View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0001017 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - New Unit Ideas - AI-Specific Units | Nov 2, 2010 1:14 pm | Dec 4, 2010 1:18 am | |
| Reporter | KDR_11k | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | considering | Resolution | open | ||
| Summary | 0001017: AI Supervisor anti-blobbing unit | ||||
| Description | Since I feel that AI Eyes aren't as much anti-blobbing as they are mandatory raid targets I've been thinking about an alternative/addition: AI Supervisor A simple camera without warp facilities that the AI uses to monitor the humans' progress. This unit gives +1 AIP for every 100 units it sees in the current system. However this only applies to the highest number of units it has seen. So if a player moves 560 units into the supervisor's system he gets +5 AIP. He removes those units and later sends in 720, netting him another +2 AIP (since the supervisor has already given out AIP for 500 units it only gives the difference). Potentially count star ships as more units. As a disincentive for raiding the supervisor early you get -5 AIP if you capture the thing intact (the humans hack it to show the AI false information). That means winning the battle for the supervisor's planet with less than 500 ships to get a bonus. Maybe the bonus could scale for different mark versions so lower mark planets won't allow as big of a fleet if you want the bonus. At first I thought about AIP penalties for early raiding but there's already enough of that in play right now, might as well give the player a bit of positive feedback for once. So these basically present optional challenges the player can complete to get a bit of a bonus. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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I think that's a great idea, I'm putting this on the list for Light of the Spire. :) |
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Can you add also some fighting possibilities for smaller fleets? If you want to punish that severely for using large fleet (AIP is most severe punishment around here) there needs to be a fighting chance for small fleets. Trying to use only small fleets is not really possible currently (hybrids, guardians, fortresses and many other "fun" structures make sure that small fleet = dead fleet) unless you use cloaked star ships to snipe things - is that only way we are supposed to play? |
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You can easily play with small fleets in the latest versions: you have starships galore, your fleet ones of which do MASSIVE boosts to the firepower of your other ships, and you have force fields that are mobile, amongst other things. Plus, let's say that the AI has 1000 ships on a planet. You'd need 1000 ships to fight them, right? Not usually. Those 1000 ships are probably broken up across 5-10 different guard posts, meaning that there are usually 100-200 AI guards that you have to fight at any given time at most, regardless of what the total AI ship count is at that planet. That's the whole problem with blobbing, is that players get scared and bring in 1000 ships against the 1000 AI ships, and then it winds up with the humans outnumbering the AI 5:1 or 10:1 at each of the sub-battles. And with the effect of the starships, it can be an even more severe issue. |
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Actually I can't say that it's possible to fight with AI against any specific guard post one at a time. When you warp in to a planet they often wake up and attack. I really don't recall any battle when I was actually fighting with one-two guard post groups - it's usually most of them at once. So while you assume that we can fight them one after the other - it's not working like that. Add to that very long range AI units that start firing on you when you enter planet and you have a battlefield on which you simply can't bring small fleet - because all that 500+ AI ships that are on that planet will be soon on you and if there is only 100 of you will need to retreat (if you can) or die. Long range starships are quite good at pulling agro - and for star ships that give attack power boost you need to pay in knowledge. Light starships are not cutting it - they are real cannon fodder once you start touching Mk III worlds. But if you try to go without dreads for example you risk meeting with guardians face to face - and you made sure that this is very risky - for small fleet it can get deadly. I just did a small test and I think I know now why it wasn't possible for me to fight like you describe - the reason is called translocator. Even few of these mean that you are up against whole planet and there is no way to separate guard post groups. All of them will wake quite quickly and their units will go to attack. So while idea of fighting which guard posts one by one maybe quite sound - in practice I simply don't see it working. |
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Yeah, translocators can certainly be an issue, as are very long range units such as snipers, siege ships and Artillery Guardians. |
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On the other hand you can retreat out of the system and bait the AI forces into heavy defenses. Especially starships will fall for this. As for sinking knowledge into siege starships, you can get a Zenith starship for the same knowledge (if you've already unlocked the fairly cheap Flagship, of course) and that thing is a BEAST. You don't need siege starships for guardians when a Zenith will rip them up in no time. If you keep blitzing forward you can catch most AI systems un-reinforced and with low numbers of defenders, you only get into 200+ unit wars when the system has been on alert for quite some time. Also if you still think you cannot meet the supervisor's challenge you can still raid the thing. No AIP bonus then. |
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Siege starships are for free for Mk I now - so no need to pay knowledge there. And baiting of AI units is nice and dandy until you fight close to you - not against reinforced distant worlds with 500+ units. Also bating high Mk units and guardians into heavy defenses can and not so well :D As for raiding - it's a nice strategy until you start having planets that may require 2+ raids before you can even touch them or you risk heavy loses. And if you would like to raid supervisor it becomes only a bit different looking Eye. I'm all for it when it's not overdone and doesn't appear on every planet. It could be good Eye replacement on some small %-age of planets to have some variety. |
