SB Plays ZEPHON 11 - A Time Of Monsters

[@lazyc0mmander277]

32:50 There was a show NPCs option on the bottom left. I think that's to show what the non-player factions were doing.

[@Turtlesism]

Sure has sold it for me!

[@umbralreaver]

The game's AI does pretty poorly at the lower difficulty levels due to its loyalty penalty, and thrives better with larger maps and more players. They hardly got to the middle of the tech tree here, whereas in a more substantial playthrough they should start producing their own titans toward the endgame. And in such maps, it's more likely that you reach the final battle with more factions intact and prepared to support the sides of the final battle. I quite enjoy how important diplomacy becomes in such games, as it can sway things significantly to manipulate how the Anchorite and Zephon feel about the various other players.

[@Wendek.]

Huh, bit of a disappointment to see the series end without at least a Voice playthrough. If you like the art, you sure would've loved their units. But I understand you were getting bored with it - thanks for showing the game though, convinced me to buy it and I'm absolutely loving it so far.

[@canaqua625]

SB did you die! More consistant video output would be nice....

[@Tyler.8046]

I REALLY love the tone and the atmosphere of the game, but it definitely feels undercooked. It seems like it's missing 3 of the 4 pillars of 4x games, namely only engaging in the exterminate aspect of the genre. The city building seems boring (build production facitilities to pump out more units), exploring is pointless outside of finding cities to exterminate (the bastions are a neat idea but they seems pretty mediocre outside of income), and exploiting the land in this is awesome but you build up cities so slowly that by the time it's relevant the game is over. I really think the city building unit needs to be part of the base loadout (not locked behind T2 tech). With how few unique units you build in a single game they NEED more voice lines; hearing "I should have stayed home" for the 300th time is grating. Tile grabbing for cities should be locked behind resources and not production; otherwise growth is a pointless resource because cities expand so slowly that you never have to concern yourself with it. The game has height maps, but the map feels SOOO flat; Like, seriously the game needs more unique terrain, forests, plains, and bleed are not enough to make a unique map. Positioning comes down to finding the nearest forest and filling them with your units. The map modifiers suck, or rather the lackthereof, I'm pretty sure 80% of the tiles in both games were just covered in cicadas; the only time I noticed a unique tile modifier was the sandstorm in on the recent episodes and there was a strategic benefit to tanking the damage it caused for safety and to give you some respite from the cicada invasion. Heroes are extremely cool, and honestly they're implemented well; I'd just like to see them take on more of a "Hero" role than a "Unit" role, maybe including unique events based on actions your hero takes? At no point in the entire playthrough (of either attempt) did it feel like the hero was more than a DPS or Buff bot for the army. Also, it would be really neat if the default interactions between "civilizations" wasn't violence (sets the tone for the entire game); I still remember the first time you met a new civilization and it flew its vehicle into your city which auto-retaliated and then it immediately shot your vehicle without you even having a chance to speak with them. Overall, my rating of the game is a 3/10, but its a SOLID 3/10. Conceptually and stylistically the game is a 10/10, but the actual implementation falls a bit flat.

[@droid-droidsson]

You bring up a couple good criticisms, but I think ultimately you are doing the game a disservice by reviewing it as a 4X at all. It is better understood as a turn-based strategy game (in fact, quite a bit of its design DNA comes from RTS games) which presents itself in the format of a 4X, working within the design space of the latter to basically produce something that feels like an RTS game despite its entirely turn-based nature. Overall, I agree with the spirit of your criticisms, there _should_ be more to this game than there is, but I did get the impression that you also misunderstood quite a few details based on this playthrough, so I would like to add what my own experience with the game was. City building is a bit barebones, but I will point out that there are technologies for each type of resource building which give situational, flat resource bonuses to the structure in question. so laboratories want to be in forests, we saw that, but mineral extractors want to be next to cliffs, food farms near the coast, influence buildings near rivers, housing in a tile with a loyalty building, transuranium stabilizers only with other stabilizers in the same tile, etc. It's entirely understandable to not want to engage with it or to find that boring as well, but I find on most turns where the game prompts me to do something with my city, I do plan and compare and make meaningful decisions, and that small "puzzle" element to figuring out which tile is optimal for which building, while not at all hard, feels quite good in the moment. The bastions, or outposts as the game calls them, are mostly there to get resources from map control, yes, but quite a few of them have strong map modifiers, and I don't mean the +20% ones. Plasma generators have a bubble shield over them that grants 33% damage reflection, reclamation tanks give +2 HP passively for any biological unit standing inside it (notably, even while in combat, unlike passive healing!), microchip fabricators give the same for mechanical units, watchtowers give elevated vision without the big, big downside of _actually_ being higher up (flying units can see almost as well as a unit in a watchtower, but can be shot at much more easily!) and crystal deposits give invulnerable damage reduction on top of the outpost defense bonus. I do hear you on the game being so slow that it is practically over by the time you get to the exciting stuff. This is why imho the game is much more enjoyable on fast game speed, or even fastest, which analogously to the game speed setting in Civilization (iirc), makes everything cost less to produce, build or research. With fast game speed and higher difficulty AI, I do tend to win 4 player games just as I manage to complete Tier 10 researches, which feels about right. The problem of too few unique units and repeating voicelines is a bit exaggerated in this playthrough, I would say, as each tech tree has like 5 different infantry units, but SB chose to research none of them, thus the Isshim Enforcer spam. Growth does become more relevant at faster game speeds, even though it does get sped up like all the resource incomes. but you are right that it is mostly pointless and there to tax your food income more, so that building resource buildings is in practice 6 resources for the cost of 2+ instead of only 1 upkeep. I did get the impression that this map in particular, or at least the parts SB explored, were extremely open, usually there are more cliffs and water tiles sprinkled throughout, and the map generation is surprisingly good at producing natural chokepoints to fight in, such that even a pretty strong numerical advantage might not always translate into battlefield success. But I suppose that effect is also diluted by the smaller unit numbers in normal game speed. Suffice to say, against stronger opponents, standing in a forest or ruin complex is not enough to win. Especially since you cannot shoot over either feature, but two rows of enemies can shoot into them if they have range. There are also quite a few unit abilities that give mobility, like the jetpacks of the Praetorians SB got at the very end during the Last Days of Earth trigger, or tunnelling of the Aegyllan Worms. I also personally find the Cyber line of units the least interesting in how they interact with the map terrain, because they most of the time just don't. Hovering just invalidates a lot of interesting terrain implications for that unit entirely, like rivers. I'm a big fan of Human units for that reason, very bad at dealing with slowdown from terrain, but pack enough firepower to make up for it, rewarding good planning and tactics. And cicadas come in swarms, they're not covering 80% of the map (pretty sure they only show up in swamp terrain, for one), rather, they were there during a couple key turns when SB got annoyed at them, and then vanished again.

