View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0015449 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - Balance Tweaks | Jun 20, 2014 11:52 am | Aug 13, 2014 5:55 pm | |
| Reporter | orzelek | Assigned To | |||
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 7.038 | ||||
| Summary | 0015449: Spire Maws and ship caps | ||||
| Description | Spire Maws seem to be unaffected by ship caps in any way. This means that on ultra low one of those can eat a ship per 2 seconds and has capacity of 50 (2 standard full caps). This might be a bit excessive. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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I think they're fine as they are, just like most "really good against fleet ships early on and in small battles" kind of ships. While I agree that maws are infinitely better at low caps than on high caps (because the incapacitated eaten ships are more valuable than they would be on higher caps) I don't think it's a big enough balance issue to do something about it. Early on a few of them can clear small waves (except for the starships) and low mark planets (except for the guardians), but later on fights are so big (and contain so many inedible opponents) that even the full I-IV cap of maws can't eat the fleet ships fast enough before getting blown up (or before other allies blow the enemies up). So even with the extra "boost" from low ship caps which makes their ability more valuable, they're mostly a support ship that slowly disables some of the opposing forces' firepower - like paralyzers but with the bonus that maybe some of them get killed if the maws survive the fight. |
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funny, they do great hiding behind a forcefield since the eating attack doesn't suffer a 75% reduction in effectiveness. especially if there's a military command station in said field with them. Since maws always have a cap of 5 no matter the scale, can swallow time be made dependent on ship caps? takes four times as long on ultra low, twice as long on low, normal time on normal, and half time on high? I would suggest a similar alteration on it's transport capacity but frankly even with my forcefield tricks I've never seen one with more than 21 ships eaten. that would make 42 on high caps which is _still_ not likely to break the 50 on a mark 1. |
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Spire maws have a fun concept but are terrible in practice. While they are indeed stronger on lower ship caps/lower diffuculty this is actually they only time when they come close of being usable. Their only time to shine is very early at the first minutes of the game where you don't have enough knowledge to get higher marks nor enough metal income to keep up with their 100k+ costs. The longer the game goes on the more useless they become until they are nothing more but 6500 wasted knowledge. I've tried using them in but they always fail to catch enemies or simply die to them so after several 30k cross planet attacks i decided to kick them out of my building queue and didn't even notice they were missing. The maws used by the ai are a completely different story though. A few hundred maws can hurt your fleet a lot if you can't outrun them. Disabling them is pretty hard due to their 100k engine health and they will render your hive golems completely useless. It's a shame that they are effectively usable by the ai only. |
