View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0022683 | AI War 2 | Gameplay Idea | Jan 22, 2020 3:31 am | Jan 22, 2020 5:22 pm | |
| Reporter | Flypaste | Assigned To | |||
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 1.304 So You Like Combat Engineers? | ||||
| Summary | 0022683: Essay With My Thoughts on Attrition | ||||
| Description | In the discord I've participated in a few discussions about players taking AI planets by parking fleets on them and waiting until the player ability to produce ships overwhelms the planet's defenses in an extended battle of attrition. The "slapping the AI with wads of cash" problem, as puffin has described it. From my perspective these discussions have typically been circular without reaching much of a conclusion. That's unfortunate but I do believe I have a thorough understanding of the issues and how to tackle them. The thing is though, I'd propose that this is a symptom of greater problems in the game and not a problem itself. We need to identify the cause of the issue and solve that instead. To make sure we're all on the same page and we both totally understand what I'm talking about, I'm going to go over my perspective on the issues surrounding the symptom. So at a basic level there are a few problems with being able to sit there and produce ships until the target planet is overwhelmed. I'll go over them here. - Problem 1: It doesn't require any brainpower from the player (no tactics needed to defeat a stronger fleet) - Problem 2: It doesn't require the player to have a superior force - Problem 3: The player can rebuild as if they had planetary support during deepstrikes - Problem 4: Makes no sense in thematic context The solution to these problems that puffin proposed (and I might add seemed to be extremely close to making it into the game) is to make player ships take longer to build when not on friendly planets. The goal with the change is to force the player to pull back after their fleet after taking losses, preventing a scenario in which the player can throw money at the AI. Technically this solution does solve all four of the proposed problems. By preventing the player from attritioning the AI, it forces the player into only taking fights in which their fleet is stronger or they have more tactical options to secure a victory. Despite this change solving all noted issues, it introduces issues of its own and for that reason I am vehemently against it. I cannot emphasize enough how much I believe this change would be horrifically bad for the game. Maybe the fact that I put aside time and effort to write this whole thing is evidence enough of that. Here's why. - Problem 1. It introduces micromanagement that slows the game's tempo down Currently when playing AIW2 if I want to take a planet I set my fleet to pursuit mode, park it on the planet, and go do something elsewhere in the game while the fight happens and I come and check back later after it's finished. With this change I cannot do that and I have to sit there and constantly micromanage the fleet back and forth through the wormhole so it can keep its strength sufficiently high during the fight. This significantly limits the number of things I can do at once due to basic fights consuming lots of APM, slowing the game down. - Problem 2: It doesn't actually stop me from attritioning an enemy planet, merely making it annoying to do As noted in problem 1, making this change will absolutely not prevent me from taking planets that I "should not" take. All it does it make me have to shift my fleet back and forth through a wormhole every minute. This can absolutely be done in between counterattacks, and in many cases can be done in such a way as to never trigger a counterattack to begin building at all. - Problem 3: It ruins my playstyle (wow three problems again I swear I'm not doing it on purpose) I like to allocate my science into metal generation and engineering techs. I also build command stations that offer the highest number of factories and I prioritize the capture of combat factories extremely highly. What this results in is the vast majority of my fleet strength not being in the mark level of my ships themselves but in my economy and my ability to rapidly reproduce them. The proposed change is effectively a nerf targetted directly at my playstyle. I could stop here at just outlining why I hate this proposed change. But if I did so I think it would end up going into the game anyway, so it's time for the big meat. I mentioned at the start that I believe attritioning is a symptom of greater issues in the game. And boy howdy can I think of a lot. Here's what I believe can be solved to prevent the need for any player nerf. 1. Counterattack implementation is flawed 2. The AI's ability to attrition is weaker than the player's despite owning literally the entire galaxy (???) 