View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0021399 | AI War 2 | Suggestion | Jul 13, 2019 9:43 pm | Jul 13, 2019 11:59 pm | |
| Reporter | NRSirLimbo | Assigned To | |||
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 0.875 Counterattacks You Can Taste | ||||
| Summary | 0021399: [TL;DR Warning] Collection of issues, suggested solutions and general ideas or improvements | ||||
| Description | First and foremost: Hope this is the right place for suggestions and stuff, but I saw the "[All Projects] Suggestion" category and went for it. This is a collection of a few issues I've noticed throughout the game as well as proposed solutions and general ideas, all woven together. Be prepared: It's long and at item 3.) becomes more complex and at times "math-y" as it goes on. Hence the TL;DR warning. 1.) The new Counterattack-waves are a step in the right direction but can easily grow horrifying in two ways. First of all, I noticed that when a single tractor guardian would sometimes drag my ships onto a level 5 enemy planet even as little as 6-8 squads of level 3 Vanguards would result in around an 8 power Counterattack. Now, 8 strength at that level is nothing, for sure. But it's something uncontrollable, and I've seen it go to 77 in another situation triggered by a fight with another Counterattack. For all intents and purposes you could even make an AI type based around luring your ships into its terrain using such tactics to gain constant reprisal attack waves. Personally, I think currently planets of higher tiers accumulate reprisals too aggressive. A slight adjustment might be in order. As to the issue itself, I can think of 3 ways to handle this, possibly a mix of them too: Either use it and make the game interesting (which is nice). Give the player a sort of way to counter it (like a Wormhole Guardian Post which disables tractor beams within a certain range, which is the first thing I can think off the top of my head). Or just exempt ships that arrived through tractor beams in enemy sectors from triggering Counterattacks, or significantly reduce the enemy strength gained through this. AS I said, it might be possible to combine 2 or 3 of these ways. Second of all, they easily get game-ending. Attacking an enemy level 5 planet with 0000206:0000100 strength and a similar attack force accumulated 550+ strength Counterattack, at a rate of 0000206:0000100 per 25 seconds. When tested, with 0000269:0000150 strength defenders and 0000206:0000100 strength attackers it results in something as high as 900+. Granted, in retrospect that was my error. I didn't attack the Command Station fast enough and in a 2nd attempt I only triggered almost nothing due to the Command Station being easily in range from where the Wormhole was. Which brings me to a bug (?) where even after the Command Station was destroyed after almost all of the planet's defense forces had been eliminated a 13 strength Counterattack was triggered. Not sure by what, maybe the remaining Guard Posts? But even so, a lot of ships died there, warranting a ton of Counterattack. So what if there is something in the way of killing the enemy station, i.e. forcefields or invulnerability of the Command Station (granted: IDK if something like this currently exists for the AI). But even if you only take a minute to destroy it on a level 6+ planet, what does that yield? 300? 400?, I can think of a ways to deal with this: Cap the maximum response based on some factor(s) which may be the number and level of Guard Posts, total Ship Strength (both attacking and defending). I'd suggest something like this: [maximum Counterattack strength] = (2 * [planet level] * (5 + [number of Guard Posts])) + (0.75 * [allocated defense ship strength]) + [highest strength of simultaneous player assault ships this planet has ever seen] Assuming a normal level 5 planet with let's say 8 Guard Posts and 150 defending ship strength it would result in 130 from planetary defenses and 112,5 from ships, added whatever the highest strength player assault was. Assuming the player takes a total of 112,5 attack strength to match the AI into the sector at once the total would be 350 maximum Counterattack strength. A high enough cap to not be stupid and throw around weight without a need in but not zero-chance game-ending the player manages to it. It also adapts to the importance of the planet and how smart or not the player uses his strength. 