View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0002183 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - Balance Tweaks | Dec 27, 2010 6:44 pm | Jan 3, 2011 11:44 am | |
| Reporter | Zeyurn | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | no change required | ||
| Product Version | 4.057 | ||||
| Summary | 0002183: AI Wave Behavior in Multiplayer | ||||
| Description | This might be applicable to multiple homeworld starts too but I don't really play those so my comments here are from almost exclusively playing 3 person multiplayer. When the AIs attack at 8 difficulty, even at the beginning or at a relatively low (for a multiplayer) AIP of 100ish-150ish, they are sending 3 waves each of 0000605:0001000 ships at the players. This means if they both decide to attack at the same time, you're looking at around 6000 ships, and very often 3000+ of one of the triangle types. Obviously this can be even more for a particularly aggressive AI. While the combined ship cap of the players doesn't exactly make these waves insurmountable, in function they are excessively grindy and boil down to the optimal strategy for dealing with all waves to having a lot of Mk 3. lightning turrets and flak turrets near high level tractor turrets and having a small mobile fleet and associated smaller turrets to take out high value targets or to catch any escapers from the AoE death net. Given that a lot of AI Wars has moved away from humongous ship battles, I feel like multiplayer is still kind of mired in that mess. I don't know that I have a perfect solution to the matter by any means, but I'd suggest that in multiplayer (or again multiple homeworld maybe) that the AI wave ships perhaps power up in some way (more health and some more damage?) instead of increasing in number, in order to make single target ships and turrets have a stronger purpose. It doesn't necessarily need to do this for every ship (although that's probably harder to deal with codewise) or every wave, and I don't think converting to starships is necessarily the right answer (although it certainly is a potential). I just think multiplayer so far feels a little too much like the unwashed masses of Mk 1 ships flooding through the gates when we play defense. I'm enjoying the offensive balance for the most part. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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Hrm, it didn't like my attempt to describe the number of ships. It was supposed to say about 1000 (a thousand) ships per wave per AI. |
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Be careful of using the tilde (~) sign in this bug tracker. The tilde sign is used as a short hand to link to comments (I think). Similarly, the pound sign (#) is used as a short hand to link to bug reports. |
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Oh, and about the actual issue. Total ships available to all players scales sub-linearly. For example, 2 home-worlds (via 2 players or 1 player with 2 homes) leads to less than 2 times the total number of ships all players can build (I don't have the exact multiplier on me at the moment, but I know it is less than 2). The problem is, the AI does scale linearly (as far as I can tell) with the number of home-worlds. With only 2 players, this is barely noticeable. With 3, it can start being a challenge. With more, then the players are at a real disadvantage. As Zeyurn mentioned, this is not an easy issue to fix. Dynamic difficulty is always tricky. |
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I actually like the larger battles in MP, but it does sound like you're getting too many ships too quickly in your games. It's generally useful, for any wave-based complaints, to turn on "advanced logging" in your options and attach the resulting files to the discussion. This will generate logs of how the AI is generating waves of the size and composition it is, so if there's a bug it can be tracked down, and if something needs balance tweaking it's easier to identify. |
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Also since I forgot to mention it.. I know missile frigates are immune to lightning and flak, but they're so bad at killing turrets you can just use the freebie tier 1 turrets or use the bombers most everyone is going to have to take them out once everything else is dead. Or you can use Beam Cannons in the mix of AoE turrets (which is easier in multiplayer because somebody else can research those while another person does lightning and flak) |
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I'll try that out next time we play, Vinraith. I don't usually get the opportunity to play more than once or twice a week with this setup due to the need to coordinate extra people. |
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Can someone with the actual multipliers chart the relative ship-cap advantage the AI has? More formally put, if m(h) is the TOTAL PLAYER ship cap multiplier with h homeworlds, and assuming the AI gets harder strictly linearly with more players, then we need a chart of m/m(h) against m. If it gets above 1 way too fast, it needs tweaking. (Ideally, it should be right about 1) |
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I do want to say that I don't actually think the difficulty itself is out of line. I mean, difficulty 8 should be rough. It was, it killed us a couple times until we adjusted and that was good, because difficulty 10 wasn't killing us before. This isn't in the slightest a suggestion to make the game easier, I don't want that. I just think that fundamentally sending waves that vastly outnumber the players makes area effect stuff a necessity and greatly reduces the variety of strategy you can use. It doesn't matter if missile turrets have a 2.4 bonus versus polycrystal (may be wrong, this is just off the top of my head) when an electric turret has armor piercing and will hit all 3000 incoming ships at once. The math is pretty clear that once you get past a certain amount of incoming units, the DPS on area turrets is always going to be superior. And nerfing the area turrets would kind of miss the point of having area turrets, so I think the solution is to not always make the waves gargantuan in some way. To add a small note to the above: I'm playing against a Sledge Hammer and a Neinzul Viral Enthusiast. The Sledge Hammer is probably providing some kind of wave bonus but I have no idea about the Enthusiast. |
