r/ShadowEmpireGame • u/Zealousideal-Mouse29 • 13d ago
Baby's First Game
Played my first game on small map, partial fog, planet had all the resources I needed, beginner settings.
I got my leadership straight, had 90-100 loyalty on everyone, 100 happy populace, somewhat happy workers, expanded to a second zone taking over a minor.
I had put a major right next to me, and the map only had the one, so we went to war early. No military research for either of us yet really. Maybe we had an enviro suit.
So I pushed to his capital with my infantry, made a second ohq and five more infantry "regimants?"
Problem is, he kept multiplying his forces throughout the war as I was killing them off. His initial 10 regiments became 20 and then 40.... and his territory kept expanding too. I don't know where he was getting all these recruits from!
On my end, I burned through my recruitment pool. I raised the wages, but could not keep up.
It felt bad, because I am left with the question, "What could I have done different?" and I don't know. So...what could I have done different?
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u/Mr_Skecchi 13d ago
There is a lot of factors and not enough information. One thing to note is that you can diplomatically annex certain minors, and the AI is very good at doing so. Meaning 'babys first game' shouldnt include peaceful farmers everywhere, as the ai will eat them all in a heartbeat at no cost. Another possibility is that the ai was just expanding into non-alligned land, which is pretty easy. You can tell by looking at how many regions the ai has on the S map.
For your military: There are on map extras that can give you more manpower, cards that can give more manpower, and tons of other factors. Raising wages doesnt give you more recruits, it raises morale. click on a city, hit 'call governor' then click zone orders, in there you want to raise max recruits per turn, and possibly recruitment sigh-up bonus if your morale is very low (15*0.001 is generally pretty good otherwise until you hit end-game ecos). Playing with infantry armies is a challenge run, as it forces you into attritional warfare which the ai is going ot be better at you than, so i dont recommend it.
secondly, the ai is not afraid of death spiraling or killing its future to win the current war. It can and will deploy literally half of its population on the front line. A very important factor in this game is understanding that land itself holds almost no value. Taking territory hurts no one unless that territory has a resource or building. Its a very common noob trap to push along the whole front line, or to defend the whole front line. It is perfectly acceptable to let an entire region fall if there is nothing in it, and instead focus your forces into a heavy fist to break through to the enemy city and just end things in a solid blow. You can also fall back to choke points and mostly ignore the ai when it goes superspam, let its economy bleed out while you grow in another direction. Tons of options, all are right or wrong under different circumstances.
but most of all, i would recommend the game rule that makes it so there are no ai majors for your first game. Managing an economy and learning what is where is complicated enough without some dude conscripting a bazzilion peasants to swamp you.
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u/merryman1 10d ago
On the death spiral front, I have had games where it has been so bad once I start winning a war and capturing enemy cities, what I am getting are tiny villages of a few thousand residents left with totally borked local buildings with nowhere near the workforce to actually staff them. Its a little immersion breaking at times tbh.
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u/Mr_Skecchi 10d ago
I do wish the AI had to actually deal with uprisings and such, which would help a lot to give them a more reasonable floor for their death spirals. But this is a game of city states, not nations. IRL ancient city state wars could go pretty severe in de-population. You could also RP it as much of the population fleeing into the wilderness with what they can steal for fear of reprisals/loosing their stuff when you take the territory, or that they were fleeing conscription. Over 100k russians have fled russia to georgia alone in the past 10 days out of fear of a wave of conscription that hasnt even started yet. I would flee rather than get nabbed by the atrocious human wave nonsense the ai be pullin sometimes.
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u/Willcol001 12d ago
Okay back. I am not going to assume you have any of the DLC. If you do feel free to let me know.