2.) Next, there is the issue of Transport Flagships being stupid and flying right into the enemy fleet. Even in this version it hasn't ended. I don't know why they do this, I can only assume it's either because they think they need to attack and/or they collide with the small ships and seek out a large enough spot with no ships blocking it, which is often very far. I can see multiple ways to deal with this quickly and one way I would very much like to see. One could simply make Transport Flagships a "priority" entity that cannot be moved by ships unless the player orders it. Or one could give them a sort of special "stay near wormhole" FRD override which causes them to not move away unless the player ordered them to. But here is what I think is the best solution: In the Fleet Manager window, why not give an "Exempt Flagship from FRD" button. Or, while we're at it, some other kinds of commands like staying near the wormhole or deliberately escaping from enemies where possible. Or, especially for Officer Fleets with powerful centerpieces, some sort of "Until you are at X% health go FRD like normal" command. This way players have much more control over what their centerpieces do. While we're at it, why not go big and give players the ability to configure their ship FRD command precisely. This is what I would like to see for both centerpieces as well as the normal ships of the fleet. For starters one of these commands could be chosen but what would be really nice is a priority list arrangement of all of them. If the highest priority command is impossible (as in if they have to protect a Command Station but none exists on the current planet) they go down the list. "Classic FRD" -> What FRD does right now. "Protect Centerpiece" (only for ships) -> The ships gather around their centerpiece to protect it. "Protect Command Station" (only for ships) -> The ships gather around the Command Station in the system to protect it. "Clear Guard Posts" -> Targets the nearest Guard Post for destruction. "Clear Fortresses" -> Targets the nearest Fortress for destruction. "Clear Turrets" -> Targets nearest Turret for destruction. "Clear Defenses" -> Targets nearest Guard Post, Fortress or Turret for destruction. "Make Run for Command Station" -> Ignores everything and heads for the hostile Command Station. "Make Run for Warp Gate" -> Ignores everything and heads for the hostile Warp Gate. "Clear Priority Targets" -> Goes for the nearest Orbital Mass Driver, Ion Cannon, Astro Train Station, etc... "Construct Ships" (only engineers and alike) -> Goes to the nearest factory and produces ships. "Repair Ships" (only engineers and alike) -> Seeks out damaged ships and repairs them. "Run From Enemies" -> For snipers, Transport Flagships and non-combattants. Essentially makes them run away as far as possible from enemies. "Stay at Wormhole" -> For snipers, Transport Flagships and non-combattants if they shouldn't go all over the map. "Do nothing" -> Final Fallback. This is what a ship does if EVERYTHING else is somehow not possible. There can easily be more of these commands but that is what I can think of right now. It'd make life easier for the player wanting some level of strategy in the fleet setup but not wanting micromanage fights down to the ship type. And it'd probably fix every kind of "runaway" Transport Flagship. Also, can we get some kind of repair while ships are in transport? Would be nice to have them being repaired while loaded in their hangar. Shields and Cloaking points would be nice too. While we're on the subject on Transport Flagships, a little variety on them wouldn't be bad either. They aren't big fighting ships but some utility would be nice overall, and with the priority commands from before they would still function even if given back their weapons. This is what I would have in mind: "Shield Transport Flagship" -> Projects a forcefield outwards. Has no weapons. Also replenishes Shield points twice as fast while ships are loaded in their hangar. "Sniper Transport Flagship" -> Has some sniper cannons. "Repair Transport Flagship" -> Has some repair capabilities. Has no weapons. Also heals ships twice as fast while they are loaded in their hangar. "Cloaking Transport Flagship" -> Has good cloaking capabilities, but lower hull and shield. Has no weapons. Also replenishes cloaking points twice as fast while ships are loaded in their hangar. "Bunker Buster Transport Flagship" -> Has large Fusion Bomb with shield piercing and higher range, but not high enough to stay out of combat. Some more hull and shield for durability. "Locust Transport Flagship" -> Has no weapons or special abilities but ships inside have 1.3 times the usual cap. This would really make things interesting, especially with the upcoming "Swap" mechanic (very excited for that one!!!). 3.) Tech. Oh, sweet tech. How I missed you. Well, I never really had you in this game to begin with. !!! STOP !!! Before anything, here's a disclaimer: If I recall correctly, Tech right now is only supposed to be a proof of concept. I know and recognize that. Keep it in mind while reading the next parts: This is not me blowing steam over something that is right now just a concept while the development focus is on fleets. It's just that I don't really like the current implementation and consider Tech a vital part of this game. Now that that is out of the way, here's what I think: All you do is power up ships. You don't even unlock anything new any more. Right now it seems to me like there is so many expensive techs, unless you take literally hundreds of planets you won't ever be able to get a variety of ships upgraded. I expect, especially with the upcoming "Swap" mechanic for people to load ships of a kind into a fleet and upgrade them to max, neglecting everything else, creating the most efficient kind of monoculture possible. Not what I think the goal here is. And to a certain extend it's