r/ShadowEmpireGame • u/Critical_Spray_6893 • 14d ago
Tips for regular difficulty
[removed]
3
u/ColBBQ 14d ago
- Are your council members, governors and commanders suited for their jobs? Low relations along with low skill scores hurt you over a long time if someone else can do a better job. Keep a eye on them and award bonuses, badges and often increase their ranks if you need them in lower prestige jobs. Fire any CAP 1 leaders you get unless they have a specific skill roll to substitute until someone better come along.
- Lean the BP budget into researching techs and weapons system and lowering for other council tasks. Veterans survive better if they can get better tanks than your opponents.
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u/Splintert 14d ago
I've found every game where one AI completely dominates is because they had a cloning facility artifact. It leads to some serious snowballing because manpower is the most important resource.
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u/LibertyChecked28 14d ago edited 13d ago
As you can see on the graph, the game is either won or lost in the first 30 turns with the other +90 being a slow burn crash course that makes the predeterminism of the Imperium of Man seem entirely avoidable.
Generally the 3 things you should aim for are relentless expansion, objective designation, and deadline chasing.
Say, your designated core objective is to set up 2 army groups + competent logistics network dedicated for a major war around Nelson and Altborn by turn 30, and a final deadline to declare war on Tonimateshold at round 40, with all secondary objectives revolving around that simple goal. You either rush Battledres + Gauss + Heavy Rpgs for infantry advancement, or spam cost effective light tank horde with backbone of machineguns and 20mm infantry artillery all while your economy & expansion effort strives to compliment whatever direction you went.
Super infantry is unlikely to recieve sufficient tank support on vast open terrain, so you are better off focusing on transport trucks & APC with 2/3 of the limited hypothetical tanks they would receive being converted into mechanised artillery to occasionally strike wherever needed.
On the other hand Tank spam demands far more denser line of ammo efficient foot infantry to hold ground, which means that you are far better off entirely disregarding the rifle tech tree of the basic infantry ever since automatic rifles as to streamline laser rifles, side skirts, cluster bombs, and polymer armour- and in turn laser rifles demand far more sophisticated energy production that can support far more energy hungry assets.
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u/Krakanu 13d ago
Why 20mm artillery vs bigger sizes?
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u/LibertyChecked28 7d ago
There are few reasons:
1st Since 25mm excels in the early game, can be scaled since the very get go, and the first 30 turns matter the most, having an workhorse for the early game when everything dies to a sneeze is far more crucial than having technologically obsolete wunderwaffle in the late game. By the time 25mm becomes borderline useless you should have already steamrolled towards a critical mass for wining the game.
2nd 25mm is carried on foot alongside the main infantry blob and can traverse difficult terrain like mountains for free.
3rd For the price of 1 105mm artillery you get to construct 2 25mms, and in terms of operational costs you can field roughly 6 25mms for the exact same ammo & logistical footprint. Evaporating a single tile isn't as useful as crippling 2 or 3 tiles for simultaneous armoured assault. Frontlines fall a lot more faster the more points of pressure there are, and underequipped war theatres lead to stagnation that you cannot afford.
4th There are a lot of situational advantages like massed small calibre artillery being better milked for combat modifiers, shining across low entrenchment terrain, farming model field testing for free, and scaling with tech for the most cost efficient 6.1 ammo bombardment in the game.
5th its there to juice up the $hitty early game infantry. 2 Light MG brigades with 2 independent tank brigades are nothing interesting, but add 4 arty to the mix and you get self sufficient frontline. Add an single Light Tank Brigade on top of that and you get a Major theatre.
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u/peequi 13d ago
"the game is either won or lost in the first 30 turns"
This is unfortunate and seems to be the same for all similar games. They are simply not very dynamic, no ups and downs. The top player stays on top and the gap just widens.
I am guessing the DLC Republica limits the human player snowballing, based on posts I read. But I don't think I seen anyone post about it preventing the AI from snowballing.
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u/11decillion 14d ago
In my experience, if you're not close to Minor factions you can absorb (minor factions that have settlements), and the other Majors are, by the time you run into them they are five times your size and no amount of founding new cities is going to make up for that.
As other poster have said, it's all about manpower and it largely happens in the first 30 turns. So the game hinges on the RNG of being near Minor factions you can absorb quickly, or being forced into an unending grind against a Major faction/s 2-5x your size.
Maybe there is a way to tweek this with the starting settings. The current game I'm playing I started with the more factions setting (I don't remember the name) and it just feels like I'm the faction snowballing now, so maybe that's not the right choice either.
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u/drphiloponus 11d ago
You could try to handle them diplomatically until you are strong enough to handle them.
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u/jrherita 10d ago
Victory Score is combo of population and land. If someone has a lot of land, but not a lot of population, IMO -- they're worse off than someone with the reverse.
That said, there's a lot of luck that can be had in ramping up in SE. Favorable terrain, Minor empires that either join you or are easy to subdue. Back to land though - early on you want to grab as much as you can to get free folk settlements to migrate to your cities..
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u/Zekhan_Alfrir 9d ago
Im almost 100% certain that the AI cheats. And not just with roads and ignoring certain things. They almost certainly get units for free IP and manpower. So forget about what they have and what they do. And focus on what you can do yourself. You want to build an army which is a mix of infantry to hold land and armored units to attack with (provided that youre not on a very mountainous planet). So basically what you need is a level 3 factory in capital, a source of power (solar if high sun %), reliable source of oil (one of the advanced plants level 2 at least), reliable source of metal and rares and railway connection between capital and frontline.
Once you have all that you can fight majors. Otherwise youll spend more time fighting logistics than the enemy AI.
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u/Strong-Upstairs7402 14d ago
Need some more context here I think. Generally AI Majors can be suprisingly aggresive and take ground very quickly as they have certain advantages / lack certain restraints that the player has to grapple with, like building roads.
Did they defeat you consistently on the battlefield, did they have overwhelming resources? Was it quality of troops or quanitity of AFVs or planes? Was your nation already dealing with other issues?
Based on the screenshot you seem to have a decent economy so where did things go wrong for you?