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Sunday, 1 March 2015

Planetary Annihilation - Game crashes when you destroy a faction

How to Reproduce
- Play the Galactic War
- Destroy a faction (kill the faction commander)

Description 
Game crashes



Personal Notes
So this is my second post in quite some time. I feel that I probably should post more often. As I am still playing games and still finding lots of bugs in said games. I'll try to be more diligent at posting these, more for myself to try and keep some of my skills sharp. If you could call it that...

So Planetary Annihilation is what Supreme Commander was suppose to be for Total Annihilation. Supreme Command was touted as the next TA game, but when I played that, none of the "epicness" was there. The reason I loved TA wasn't how nice the units looked or how big the units got. It was the tactics (or my lack of) of the game. It meant that even if you had only tier-1 units, you could take out tier-3 units if you had enough, and in TA it wasn't only about the type of units. It was also about the quantity. 
My favorite memory of TA was playing 1v1 against a friend who section half the map to themselves. I didn't realise this until I started scouting, but by then I had 10 teir-1 K-bot factories pumping out 1 unit every 1-2 secs with the resources to back this up. I first found his mine field. Lost by first platoon of 50 bots. Meh went and got the next batch and moved out. Found a wall supported by plasma cannons. Ok attack the wall. Lost that batch. Fine .. next batch move close to the wall and self-destruct. Ok hole made, lost batch. Next! This is also another reason why I would be a terrible general. I eventually over-ran him with numbers. He tried to counter with Teir-3 bots but they take at least 20-30secs to make, by then I already had 200 bots ready to roll out. Just overwhelmed with numbers. 
Supreme Commander wasn't a numbers game. It wasn't event a strategy game. It was experimental units. The first person to get one, won. That's it. If you got yours built in time to counter theirs then it was the person that kept theirs. Teir 1-3 bot/tanks/planes did nothing to experimental units. The only saving grace was that experimental units needed huge amount of resources to make and time. But with enough construction buts this could be as low as 5 mins. It was just silly.
Planetary Annihilation goes back to the TA roots. There are only 3 Tiers and the Tiers are quite balanced. 1xT1 KBot cant take out a 1xT2 KBot in a 1v1, but if you had 5xT1 KBot then its a fair fight.. ish ...
 Planetary Annihilation is a great game. With the game mechanic that you are fighting on a planet vs other Bots on other planets. You can build up your forces here to ensure you have control of your planet, but the other guy is over there taunting you. You need a way to get over there too. Or (my favorite) you could just throw an asteroid or small moon at them.

Homeworld Remaster Collection - Intermittent exiting during missions


http://store.steampowered.com/app/244160/


How to Reproduce
- Run mission 2 from Homeworld 1

Description
The game just closes, and the program exits without warnings or dialogue boxes. This also means that if you are in the middle of the mission or near then end and it exits. You would need to restart the mission from the beginning.
You are able to reload from the start of the mission a second time and play through it. However other missions along the way also caused this.

Personal Notes
I loved Homeworld. Played it when it was first out back in 1999. Loved it then, love it now. The remastered is true to the original Homeworld feel. I still get the nostalgic feeling when focusing on ships close up and watching them do dive runs on capital ships, while the capital ships are firing their anti-ship guns back. Watching this just makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. The beauty of it all, the attention to detail. The remastered collection has just built on top of that beauty while leaving the core gameplay the same (if it works why mess with it).
However .. the gameplay of the original still makes me angry sometimes. There are some really cool ideas on the gameplay. The most interesting being the one where all ships that you have that survived the current mission will go with you onto other missions. This is awesome, only if the game didn't feel like it was going out of its way to destroy any cool ships you have and not giving you any resources to rebuild your fleet.
One mission was you had to have your ships protect your mothership from on-coming asteroids by blasting them into space dust (or small particles that didn't do as much damage while your repair corvettes try and repair all damage as quickly as possible) The problem is if you didn't have a big enough fleet then your screwed, cause there is barely and resources to harvest to rebuild. With any resources there are, on floating asteroids as they float slowly out of the map (just fast enough to outrun any harvest ships) With all the asteroids coming you also have to have your ships dodging them else they get destroyed. I lost 1/4 of my fleet to those stupid asteroids, and I had a fleet bigger then the fleet cap because I was converting any ships my salvage ships could get a hold on.
Another mission you had to fly through the aftermath of a supernova (imagine extreme radiation) to attack a garrison station. Problem is that the radiation is deadly (of course) and will damage/destroy any ships not protected by space dust. Figuring out the space dust was difficult due to the nature of the 3D map and the space dust not being clearly defined. My tactic ended up being sending my frigates and capital ships in formation surrounded by some fighters. If my fighters start taking damage I would usually have enough time to move the fleet deeper into the dust cloud while maybe only losing 1 fighter, not maybe even none.

There aren't many games that I would obsess over from my past like Homeworld (and Total Annihilation) but the remastered collection is well worth it to me and let me go done memory lane (and fustration)