Caltrops - Gamerasutra

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by Fortinbras 12/17/2007, 4:53pm PST

As far as I know factions can't share resources with each other in multiplayer. Masari resourcing is capped, you have to spend resources to make resources, but that didn't seem to bother the AI I was playing against.

Pace-wise it plays faster than an old Command and Conquer game and definitely faster than Supreme Commander, I wasn't ever really bored (but this may just be because Novus require tons of micromanagement). Truthfully the pace makes me think of a Dawn of War game, if you're a fan of sending units into the meat grinder your playstyle's not going to be incompatible with any of the factions. In the Global Campaign mode you can bring along a shitload of units with you when you setup your initial base at no cost, which prevents early rushing, but as I've discovered Masari have way too nice a position when it comes to turtling, and since there's a superweapon cap (one of each), it's impossible to break it when you're in late late end-game and you've exhausted a lot of the resource nodes, they just recover way too quickly and I can't match their perpetual meat-grinder style.

Also a few other things about Novus that drive me nuts:

Novus Blade Troopers are the main infantry and they're melee only and hurt really hard and have a cool special ability that allows them to copy themselves twice, basically tripling the size of your squad for about 15-20 seconds. UNFORTUNATELY every single Masari tank can turn them into road pizza. Against a melee-only unit this doesn't make any goddamn sense.

The Novus resource pathfinding needs a big fucking tweak. You can build a high-speed network telephone pole line to a resource-rich area and they'll STILL fly to whatever resources are closest to their building, even if they have to take longer to get to it. The only solution I found was selling my resource buildings and building them closer to what I wanted to harvest, and this seems to defeat the point.