View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0023096 | AI War 2 | Suggestion | Apr 4, 2020 1:29 pm | Apr 10, 2020 9:05 pm | |
| Reporter | GreatYng | Assigned To | |||
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 2.016 Thunderchild | ||||
| Summary | 0023096: Improve Flenser performance (against Imperial Spire) | ||||
| Description | I have a save ('Het einde is dichterbij') where if the Flenser goes to the adjacent AI planet (seems to be a 50/50 chance on load) it tries to fight the 18k strength Imperial Spire. It fails miserably; on a good run it may destroy as many as 5-ish dreadnoughts before it is ganked into oblivion when the Spire converge on it (and half of the ships present usually just keep moving to another planet). I will admit the Flenser performs a lot better if it goes to the other planet (mine) which has a few Spire defences added to the standard ones and no Imperial Spire ships, in that case it will succesfully destroy the command station (if it doesn't retreat) and only lose almost all of its shields. For the top-tier exo-galactic war unit I expect a better performance against the Imperial Spire fleet, and I also think the Spire Dreadnaughts strength is significantly understated by its estimate. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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This is potentially a thorny and debatable question, but the Flenser and other exogalactics aren't designed to counter the Imperial Spire. Getting the Imperial Spire is the win condition, and once they arrive the idea is it's basically over for the AI. The function of exogalactics is counter things like the player's Spire buildup prior to the Transceiver Exo, and that's where the balancing question lies. |
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My own thoughts: So, I poked at that save. Unfortunately I wasn't able to watch it attack your planet since for me it always went and got squashed by the imperials (10 load attempts or so.) However, more or less agree with what GreatYng is saying here: The Flenser is just not achieving the results that it's strength rating and mythos suggest it should. A 14k doomship vs 17k of imperials, half of whom aren't even fighting it, should be a fight that causes severe losses to the victor, wheras what I was seeing is the Flenser being lucky to get more than one kill. Then elsewhere, if the Flenser is loosing 1/3rd of it's total hitpoints to kill a planet with 0000001:0000001.3k strength of defenders, even if, as I assume, a few imperials are stopping by, that's not right either, since it suggests that (I also don't think it's a real problem if the Flenser can fight it's own strength in imperials and win, the real strength of imperials is that they always have more, anyway. 14k strength is what, a minute or three's production for them?) But I think we have two issues here: Issue 1: The Flenser is not strong enough. 14k strength is an enormous amount, especially if it had a support fleet, but I don't think it really deserves it's strength rating, which leads me to the second issue, and it's something that I've been thinking for a while before this. Yng mentions that the Dreadnaught's strength is understated, and I don't think it's just them: 2. I'm not convinced the strength formula works well for some of the new units introduced in The Spire Rises. I suspect the strength formula is flawed, and I think the reason it hasn't been an issue before is that most ships had a fairly similar DPS/health ratio, and the new Spire ships don't share it - they are enormously heavier on attack power. Meanwhile, the larger exogalactic units in particular (T4 and 5) are noticeably heavier on health than most older units. My thought is that the current formula is overvaluing health somewhat. My favourite example when thinking about it to myself is this: Why does a Mk1 spire city hub have 20 strength? It has no weapons, so a 0.04 strength fighter craft will beat it eventually. Something that has no ability to either defend itself or help other things defend themselves, for example by providing gravity, attack boosts, bubble forcefields, should not have any strength at all. ...What is the current formula, anyway? |
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The current formula is a secret impenetrable to us mere mortals, but there's no question that it's flawed. Part of that is that any strength formula will inherently be flawed, because there's no way for one number to measure the various interactions that can happen. You can see the issue even when upgrading ships to another mark level - they often will have a 25-50% strength boost when in fact they are clearly 75-100% better at the upgraded version. |
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It's also worth noting that in testing and afterwards, with the same version of the Flenser that we have now, it had no problem soloing a maxed-out Spire city with supporting fleets. So I think there's a disconnect somewhere in here. |
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Oh, I completely understand that the strength formula will only ever be an approximation, especially when more complex interactions like aoe weapons and hull bonuses are involved, and I think it was fine for the ships we had before. But since AFAIK the AI does use strength as part of it's decision-making, and players would certainly expect to be able to, it does need to be at least vaguely right. (I had a little play with the flenser's stats for fun. One thing that really stood out to me was an early attempt: I halved the health and hexrupled the weapons. That had slightly less strength than the vanilla one. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that this seems a fairly clear indication of a bias to me, since we all know which of those two Flensers is going to win in a fight.) |
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Formula: "The formula, per mark level, is simply: ( (hull health at that mark level)/12 + (shield health at that mark level)/20 + SUM( DPS of each weapon at that mark level) ) / 20. Minimum 1." The Flenser was originally designed to wipe out a 13 City Spire Fleet, with maximum Neural Nets. If you're a bit above that, you'll defeat it. This was done with only the Flenser. I imagine if someone came up with a Flenser more to their liking, it may be implemented by someone who still has source access, which I no longer do. I imagine someone may be able to step in and pick up where I've left off, probably with a better grasp of how things really are. |
