Hegemonia Legions Of Iron Patch 1.10

• Hegemonia Legions Of Iron Patch 1.10 2

Now, I'm sure you're all wondering why on earth anyone would even GIVE this game a try. Well, I'll tell you.

I got it cheap.Now, onto the impressions. 'OMG, I'm Hegemonia, and I SUCK'.Ok, maybe that's not what you were looking for.I bought Hegemonia from CompUSA, HOPING beyond hope that it would be a reasonable substitute for doing what I wanted out of Pax Imperia 2. Basically, its a combination empire building game and RTS. You don't design your own ships so much as select ship classes with certain attributes, and they're god-awful expensive.Combat ships are grouped by 1 of 4 classes. Fighters, which basically use just cannons or missiles and come in a group of 7.

Corvette's, which come in groups of 4 ships and carry either turreted weaponry(good for anti-fighter/anti-ship) or Blasters (good for anti-ship/orbital bombardment), or missiles. Next is Cruisers, which come in groups of 2 ships with the same options as above, and then Battleships, which come 1 at a time and are very powerful. Additionally in the military construction tree you will see military starbases. These are super-slow moving powerhouses. Move them into position, deploy them, and they can pretty much destroy anything.

Here's a hint, set them up right outside the wormholes into your system. I'll explain why later.There are also several other types of ships, such as mining vessels, wreckage reclaimers, spy ships, and both interplanetary and insterstellar merchant vessels.There are also of course, planet side buildings that do everything from help you construct faster, to lowering maintenance costs, to raising moral. Additionally, there are some defensive planetstructures, like planetary shielding and ground based anti-ship weaponry.Research applies instantly unless it requires construction of buildings.

Thus, development of better proton weaponry is automatically applied to your ships in the field, no matter how far from home they may be. The same goes for shielding, new armor, better computers, neural implants.Unless you play smart, you'll never see any of this. Let me show you why.Basically, I'll ignore the single player campaign mode for now and go into a skirmish with the AI.

To play this, you have to create a multiplayer server, as though you were going to play another human(what other human might have bought this game you ask? Me, and perhaps the developers mom.

Perhaps.) Select one of the 7 or so multiplayer 'senarios', which are more like preconfigured maps with no 'senario' part about them other than the map, select your race and team color, and then click ready. Add an AI player, then start the game.Now, here's a couple of tidbits you should know. First, the alien species are all different. All 3 of them. They each have one weapons technology which has slightly minute differences. Humans have proton weaponry.

The insect like aliens have quantum weaponry, and the rock-like aliens have ion weaponry. What are the diferences you ask? Well supposedly proton weaponry is well rounded, ion weaponry is good at hitting a target but weaker, and quantum weaponry does more damage but is more likely to miss. Other than that, the speicies perfer different worldtypes. Humans prefer terran, with a super-chubbie for 'gaia' type worlds. The insect like aliens prefer barren, with a super-chubby for acid worlds, and the rock-like aliens seem to prefer rocky worlds. There's not a whole lot of overlap, at least until the ability to terraform comes into play.It doesn't matter at all.

Not only are there no other real differences between the species, but the AI always takes human. You can play as an alien if you want, but you'll never face anything but humans, apparently. And, near as I can tell, you can't make the AI Switch races, or even team colors. And, if you add more than 1 AI, they'll always be on the same side against you. So, if you have 3 AI's, it'll be 3 against your lone 1.Not bad you say?

You need a chalenge most of the time. Well, you're in for a challenge.The first thing to note is that the AI cheats.

And not just in that it knows where you are(something which you won't know about it many times, except perhaps if its using merchant ships and you catch them leaving his planets). It cheats massively.The first thing to note is that to research, you not only have to have 'research points', but also you use resources AND planetary labor to do so. This research can pay off with things like 25% less resources used for construction or 10% better chance to hit from your weapons.

There are many tech tree's and many different options you can take.Except if you're playing the AI. No matter what, its agressive. And not in the 'trickle of fighters harassing you ever once in a while' way. Shortly into the game a group of corvettes will show up. This is the first real shipgroup capable of orbital bombardment of planets. You'll not that its faster than a human could possibly research this technology and build a group and move them across the board. You see, ships move in realtime, and move slow.

