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Come for the Raifus, Stay for the Plot: Girls' Frontline - Baking Time

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Not in Person said:
I'm legitimately curious if they have any "Events" of any kind yet, and if yes then how those went.
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They had one event so far, with a nice enough story (both in the sense that it was well-written and engaging, and in that the nice/sympathetic characters in it got good endings), that gave us a fully-upgraded event-only unit of fairly high rarity, and a very generous event shop where we could buy various materials for skills and promotions (think training data and memory fragments/fire control thingamajigs, to make a GFL comparison), along with other resources such as money and XP cards (units don't gain XP from participating in missions, but solely from what could be compared to combat records) via tokens earned from farming event maps. Two of the event maps also made for great farming spots to grind certain promotion materials.

As for the event itself, it was fairly short in terms of maps (~6 or so), but there's something to be said about brevity being the soul of wit, and there were also six additional challenge-maps unlocked later. The event-maps themselves were within the reach of even those who'd only just started the game to complete in terms of unit requirements (ie, you didn't have to have a bunch of fully-maxed out high-rarity units or the like), but also still reasonably challenging to figure out how to solve with your team.

Overall, I have to admit that I found it much more enjoyable and rewarding than Girls Frontline's earlier events like Cube or Arctic Warfare.

Doctor Squared said:
According to folks on the CN server Polarized Light is a lot easier than past events.
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Have to admit; that's incredibly heartening to hear, given how frustrating I found CT already. Though that still leaves Shattered Connexion to worry about? IIRC that's the one between CT and Polarized Light?

Also, while somewhat on the topic of events; would anyone happen to have some farming guides for MT-9 from Arctic Warfare, or the various limited dolls from Cube?
 
Alastor Mobius Toth said:
I played this game since launch. I mean literally, almost every single day since launch.
And I've grown to despise it.

The doll designs and story doesn't cut it anymore. The story chapter escalates to such a grindy munchkin horseshit that I get sick just thinking of playing this, with repetitive boring tile screens and fights determined solely by unit and equip combinations with basically zero input.

I really, really wanted to enjoy this event. But I fucking don't care anymore. I no longer have enough time in the day to deal with this, especially not when Arknights is superior in every single aspect. I will make one final effort at just busting through Chapter 3 and try circumvent Vengeance map (fuck it, and fuck whoever enjoys it, and fuck the one who made it in particular), then I'm just done. I know some people who played the CN version and warned me about it, but it really just pains me to see GFL jump head-first into munchkin territory solely because the devs can't some tiny percentage of gamers insta-clearing their shitty maps or something.
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I managed to beat both Mark and Vengeance, and I agree with your assessment of Venegance. It's overly punishing and restrictive.
 
landcollector said:
I managed to beat both Mark and Vengeance, and I agree with your assessment of Venegance. It's overly punishing and restrictive.
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Except you don't actually have to beat Vengeance? Mark is literally just an easier version of Vengeance, and they both lead to the same main story node afterwards. Instead, Vengeance has an alternate win that's just "sit on your command center doing jack all for 7 turns" which nets you the bad end reward and the stage clear reward. Really, the biggest offender of what the fuck stages this event was easily A New Hope. "Boy hope you can either do super micro with optimal teams to burst through massive enemy squadrons, or you specifically avoid capturing a helipad one step away from your base and instead kill 9 units on all the OTHER tiles." Pretty sure it's been complained about already in this thread, but honestly it bears repeating how incredibly stupid that win strat is.
 
