So I ran into this problem in BB3 as well. I have spread out and explored all of north America and all of south America. I have setup a radar station on all the farthest points of the known map… but that is it! There are no havens seen from the remotest radars, so that is end of game.
It might be worth having some non-random havens in the choke points, between land masses, so the player can continue to explore. If this were a full campaign in the end game, it would restrict the player to only 1/3 of the globe.
Some ideas around it would be:
To have pre-built havens at the land choke points.
There is always a mass of havens in the middle of the USA (which is weird, a WW3 event would leave very little liveable there and the remoter places full) Maybe having the mass of havens around the land choke points would allow the exploration to continue.
A one off suicide mission with a manticore. You can fly double distance in a direction but then run out of fuel. This would require having a second manticore which might be an issue. Any Havens you fly within range of get spotted.
An exploration team. You send of a team with a Vehicle in a direction and they will report back with havens found at a much later date.
Personally I’d like to see exploration meaningful - it must be hard and slow, it must take time to find at least something on the map. Right now everything unfolds too fast and too easy.
I agree with this, but most probably in the final game exploration will be much slower. If it were fast as in the Backer Builds, I’m assuming the game could be finished in couple of hours.
I agree, needs to be slower but you don’t want it to feel like a grind. They need to find a balanced way to slow us down but not make it boring. Not an easy balance to make.
Maybe making the radars not see as far, but making them cheaper? We would need to save up and build the radars.
Having far more havens in every area? More to explore in every radar range, slows us down before moving on to the next.
Having a cool down or a cost to meeting new havens? If there is a cost to see new havens we would need to save between meeting each one, rather than just clicking one to the next.
Giving the radars a build time. Every time we build one, we need to wait for it to be built before seeing the map around.
At the moment it was really hard to push out into both North and South America. I only had enough Soldiers to make a single 8 man squad but had 2 manticores. I had to keep the squad in North America (where all the attacks were happening) or I could not fly to them in time. Hopefully in the end game it is also easier to hire soldiers, not just relying on the RNG of random new havens giving up a single soldier.
The random events when you land at a haven, I think, are a fantastic. Easy ways to tell the stories of the game lore, adds depth to the game and puts a face to the havens. It is like a small instant reward for expanding out and exploring. Hopefully they have enough time to make LOADS of them so there is always something new and random to see.
Given that in BB3 it turned out we were playing Level 10 Warrior-Kings instead of newb rookies, I suspect it’s currently all so easy because they’re making life simple for us to test out the mechanics.
OK, I will make it now… Oh wait… I am not a programmer… DAMIT!
I am sure they will have it sorted out in the next release. I am guessing they want us to get as far as we can in the BB releases so we can see and test more.
Indeed. One of the best decisions I saw in old “Dune” game. There was globe, there were havens to discover, there were heaven leaders as well, in each and every haven. However, there were like 30 or so on the globe, finding one was An Event .)
In PP I’d like to see not many, but a few havens, each is important storywise and not so easy to find. Points of interest is one thing, but Haven must be something important, something special.
The random events when you land at a haven, I think, are a fantastic. Easy ways to tell the stories of the game lore, adds depth to the game and puts a face to the havens. It is like a small instant reward for expanding out and exploring. Hopefully they have enough time to make LOADS of them so there is always something new and random to see.
I don’t like the way it is implemented, looks like a card game. I mean, here we land, notification pops up with 3 options, and that’s it. Maybe it is just for BBuilds? I’d like to see some introduction to this particular haven - some info, some background, what to they want or aim for, etc etc. And among all that some options to act somehow - give them food, or trade, or accept a mission, whatever.
Haha, now you are showing your age! I played that one to death and when Westwood were a thing, Dune 2 was about the best game I had ever seen. Either way I agree it is a good idea. They need to keep loads of missions and points of interest to keep us busy, but havens should be a rare and exciting thing.
Hey, the more info the better! Compared to BB3 where we just landed on a site and there was nothing at all, I think this new system is fantastic. Without the pop up, there was nothing special about finding havens at all. It was just point and click until you found something to do. Now it is actually interesting to land on a site and learn more about the world condition in the game.
If they can expand on it further and add more details like you mention, all the better. If there was a back ground story to the haven, on going trading with them, stories that led to missions, if we trade enough and get them on side the possibility of hiring a soldier, etc etc. The more we find out from the havens about the lore of the game, the deeper the game will get.
I guess it depends how much time they have to implement while keeping the game on track. The more info we get when landing on the sites the better.
I would prefer to have more havens than less. It would create more strategic points where more of them could fall during warfare. Remember that factions will fight with each other without our presence. So with lower number of havens your ‘land choke points’ could be lost and forgotten. Even from lore perspective it would be not wise for human race to group in large populations and invite virus to our doorstep.
I think that 4 things can slow us down:
radar/radio structure build time (i see some research tech to decease this time by 80% later in the campaign)
lower range and flight speed of dropship (do you remember that we will find some helicopter first, rather than VTOL Manticore?)
refuelling time and rearming time (simple like that right?)
despite of current fun with automatic free refuelling and freedom of flight to anywhere we want I would bring back refuelling at some cost like in BB3 just with some changes. We would have free refueling at allied havens (like 45+ attitude), also cheap like 5 materials refuelling at friendly havens (0+ attitude) and emergency refueling for some amount of all resouces like 1 tech/ 30 materials/ 10 food in all other places (you need to bribe local leader or harvest surroundings to create fuel)
That last point would force us to take care about havens requests (and put us at conflict with other havens) and we would need to be aware of attitude map on global scale (some layer of geoscape could help here - there was something similar in recent XCOM 1, but there it was useless).
Didn’t think of that, good point. If these factions are all going to be fighting and clearing each other out, we need loads more havens, not less. I keep thinking in BB4 terms but once all the systems are active in the game it will totally change how this all works.
I also like your fuelling cost based on how happy the haven is with us idea. Another reason we can’t just piss off the neighbours all the time!
I didn’t know about the helicopter before the manticore either… That might be the way they slow us from pushing out too fast right there. We start only being able to push out 100km at a time. We are seeing the end game spread out, not the start game.
Going to point out that the helicopter before manticore thing isn’t actually a thing. In all likelihood, we’ll start with a Manticore.
Admittedly I had a hand in spreading this misinformation. As far as I can tell it originates in a Polygon article for around the launch of the Fig campaign.
So sad news Well maybe it will end up better for us.
There was a mention that they will also recapture havens from each other. So we will see New Jericho soldiers and banners for example in Anu haven. But I suppose that fight won’t serve them well and overall strength of haven will decrease so such haven will be more vulnerable to Pandoravirus attack.
I am guessing they want us to get as far as we can in the BB releases so we can see and test more.
Well maybe it will end up better for us.