So after playing with the Shadows expansion for a time, what is everyone's opinion about the Forgotten and about the Pillage mechanic? What is good, what needs balancing and what do you wish would have never been implemented?

The Forgottens are my favorite race now. Before it was the necrophages, but necrophages have poor original features compared to forgottens.



I love the stealth, the ambush, the pillage, and the spying. I love all.



The pillage mechanic is very funny. I guess it's underpowered because the reward are a bit weak, pillage is a kind of gentle action, if we can say it. Maybe it should be increase, not the dust but the amount of ressources earned.

Just lost a drawn out Serious difficulty game as Forgotten.



The good; I like the faction a lot. Great concept & mechanics. Stealth & sneak attacks is a great idea.



The bad; Bad technology pickings is the reason I lost the game. I had 4 spies stealing tech on the regular, but I never got access to the techs I actually needed to stay competitive, and I couldn't afford the dust cost to purchase outright after hitting the mid game. Perhaps I just got unlucky with RNG this time. I hope the tech steal options aren't normally the poorer ones in the tree. I'm glad I didn't win straight out the gate. Going to start a new game, and see if the faction is indeed handicapped, or if I just need a better strat with these guys.

A cold war is now a real cold war, close border treaties make sense, and ya. Awesome

The mechanics have been fine in the few games I've played. The only thing I would change is the loot table, the rewards are too great. The dust amount is fine. It makes sense to get resources from looting extractors, but I would scale back the rewards table for other building types or make it more like the ruins table where there is some chance at getting nothing (except for dust).

The pillage mechanic is fine, the AI reaction to it is so not fine.



The AI will often do nothing about pillagers until they declare war. They treat you as if it's an actual cold war even as you're pillaging their stuff. You basically just do a pillage rotation, going from X to Y to Z pillaging until finally the AI declares war and chases you out.



Other than that: The shadows seem a little on the weaker side. Certainly still playable, but they have to jump through a lot of hoops to get what other factions get basically for free. They basically need to dedicate MASSIVE amounts of dust and multiple heroes just to keep up technologically. Their pillaging is great and helps them generate some dust, but then you just earn the ire of all the other factions. Their units are a bit weaker to make up for stealth which can make it difficult to fight in large battles so you have to go find a minor faction tanky unit.



Their ranged units seem to do okay in a massed spam, but do decidedly less damage than other factions unless you get a good blob of them in the back.

hashinshin wrote:
The pillage mechanic is fine, the AI reaction to it is so not fine.



The AI will often do nothing about pillagers until they declare war.

This.



The problem with pillage is there aren't any available targets for pillaging early game, and by midgame it becomes suicidal.