that randomly attack (see #2 above) are often several times stronger than your own, even early game.
4.) There are several other things that indicate that the campaign portion of the game is underdeveloped. There’s no explanation of how threat and loyalty work in the game or the manual. There are only two zoom levels: one planet and all planets.
Feel free to express your thoughts or let me know if I am misguided in any of these beliefs. Some are my opinion and some are factual observations about the game.
What’s so sad to me is the skirmish levels and the rest of the game are undeniably great, yet campaign mode needs significantly more work to even just be called adequate.
Actually I think it may be intentional. I know the costs are supposed to go up over time, as you can only patch a ship so many times before it’s cheaper to just replace the whole thing.
These are bugs, not features! Can you imagine how this would be in a game like Starcraft? If you had to periodically purge and rebuild your fleets because they got “old”??? That would never fly!
Well, this is not Starcraft. The GSB universe is full of massive interstellar powers who can often consider entire fleets expendable. It is only logical that the repair costs of something will increases over time, especially if it is getting damaged.
The strategy I have used (I think it was Medium) in the 47 planet campaign is fairly simple:
- Never fight on more than two fronts at a time. This means that a planet you attack should not ideally be a linked to more than two planets, one of which was the one you came from. If this is impossible, you need two fleets capable of winning a tough battle on that planet, so that it can be defended while the other fleet advances.
- Yes, in the beginning you do need to sacrifice a cheap frigate to spy on their fleet.
- Play close attention to the Threat Meter. At Medium, the enemy can and will attack even at low percentages if the planet is undefended. The trick is to reduce the amount of planets subject to threat to as few as possible. Even when I have two-thirds of the galaxy in my hand, I do not have the resources to defend more than two planets at a time while advancing. There’s a cluster in the south-central parts of the 47-planet galaxy that is very difficult to beat because all the planets are interconnected, and once the enemy broke through the defenses and took 3-4 planets before I could stop their advance… this because I tried to defend three planets at once with an income of 10k+ per turn.
- Camp on planets that have either “No Fighters” OR “No Cruisers” OR “No Shields”. This limits the usefulness of most enemy fleets because they do not seem to know about those restrictions, and it reduces the variation between fleets that attack you. No Fighters, for instance, means that you can prepare for either anti-assault or anti-MWS. No Cruisers = Fighter bonanza.
Stig, thanks for the tips. If they ever fix the intolerable save game mechanism, maybe I can bring myself to play it again.