doomed to end this way because people will specify fleets for a purpose and upgrade what they like. But it can be made more interesting. I also don't really like how ships can be so different in mark levels, with some ships or stations upgrading only 3 times, some gaining from multiple techs and experience and going up the mark levels, leaving the rest in the dust. This is what I criticize, now to how I would solve it. And it's a long one, involving nothing less than a scaling, damage, shield/armor/hull etc rework. Brace for impact! First of all, I think tech variety is good but right now things are confusing. Which ship counts to what tech(s)? Why do they cost different amounts of tech points for the same yield? Instead of upgrading ships of a "category" why not start with what has been implemented currently: Ships being separated into Strike Craft, Corvettes, Frigates, Arks, Golems, etc... And each ship weapon having a type (Fusion Bomb, Ballistic, Railgun, etc...). Why not start there. First part of this would be to streamline weapons into categories: Projectile (Ballistic weapons of any kind, Petards, Grenades, etc) Energy (Fusion Bombs, Energy Waves, Beam Cannons, Lasers, Tesla Coils, etc) Artillery (Railguns, Spider Cannons, basically all infinite-range stuff) Warheads (Rockets, Missiles, Torpedoes any kind, etc) Melee (Melee attacks) Possibly more. I haven't made a complete list of this. Then create 3 simple techs for each of these, with rebalancing and including new shield and armor mechanics. This is where the math-y part starts: Damage (increases damage by 0.25 base value) Fire Rate (reduces reload time by 1 / (1 + [tech level * 0.25 base value]) Range (increases range by 0.25 base value) Weapon Effect (manual adjustments required) At mark 5 units would have 2x damage and 0.5x reload time (2x firerate), resulting in a bit more than 4x effective DPS which is nearly in line with current values. The 2x range is an extra add-on for utility. As for the weapon effects, this would be something like weapons slowing enemies, dealing bonus damage based on conditions etc, but also the conditions increase. As to why I'll explain shortly. To counter this defensive Tech is required which I would base on the ship category as mentioned before. Each gets the following Techs: Structure (increases ship hull and armor by 0.3 base value) Shield (increases ship shield (personal and bubble) by 0.3 base value and by (1 - [base value]) * [mark level] * 0.1). For those who don't crunch numbers: This increases albedo by 10% of what is missing to 1.0, so a ship with 0.3 albedo will gain 0.07 per mark level and going up to 0.58 at level 5 while a ship with 0.7 albedo will only gain 0.03 per mark level and going up to 0.82 at level 5. This ensures no ship gets above 1.0, unless we're talking about level 10+ and make "high albedo" not much bigger values but instead put an emphasis on the "remaining albedo to 1.0", if that makes sense. I hope at least some people get what I'm going for here, but I'm probably just bad at explaining) Engine (increases speed and engine rating by 0.25 base value) Now it gets technical: If ships increase in the values like a ship with 20mm armor going up to 50mm, then weapon effects (like "if the target has at most 30mm armor the weapon does 4x damage") will also have to increase their armor requirement to 75mm, otherwise it'd quickly lose its effect entirely. This also means that a sufficiently enough upgraded grenade (from which the weapon effect above was used as an example) could potentially do bonus damage to ships with higher base armor, but at a lower level. Now, the inverted is true too. Pike turrets deal bonus damage to anything with anything at at least 90mm armor, and if they upgrade it goes to 225mm. So if a pike turret has been upgraded enough times it may stop dealing bonus damage to a certain lower-level enemy. This is the only cause of concern I have with this system. In the end, when maximum level on all sides has been archived, all will behave exactly as it did before. But in between it might be the cause of a lot of "oh, my ship is now level 3 and actually WEAKER against certain targets", though to be honest, I suspect that it'll mostly be the opposite as in experience the player is mostly battling higher-level AI units. A lot of testing would be required to make this work, so I can see why convoluted, wonky systems like this are to developers what garlic is to vampires. But in all honesty, I'd say it's very interesting and makes for a good upgrade option, and it would allow the next step to be possible: What good for is a shield that only recharges out of combat? I've always hated this kind of shield in games, from FPS to strategy. Shields should be constantly regenerating. So I suggest (and this is purely experimental) to give shields a passive regeneration based on how high the capacity is, maybe 10% of their total cap. This would mean that shields become a barrier for things with low DPS. In return, what good is armor that doesn't absorb damage? Maybe I've missed it, but in AIWC armor used to reduce shot damage by the armor value, i.e. if a shot deals 100 damage and the