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Dolos Minerva
The void Anomaly looms over the planet like a dark omen. These scientists must have been mad to study the phenomenon from this close, but it’s not for me to question their motives. We’re here to secure a foothold, search for any survivors and investigate what happened. Prepare for Planetfall.
Meet Jack Gelder, the default protagonist of the tutorial and the Vanguard faction campaign. If you don’t like his bland action hero face however, he can be renamed, and the full might of the character creator can be brought to bear on him until he is more pleasing to the thread.
Good, there is no time to waste. We’ll start by setting up and expanding this colony. Start a surface scan for survivors and existing colony infrastructure. Inform me when our research systems are online.
Yes Commander. Recalibrating sensors and initiating surface scan…
A biodome has been located nearby, but there are no signs of survivors.
Continue scanning the planet surface. If there are any survivors on this world, I want to know about it. I’ll scout the adjacent sectors and investigate the biodome - it should contain supplies that will help us expand our colony.
This is A.I.V.A, our pet AI and official tutorial fairy. I will be using my LP’ers prerogative to remove all of her out of character tutorial dialog, in favour of explaining how the game works at my own pace.
We start with a single vanguard faction city set up around our landed ship, and an army with Jack Gelder, a bike unit and four marines. With a lake to the west, a giant mountain to the north, and the edge of the map to the south, we only have one way to go-east, toward our first objective.
Colony production facilities are currently idle, Commander. I recommend we start with building the Central Replicator Facility to increase production. I have highlighted this structure in the colony interface.
After moving our army as close to the glowing objective as possible, we get our initial building tutorial. Production works pretty close to a standard 4x game-everything costs a certain amount of production and the city will contribute a certain amount of production to the total every turn. We don’t have any actual choices here, due to tutorial restrictions, so we follow the “suggestions” of the AI, and end our first turn.
Commander, our laboratories have come online and Research is now available. We can begin researching technologies to unlock new deployments to help us on this planet.
For Military Research it is recommended to start with Nanite Support to provide our troops with extra protection and unlock battlefield operations.
For Society Research, it is recommended to start with Frontier Facilities to unlock basic infrastructure upgrades for our colony. I have highlighted these skills in the research interface for your convenience.
On turn two, we finally get access to the research screen. Unfortunately, the tutorial strikes again, and we are forced to take the first tech on the list, Nanite Support, over any other options. Not that it's a bad pick, but there is the principle of the thing.
Then we are switched over to the second research tree, and are told to again pick a tech. This is one of the more interesting design aspects in this game-you have a split between a purely military tech tree and society tech tree, which contains economic techs. In my estimation, this is a good decision in a military focused 4x. Too often with a single tech tree, the optimal move is to grab a bunch of economy techs and try to survive with your starting units as long as possible. Which can make the turn to turn military gameplay repetitive. A separate military tech tree keeps the player from optimizing the fun out of the game, and playing with a steady stream of military technologies.
There are no survivors here. It looks like the structure was overrun by critters. We must reclaim this biodome and annex it’s sector to our colony. This will expand our domain and increase our supplies.
We do not have enough colonists to control additional sectors yet, commander. We will need additional food to allow the colony to grow. Larger colonies can sustain more province sectors.
I want to establish our foothold here as quickly as possible. We can recover extra food from the overgrown biome after we clear out the wildlife.
After dealing with research, Jack and the troops finally reach our first objective-a wrecked biodome occupied by some giant mutant grasshoppers and beetles. Since this is the tutorial, we have a three to one numbers advantage and it would take some comical floundering to even lose a unit.
Welcome to the combat screen. We have successfully moved from a turn based strategy game on a hex grid to a turn based tactics game on a a hex grid.
In all these tactical battles the defender gets the first turn, but ranges in planetfall are short enough that there’s almost no way for the defender to hit the attacker in the first turn. Which is good, because we’re just standing around in the open here.