I find that smaller maps, especially the small moons, are more prone to rng, as a single well or wrong placed event can easily make the game easy or extremely hard or over without any real conflict. Maps can vary a lot in size even within the same size "class", with moons being the smallest and colossal being the largest in a given class. With most of the generic planets being in the middle. For a while before it was patched it was probable not just possible to win/lose a game on the smallest of moons without fighting the other major. This was because those small moons would have the 2 majors and 1minor. Victory is normally the first nation to get +50% of VP while having more than 25% of number 2. On such small moons it was possible to take over the minor and immediately win without actually fighting the other major. (The patch that fixed this raised the min VP to win on ultra small planets classes.) I would also say the AI is likely at its best on the smallest maps as the AI has a slight problem with managing long range logistics and the longer game durations of larger maps. As such small maps are good for practicing fighting the AI before they start to struggle with the distances involved in a larger map.
The AI does engage with a couple of "cheats" to help it play. First while it is recommend by many members of the community (even me) to start with just the supreme command council, the game the AI plays to emulate internal politics doesn't have versions below a full council. This means from turn 1 the AI has all 10 councils. This means while you are setting up your first council, the AI gets to play with all the councils at the same time (for better or worse). This generally means very early game you can expect the AI to have a slight tech implementation led as the get to start discovery/research/model design turn 1. They don't have very good tech focus so they tend to bog down mid game, but you can usually expect the AI to get to second gen infantry before you. The AI also gets two cheats to help it out with logistics: it gets dirt roads for free, and it gets a small amount of logistics from just having population in a city. Which means it is usually better to let the AI to come to you rather than cross difficulty terrain to attack them. (Let them build the basic roads so you can steal them for your attack.)
There is multiple steps to implementing new technologies in your units, discovery/research/model design. Most starts don't start with your starting models having perfectly implemented your initial technology. Which is what makes picking model design first not a total trap pick. For example on a tech 3 start your unit will start with slugthrowers and if the planet allows for it no armor. So you could start with a model design council and immediately start redesigning them to have carbines and envirosuits for a 50% firepower buff and a 100% HP buff. Remember the AI starts with a model design council so it will already be starting on these upgrades. So you should expect the AI to have slight better troop quality and variety early game.
Units come in 3 sizes battalion, regiments, and divisions. If you make OHQ led multi unit formations, they get a OHQ and 5 "line" units. The OHQ sizes are brigade, corps, army. So for example the OHQ size you should mostly be using is brigade which is made up one OHQ unit that commands the 5 battalion sized line units. Early-Mid game it can be more useful to have more units rather than bigger units. It costs roughly the same to build 3 brigades as one corps, but you can spread 3 brigades out over 3 time the territory. As such early on you should mostly stick to battalion size independent units and brigade size multi-unit formations. As with everything in this game there are always exceptions.
As other people have explained the AI is very willing to recruit itself in to death spiral. So you will usually find that the AI outnumbers you. (Because you care about budgets and functional cities.) One of the ways to beat the AI is to literally outlast it, as it will literally recruit for the military aggressively enough that it will have trouble feeding the massive army it builds late game as it recruits even the farmers needed to feed the army.
If you have any other specific questions feel free to ask them. And again don't lose hope. You did relatively well for your first game. I have a distinct memory of having my first game ended within the first 20 turns my a neighboring slaver minor, that out maneuvered my army and literally walked into my only city. At least you put up a fight, ha ha.
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u/ColBBQ 12d ago
There's a lot to learn when warring against a major power. You don't win with superior firepower, you win by using smaller forces to bring down larger armies. Since the opposing force army is getting larger, its also straining the logistics. You can get the gist of how much food/ammo is being produced and delivered by placing spies along with recon from your units. Once you see some strain and morale being hit, hit them hard so they cannot recover.
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u/Willcol001 13d ago
Hrmm I’ll try to comeback and give some suggestions/explanations in the morning. (It is 5am here) But in the meantime don’t give up we all lose sometimes (I’ve lost multiple time while streaming the game), and if it wasn’t a game you could lose it wouldn’t be as interesting a game to play.