target has 40mm armor it'd only deal 60 points of damage. As far as I can tell this is not the case in this game, but again, I might have simply missed it. So I suggest re-introducing this. It would scale well with the current system: At level 1 a shot of 100 damage at 40 mm armor, if the ship has 100 hull points would deal 60 damage, which is 60% of that ship's hull. At level 5 a shot of 200 damage at 100 mm armor, if the ship has 250 hull points would deal 100 damage, which is 40% of that ship's hull. The thing that would offset this is that fire rate increases, so in the same time that level 1 needs to reload level 2 would already have shot out another bullet. In other words: In this example the total damage to the enemy would now be 80% of the target's hull, which is a slight increase in combat velocity as the ship levels increase, just as it is right now. The same is true if we are talking about shields: At level 1 a shot of 50 damage each second to a shield of 100 capacity, regenerating 10 shield would yield a net damage of 40 per second, which is 40%. At level 5 a shot of 100 damage each 0.5 seconds to a shield of 250 capacity, regenerating 25 shield would yield a net damage of 150 per second, which is 60%. With shield there also is a slight increase in combat velocity. This would also mean that as the game continues it becomes more important to fight enemies with a matching opponent. If a shot deals 50 damage and the base armor is 40, then before it might have dealt 10 net damage, but at level 5 it will be 80 damage hitting an armor of 100, dealing no more damage. The same is true for defeating shield regeneration, where shield piercing and high dps ships become more important than before. Also, I think this would for balance require some ships to gain armor-piercing attacks like in AIWC. As to the subject of range: This means that ships at twice the speed can cover twice the distance and get to opponents with twice the range in the same amount of time as before. So even here increased range counterbalances increased engine speed and vice-versa. Back to the subject of Tech: There also should be cloaking and tachyon tech to counterbalance it: Cloaking -> (increases maximum amount of cloaking points by 0.25 base value. Decreases cloaking point loss while firing by 1 / (1 + [tech level * 0.25 base value]) Tachyon -> (increases cloaking point drain and tachyon range by 0.25 base value) Instead of upgrading per ship class here this should be a simple "all ships with cloaking" and "all ships with tachyon" upgrade, increasing the maximum cloaking points and cloaking point regeneration as well as the tachyon range (similar to weapon range counterbalanced by increased speed), while the cloaking point loss per shot is counterbalanced by the increased fire rate. So, again here, things at level 1 behave the same at level 5. Also note that, if a tachyon has an albedo requirement it scales the same way as the albedo of ships. It's essentially like a "weapon effect". As for mass and power cost, as well as what mark level a ship actually is at, this is how I'd solve this issue: The current mark level of a ship is equal to the average of all its "components", so for simplicity: If a ship has all its weapon techs maxed out to level 5 and all its defensive stats are still at level 1 then the average would be 3, thus the ship is currently level 3, consumes the power of a level 3 ship and costs the metal of a level 3 ship. It might be a good idea to make this a "liquid" level instead of a fixed number, whereas a ship can cost the energy and metal of "level 2.3", with it being rounded to "level 2" or maybe "level 2+" for visibility purposes. As for mass, I don't think this needs any increase as levels go up. Thus weapon effects based on mass shouldn't scale one bit either. Kind of feels wrong to increase the mass of something, then increase its thrust (according to physics the acceleration should stay the same) but then doubling the speed as if nothing happened. Oh well, what does that matter in a game with maximum speed for objects far lower than light speed (or at least it seems to be this way. How big is "1 unit of range" anyway? How much damage is "1 unit of damage". How much thrust--- OK, I'll stop). For all those who have stayed until here: O7 I SALUTE YOU O7 That's all I can think of right now. I really hope at least someone ready this to the end. Know that I don't blame anyone who thinks it's too long, though then I question why they ignored the TL;DR warnings... Also, if my math is off anywhere here, then please let me know. In my defense, it's fairly late night here. In my "undefense", I could've just waited until morning. But I don't like reading this many lines I already know the gist of either. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 13, 2019 9:43 pm | NRSirLimbo | New Issue | |
| Jul 13, 2019 9:45 pm | NRSirLimbo | Description Updated | |
| Jul 13, 2019 9:46 pm | NRSirLimbo | Description Updated | |
| Jul 13, 2019 9:46 pm | NRSirLimbo | Note Added: 0052224 | |
| Jul 13, 2019 11:59 pm | Ovalcircle | Description Updated | |
| Jul 13, 2019 11:59 pm | Ovalcircle | Note Added: 0052225 |