McFluffles said:
Except you don't actually have to beat Vengeance? Mark is literally just an easier version of Vengeance, and they both lead to the same main story node afterwards. Instead, Vengeance has an alternate win that's just "sit on your command center doing jack all for 7 turns" which nets you the bad end reward and the stage clear reward. Really, the biggest offender of what the fuck stages this event was easily A New Hope. "Boy hope you can either do super micro with optimal teams to burst through massive enemy squadrons, or you specifically avoid capturing a helipad one step away from your base and instead kill 9 units on all the OTHER tiles." Pretty sure it's been complained about already in this thread, but honestly it bears repeating how incredibly stupid that win strat is.
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A New Hope is the one map that's objectively kinda badly designed in terms of giving you no information on how you're supposed to win the map. The alternative is spawning every echelon you have to get the AP instead to make the rush through the Hydra gauntlet, though; it can be easily bruteforced that way.
 
landcollector said:
I was under the impression every stage /route had to be beaten in order to get the True End. Perhaps I am mistaken?
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Haven't heard anything like that myself, though I only just got around to reaching White Doll today, so not like I can confirm for certain. I figured "clear every stage" just meant having them marked as cleared and getting their rewards, which unlocking the bad ends does just fine for stages like Red Zone and Vengeance. Guess I'll either find out for sure this weekend when I finish the rest, or let someone else more in the know confirm it.
 
McFluffles said:
Except you don't actually have to beat Vengeance? Mark is literally just an easier version of Vengeance, and they both lead to the same main story node afterwards. Instead, Vengeance has an alternate win that's just "sit on your command center doing jack all for 7 turns" which nets you the bad end reward and the stage clear reward. Really, the biggest offender of what the fuck stages this event was easily A New Hope. "Boy hope you can either do super micro with optimal teams to burst through massive enemy squadrons, or you specifically avoid capturing a helipad one step away from your base and instead kill 9 units on all the OTHER tiles." Pretty sure it's been complained about already in this thread, but honestly it bears repeating how incredibly stupid that win strat is.
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Requiring one to see the future (or ask Mr. Google) to clear a map is bad design. Singularity and its unexplained radar nodes was bad enough, now these magic bullsh!t Cyclops/Caches?

Bad, bad design.
landcollector said:
I was under the impression every stage /route had to be beaten in order to get the True End. Perhaps I am mistaken?
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Think timeout clears count.
 
Librarian said:
Requiring one to see the future (or ask Mr. Google) to clear a map is bad design. Singularity and its unexplained radar nodes was bad enough, now these magic bullsh!t Cyclops/Caches?

Bad, bad design.
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Honestly, I could live with maps that require a bit more planning like these if it weren't always high difficulty NIGHT maps. Especially in these KCCO maps filled with death tanks and 100k CE enemies that you can only kill with specific setups or microing, it just feels like a massive fuck you to try and wander anywhere and run into things in the fog of war playing blind. Meanwhile, taking a look at White Doll which instead occurs during the day, it's pretty clear that you want to be luring the shielded tanks out of the way then moving an echelon down the opened path, since you can actually see the entire map and plan around obstacles like that. No Vengeance or Mark wandering night tanks, no New Hope working against basic strategy ingrained in you for 10 chapters and multiple events, and no "by the way you have 4 turns to figure everything out blind have fun" of EVERY night map.

Have I mentioned that I don't like night maps?
 
Night is such shit. The illumination fairies and radar nodes only slightly help the sight problem, do nothing for the turn limit, and if you want to hit anything with an AR you need to go through each one and change out the really nice crit scope you spent a lot of time and resources upgrading for this other thing.

None of this is that harsh on its own, but it's all those things every night every time. Doesn't help that most SPEQs on ARs are scopes and really makes you miss them.
 
yassssssssss

I finaly beat "Mark." Turns out the trick is not to fight the tanks, but to use dummy echelons to bait them away from the supply line.

My thanks to @Not in Person whose advice helped me scrounge together the resources for my second RF-HG team that was a necessity in pulling this map off.

I will say I appreciate the portrayal of tanks as being vastly more terrifying and dangerous than mechs, to the point where the best policy is to simply not fight them at all. :V
 
Librarian said:
Requiring one to see the future (or ask Mr. Google) to clear a map is bad design. Singularity and its unexplained radar nodes was bad enough, now these magic bullsh!t Cyclops/Caches?

