View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0021997 | AI War 2 | Balance Issue | Oct 29, 2019 4:26 am | Jan 8, 2020 6:24 pm | |
| Reporter | Orelius | Assigned To | RocketAssistedPuffin | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | fixed | ||
| Product Version | 1.003 Sortable Objectives | ||||
| Summary | 0021997: I won on difficulty 10 | ||||
| Description | Map Settings: Map type: Honeycomb Number of Planets: 80 Seed: 187279878 Starting Planet: Foley Starting Fleet: Doorkicker fleet Starting Battlestation: Shield Defense Starting support fleet: Combat engineers and Factory The AI: Default settings, Difficulty 10 No other factions, all other settings as default. General strategy: (optional): Keep forgetting about instigators which make your life really difficult 1) Obtain starting fleet with synergistic upgrades. Fusion, Melee, and Splash overlap significantly with Heavy. 2) Obtain synergistic GCA (beam cannon) for early defences, further GCA are likely not necessary. 3) Grab every single kind of AIP reduction possible, use excess AIP to secure a large territory for energy and research. (Note, did not attempt to use superterminal) 4) Grab valuable fleets that use existing upgrades and reroll ARS's to grab upgrades 5) March up to the AI Overlord, plant a military station on an adjacent planet 6) Snipe the guard posts with sick micro 7) Bleed out the praetorian guard by slapping it with wads of cash 8) Go for the kill 9) Flex on discord 10) Flex on Mantis No mechanics were taken advantage of, to my knowledge, aside from reloading saves. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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My thoughts so far, based on this and things in the past: 1): Doorkicker probably needs some unit types swapped out. It's oddly not actually that fitting to the name. I'm thinking toss MLRS and Grenade, bring in...Pulsars and Vanguards. Then it still has the crowd control aspect, but also some actual breaching capability. This'd also solve the crazy synergy for Splash Tech. 2): Siege Frigates need another hammering. With the above, the Fleet is no longer so reliant on them to deal with Posts, so I can reduce the starting count by 1. 3): Engineering capabilities are set too high in general, letting the player simply attrition the enemy to death. There's little time to refleet if you have the Metal stored, which is often. This ties in with Counter Attacks rarely firing. Definitely something I've been noticing. 4): Some sources of metal get too high. Economics for instance have a crazy return on a level or two. 5): Hull Techs cost need to be bumped up. They were priced in a similar manner to Weapon Tech - i.e same Science per Power, considering it to be bringing a unit to MK6 and 7. The amount of times these benefit the majority of the player units says to me they should go up noticeably, from 7,500 to at least 10,000, even considering 12,500 as they're meant to be late game, and your access to MK6 and 7, not your early game power spikes. 6): Potentially the stack damage multipliers of some units reduced. The usual is 2x, thinking this needs to be 1.5x, particularly on units that don't actually suffer much from stacking (Grenade units), as opposed to Tesla which need a lot more victims. 7): Beam Cannons...Splash is a common Tech for Turrets. Curious about making it Technologist, though that's already one of the highest unit counts. Likely will not. Perhaps just a damage drop and energy drop. I recall finding these were really good but super intensive. Of course, if you can get the energy for them it's somewhat nuts. 8): Coordinators. 30% boost to global cap is fairly nasty, especially considering how cheap it is to Hack (Advanced Factory in Classic required MK3 Techs, and was fairly expensive, and Classic also had far fewer hacking points than here (20 per planet usually, versus 30 here). So thinking that cost needs to go up OR Hacking points per planet go down. Maybe even the benefit goes to 20% or 25% One thing I'm a bit concerned about is the use of "Plaid" combat speed. I don't use these much so this is not from experience, but I wonder if that 4x damage is influencing things in places, mainly alpha strikes. A wave could spawn at a wormhole and get nuked before it has a chance to do anything, while normally it'd at least survive for a bit. So I'm worried a little that some of the data gained here might not be as relevant to normal speed. The values I'm checking seem to match, plus some of the data from Discord, but think worth it to note. And of course, ideally all of those speeds would be viable. |
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Some comments on your comments: 1) Yeah, Doorkickers have a little much synergy for both Splash and Heavy Tech. In all of my games so far, I've typically had a lot of Heavy and Light ships, with not that many mediums. 2) I didn't have a particularly high opinion of siege frigates, and I don't think they had that much of a role in early game success. I attribute that more to the mark IV units I got out of the gate 3) The recent changes in engineer targeting and repairing crippled ships are pretty noticeable. By the end, though, my repair capability was capped on the metal end even though I had ~450k metal/second income. 4) My economy was limping along until I got my second econ upgrade. After that point, it was ridiculously robust. 5) I think the way tech costs as a whole might need to be reworked; they're already really limiting. 6) Yeah, I don't know about that. The majority of my battles were pretty much autoresolved. 7) It was actually impossible to use beam cannons in a major capacity once I upgraded them to mark V because the energy cost was truly ridiculous. I had tons of energy problems due to it. It did keep my MDC and homeworlds safe though, but primarily as a result of the AI never really launching real attacks on them. 8) Coordinators are really strong, yeah and they also don't really cost much. I've been wondering a long time about the impact of speed on balance and I don't think it's that important here, especially on the note of alpha strikes. My defenses on my worlds are typically based at the command station, but maybe one reason a lot of things worked out well was the mobility of my ships. Maybe not for deepstriking, since I typically cleared out worlds as I went to AIP reduction and other important structures, but for quickly returning my guys to defend. The more important impact it would have is on the metal economy, everything is dying 4x faster, so you'd need much more money to keep everything replaced. |