All units have three action points base, which are used when moving and taking actions. The colours of the movement range correspond to how many action points will be remaining when the troop moves there. The green “shuffle” area leaves you with all your AP, the blue with two, the purple with one and the red leaves you with nothing.
Since we have a range advantage, all of our troopers move forward into cover and go into overwatch. In concept, this is pretty similar to most tactics games these days: anything that does anything in one of the highlighted hexes will get shot at. This ability is actually fairly rare in planetfall, restricted to mostly rifle armed infantry and a few lighter vehicles, and is a nasty counter to melee units like the wildlife we’re facing.
Troopers have the repeating attack mode, which means they get one shot per AP remaining, and that applies to their overwatch as well. Thus ideally we want them to get to a fairly close piece of cover. If they have to make a 3AP move, it's not worth going on overwatch, and instead they go on defence mode, becoming harder to hit.
Vanguard troopers, conceptually, are generic space marines, your standard X-com rookies. They've got assault rifles, cool blocky armour, and can throw one volley of grenades per battle. Their only unique rule is that they are more accurate when in cover. But what does that mean in planetfall?
For the vanguard, Troopers will be your primary damage dealers for the early game-9 damage repeating shots with above average accuracy is a lot, three hits from troopers will take half the health or more off of most early game units. That said, they are fairly fragile, need to stay still to do their full damage, and only have moderate range of seven hexes. Most of the rest of early game vanguard arsenal revolves around protecting troopers and clearing lines of fire for them.
The last thing to talk about is their flavour text, which says more about the wider vanguard and star union than it does about the troopers themselves. This strongly implies that from a purely military perspective the union would be better of building killbots then recruiting and equipping these troopers, but from a political perspective having a human military is useful. You need somewhere where the violent can indulge their impulses, the ambitious can climb the ranks, and where the idealistic can feel they make a difference.
Meanwhile our bikes move up and take some pot shots at the giant grasshoppers, but miss. The bike’s laser arrays are a single action attack- they do the same thing with one action point or three, which gives them a more freedom of movement then the troopers.
In ancient times, our ancestors rode bikes to freedom, claiming virtue in a life on the open road. Ancestral records show leather-clad mobs of two-wheeled ruffians decorated with the flaming skulls of their enemies. Some anthropologists believe the Assault Bike captures that instinctive melancholy—without the skulls, of course. The old bikes had no Laser Arrays capable of strafing mobs of enemy invaders or focusing all power onto a single target. One can only wonder if our ancestors ever would’ve left the open road had they these additional capabilities.”— Professor Quinlinn T. Ortivexis, “RV-4367H: Historical Parallels: Humanity’s Twisted Past”
Assault bikes are the vanguard T2 combat unit, and will they’re about as awkward as they look. Their laser guns have two settings- a focused blast that has a range of five spaces and knocks light targets back a space, and a wide blast which hits the seven hexes in front of it. And, with a fast move speed it’s pretty easy to get this thing around the enemies flanks for some good shots and, if the stars alight, push them out of cover and into the sights of your troopers.
The bit but is that because of the bikes unique design, it has the exposed flanks downside, and loses 2 points of its armour if you get around behind it. Which is easy to do when the bike has short range and is trying to get flanking shots. So they have a tendency to die.
The fluff text is a nice combination of jokey text and world-building. We know that it has been so long since “our” present that records are scattered and inaccurate, even before the fall of the star union. It’s not ever made clear if planetfall is supposed to be the far future of our world or a completely fantastic setting, but regardless, the time when motorbike gangs roamed to roads of a single planet was so long ago that it has been mostly lost in the mists of history.
On the enemy turn, the mega beetles manage to dodge overwatch fire completely and manage to score a grazing hit on the forward squad of troopers.