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Great idea! I think it would be interesting to have a variant of this that gives a large, temporary wave multiplier boost to the next wave instead of a permanent AIP increase - would give it more of a "risk and reward" feel instead of an outright punishment. |
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Wouldn't this dramatically and disproportionately punish swarmer ships? I agree with Orzelek and Moonshine Fox wrt: fighting the whole planet. In my experience you dont have a choice a lot of the time. There's often a great number of Guardians and Fortresses and long-range Guard Posts that essentially force you to either take the whole planet out in your first attack or suffer massive attrition casualties while trying to be fancy. |
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I'm not sure what I'm doing differently but I'm almost always able to tactically remove specific targets from AI worlds with only strategically appropriate losses... I'm not saying it's ever particularly EASY but it's almost always POSSIBLE... I for one am in favour of the Supervisor! |
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I'm proposing a bit more radical twist of this idea. What if this was indeed a feature common to every planet. Like, for instance, similarly to the original idea, every 50 ships on a planet increases AIP by 1, up to like 20 at 1k ships at most. In addition though, the Command Stations would only increase AIP by 10 upon destruction. Basically, if you go through the entire game using a maximum of 299 ships at each planet, you'd be getting roughly the same AIP as you currently would. Go with less, and you'll get less AIP. On the other hand, march through the entire galaxy map with a 1k fleet and you'll just rack up the AI's wrath upon you with a giant AIP. This would make a lot of sense in many ways. Why wouldn't the AI be alerted to humans moving a giant fleet all over their planets. Why would they be more alerted to a command station being destroyed than a 1k fleet of ships? This makes even more sense when attacking the AI home station. Normally it seems pretty common for many to jump over several planets and go straight for the AI core with a giant fleet. On the way there are usually only a few targets that need to be dispatched before you can call the route safe, and that hardly raises the AIP noticeably. Shouldn't the AI be alerted just by the fact that you are moving a giant fleet through their front yard? The mechanic I've proposed would reward using small fleets and avoiding drawing too much attention throughout the whole campaign. You could still choose to blob and steamroll the entire map, but for the cost of really high AIP. If you're patient and careful enough though, you could go through the map with even less compulsory AIP than you normally would, which in the end makes the endgame a lot easier, and you could genuinely surprise the AI with a bigger fleet than what it thinks you have. ;) This does punish the swarmer units a bit, but essentially it just means they need to be slightly rebalanced. Maybe more actual swarm bonuses, so that they're a powerful alternative to a standard small fleet. As a whole, small fleets and guerrilla tactics rewarded, blobbing with huge fleets punished, all with controlling AIP according to ship counts only. How handy is that!? Any thoughts? ;) (edit: oh, and I meant that this wouldn't a separate structure you can just raid to avoid the AIP, then bring in your fleet. It'd be in effect on every planet that meets some specific criteria, like having any structures intact. Once you clear a planet of every AI structure, you can safely move fleets of any size through them without raising the AIP further. Where the AI dwells, it takes notice of your fleet.) |
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That sounds too radical to me, maybe as some kind of super-hard option but not as part of the base game. |
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Well, maybe the 1 AIP per 50 ships is a bit too harsh, but if you really think about it, it's not really much harder than the current. You'd just need to plan when and where to use force, and where tactics. Instead of rolling over every mk2 and mk3 planet with 1k ships, you'd want to minimize the attention (AIP) by going in with what you really need, not the whole 1k fleet on every single planet you can. Then once you find a tough mk4 planet, you'll likely want to go in with a bigger fleet. It should perfectly punish using full-force blobbing when you really don't need to, and when you do need to, it'd come with the extra AIP gain, as the AI is alerted by your huge fleet. Even just the original ratio of 1 AIP per 100 ships would probably make a huge difference to how you'd want to use your fleets. |
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This is being tabled for now, but if it's upvoted a lot in the vote tallies it will get attention sooner than later. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 2, 2010 1:14 pm | KDR_11k | New Issue | |
| Nov 2, 2010 1:28 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0002532 | |
| Nov 2, 2010 1:28 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Nov 2, 2010 1:28 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => confirmed |
| Nov 2, 2010 1:45 pm | orzelek | Note Added: 0002533 | |
| Nov 2, 2010 1:49 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0002534 | |
| Nov 2, 2010 4:09 pm | orzelek | Note Added: 0002546 | |
| Nov 2, 2010 4:10 pm | orzelek | Note Edited: 0002546 | |
| Nov 2, 2010 4:13 pm | orzelek | Note Edited: 0002546 | |
| Nov 3, 2010 8:45 am | Moonshine Fox | Note Added: 0002603 | |
| Nov 3, 2010 1:01 pm | KDR_11k | Note Added: 0002617 | |
| Nov 3, 2010 1:04 pm | KDR_11k | Note Edited: 0002617 | |
| Nov 3, 2010 2:16 pm | orzelek | Note Added: 0002620 | |
| Nov 4, 2010 7:26 pm | unclean | Note Added: 0002728 | |
| Nov 5, 2010 8:38 pm | TheDeadlyShoe | Note Added: 0002794 | |
| Nov 6, 2010 8:30 am | zebramatt | Note Added: 0002810 | |
| Nov 7, 2010 12:39 am | HitmanN | Note Added: 0002864 | |
| Nov 7, 2010 12:41 am | HitmanN | Note Edited: 0002864 | |
| Nov 7, 2010 12:55 am | HitmanN | Note Edited: 0002864 | |
| Nov 7, 2010 2:30 am | KDR_11k | Note Added: 0002872 | |
| Nov 7, 2010 8:26 am | HitmanN | Note Added: 0002876 | |
| Dec 4, 2010 1:18 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0005146 | |
| Dec 4, 2010 1:18 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | confirmed => considering |
