View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0002197 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - Balance Tweaks | Dec 28, 2010 7:02 pm | Jan 10, 2011 11:59 pm | |
| Reporter | Sunshine | Assigned To | keith.lamothe | ||
| Status | resolved | Resolution | fixed | ||
| Product Version | 4.058 | ||||
| Summary | 0002197: Eyebot ammo type changed to missiles | ||||
| Description | As of right now, the only good defense against Eyebots is a huge network of tachyon drones and very aggressive patrolling, and Eyebots in the hands of the AI are an absolute nightmare. Suggest their ammo type changes to missiles to give players an (expensive) recourse to defending important installations from Eyebots by constructing counter-missile turrets. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | |||||
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At a quick glance, I really like the sound of this. |
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To be honest, I think eyebots were a silly idea in the first place. Cloaked AND immunity to force fields?! I don't think there is any way you can balance that without removing one of those two abilities. Missile ammo would be a nifty nerf, but still eyebots would still be "godbots". |
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Aren't the godbots stupidly flimsy though? In the realm of "lollightning turret" flimsy? I haven't played with Eyebots since before the 4.0 beta release, but I distinctively remember them being stupidly easy to kill. |
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They now have a little over 100k HP at mk1 IIRC. Damage was taken down a smidgen though. |
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Hmm okay, that is certainly not flimsy. In that case they might need a lookover. |
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A game I played with two people the other day, without using voice chat, ended rather quickly. One guy got hit by eyebots before any of the three of us had significant defenses (his home station went down). We played it out until the host had to go, but the eyebots were a pain. |
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I had a single eyebot attack my base very early, it destroyed my docks in seconds leaving me without the ability to build any mobile units and building turrets took many tries until the bot ignored them for long enough to finish building. |
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Keith, your thoughts? |
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This is a good idea; the alternative is to remove the immunity to forcefields and that's ok but it would be a variety-removing move so for now we'll try: * Eyebots now have dark matter ammo (same as astro trains), and so it's much easier for the player to protect their command stations and whatnot by simply building counter-dark-matter turrets (which have a tech cost, of course). ** Thanks to Sunshine for suggesting changing the ammo type. I prefer this to making it missile ammo because that's actually two techs up the tree. We'll see how it goes. |
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IIRC when it comes to science (my science lab was blown up so I don't have one right now to check), counter missile and counter dark matter turrets can be researched independently of one another, so unlocking counter dark matter turrets is not necessary for unlocking missile turrets. I was suggesting missile ammo because while there are a decent number of things (leech starships, eyebots themselves) that are immune to missile ammo, very few structural things are immune, whereas for some reason I remember a decent number of structural type targets (the things eyebots like to eat) being immune to dark matter. I can't off the top of my head remember right now, I just remember having had some problems getting muni boosters to attack stuff. I'll try to find those things. |
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Here are the things I found that are immune to dark matter ammo: Metal Harvester Crystal Harvester Science Lab Transport Ship Engineer Drone Ion Cannon Sniper Turret Spire Blade Raid Starship Leech Starship I only searched through the Mk. I stuff though, but a few of those sound like things the Eyebot should be attacking, mainly the harvesters and ion cannons. |
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Can you get us a list of missile-immune stuff as well? |
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Immunities in general (like dark matter, missile, blade, etc) they are planning on re-balancing at some point. Right now, the immunities are spread around a little weird. |
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Lightning Warhead Armored Warhead Leech Starship Vampire Claw Eye Bots Acid Sprayer are all immune to missile ammo |
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"Immunities in general (like dark matter, missile, blade, etc) they are planning on re-balancing at some point. Right now, the immunities are spread around a little weird." In that case, I like the Dark Matter ammo. It fits nicely. |
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I think missile might make more sense. And yea, there is no dependency on sniper there. They are just in a visual stack, not an actual dependency line. |
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Well, when you finally do get around to re-balancing immunities, please look at the eye-bot ammo type again. :) |
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I don't think the immunities are that off... they need some tweaking, but for the most part they are pretty decent. |
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Yea, missile and dark-matter immunity is almost balanced. I'm mostly concerned with the overabundance of blade immunities. But that immunity has no relevance to this post, so I won't go into further detail here. |
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The more I've thought about it, the more I've been inclined to keep blade immunities as-is. Again: the more things are made consistent with other types, the more everything is the same. Right now, blade stuff is great for a lot of open-field stuff, but not helpful against large structures, etc. I like that. |
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Without adding complexity to mitigate some of the problematic cases, blade immunities are fine. I'll still maintain my opinion that Shredders and Vampires should have a different attack type than Cutlasses, however, to let Cutlasses attack larger targets while still restricting Shredders and Vampires from being super abusable. Edit: I strongly oppose removing FF immunity from Eyebots - currently it's them and infiltrators that are ranged units that can attack through forcefields (snipers don't really count, being in a different class), and they serve (or at least should serve) slightly different roles. That being said, removing FF immunity from Eyebots removes one of what I've found to be their main roles, which is hunting down Hybrid Hives. Also, I think Missile and Dark Matter immunities are generally okay - having Leeches immune to missiles is a bit wonky, but it doesn't make them super difficult to deal with (as would be the case if Raid Starships were made missile immune again). |
