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IDProjectCategoryLast Update
0021921AI War 2Balance IssueNov 7, 2019 4:23 pm
Reporterdarkarchon Assigned ToChris_McElligottPark  
Status resolvedResolutionfixed 
Product Version1.001 Official Game Launch! 
Fixed in Version1.005 Answering Your Top Requests 
Summary0021921: Remove Custom Fleets and EXP overhaul
DescriptionSo, after having some discussions on Discord with several people it crystallized out that there are few shortcomings to the current systems. Let me try to summarize it up:

- EXP are essentially meaningless for combat fleets
- Flagship slot limits are just a hindrance when you have custom fleets which have all lines unlocked, it feels like a limitation
- That makes captureable combat Flagships worth less than Flagships you can build yourself

I have some ideas and opinions on that matter.

Custom Fleets:
Get rid of the custom fleets again. Hear me out here - the custom fleets destroy the balance of captureable flagships. Building one "saves" you from capturing a planet, hence increasing AIP. This reduces risk-reward situations with capturing fleets, since you can "just" continue hacking ARS to increase your fleet limit with custom fleets. Especially after the upcoming 1.002 patch and when custom fleets can hack and get new fleet lines this whole issue will get blown up further.
Furthermore you could capture a single fleet at the beginning of the game and shove everything into the custom fleet, making it stronger than before. Given how EXP are scaled, the single custom fleet would get more EXP from combat than having two different flagships. This further hurts the balance of captureable vs. custom fleets. With custom fleets having special abilities, the captureable fleets get hurt even more since they are most often generic transporters.
This is a game of risk vs. reward and playing a hand you got dealt and making the best of it. Custom fleets dampen that whole experience, removing risk (capturing planets to increase your fleet capacity, when your flagships are already full of fleet lines) for a reward (getting more ships, thus more power, from "just" hacking an ARS). There should be more incentive capturing fleets to increase your strength and with custom fleets this incentive gets decreased.
An alternative to removal would be spawning custom ships without any or maybe just one fleet lines unlocked, this would decrease the value of a custom flagship over a captureable one.

Experience:
Currently, combat fleets gaining experience gives them (almost?) no benefit for the most part. Stations and other fleets benefit more from the EXP to increase the Mark level of many structures and units they hold in the fleet. This as a whole feels somewhat tacked on and I have heard several people complain about the inconsistencies. Or even removing EXP altogether.
I do not believe EXP should removed at all, however. But it should give you a different incentive than increasing the Mark levels of the ships at hand and give you a good reason to level up the combat fleets as well.
This is why I believe that a RPG-like system, with a small (and slightly different) skill tree for Stations, Combat Fleets, Citadels and Support fleets should be implemented. This skill tree could cover various skills the centerpiece or the fleets in the ship would inherit. One could think of, for example: enable cloaking (centerpiece), increasing cap of fleetships, faster movement for fleetships or centerpiece, slightly more damage for ranged weapons or for melee weapons, slightly stronger cloaking for fleetships, more damage output for the centerpiece (e.g. for citadels), increase mark level of drones, decrease build speed or cost, etc. etc. etc.
There are endless possibilities one could do with such a skill tree system, it would feel less tacked on to the whole EXP and would not make ships incredibly imbalanced since the perks they might get are just *minor*. Instead of levels one could also consider just using the EXP itself to unlock the upgrades for the fleet and use levels only as "marks" when the fleet reached a specific point in EXP (i.e. 5000, 10000, 15000 etc.)
Adding those perks, would make custom fleets less desirable and make normal fleetships more interesting and diverse, more specialized to play.
TagsNo tags attached.

Activities

Asteroid

Oct 25, 2019 3:22 pm

reporter   ~0053978

Custom fleets were added by Chris to solve a specific problem, namely the lack of traditional RTS control groups you can assign to hotkeys, which made things like sending off a force of cloaked ships separate from its fleet or hotkeying your sniper separately impossible or unweildly, among others (see the linked issue for other things that were impossible or painful):
https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=21640

If they were removed, another alternative to control groups would have to be implemented to solve those problems.

Unless XP can be made really interesting I definitely vote for removing it altogether for mobile fleets. However here are some alternative ideas:
- make it so fleet XP is attached to the abstract "fleet captain", not the fleet. So you could swap the flagship freely just like you can swap the ships.
- add a new Command research category which controls the number of total slots per fleet you have, making so without research, custom fleets are initially less good than fleets you find on the map.