All attacks in planetfall have a 25% chance to graze for half damage and reduced chance of additional effect on top of the displayed hit chances. So, a 50% chance to hit will do something 75% of the time, and anything with a listed hit chance above 75% will do damage. This makes planetfall combat pretty lethal without being too swingy. Even with cover you will take some damage, and can reliably be worn down with concentrated fire. It’s also a more transparent way to implement the whole “lying about hit chances because people are bad at estimating statistics” that is fairly common in the turn based tactics genre.
The giant grasshoppers, not having a ranged attack, brave three units worth of overwatch and predictably get cut down.
After that, a squad of troopers run up and use a grenade to dig out the beetles from the cover they’re hiding behind.
This leaves them wide open for a hail of bullets, ending the battle.
Commander, out colony has now grown big enough to supper an additional sector. I recommend annexing the sector which contains the biome, as this will add its food income to our colony.
Good. We’ll annex this sector to our colony as a province sector so we can start exploiting the land for resources as soon as possible.
Taking the biodome gives us an bunch of food and gives our capital 4 population. This makes it big enough to expand to more territory, annexing the sector and gaining the benefit of the biodome we just cleared. This process takes a turn.
Surface scan completed, commander. I am picking up a vanguard military signal nearby. This could signify the presences of survivors on the planet.
Bring it up on scanners. Let’s find out what the hell is going on here.
Once we give the order to annex a new sector of the capital we get our next objective- a strange signal just out of our vision range.
One of the cool features of planetfall is your scanners. If there are any units close to a city but out of an actual units sight range, you will get a sensor marking that something is on a space without telling you what it is or who it works for, even if you haven’t scouted the territory. Yellow sensor markers like we see here indicate units that haven’t moved in their last turn, while red markers with exclamation points in them mean that the unit is moving. We can see here that there are two stacks of units by our new objective marker that are currently static.
Commander, that sector has been successfully annexed to our colony, and is now considered a province sector. It can now be exploited for additional resources.
Let’s get his exploitation up and running as soon as possible. What does terrain analysis tell us? How can we best exploit the new province sector
Upon our next turn, our AI continues expositing about how to develop our sole city. Province sectors like the one we just claimed at base only provide the income of special sites within them, like the biodome. They can be upgraded to provide one of the four common city resources-food, production research, or energy which is the primary currency. Depending on the terrain and climate in the sector, each province is better at certain productions. Fungal plains sectors like the one we just claimed are good at food or research production, and the tutorial script has decided that we’re making a food production sector.
Starting our third turn, we finish our first two technologies. Nanite support is the first vanguard military technology and unlocks a mod that gives most units a small self heal once per battle, and a pair of defensive operations. While these are good, mechanically, I do want to focus on the quote. It is the first technology quote you’ll see in the entire game, probably, and its about how they aren’t going to try to explain how the technology works. This is not hard sci-fi. It’s not trying to be hard sci fi, and getting that established early is for the best.
Our other technology, Frontier Facilities, might as well be a mandatory choice for every single game. It lets you make new cities. You want new cities. You need new cites. And, I suppose, extra happiness and fortifications are useful. But not as useful as cities.
Meanwhile, our army advances towards the mysterious signal, finding what appear to be friendly troops, staring at more overgrown insects.
Lieutenant Jiang? What the hell are you doing on this rock? Last I heard, you were stationed on Leave-6.
Commander Jack Gelder!, I require your immediate assistance! Our settlement is overrun with hopper hounds and we need help fighting them off. We are sending you blueprints for some weapon modification, let’s burn theses bugs down.
Commander, before engaging in battle we should mod our units to make them more combat-effective. Select our army, and inspect units in the army panel below to see and equip mods.
We can equip the mods Lieutenant Jiang game us on troops or your weapons commander. Please bear in mind that while the process is immediate on your weapons, modifying our troops leaves them vulnerable for a single cycle.
We are going to ignore that conversational dodge, because we are easily bribed. This conversation gives us the first firearms and laser technologies for free, though it doesn’t trigger their tech popups, which I’ll show when we get them is a real mission. Between them and the tech we got last turn, we can start to kit out our army.