Even fighters take quite a while to reach their destinations, and corvettes move that much slower. You can get 10% upgrades to speed, sometimes up to 15% or even 20% with the greatest of engine technologies, but it still takes forever to move ANYWHERE with ANYTHING. So, when the AI shows up with a corvette group.

Skipped right past fighters, onto corvettes. Now the first thing you should know is that if you don't already have something in space to defend with, you've already lost. YOu cannot construct anything planetside, including fighters, it all gets done in space. In the meantime, those corvette's are either blasting what you're constructing, or destroying your planets buildings and population. Every once in a while they'll wander away, or even just pass by without firing a shot. Most of the time, however, they'll attack.This attack is easy enough to repulse.

Corvette's are generally quite weak early on against fighters, even if the fighters only have laser cannons. If you've got, say, 3 fighter groups, you'll win this encounter. Of course, you'll have invested alot of money both in making those fighter groups and maintaining them, but its do that or lose.Don't sit on your laurels though, because you're probably only minutes away from the next corvette strike. This time with probably 2 groups of 4 corvettes each, or 8 corvettes.

This time your fighters will lose.Now, if you've selected a senario where the map dictates that you and the AI are in different systems, you're in luck. There's a vulnerability to the AI that you can exploit. You see, it seems to only like coming through the wormholes one group at a time, making it easy to ambush them as they exit. Plant your fighter groups around the wormhole(s) into your system and blast them as they enter. Just be prepared, you're going to lose fighters slowly. Replace them or you'll have a painful reminder of why you needed to keep those corvette's out of your system.

This little manuever should keep you safe long enough to buildup some better weaponry. However, once the AI starts shoving 3 and 4 corvette groups through the wormhole, still one at a time, but fast enough that you haven't destroyed hte last corvette group before the next one shows up, you'd better have something better in place.If you can get a military base in place near the wormhole, and combine that with occasional fighter support and continued upgrading of weaponry and shields, you can hold off the AI indefinately. It will eventually start sending cruisers and battleships, but the base is such a weaponry powerhouse that it should be effective against all comers, as long as they come one or two at a time. In my experience, one base, 3 groups of fighters, and a single group of corvettes were capable of stoping any assault group the CPU sent my way. Of course, I only discovered this after trying 5 times to find some way to stop the waves of corvettes.Now, you're supposed to mine asteroids, but no matter what you're going to run into money trouble. It costs far more to field starships than your planets can support until they are well into full development, while the AI forces you to continue to squander your starting cash on ships and support for them, until you can't afford to support them at all.

It never seems to have this trouble, despite never doing any mining.You can also gain money by increasing the tax rate, which lowers morale, and by using interplanetary and interstellar merchants. These guys, once constructed, are pretty much out of your control. They give you cash everytime they visit an inhabitted planet, but there has to be at least 2 inhabitted planets in a system for the interplanetary ones to do anything. These are about the only ships worth using over the long haul, as they do pay for themselves.Mining ships get attached to asteroids, and won't let go even when they've depleted it.

Because of their cost and the time to move them, they're almost not worth using. Colonization ships are a necessity for starting off new planets, while population transport ships I have yet to even try.

However, there seems to be some absurd limit to how many of these 'special' ships you can have in use at one time. For example, on a senario I beat last night against the AI, I was apparently only allowed 5 special ships. This includes those military starbases, BTW, though I'm not sure why.Building buildings seems to be limited in some regard by how much population you have, though the type of building does not matter, only the number of buildings. There seems to be no reason for any of it, and the manual, thick as it is, will not tell you why, how you can change it, or what you should do.The visuals are ok. Not stunning, but they are fully 3-d with a fully 3-d camera. Wormholes look appropriately StarTrekish when they open, spinning out and flashing in light, only to resume their typical mall swirl. Planets and moons have orbital paths, and though you may raise your planet from a population of 30 million people to 8 billion, they will never actually move in space at all, though they do rotate.