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Neinzul Enthusiast I think gets a 2x multiplier, but in return they use the quite weak Neinzul ships, so it balances out. EDIT: Nevermind, I was thinking of the Youngling Enthusiast. Yea I have no idea either. |
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The core complaint here isn't a bug, it's by design. Note that my standard mode of play is actually 4-player co-op, so this hasn't gone unnoticed. You get 2x waves times the number of players, and that's totally by design. If you're seeing waves that large, it's simply the AI types in question at the time, and/or simply that the AI is striking you both at once, as you note. In a 3-person game, if you're seeing 6000 ships from both AIs attacking at once, that's like seeing 2000 ships attacking from both AIs at once in solo. That's a bit on the high side, but again, there's definitely no bug there related to multiplayer. |
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Well, right, that's why I marked this as a suggestion for improvement, not a bug. I don't think it's a bug, it looks exactly in line with the charts you have on the wiki. I just think it produces battles that are just blobs of thousands of ships every time, which makes anything other than utilizing area effect stuff extremely sloggy. |
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I think there's a modifier for half wave sizes. You could also give everyone lower than zero handicaps, or play with lower ship cap scales. So you should he able to get the effect you want. The main design is working as desired, though. When you have many players, there gas to be a corresponding increase in wave size to have those "oh crap" moments. Otherwise the ai is not much of an offensive threat, and it's just players roaming around the galaxy doing whatever hey please. Hope that makes sense. |
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It does! I think you're misunderstanding what I want though, although maybe an AI like Starfleet Commander would do it for me. I'll have to give it a try sometime and see. Basically I'm suggesting in multiplayer games that instead of the waves only getting larger they also get tougher so you're not fighting thousands of enemies. Maybe mix in more starships, a few higher mark ships, or just plain make some special wave only ships for the AI that are a bit rougher than the standard fare and convert some of the added wave size to those. Basically same firepower, but a little more compact than usual. Maybe a new AI type that does something like that if you want to give people choices? I don't know. I don't want wussier waves or an easier game, just a reason to do something besides 'place many lightning turrets' on defense. EDIT: Edited wording a bit to be a little clearer. |
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I see what Zeyurn is saying. Do something like decreasing the multiplier per player for fleet ships in waves, but in return increase the multipler per player for star-ships (and support ships for the support corps, and the spire ships for the spire hammer) too keep things difficult. In other words, keeping roughly the same firepower per wave with less units. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 27, 2010 6:44 pm | Zeyurn | New Issue | |
| Dec 27, 2010 6:45 pm | Zeyurn | Note Added: 0007099 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 6:47 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0007100 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 6:47 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0007100 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 6:51 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0007102 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 6:51 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0007102 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 6:53 pm | Vinraith | Note Added: 0007103 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 6:53 pm | Zeyurn | Note Added: 0007104 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 6:56 pm | Zeyurn | Note Added: 0007105 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 6:59 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0007108 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 7:01 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0007108 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 7:07 pm | Zeyurn | Note Added: 0007109 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 7:10 pm | Zeyurn | Note Edited: 0007109 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 7:15 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0007110 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 7:16 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0007110 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 8:52 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0007118 | |
| Dec 27, 2010 8:52 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => resolved |
| Dec 27, 2010 8:52 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => no change required |
| Dec 27, 2010 8:52 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Dec 27, 2010 11:57 pm | Zeyurn | Note Added: 0007141 | |
| Dec 28, 2010 12:04 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0007143 | |
| Dec 28, 2010 12:51 am | Zeyurn | Note Added: 0007148 | |
| Dec 28, 2010 1:16 am | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0007149 | |
| Dec 28, 2010 1:31 am | Zeyurn | Note Edited: 0007148 | |
| Jan 3, 2011 11:44 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | resolved => closed |