All units can equip up to three mods, which are unlocked via research. These can a variety of things- in this case, the nanite injectors will let units heal themselves for a moderate amount and gain an armour boost for the rest of the battle, and the incineration module gives jack’s laser rifle have a chance to light targets hit on fire. However, all mods either give a percentage boost to damage, bonus health, bonus armour or bonus shields. This is an interesting design decision, since regardless of the effect of the mod, your unit does get stronger in a reliable way. It also means that there aren’t any mods which are a pure damage or pure defensive upgrades, no obvious but boring choice. It really makes lowers the barrier to experimentation.
Also once a unit has gotten a set of mods, it can be renamed. There’s a fairly sensible automatic name generator that will provide a name based on the highest tech mod, but I will be taking name suggestions from the thread.
Anyways, after a turn of kitting our stack and Jiyang’s stack with mods, we can do some high powered extermination. We’re up against four units now, a giant grasshopper alpha, two units of red hopper hounds, which have better stats because they’re red, and the same beetles as last time.
When multiple stack of units get into a fight, they all start in the relative position on the tactical map that they were in on strategic map. This leads to a maximum of seven stacks per fight, the attacked stack and the stacks on the six hexes around it.
Also, conveniently, enemy units will get a coloured marker around their healthcare if they are in range, with colour corresponding to the hit chance. Here, if Jack stands behind the tent with the icon near it, he is in range of the two front hopper hound units, and with clear shots at the edge of his range, they’re yellow, which would be around 65% chance to hit.
As we are still fighting a primarily melee enemy as the vanguard, everyone walks forward and goes into overwatch. Or deploys gun turrets and has the turret go into overwatch.
Engineers are the first researched vanguard unit, armed with shotguns, powered armour, and a variety of engineering tools. They are a hybrid of a support and combat unit, but because their support functions only work on mechanical units, and early game vanguard armies tend to be focused on biological troopers, you won't be using that half much early game. If you do find a strong enough mechanical unit that it wants dedicated support they have a relatively strong heal effect, and can boost their accuracy by a huge 30%, and all mechanical units in their stack will heal an extra 6hp per strategic turn.
Even without that they aren’t that bad in a fight. By themselves, they’re a more fragile, slower and lower damage assault bike, but they bring along a gun turret, and two units for one slot is a decent deal.
The gun turret is basically a trooper, with no grenades, ability to move, and worse damage and health. Their primary advantage is being completely expendable, since a new one can be spawned every fight at full health. Any bullets that get shot its way aren’t landing on units which actually have to spend turns healing
Engineers, and their turrets, also start the vanguard tendency of being composed of total goofballs in their fluff text. It’s a way to take the edge off what is, on paper, a highly militarized society and one of the primary military arm of the star union. Lots of the “generic space marine” factions in sci fi media can easily fall into pretty fascistic narratives, and keeping a healthy degree of humour helps undercut that tendency.
This pays off immediately when giant red grasshoppers jump on Lieutenant Jiyang, and are immediately shredded finely by flechette rounds.
With Jack’s side, the overwatch fire gets split up between the two enemy units, and they come out mostly intact, and take chunks out of my attack bike and troopers.
To extricate my bikes from grasshopper doom, its time to call in the orbital laser cannon.
“Operations” are essentially a replacement of what spells were in previous age of wonders games. They range from air support, orbital weapons, electronic warfare, psychic powers and anything else that isn’t easily modelled as an unit that exists in a map hex.
The laser strike is a pretty basic operation, that hits a single unit for a moderate amount of damage. Crucially, it cannot miss or graze, making it very useful for finishing off a mostly dead unit when everything else in range has moved. This is not that situation, but it’s also the tutorial and I have no meaningful choices.
With that done, the bits and troopers finish off the big one, and Jack shoots the beetles.
Thank you, Commander. You got us out of a tight spot there.