Space battles involve little movement, even for fighters, and though target hits look good, and explosions are nice, and some of the larger explosions (mining vessels, military bases) look incredible, they have no real effect on the game. The fighters that destroyed the enemy military base don't take any damage from the explosion, even though it was large enough to light up half the system. The control system for the camera works well except for following, which sometimes works and doesn't, and that it doesn't transition well from the 2-d map to the 3-d, instead going back to the 3-d map or 2-d map where you were before on that map. Convienent for some, difficult for others.You can speed the game up to 4 times faster, which still leaves movement slow. However, it also means research and construction is faster, and that you can get smoked while not paying attention because combat is short after those long walks to the fight.The control system for the ships is adequate, but needs work. Selection is done with a left click, and that's all that's done with the left click.

Hegemonia Legions Of Iron Patch 1.10 2

Right click does EVERYTHING else. Want to change the agressiveness stance? Right click menu. Want to attack weapons instead of the hull or engines?

Right click menu. And here's the problem. Want to attack an enemy group? Right click on them. Except that if they're too close to your group, it'll bring up the right click menu for your ships instead of attacking. And, you can't band a box around anything to attack it.

Be prepared to click.Now, of course the AI knows where you are at all times. But, with rare exception(merchant ships for example), unless the enemy AI is within your radar range, they are completely invisible. Thus, if they get through your wormhole they can get lost in the vastness of space, only to attack one of your poorly defended planets.If you're so unlucky as to be stuck in the same system as the AI, be prepared to lose. It can and will colonize most planets very quickly, while building merchant ships, and sending masses of corvettes through that hidden space to your planets, particularly those you've defended the least. I was caught in this position myself, and decided that a preemptive strike was the only solution. So, I used my fighter groups to keep it from sending any ships out from its home planet, only to notice it'd already colonized two neighboring moons. So, I planted a fighter group on each moon, build corvettes, and sent them to the homeworld while checking the other planets to ensure they had no colonies on them.

All was well.Except that corvettes appeared from nowhere. Confident that my fighters would continue to sit in orbit and destroy any corvettes under construction, which I could visually obseve them doing, I thought I had the AI locked down. Unfortunately for me, I didn't realize that the AI can spawn ships from empty space. Colony ships, Corvettes. I pop out of a research screen to notice that the planets not colonized before were now colonized with fleets of their own, and that my ships around the enemy's home planets were destroyed.It didn't take long for me to figure out that either there were planets not visible on my map that the AI could use and I couldn't, or that the AI's fleets of corvettes result from it simply cheating and creating them from thin air. It doesn't just outproduce you, it is GOD and simply creates things that don't exist. Now, for the little bit of single player I have tried.The story seems interesting, if the characters are un-developed and poorly voiced.

However, the scripting is so buggy that its not worth playing. Sure, you can play it cooperatively, but only as the same empire. No diplomacy available there. Additionally, sometimes if you do part of your mission out of sequence or miss something necessary in the right order, or simply just have bad luck, you can't complete the mission.

More than once I've played a mission where I was asked to colonize a planet and been provided with the colony ships, only to discover that they were bugged and wouldn't colonize anything. Or, that I'd colonized said planet and constructed the 3 required interstellar merchants, only to discover that it wouldn't complete the mission because the game didn't like the order I did it in or something. Apparently a patch already available fixes several of these issues, along with providing 'improved AI'. I tested this AI, and all I can say is that it just cheats more. Some improvement.The Single player is so buggy, and the AI cheats so horribly, that my only hope for the game is that in multiplayer with humans it will shine.

However, the matchmaking service is gamespy; tripe I have spent quite alot of time avoiding when possible. Thus, unless someone has an IP for a server, I'm out of luck for trying that as well.My verdict on this is that in no way is it going to be MOO3. In fact, I bet O.R.B.