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Ah, so it's purely additive. That does make sense of the behaviours we're seeing, I guess. |
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Maybe for special cases like the extragalactic war units and high-level Spire stuff, the threat values should be hardcoded rather than calculated with the formula. I'm guessing either the Flenser is underperforming for its stated Strength value or the Imperial Spire are overperforming. Questions here: * Is the Flenser kicking enough ass when put up against high-tier Spire City stuff? * Does the Flenser's strength value adequately reflect how much ass it kicks? * Do player-available Spire units have Strength values that adequately reflect how much ass they kick? If you're asking "should the Flenser do better against the Imperial Spire?", the answer is no. If you have the Imperial Spire fleet then you should just win. |
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I think if the Flenser is designed to kill a 13 city spire fleet and it can, then by definition it's fine. At that point my line of thought becomes that the AI is perhaps a little too reluctant to field them when a player has far more power than that, rather than sending thousands of MkVII guardians and other chaff that start to affect the simspeed. For the other two, I think I've already gone on enough. |
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I can confirm that the flenser, planet cracker, and to a lesser extent, mothership, are very very weak. Flenser is dominated by a player who simply spreads his fleet out so that the "doom ray" doesn't hit all of it. In this scenario, a decently small spire fleet can easily destroy a flenser. My suggestion is that the weapons on these ships are changed so that the beams (which the AI cannot possibly use effectively at high damage levels) are weakened, and additional "point defense" or shot-based weapons are introduced. Additionally, the current strength of these ships is way too low... they should be the "mega" ships of the AI, which means they need a "true strength" of at least 1k or higher, and with the flenser possibly going up to 8k or more (it's supposed to be the pinnacle of the AI's ships.. an AI that "rolled over the spire like a minor speed bump"). If flensers are being destroyed by a few spire battleships and dreads (as they are right now), it just makes no sense how the spire ever lost anything against the AI. |
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I agree that balancing the Flenser around the Imperial Spire was a terrible suggestion. I do still feel like it lacks the punch that its strength rating (or the flavour text) suggests given that in the example I provided the fleets should be fairly evenly matched; on the other hand if it can kill a 13 city Spire fleet, then making it stronger does go into overkill territory; I assumed that was the purpose of the thing, but this is a good feat to draw the line. I remember (no save sadly) fighting a Planet-Cracker with two Level 6 (maybe level 7) Spire fleets and no Neural nets, and it did manage to destroy a lot of the Spire fleets but the dreadnoughts kicked its ass. I had another 5 Spire fleets (marks 3 to 6, I believe) I could drag in to help if necessary. That save I provided was my second Spire victory where I decided to conquer the galaxy before building the transceiver, before that I only had the minimum amount cities required to get the Galactic Capitol to mark 7. I don't think I even saw a Mothership/Planet-cracker then, and if I did it was so trivial to deal with I don't even remember. I actually wouldn't really mind if these units are left as they are, but then it would be nice to see more Motherships/Planet-Crackers as AI reinforcements instead of a stack of 500 forcefield guardians or something (that was just tedious). On sightly related note, why is the point-defence on the Planet-cracker infinite in range, but not for the Mothership? |
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I'm in favor of both ideas given the amount of feedback that has come in; beefing up all of the Tier 4 & 5 options somewhat but then also having them come more often. I think part of the latter issue is that there's a separate budget for the Spire exo stuff and the extragalactic war spawning; so maybe increase the mix of extragalactics in the high-level exos in addition to the ones that just spawn on their own periodically? |
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I wonder if the issue with the low number of high tier ones in the exos compared to player strength is that while the player might be funnelling them through a small number of chokepoints, at higher numbers of cities they are actually a lot of separate attack forces for different targets? Maybe the AI should alternate between the current behaviour, and sending one (or maybe two) attack forces that are a much larger wrecking ball, having a much larger budget for each target, and thus able to afford high tier extragalactics at a more reasonable time, rather than the huge guardian stacks? I would be in favour of a slight buff to the mothership, as well, currently a single Mk VII spirefleet can beat it and a few escorts if you have a mil command there. |
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Yea the excessive super guardian stacks need to end... I can't even see how many guardians are coming in due to how high they are being stacked. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 4, 2020 1:29 pm | GreatYng | New Issue | |
| Apr 4, 2020 1:29 pm | GreatYng | File Added: Het einde is dichterbij.save | |
| Apr 4, 2020 3:44 pm | Strategic Sage | Note Added: 0056681 | |
| Apr 4, 2020 5:38 pm | Lord Of Nothing | Note Added: 0056682 | |
| Apr 4, 2020 6:04 pm | Strategic Sage | Note Added: 0056683 | |
| Apr 4, 2020 6:06 pm | Strategic Sage | Note Added: 0056684 | |
| Apr 4, 2020 7:10 pm | Lord Of Nothing | Note Added: 0056685 | |
| Apr 4, 2020 7:44 pm | RocketAssistedPuffin | Note Added: 0056686 | |
| Apr 4, 2020 7:46 pm | Lord Of Nothing | Note Added: 0056687 | |
| Apr 5, 2020 12:53 pm | Fluffiest | Note Added: 0056690 | |
| Apr 5, 2020 4:51 pm | Lord Of Nothing | Note Added: 0056691 | |
| Apr 5, 2020 8:14 pm | swizzlewizzle | Note Added: 0056693 | |
| Apr 7, 2020 4:56 pm | GreatYng | Note Added: 0056738 | |
| Apr 7, 2020 6:08 pm | Strategic Sage | Note Added: 0056740 | |
| Apr 8, 2020 3:47 am | Lord Of Nothing | Note Added: 0056748 | |
| Apr 10, 2020 9:05 pm | swizzlewizzle | Note Added: 0056782 |