Don’t mention it, Lieutenant. Status report. What happened here?
A force of Outlanders made planetfall a few cycles ago and assaulted our positions. Their assault was entered on the Voidtech facility nearby. We fought them off, but we suffered heavy casualties.
Any survivors?
None on their side, but our colony was burned to the ground during the assault. You are looking at all that remains of my detachment and the colony.
What a mess… I’m sorry about your casualties, Lieutenant. What about this void tech facility? Why were they after it?
I don’t know commander. All of the scientists who knew of the facility perished in the assault. With our colony destroyed, we were unable to annex the landmark to investigate it further.
Alright, let’s get things back on track. I’ll take command here. Pack up your settlement so we can redeploy it and set up a proper colony. Lieutenant Jiang, lead the way to the Voidtech facility.
With that, we’re given another objective to move to the next sector over to explore the exodimensional observation complex.
We also get a free colonist unit, and an objective to set it set up in the local sector.
Warning: incoming graviton wave in 2.26 seconds.
Gravitonic wave? Wha..
A gravitonic wave passed through the system, origin unknown
Well it looks like we’re still all holding on to our atoms. Status report.
Preliminary readings indicate the void anomaly absorbed most of the graviton force, keeping the planet relatively unaffected.
For further analysis I will need to connect to the void tech facility. It contains advanced sensors that are attuned to the void anomaly.
Alright we’ll move in and get you hooked up to the void tech facility ASAP.
As soon as our troops move next to the objective, we get yet more dialog.
The damage you see on the structure is all superficial; all of the heavy fighting occurred on the outskirts.
Aviva, can you access the facility and use its sensors to see what’s happening with the Void anomaly?
Access to the facility is encrypted, Commander. Establishing a connection will require the void tech facility to be annexed to a colony so that I can link directly to their mainframe.
We don’t have time to lose. We’ve founded a new colony nearby that we can annex the landmark sector to.
Landmarks are special sectors with a single giant mostly intact facility taking up the entire thing. These sectors cannot be settled directly, but if they are annexed by a nearby city, the rewards are very significant. They normally have a significant guard on them, but in the tutorial this one is defenceless.
Sadly, we won’t have much time to play with this one.
Establishing database connection…
…
Connection to Voidtech facility database established. Running analysis of Void anomaly...
Report. What are your findings?
The void anomaly has started to expand exponentially. There is a 99.07% chance that the planet will be consumed by the anomaly within the next three cycles.
We should leave, Commander!
Backup all data from the facility and get everyone evacuated. There is no time to waste!
Backup Status: complete. Planetary escape vectors: calculated.
Caution: due to Void disturbance, there is a 33.1% chance of catastrophic failure during gravity well escape. Safety margins need to be overridden before a course can be locked in.
To hell with the safety margins! There’s a 100% chance we’ll die if we stay! Lock in the escape vectors and get us out of this hellhole!
With that, the first mission is over. Well, the tutorial. Without even another faction on the map, comicaly weak independent units, and no side content, it's not much of a map. But, it does what it needs to do, introducing the player to the basic mechanics without much risk.
Well it looks like we’ll have plenty of time to sleep on this. The gravitonic force destabilized the Void Rift in this system, making faster than light travel impossible. We have to get home the old-fashioned way - it will take us close to 200 years to reach the nearest star union hub. I have ordered everyone to prepare for cryosleep. We will see what kind of world we wake up to.
That concludes the tutorial of planetfall. From here we have three options
[]Continue with the story of Jack Gelder or his designated replacement on Leave 6 and the Vanguard, and perhaps learn how the apocalypse happened.
[]Go to Arcadia Celeste, and meet the Kir’ko, an alien race of bug people that had once been enslaved by the Star Union, and are trying to make their own civilization in the aftermath.
[]Go to Chimera Glacialis, with the Dvar, a bunch of post-apocalyptic vaguely Russian space dwarves, who are just trying to make a quick buck.