Beats the living crap out of it. Its a good idea that was so poorly implemented that I don't think it'll every get fixed. GG Digital Reality, you've made what should have been an outstanding product into a steaming pile of dung.The game has alot of potential, but the AI forces it to be a cloberfest between whoever can produce the most ships. Since you're hampered by things like maintenance, actually getting resources, and construction/research time, the AI will always win unless you find a nice exploit to use. Either way, if you don't start out with massive cash or use a trainer to get it, forget winning, or even moving up very far on the tech tree.

The Singleplayer has so many bugs that you have to play the same mission several times to work yourself around them.I'd like to say 'buy it' so someone will suffer as I have, and maybe discover if the multiplayer can rescue this garbage, but my soul will not allow it. Avoid this game at all costs.This is of course my personal opinion and in no way reflects that of Ars Technica. Of course, it does relect that of anyone with a brain. Those were my exact feelings.

I wanted to leave room for doubt, just in case some beta-tester said they'd been testing it for months and felt it was great(I did bother going over to look at their website and forums.)Frankly, the AI felt like it cheated to make up for the fact that it couldn't compete otherwise, and the single-player campaign bugs are obvious symptoms of being rushed before completion.I'll play the game a bit more, and see what comes of it. Hell, I might change my mind. Right now, however, this game is in my shitbox. Quote:Originally posted by Vampyre.unless the enemy AI is within your radar range, they are completely invisible. Thus, if they get through your wormhole they can get lost in the vastness of space, only to attack one of your poorly defended planets.Unfortunately for me, I didn't realize that the AI can spawn ships from empty space.

Colony ships, Corvettes.It didn't take long for me to figure out that either there were planets not visible on my map that the AI could use and I couldn't, or that the AI's fleets of corvettes result from it simply cheating and creating them from thin air. It doesn't just outproduce you, it is GOD and simply creates things that don't exist.Could the AI be moving some of the ships it has produced to the outer reaches of the system, and then moving in and attacking at a later time?

You could check this out with some scouts. If you have already done this, well, nothing pisses me off more in a 4x than the AI playing by a different set of rules.

Its too difficult to tell for certain. However, I did have their home planets surrounded and scouted the other planets in the system. It was a one-system map, so no outside reinforcements. Its possible that the AI took some corvette groups and flew them off to the edge of the map, only to bring them back, and included with those the colony ships necessary to colonize those planets.Of course, it'd still have to be playing by a different set of rules to produce those faster than I can produce my basic fighter.

Both colony ships and corvette's require research. Basic fighters not only produce quickly, but require none.Even the Adreniline Vault review mentions that the AI cheats in single player. I just didn't think it did in skirmish.Again, the AI can be beaten, at least for a while, but ambushing it as it enteres your system from outside, but only if you act quickly.What I perhaps didn't get across is that the entire time you will be losing money.Last night after beating the AI I took my time, colonized all available planets, and built them up 100%. I used all my 'special' ships for interstellar merchants, and only THEN did I proceed to break even, and then, only by having huge spurts of income followed by short periods of small loses. Though I'd evidently been gaining resources for the latter quarter of the game, had I not used. A tool to make resource injections(OK, I downloaded a trainer so I could see how badly the AI cheats), I wouldn't have gotten that far. I'd have been broke about mid-game, just when the AI is trolloping in with its 3 cruiser groups.I should also mention that the AI hadn't bothered to expand at all that game, and couldn't possibly have afforded a single cruiser group while spending all that money on those 20 or so corvette groups I ambushed.

So far I know the AI gets fast building, free research, and free money. What great programming!I still need to try this online with a real person. Maybe it'd be tolerable then. It does, after all, let you play through the entire single-player in cooperative mode, so perhaps if its not so buggy later on then it'd be worth playing.Of course, you cooperate by playing the same side instead of two empires. Ah well, can't be perfect. I downloaded the demo to this 'cause I thought IG1 was a pretty good game. I was hoping for IG1 with 3d graphics and more 'stuff'.

I didn't even make it through the demo. I didn't even make it through the first mission of the demo before quitting and uninstalling it. The interface is horrible. Quite possibly the worst camera control I have ever seen.

Ship movement sucks too. Half the time the in-game instructions weren't correct either. I'm not surprised the game turned out to be crap. Sorry you had to endure that!-Rav.