Asteroid

Oct 25, 2019 3:24 pm

reporter   ~0053979

Chris wrote a huge post about the rationale behind custom fleets when they were introduced: https://steamcommunity.com/games/573410/announcements/detail/3032537193884066560

BadgerBadger

Oct 25, 2019 3:25 pm

manager   ~0053980

The plan has always been to give regular Transport Flagships something nice when they level up. It just hasn't been done yet.

RocketAssistedPuffin

Oct 26, 2019 8:39 pm

reporter   ~0054036

Discord discussion in general is majority against EXP seemingly. Seems to be little support for it overall in all the places.

Some people kind of like it ( https://steamcommunity.com/app/573410/discussions/0/1693843461187093523/ ).

Chris_McElligottPark

Oct 28, 2019 6:38 pm

administrator   ~0054073

Copy-pasting this from discord:

4) Anyone suggesting things that are going to majorly redefine how the game functions is probably not going to get a very positive response to those ideas. I'm happy to revisit some things like Outguard, because they're underused and not very useful. I plan to expand EXP to be more exciting and useful. Interface things or balance things to fleets are things I'm certainly willing to contemplate, it's only sensible. But to do something like remove flagships, allow unlimited lines in fleets, or do other really extreme things that really change the game would absolutely a giant pivot for the game again. That's something I see no reason to do with so many people happy, and in general we'd have to have an overwhelming level of unhappiness from people for me to contemplate more than refining such systems. Part of going to 1.0 was to signal that those systems are now mature and "are what they are." They'll be balanced, but they won't suddenly go through another giant pivot like we saw during EA. We'd have massive riots if we started making major changes to the whole flow of the game in a post-release support update. Wow.

Chris_McElligottPark

Oct 28, 2019 6:39 pm

administrator   ~0054074

Also from me on discord, kinda relevant:

Bear in mind that you can assign as many fleets to one control group as you want. So from a UI standpoint, that's what a control group is -- 1+ fleets. Fleets themselves are an operating unit that has its own fleet-wide bonuses, benefits, perks, etc. Even now putting raiders in a fleet gives a fleet-wide bonus, for example. Fleets are meant to be your primary unit of.... units. In some respects fleets were my answer to both "procedurally designed ships" and "hand-designed ships." I see fleets as basically being giant modular ships. That's how I think of them, as the primary chess pieces you move around the board.

Asteroid

Oct 29, 2019 1:07 am

reporter   ~0054094

Chris I linked to your rationale for these additions so the discussion doesn't start from scratch, but I'm confused by your comment about allowing unlimited lines in fleets being an extreme thing that would really change the game. For all intents and purposes, fleets already have unlimited slots because of the custom fleets! Nine fleets do anyways, which is a high enough number to lodge all your ship lines up to the endgame, especially if you put separate some fleet lines in the leftover transports to micro them. So giving every remaining flagship except perhaps officer fleets unlimited slots won't change anything to the gameplay, it'll just confuse players less and open up some UI possibilities.
All ships in one fleet.png (125,116 bytes)   
All ships in one fleet.png (125,116 bytes)   

Strategic Sage

Oct 29, 2019 1:28 am

reporter   ~0054096

I think unlimited lines in fleets would change a lot more than that. For one, there's the whole 'one ship line of each type' thing that's been stated would be really problematic to change. It could become hard to find a fleet that could accept a new ship line if you had a lot of the same type. It would also greatly impact the EXP system, esp. if that does get enhanced down the road, vis a vis the whole balance issue with fleets getting more/less xp based on how many of them are around - that becomes a total non-consideration if you can just cram more lines into one fleet to get around it.

darkarchon

Oct 29, 2019 5:06 am

reporter   ~0054098

> For all intents and purposes, fleets already have unlimited slots because of the custom fleets! Nine fleets do anyways, which is a high enough number to lodge all your ship lines up to the endgame, especially if you put separate some fleet lines in the leftover transports to micro them.

This is exactly the issue I'm having with custom fleets. Instead of playing with the cards you got dealt you make your own cards, breaking the system to a degree. Since Custom Flagships are so "powerful" or superior to normal transports there is really little incentive to use the normal transports at all. Maybe a solution would be to limit the fleet lines per transport/custom flagship to 4 and unlock all lines to start with to balance the clear superiority out? It would still allow for micro-ing and making custom control groups as one wishes.