[@Tyler.8046]

@droid-droidsson it sounds like a majority of the problems are caused by the standard speed of the game just being too low to begin with, fast or fastest should probably be the default with an additional speed setting beyond that. I definitely think decreasing the cost and build/research duration would alleviate some of the issues, but doesn't fix them all together; especially since the average player isn't going to think to just bump the game speed. The standard game experience should be the "best" with the option to adjust it based on what you're looking for (i.e. a quick session or a long slog). That said, my biggest criticism still remains that city builder units shouldn't be locked behind T2 research. Maybe if you bee-line them it isn't a problem, but I think almost every civ in this game had 2-3 cities at most which kills the city creativity you spoke of. turn-based strategy or not, building expansions is an important part of making the map feel dynamic. As for whether or not the game should be reviewed as a turn-based strategy or a 4x, I think the game itself sells itself a little too much as a 4x; Almost reaching a point of just being a post-apocalytpic horror clone of CIV games. The only real difference being the lack of unique victory conditions, which I think would benefit the game greatly and encourages different civs to do different things; I haven't played, but from these two playthroughs, the biggest difference between the civs seemed to be whether or not he could move after shooting with his units and the abilities he had in the top left, I assume there is more to the variation in the research but again that's plagued by the default game speed.

[@droid-droidsson]

@@Tyler.8046 I've been playing all my games with 2-3 cities, it's different than Civ for sure, but I think you dismiss what you can do with three cities a bit too quickly. Cities can reach out up to three tiles in any direction from the city center (locked behind two researches), you can find a lot of diverse tiles in that area usually. My current game is the first time I've built a fourth city, and at that point it's barely worth it anymore imho, but given that it's not exactly a standard game (8 player Free For All with Diplomacy disabled + no Last Days of Earth to end the game earlier) I tried to be prepared for the extra long haul. Unlocking Engineers from the start isn't going to do you a whole lot of good. you need to scout for good city locations, anyway, and unprotected engineers can easily die to neutrals, even leashed ones, if they get hemmed in by Zone of Control. I think Tier 2 research is a good place for them, up until then you won't have the 40 ore and 40 influence spare to build a second city, anyway. And, well, I don't think the game would be more fun with 6 cities per player, or however many you were imagining. that would then definitely require a very different building system to not get stale, and would make destroying all enemy cities much more tedious. I can't really speak to how much the game sells itself as a 4X, to me it seemed like clearly a reskin of their previous game Gladius, with all the Warhammer IP filed off. And Gladius very much sells itself as a Warhammer game - and thus a game fundamentally about war, first and foremost. Are you saying that the actual marketing of Zephon tried to pitch this game to you as a Civilisation-like game, or that you looked at the game and decided, based on what you saw, that it must be a 4X? Because the former is deceitful, the latter is an unfortunate side effect of taking advantage of well-established design ideas that really should be explored more outside the context of Civ games and its likes, imho. I don't think it's reasonable to expect indie studios to reinvent the wheel in terms of UI/UX elements just to avoid a resemblance to a major title in the industry. Lastly, SB goes by she/her, she's a woman.

[@Tyler.8046]

@@droid-droidsson I don't expect an indie game to reinvent their UI/UX, however if you pull all the elements from a 4X game and try to sell yourself as a turn based strategy, you're fighting an uphill battle against comparison. Unfortunately, the UI decisions they made give the game a false impression of being a 4X game on those who might be interested in picking it up. That said, my comparisons are based on the look and feel of the game, not marketing. I don't follow indie games that closely, especially those I haven't purchased. I'm also not aware of any of the studios previous games. As for SB, I appreciate the correction but don't think it changed anything about what I said.

[@Daemonworks]

I do think the basic problem is that it leans very hard into something closer to the tabletop mini wargaming experience. Perfectly fine to do so, and they seem to have done it fairly well... but in leaning into that, they leaned out of other things, and if those other things are load-bearing for you, it's going to feel weak.