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AIWar 2010-11-05 19-16-07-20.jpg (93,519 bytes) |
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Chris, I can't think of anything I did recently having any impact on announced waves (some of the fallen spire stuff could just hit them with unannounced ships, if it was buggy). Could this be related to the core cpa guard post? |
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Happened again at precisely 10 min. I attached another save file. Difficulty 8. I will try again at seven |
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on difficulty seven, a wave warning appears at 11:48. Only 500 ships but … Doesn't feel normal. Attaching another screenshot and one last save file. |
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AIWar 2010-11-05 21-12-59-53.jpg (80,251 bytes) |
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I thought this was intended? These waves are rough but very defeatable given the players starting economy strength. I've gotten hit by 2000 ships on the first wave on a dual-homeworld, high-cap, sledgehammer/golemite diff 8. |
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Looking at the screenshots, it appears that everything is well. The individual waves aren't actually overlarge, those are as intended. And a change of mine with the last release was to fix the issue with that first wave of the game getting "eaten" and not actually spawning any ships. In the case of the one with 1300 ships, it looks like that has two players or two home planets -- the number of waves is 2x the number of players/home-planets, so again that seems correct. |
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AIWar 2010-11-08 08-31-40-45.jpg (124,114 bytes) |
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AIWar 2010-11-08 08-32-21-58.jpg (124,622 bytes) |
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AIWar 2010-11-08 08-32-46-20.jpg (121,267 bytes) |
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I have uploaded three screenshots of the different save files in order. I only have one home planet and one player.is that still correct? |
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Chris, it's one player with one homeworld, with an AIP of 10. The 4 waves makes sense because both AIs can wave at the same time and diff 8 has double waves. But the ship counts? Ouch. At 10 minutes with 0 additional AIP? |
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I see. I forgot that diff 8 had double waves. It probably needs to stop having those, as that makes for a HUGE jump between 7 and 8. Without the double waves, that should be a manageable influx (I'm assuming it's High ship count, as that seems to be the standby for Machine). |
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Yea, it's on high. In my tests with the save, a 700 total wave-set would have been doable. A bit of a smack in the face at 10-minutes-in, but on difficulty 8+ it may as well let you know what you're in for early on ;) |
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Another thought: with the 2000 ship cap on a wave (on high), keeping the double-wave effect of diff 8 and halving the wave-size-increase might provide more room for scaling the difficulty. With just dropping the double-wave effect it would hit the 2000 cap quicker. On the other hand, if they start getting total wave sets larger than 4000, we can run into other problems. |
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Letting you know what you're in for early on is pretty much the goal with that change: when players don't get a wave for 40 minutes, they think the AI is too passive, and then they wind up overextending and getting killed an hour in, which is frustrating. When they have to defend against one bigger wave earlier, they win up either with better defenses or an earlier loss (telling them to change difficulty levels). Or that's the theory. Having double-wave effects is something of a staple of difficulty 8, though, so perhaps that is something that shouldn't be changed. I guess the problem is that players don't really have time/resources to quickly build up in the early game. Perhaps that's the core problem, rather than anything else: players need more resource stores at the start so that they can quickly start building up their defenses. And possibly having that first wave declared right from the start might be helpful in terms of telling new players "you better build some defenses with this stuff, bud." My main goals here: 1. Let's get the players off to a quick start, no futzing around waiting for stuff to build or resources to accumulate, let's just get straight into the game. 2. Let's have players able to attack planets and take them pretty fast. 3. BUT, let's also have players get an attack of significance even faster off, so that they're forced to build up some defenses or die. And thus so that cycle of frustration isn't there later if they get hit by an unexpected large wave and get killed. Getting rid of the sense of sudden, unexpected spikes in difficulty, in other words. |
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Yea, I'm a big fan of an early attack. Not _right_ at the start, but soon. And fairly big, representative of what to expect. I'm not sure the problem is a lack of starting resources, it already feels like I get a _ton_ of stuff to start with, particularly with home command stations giving 300/s of each, etc. But perhaps that's from my first experience with the game being from not-long-after-1.0, where we got rather less than all this ;) I think the issue was more subtle here, we're talking a factor of less than 2 off. Even 1000 ships would have been doable, though something I would have associated more with difficulty 9 or something between 8 and 9. Anyway, it's good to know that there weren't any big bugs in this, just the combined outcome of a number of recent changes leading to a "whoa" moment ;) |
- Anonymous