3. Combat factories have more buildpower than planets 4. There's no tactics to be employed So if I were made god to snap my fingers and fix attrition in this game in one fell swoop, what I would change is as follows: - Rework counterattacks. The current counterattacks due to having a threshold, it resetting on leaving the planet, and the 2 minute counterattack activation timer, are incredibly easy to play around and juke into being a nonfactor and thus not serving their purpose. My rework for counterattacks is to have the AI create a wormhole on the planet (the same kind used for wormhole invasions) and send units through it to fight the player back. The longer the player is on the planet, the stronger the reinforcements pouring through the wormhole become. For thematic reasons I'd like to see these units belong to the reserve fleet. This solves the issues of counterattacks that don't serve their intended purpose and the AI's seeming refusal to attrition despite that being its main strength all at once. - Rework combat factories. Have combat factory engineers work like GCAs. The goal here is to make the player worse at rebuilding their fleet during deep strikes while having the same total build power available while at home to prevent a loss in tempo. Instead of a horde of engineers following a combat factory around have it allow you to create more engineers at each of your planets. Add a couple repair beams to each combat factory so it can still reapir your fleet. A partner change to go alongside this is to increase base factory build speed, but add diminishing returns for engineers assisting building. This will result in combat factories not having pitiful build power on their own. This also synergizes perfectly with the increased GCA cap of engineers at each world, causing the player to see a huge jump in build capacity upon bringing a combat factory to an allied world as the engineers shift to assist it more efficiently than they would be if they were all stacked onto the planetary factories. Diminishing returns also prevents the increased engineer count on player worlds from affecting balance of defense construction. - Nerf early game fleet production and metal generation, buff the tech upgrades. There was a case of someone attritioning a mk 4 AI world to death using an entirely unupgraded fleet and no economy investment. I think it makes most sense that for a player to be able to do this, he would need to invest into rpoduction upgrades, and for a "production as offensive technology" run to be a viable way to play the game. Thus, I'd like to see the gap between "no production investment" and "fully committing into production" to be larger to emphasize the difference in gameplay style and the higher tempo of playing with production investment. - Tactics are extremely limited. Shortening this thought is difficult, but in a nutshell the player doesn't have any tactical options. There are times where having good micro is important - for example protecting a specific ship with shield frigates - but good micro is not good tactics. I'll only use a simple example since this is getting too long, but a tactic that I would enjoy being able to use is to bring a fleet composition that counters the AI's fleet composition. However, the AI's planets and fleets invariably end up being a grab-bag of random whatevers. Thus, my fleets also need to be a grab bag of random whatever to have assorted counters for the AI's whatever. This leaves no room for intelligent fleet design and countering and everything devolves into pursuit mode fleet balls until someone emerges the victor. This is exacerbated even further by being forced to capture fleet lines (inflexibility) and being forced to commit into technologies (more inflexibility). A possible way to mitigate this is to be able to "exchange" ship lines at an ARS for free to allow the player to switch their fleet composition on the fly without directly increasing their strength, and to make the AI commit more into doing one specific thing to open up the opportunity to whip out counters. I can go into more depth on each of these proposed ideas if you'd like, they're each worthy of an an entire mantis ticket in their own right. I tried to sum it up here as best I could and I have many many more thoughts on each of these topics. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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Good write-up. I'm in favor of reworking counterattacks as well, but not in this way. Having the AI bring in reinforcements based on time on planet punishes players who like to micro with careful maneuvering, and also rewards players for leaving and coming back in resetting the timer, gaming the system. For those reasons I oppose the proposed solution here as not really improving them. I think the combat factory idea is at the very least worth considering. It sounds good to me at first blush. I strongly, disagree with the idea that tactics are currently not worthwhile. They definitely are. I just as strongly disagree with being able to exchange ship types at ARS. Those decisions ought to remain permanent to retain long-term planning strategy as a game unfolds. I do think having AIs focus on certain types of ships more than others would allow for more flexibility in countering them, but I often find tactics useful in attacking enemy planets so in general I don't think that's the issue (though it can always be made better). I almost never use pursuit on enemy planets except for melee ships, and wouldn't even use it then if a target seek range feature is eventually returned. . I do not at all agree that planetary assaults currently inevitably devolve into that. This is a good and important discussion - I earnestly hope others will find it worth contributing to. |
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Change the reinforcements to be based on defenses killed instead, that would fix the issue with players that want to treat it as a puzzle. Additionally the timer would not be instantly reset on leaving, it would slowly degrade over time. As I said these thoughts are barebones and each one needs its own mantis writeup. |