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Well, like the new Spire rams, cutlasses are ships that "ram" into enemies and thus take self damage to deal damage. Maybe cutlasses should get ram ammo type too? (Does the human home command station have ram ammo immunity?) |
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Could be ram... but that does seem a bit odd. I could make vampires and shredders have a new "incision" type that duplicates the old blade immunities, while then having a different set of blade immunities. That's more the direction I'm leaning. The rams are really a lot harder-hitting, and I think their immunities should be balanced differently. And, in the future, the incision damage type could be expanded upon with other interesting ships, too, without having to impact the other blade ships like cutlasses (ram just doesn't sit right with me for them). |
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I'd suggested that Vampires and Shredders have a "fusion cutter" damage type, to represent them latching on and slicing apart the enemy ship piece by piece, methodically, whereas the cutlass just kind of smashes into and rips apart the enemy ship. Rather than "ram" damage type other damage types could be "structural trauma," "blunt," or something similar. Suggest that in the tooltips "ammo" be replaced with "damage" or "damage type" because it's not like melee ships really have ammunition (or, in some cases, they are the ammunition). |
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I like fusion cutter, that's better than incision. I can't really rename Ammo, because that would just take up more space; I think people understand what we mean, eh? ;) |
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I think people understand what's meant, it just makes it more "clean". |
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I do very much like the changes to the eyebots, but the only thing that seems a little unbalance is that when the AI goes for that ship, either from start or randomly gets it, you have to research anti missile turrets. And they are the only ship I can think of that absolutely needs to have research done to prevent you from losing the game. Otherwise they still own your systems fast, not to mention that they are immune to snipers and insta-killing, like counterspies, which if worked would help with curtailing their numbers with little limited cloaking ships. Otherwise the amount of research for just countering one ship would be nearly enough to get a mark 3 fleet ship. 4K for anti missile, 1k for decloakers, 250 for tachyon turrets, and 750 for M2 basic turrets for the sake of defending mining nodes. Basic turrets are lower knowledge then mark 2 lasers, though lasers do more to kill them. That seems like reasonable defenses for taking care of eyebots, but few ships need that amount research to defend against. Even with other cloakers they are killed by snipers, counterspies and/or missile turrets, but eyebots are not effected by any of those. Less research needed to counter one unit and a better way to effectively taken them out is what I think they need. Just my two cents. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 28, 2010 7:02 pm | Sunshine | New Issue | |
| Dec 28, 2010 9:45 pm | BigJake | Note Added: 0007174 | |
| Dec 28, 2010 10:24 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0007175 | |
| Dec 28, 2010 10:40 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0007175 | |
| Dec 29, 2010 2:58 pm | Moonshine Fox | Note Added: 0007217 | |
| Dec 29, 2010 4:30 pm | Sunshine | Note Added: 0007219 | |
| Dec 29, 2010 4:34 pm | Moonshine Fox | Note Added: 0007224 | |
| Dec 29, 2010 4:53 pm | Draco18s | Note Added: 0007230 | |
| Dec 31, 2010 4:39 am | KDR_11k | Note Added: 0007288 | |
| Jan 6, 2011 5:55 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0007624 | |
| Jan 6, 2011 5:55 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => keith.lamothe |
| Jan 6, 2011 5:55 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => acknowledged |
| Jan 7, 2011 7:14 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0007792 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 7:14 pm | keith.lamothe | Status | acknowledged => resolved |
| Jan 7, 2011 7:14 pm | keith.lamothe | Resolution | open => fixed |
| Jan 7, 2011 7:28 pm | Sunshine | Note Added: 0007794 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 7:37 pm | Toll | Note Added: 0007796 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 7:39 pm | Sunshine | Note Added: 0007797 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 7:45 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0007798 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 7:47 pm | Toll | Note Added: 0007799 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 7:51 pm | Sunshine | Note Added: 0007800 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 7:59 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0007801 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 8:05 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0007803 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 8:07 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0007804 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 8:09 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0007805 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 8:09 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0007805 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 8:09 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0007805 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 8:13 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0007807 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 9:17 pm | Sunshine | Note Added: 0007841 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 9:19 pm | Sunshine | Note Edited: 0007841 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 9:21 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0007842 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 9:22 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0007842 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 9:25 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0007844 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 9:44 pm | Sunshine | Note Added: 0007845 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 10:05 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0007849 | |
| Jan 7, 2011 10:11 pm | Sunshine | Note Added: 0007851 | |
| Jan 10, 2011 11:59 pm | Draco Cretel | Note Added: 0008196 |