Bad, bad design
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Yeah, they got a lot of backlash for this map. The good news is that they've moved away from opaque and unclear puzzle mechanics towards using command consoles to signpost when there's some sort of puzzle mechanic, at least for future events.

Nottheunmaker said:
Night is such shit. The illumination fairies and radar nodes only slightly help the sight problem, do nothing for the turn limit, and if you want to hit anything with an AR you need to go through each one and change out the really nice crit scope you spent a lot of time and resources upgrading for this other thing.
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Fog of war is literally a basic mechanic in dozens of strategy games. If GFL night missions are shit for having a mechanic basic as this, then something like 90% of the strategy games out there are shit because they also have fog of war.

You're given tools to counteract the lack of vision. There are guides that walk you through things if you just want to clear the map and there's a database that shows you what the full map state looks like at mission start, with all the non-randomized enemy placements, if you need to plan things out beforehand. You can give yourself more room for error by capturing helipads to maximize your action points, and those are clearly marked out on the map so you always have basic objectives to go for.

Even if you fail once, you can just try again, knowing that the basic shape of the map isn't going to change. Is losing a mission once really such a setback?
 
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Finally got all the event dolls
Mk12 at 112th attempt
A-91 at 32nd attempt
Python at 5th attempt
M870 at 5th attempt[

I think I lost something after I got Mk12

For me, the most stand out doll from this event is M870. Her tail really reminds me of that scene with University Cyborg Girl from the Transformers movie.

Also, what do you need a 1000/400(6s) defense shield for?
 
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Arcus said:
Fog of war is literally a basic mechanic in dozens of strategy games. If GFL night missions are shit for having a mechanic basic as this, then something like 90% of the strategy games out there are shit because they also have fog of war.
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The issue isn't the FoW alone, which @Nottheunmaker pretty clearly indicated; it's the combination of FoW with various other factors and effects that make GFL night missions tedious and annoying.

Alyuna said:
Also, what do you need a 1000/400(6s) defense shield for?
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Tanking enemy boss attacks, I believe. Or at least that's what I read somewhere.

landcollector said:
Currently pondering on how to approach the Stumbling Block map.
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You can just park your strongest RFHG echelon on the command post, set the various allied echelons to "Wait", and keep pressing "End Turn". At about Turn 4 or so your HQ will be surrounded, at which point you set the (surviving) allied echelons to "Eliminate".
Stumbling Block is, surprisingly, probably the easiest map of the chapter.
 
Kelenas said:
The issue isn't the FoW alone, which @Nottheunmaker pretty clearly indicated; it's the combination of FoW with various other factors and effects that make GFL night missions tedious and annoying.
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Like what, the complaint about PEQs? The equipment system in this game is already as close to braindead as you can get without making it completely pointless. The ideal equipment loadout for almost every doll remains the same regardless of the scenario because in most cases you literally don't have any alternatives. The only real exception is with PEQs, except the decision whether to equip them or not is based on a single, binary map wide condition that you always know about in advance.

Do you need to consider your equipment loadout based on the enemies you might be fighting? No. Does the ideal equipment loadout ever vary depending on the doll? Only across classes. The worst criticisms you could level here are that it's a boring system and swapping out the equipment can get slightly tedious at times since you have to do it for multiple dolls, and you can do that from the squad formation screen. And it's not like you should be having to change equips literally every mission.

Dealing with the turn limit is just about planning your moves, securing map helipads to maximise your AP (and your options), making steady progress towards the map objective. There's only a few night maps where I found the turn limit truly frustrating, and that's because you literally only had 2 turns to kill everything in both those cases.

Alyuna said:
Also, what do you need a 1000/400(6s) defense shield for?
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Does force shield things, basically. Unfortunately, you only get the complete invulnerability for 1 second, and the damage reduction is applied after armor (if it was before armor, it would be ridiculously effective). Also it's basically useless for low damage, high volume attacks, since you can't reduce the damage of attacks below 1 with only 90% force shield reduction. Oh, and it has a 10 second cooldown. That limits the usefulness.