Chris_McElligottPark

Oct 30, 2019 4:24 pm

administrator   ~0054173

I do think that fewer slots in the custom fleets is probably a good idea. I think I went overboard with the number of slots they have. I do want people to be able to customize, but not to obsolete the other fleets that people have.

RocketAssistedPuffin

Oct 31, 2019 9:44 am

reporter   ~0054197

I was thinking just 5, since that appears to be the absolute maximum a Fleet can have, and that's only on a few designs.

Some Fleets only have 4 maximum unit types.

I've also split up the Flagships a bit, so they have some differences. That's in my held changes.

HellzStormer

Nov 1, 2019 10:48 am

reporter   ~0054239

There is definetly something wrong right now: The custom fleets are straight up better than the flagships we find in the beginning!

They are either: Faster moving or cloaked
They can get up to 7 different units from the start! The basic Transport flagship can only reach 6, and it needs to actually be getting shiplines from a hack, which is quite limiting.

One could say, just keep 2 flagships together in a hotkey and you don't need to have 6 ships in one flagship. But that is reducing the XP gains. (EXP being a different subject)

Things would feel a lot less "wrong" or "weird" if at the very least, they were equivalent to the ones found:

There should be no faster flagships, I never wanted my flagships to be slower. A faster flagship to capture sounds like a good idea to make me prefer the ones I can capture.

For the cloaking flagships, if you really want them: If all the built ships of a Transport flagship have cloaking, then the flagship could have cloaking. Only enable that for the basic Transport flagships and the custom ones, not for Golems and such.

Alternatively, a Cloaking flagship that doesn't care about what it built (the current Stealth custom ones) also sounds like something that would encourage me to capture flagships.

Side note: I read somewhere that we were limited in the number of custom fleets, but that doesn't appear to be the case. I just built Stealth Alpha 4 times in my game...

Asteroid

Nov 2, 2019 5:49 pm

reporter   ~0054291

Yeah... Another thing that's wrong with custom fleets as a control group substitute it's that they give you an XP penalty. You'd like to micro your snipers and the official way to do that is to split them out to their own flagship, but you're penalized for it (before you were even penalized by the 7000 energy cost but that's going away).

Chris_McElligottPark

Nov 7, 2019 4:23 pm

administrator   ~0054438

With all the changes in 1.005, I think we at least need a restart to this conversation. But: generally speaking, now the custom fleets are not better, everything has slots, EXP is still near-useless for combat fleets but that's a temporary thing until perks arrive, EXP is not a thing for non-combat fleets anymore, and the penalties for multiple fleets are lower.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback, this did help steer the design adjustments.

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
Oct 25, 2019 7:19 am darkarchon New Issue
Oct 25, 2019 3:22 pm Asteroid Note Added: 0053978
Oct 25, 2019 3:24 pm Asteroid Note Added: 0053979
Oct 25, 2019 3:25 pm BadgerBadger Note Added: 0053980
Oct 26, 2019 8:39 pm RocketAssistedPuffin Note Added: 0054036
Oct 28, 2019 6:38 pm Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0054073
Oct 28, 2019 6:39 pm Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0054074
Oct 29, 2019 1:07 am Asteroid File Added: All ships in one fleet.png
Oct 29, 2019 1:07 am Asteroid Note Added: 0054094
Oct 29, 2019 1:28 am Strategic Sage Note Added: 0054096
Oct 29, 2019 5:06 am darkarchon Note Added: 0054098
Oct 30, 2019 4:24 pm Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0054173
Oct 31, 2019 9:44 am RocketAssistedPuffin Note Added: 0054197
Nov 1, 2019 10:48 am HellzStormer Note Added: 0054239
Nov 2, 2019 5:49 pm Asteroid Note Added: 0054291
Nov 7, 2019 4:23 pm Chris_McElligottPark Assigned To => Chris_McElligottPark
Nov 7, 2019 4:23 pm Chris_McElligottPark Status new => resolved
Nov 7, 2019 4:23 pm Chris_McElligottPark Resolution open => fixed
Nov 7, 2019 4:23 pm Chris_McElligottPark Fixed in Version => 1.005 Answering Your Top Requests
Nov 7, 2019 4:23 pm Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0054438