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Perhaps it's too easy to deepstrike now, which let to easy capping of all the AIP reduction and easy access to the AI homeworld? I'm wondering if the occasional world you simply can't cross without taking care of some obstacle in the system first wouldn't be beneficial to the game. Perhaps also more worlds that offer a unique challenge to conquer: when playing on diff 6 or 7 I didn't really feel challenged by ion cannons or eyes at any rate, curious to know what other people's experience is like. |
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The AIWC mechanism for "Deepstriking causes threat generation" could be brought back, I suppose? |
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Yeah, that sounds very reasonable. Right now, there's no deepstriking penalty at all. |
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Eyes are a lot scarier in my testing changes. |
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- The AIWC mechanism for "Deepstriking causes threat generation" could be brought back, I suppose? That could work as long as it's communicated to the player very clearly i.e. he knows what action is causing that reaction. It could feel paralyzing to newer players though, deep striking is scary enough already for them. Hence my suggestion about map obstacles you can't waltz past - I like the idea of a challenge better than a looming threat. |
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While I advocate the idea of Difficulty 10 being unbeatable, I would caution against balancing the game based on it as more than a secondary consideration. It's like how trying to write the law based on extreme cases usually makes for bad law. For example, I bet the massive energy costs of beam cannons makes them feel unusable for a lot of players. There might be ways to exploit them to make that energy cost worth it, but it won't feel like that to novice players, and probably even a number of intermediate players. This isn't meant to shut down the changes you suggest here, Puffin. Just wanted to add a cautionary tale. |
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Also, Asteroid's idea for map obstacles is well-thought-out and worth exploring. |
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Aye, fair point. A lot of my notes up there is based on information beyond Difficulty 10 - the saves here were good confirmations of my thoughts. The Beam Cannons I definitely agree on. I have decided not to build them recently out of that cost. That makes me reconsider the change to them slightly. |
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Yeah, beam cannons have too much power/energy cost for relatively little GCA investment. With them, it's too easy to get to silly amounts of defensive strength without taking more than 1 or 2 GCAs. The other thing is energy balance - I feel like it's way too restrictive at the moment. Your defense needs go up as you take more planets and get more energy, and the amount of energy you gain as you expand doesn't offset the amount of defense you need. |
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I agree on deepstriking being too darn easy, and needing some counter. I was able to pop the data centers and distribution nodes rather trivially with one/two transports and melee units. |
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How do you people feel about Lone Fleet? Spire and Golems in particular. I have been modding mine in Diff 7/8 because they feel terrible, even more now that crippled flagships need time before they can be repaired. How do they fare for you, and at higher difficulties? For me Vanilla Lone Fleet are straight up a deterrent to taking a planet, due to the AIP increase first and weak firepower/survivability second. |
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Lone and Officer fleets are largely pretty bad, in my opinion, because of the AIP penalty and since they're typically not that much better than a normal fleet even if it lines up with your upgrade synergies. I do my best to avoid taking any. |
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Long time since report was made, many changes. If still possible, please make new one. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 29, 2019 4:26 am | Orelius | New Issue | |
| Oct 29, 2019 4:26 am | Orelius | File Added: 1 Early game.save | |
| Oct 29, 2019 4:26 am | Orelius | File Added: 2 Reducing AIP.save | |
| Oct 29, 2019 4:26 am | Orelius | File Added: 3 negative 110 aip.save | |
| Oct 29, 2019 4:26 am | Orelius | File Added: 4 secured territory.save | |
| Oct 29, 2019 4:26 am | Orelius | File Added: 5 right before overlord.save | |
| Oct 29, 2019 4:26 am | Orelius | File Added: 6 game end.save | |
| Oct 29, 2019 5:03 am | Orelius | Description Updated | |
| Oct 29, 2019 8:45 am | RocketAssistedPuffin | Note Added: 0054100 | |
| Oct 29, 2019 8:45 am | RocketAssistedPuffin | Assigned To | => RocketAssistedPuffin |
| Oct 29, 2019 8:45 am | RocketAssistedPuffin | Status | new => assigned |
| Oct 29, 2019 3:28 pm | Orelius | Note Added: 0054128 | |
| Oct 30, 2019 12:37 am | Asteroid | Note Added: 0054144 | |
| Oct 30, 2019 1:46 am | BadgerBadger | Note Added: 0054146 | |
| Oct 30, 2019 2:08 am | Orelius | Note Added: 0054147 | |
| Oct 30, 2019 8:24 am | RocketAssistedPuffin | Note Added: 0054149 | |
| Oct 30, 2019 9:17 am | Asteroid | Note Added: 0054150 | |
| Oct 30, 2019 2:02 pm | Apthorpe | Note Added: 0054158 | |
| Oct 30, 2019 2:06 pm | Apthorpe | Note Added: 0054161 | |
| Oct 30, 2019 2:14 pm | RocketAssistedPuffin | Note Added: 0054162 | |
| Oct 30, 2019 4:42 pm | Orelius | Note Added: 0054177 | |
| Oct 30, 2019 10:31 pm | donblas | Note Added: 0054187 | |
| Nov 2, 2019 7:04 am | ArnaudB | Note Added: 0054273 | |
| Nov 4, 2019 8:01 pm | Orelius | Note Added: 0054347 | |
| Jan 8, 2020 6:24 pm | RocketAssistedPuffin | Status | assigned => closed |
| Jan 8, 2020 6:24 pm | RocketAssistedPuffin | Resolution | open => fixed |
| Jan 8, 2020 6:24 pm | RocketAssistedPuffin | Note Added: 0055446 |