M870 still has good armor and HP values, which is most of what you want from a shotgun anyway.
 
Thoughts on night maps in general: they're genuinely interesting! Unless they have a one or two turn limit, in which case they're either easy as hell or dumb as hell.

The problem with daytime maps for the most part is that player damage scaling and such are usually so batshit insane that there's very few enemy types that become outright threatening in the endgame without being straight up deathstacks that you're supposed to avoid.

Night maps curtail one of the main sources of DPS increase, that being critical rate (and by essence, critical damage which is one of the main offenders, seeing as every source of it is multiplicative). If you do use units that can still nearly cap on crit rate, they trade it for something else (SOP2 and AR15 don't have significant FP buffs nor AP, so they suffer to varying degrees versus armor, and RFs suffer heavily versus anything with evasion).

In regards to vision, the fog of war can make a map interesting when you're not completely stumbling blind in the dark. Singularity's ranking map was actually pretty good about that, since even if you didn't have illumination fairies, you could watch the colors flipping and messages that accompanied them; the game -does- have differing messages for surround caps by enemies versus direct captures.

By contrast, the worst example would have been Cube's final map. At the time, players had no fairies and relatively weak echelons; lv70/x4 was considered high-end at the time, and usually players would have only two squads at that level. Those squads had to go almost completely blind to find Ouro when she had something like five potential spawn locations, and it was frustrating enough that most players (myself included) used a web app that calculated her potential locations based on enemy captures at the end of turn 1.

Mica did learn over time, though. Both Isomer and SC have easy mode for the next two events (three, if you count the travesty that was Polarized Light being literally easier than game journalist difficulty), as well as the map design being generally improved in regards to information given for objectives and movement.

TLDR: CT is the last event that's really insane unless you choose to do the EX versions of future events. Damage scaling is nuts during daytime (and MGs by extent, which I didn't touch on but should be obvious) and is hard to reign in, so night maps make it easier and more interesting to make threatening enemies. Fog of war was handled poorly to start, but Mica learned.

Also as a final note, @landcollector : If you can, avoid having the NPCs fight enemy comps on Stumbling Block with Aegis units in them. Those take -way- too long for the NPCs to kill; almost 22.5k HP per stack of five. By contrast, they'll chew through Hydras relatively easily. If they have to fight them, just retreat; they won't win those fights.
 
Arcus said:
Like what, the complaint about PEQs? The equipment system in this game is already as close to braindead as you can get without making it completely pointless. The ideal equipment loadout for almost every doll remains the same regardless of the scenario because in most cases you literally don't have any alternatives. The only real exception is with PEQs, except the decision whether to equip them or not is based on a single, binary map wide condition that you always know about in advance.

Do you need to consider your equipment loadout based on the enemies you might be fighting? No. Does the ideal equipment loadout ever vary depending on the doll? Only across classes. The worst criticisms you could level here are that it's a boring system and swapping out the equipment can get slightly tedious at times since you have to do it for multiple dolls, and you can do that from the squad formation screen. And it's not like you should be having to change equips literally every mission.

Dealing with the turn limit is just about planning your moves, securing map helipads to maximise your AP (and your options), making steady progress towards the map objective. There's only a few night maps where I found the turn limit truly frustrating, and that's because you literally only had 2 turns to kill everything in both those cases.
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Technically all true, but at the same time still misses the point. The issue isn't just PEQs alone any more than it's just the FoW alone, or just the turn limit alone, but the combination of all the various penalties, issues and whatnot into one mission-type that makes night missions tedious and annoying.

Or, to be perhaps more specific; the issue is how all of those things are blatantly added purely for the sake of making the players' life harder, instead of being added in order to (and in a way that) make(s) the game more interesting and fun.
 
They made PL ranking daytime, and the result of that was players running para debuffed RFSMGs into 40k enemies to unclog spawn helis each turn (yeah, they used parachute to save AP) and ramming 300k deathstacks with Kord while hoping that RNG and her penetration skill lets her murder one of the typhons by 4 seconds.
 
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