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I think a lot of this is pretty reasonable. In general my thoughts on the four items noted: 1. The counterattack implementation could definitely use some work. That said, I'm not sure if your proposed solution is really the best. Counterattacks are meant to prevent you from being able to attrition large planets to death, and that's their only function. But if the ships are coming out instantly and fighting you, then that actually gives an invisible-on-the-map strength buff to EVERY planet of the AI, and is going to be a problem. If you have low-mark ships but are clever and fast enough, being able to take down a high-value target is great. Counterattacks are clearly not doing their job at the moment, but I don't feel confident of your first solution either. I think it's going to take a lot of brainstorming and a lot of people weighing in, if I had to guess. 2. Combat factories having fewer engineers is fine I guess, but here again I worry that basically we're going to cause more problems. I see your point with this, and I agree with the notions on why Puffin's approach also was nonviable (too much micro, etc), but with combat factories reduced we then have a case where you may be super rich in metal but unable to actually get the ships out the door without returning to your home base. So it's the same problem as Puffin's. I've had similar ideas to both of yours in that the end result was the same, even though the mechanics of my ideas were different from both of yours. I think it's fair to say that if you have the metal, you should be able to spend it on the front lines more or less as easily as elsewhere, otherwise we're introducing micro. But the ability for your factories to become a giant "ship gun that fires ships" is problematic and always has been. 3. The tech upgrades getting a buff causes various problems, most notably that mark 1 units become useless and also that investing in single techs becomes all but required. We nerfed the increases of ship power per mark level for this very reason, and I think that's relevant. In AIWC, it was also possible to kill a mark 4 planet early on (that was the equivalent of mark 6 here) if it was near you at the start and you rushed them really fast. That was the game's equivalent of a zerg rush, and it's okay, and it didn't work anymore in general after the AI had time to build up a bit more (clock time plus AIP gains). That feeling of satisfaction of choosing to wear down a mk4 planet early and lose some of the tempo was really fun and I think is really valid in AIWC and there. So I don't see a huge problem here, from this particular example anyway. 3.a. Nerfing the early game economy to require holding more than one planet is certainly something that might be a good idea, nonetheless. Choosing to attrition a planet over time without capturing any other planets first is something that probably should mean metal shortages, and I doubt it currently does. I think we would need to be making rather cautious changes in this area, but I could see heading in that direction being a good idea. 4. There are some tactics required, but only so much. A deep tactics game is anathema to a 4X environment, and that's just the way it is. If you can win by microing around your units and doing huge amounts of tactical input, then you can't focus on the big picture. Not only that, but at the highest levels of play, if you CAN do that sort of thing, then you HAVE to do that sort of thing, and this becomes a very different game. This is a game primarily about positioning and long-term decision making and paying attention to multiple things at once. I also enjoy tactics, but I recognize that one will subsume the other in any given game, and no single game can be all things. There are a lot of genre mixes where these sorts of tradeoffs are needed: Breath of the Wild, Dragon Quest Builders 2, and many others come to mind as examples of trading some sort of freedom or feeling for a different form of freedom and feel. |
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Rather than making combat factories slower when they're away from the homeworld, why not make them much less metal efficient? That way, if you try to use them as ship guns that fire ships, you'll run out of metal unless you've invested in a huge economy for that specific purpose. Alternatively: currently, fleets can rebuild when within one hop of any factory. What if that was "within one hop of a planetary factory, or on the same planet as a mobile factory"? That would at least force you to expose your combat factories to danger. The AI could even use tactics that specifically target combat factories. I agree it's a bit silly that the player can out-attrition the AI so easily. If you want to be able to attrition down planets, you should at least be investing science and hacking into doing so. |
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OOH! I really like the idea about combat factories having to be on the same planet, not just adjacent ones. Making them be exposed seems very fitting. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 22, 2020 3:31 am | Flypaste | New Issue | |
| Jan 22, 2020 3:32 am | Flypaste | Description Updated | |
| Jan 22, 2020 3:38 am | Flypaste | Description Updated | |
| Jan 22, 2020 3:41 am | Flypaste | Description Updated | |
| Jan 22, 2020 3:49 am | Strategic Sage | Note Added: 0055706 | |
| Jan 22, 2020 4:01 am | Flypaste | Note Added: 0055707 | |
| Jan 22, 2020 11:45 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0055711 | |
| Jan 22, 2020 5:09 pm | Fluffiest | Note Added: 0055713 | |
| Jan 22, 2020 5:22 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0055714 |
