View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0023840 | AI War 2 | Suggestion | Sep 30, 2020 1:16 pm | Oct 30, 2020 8:07 pm | |
| Reporter | Ymir | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | feedback | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 2.603 Nanocaust And Civvies Strike Back | ||||
| Summary | 0023840: Zenith Devourer is pointless. | ||||
| Description | Let me preface this by saying that I wasn't sure if I should post this here, or to the Steam Forum. If this kind of thing isn't meant to be posted here, please tell me so. The description makes this faction sound like this terrible thing crawling through space, wiping out anything it comes across. In reality, it's a pitiful joke. It poses absolutely no threat to the player. It's super slow, has pitiful range and doesn't have any behavior other than flying a straight line from portal to portal. Should you ever come into contact with it, all you have to do is move your fleet a bit and that's it. Later in the game, it's easily destroyed to basically teleport it to some random re-spawn planet, but why even bother? "absorbing all mobile military forces it finds" "can sometimes create massive shifts in a fight" Yeah, no. None of this is even remotely accurate. Here is what I'd do. Minimal effort solution to actually make it interesting. Give it infinite range and make it way more durable, if not indestructible. Possibly boost it's offensive capabilities. No idea how it's targeting works, but this would have to be in some way that doesn't favor any faction on the planet. That's it. Now you'll have to keep an eye out for it and should you fail to do so, it'll actually impact any battle it enters. You can still easily avoid it, but you have to take it's location into account. I don't know how this would impact general balance, especially since the AI usually controls the majority of planets and would be affected by this disproportionately. I just feel like somethings needs to be done to this faction to give it a reason to exist. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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This is... a good point! (And yes, you're in the right place to post it.) I think that this was one of the earlier factions that we added, and the rest of the game got rebalanced around without this changing much. Also, I think that this thing is pretty limited in terms of not being allowed to eat certain types of units, I can't recall. The devourer golem is going to always be kind of either hilariously overpowered or a non-factor, OR it's going to be incredibly variable. A lot of that has to do with route selection. Based on that, to some extent we concluded that the devourer golem is not all that interesting as a concept in general. So Badger developed the Macrophage as a way of having the devourer, but distributed, and way more interesting. And people mostly moved on to playing with those, so the devourer itself lost most of the people who would have played with it, With all that history out of the way: I don't think that the devourer golem is something that can be balanced in a way that gives a "real game." I think that it will always be the sort of thing that makes the game hilariously different and unbalanced if it is clean-sweeping parts of the galaxy at random. And that's what it advertises on the tin, so I think that's what it should do. It should be almost impossible to kill, it should have a larger range, it should absolutely wreck anything it gets even close to, and it should just be a general agent of chaos. I can make those balance changes fairly easily, and I have a coupe of new mechanics in mind that might augment it well as well as feeding into DLC2 features later. But I'm going to leave this in feedback state for a bit to see if anyone objects before I make a massive swing like that. Right now I agree with your sentiment that the devourer is such a non-entity as to be pointless, but maybe it's "just the right amount of chaos" for someone else, I don't know. Maybe I need to put in some options that let you choose from a couple of different devourer experiences, at the faction level, and the current stats are the lowest tier or something like that. That might be easiest. |
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I would suggest having the impact of the Devourer be decided at the lobby level. Keep the Devourer as is by default and having a more impactful version that can be opted into |
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I'd like to make it something that at the faction level you can choose what the level is. I guess the faction description would have to be rewritten for all the cases, and the impact of the faction would have to become variable. I would not see this as being a simple intensity dropdown, but maybe something like a dropdown with three different descriptive options that determine which type of devourer spawns. Keeping it as-is for existing savegames is a must, but the question of what happens for the quickstart defaults and for the faction default is an interesting one. Should the apocalyptic version be the default thing people run into, or should devourer continue to be a minor nuisance for most people? |
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The only thing it's not allowed to eat are buildings, so it doesn't path by a Command Station and destroy it. Otherwise the 900,000 DPS is free to do whatever. Classic one would chase units for a while: behavior="Stationary" Is set on it here. Might be able to remove that, and make it not update its next destination for a while after arriving somewhere. |
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I was thinking of leaving the current one as it is for the "cute" version of the devourer golem. It needs a better name. For the midlevel one, which I guess is World-Wrecking, but I don't know the best name, I'd make these changes: 1. Allowed to shoot buildings. But not kings. 2. Double the range it has right now, but same behavior. 3. New "all damage done to me is reduced by 50%" mechanic, making it harder to kill. For the Apocalyptic version of the devourer golem, I was thinking of the following: 1. Also can shoot buildings. But not kings. 2. Triple the range, or maybe sniper range. 3. New "all damage done to me is reduced by 90%" mechanic, making it almost impossible to kill. 4. Even more DPS, maybe to the point it insta-kills most things? 5. Maybe give it the ability to destroy any metal generation spots that it passes within a certain smaller range of. Overall I like that it's always on the move. |
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I agree that the range, damage, and health should be buffed. Although, infinite range would be rather annoying. I think that it should just roam around a planet a bit more instead of only ever going in straight lines between wormholes. Personally, I wouldn't ever enable the "minor nuisance" variant. The reason to turn on the devourer is to make a big nasty roaming enemy that will make huge shifts in fights. As it currently is, it fails at that. And if you were to buff it, but leave the new power behind a setting, then it would still, by default, be nothing like it is meant to be. I feel that instead of having a toggle between "big nasty threat" and "minor nuisance," we should just make the current minor nuisance into a nasty threat. Why would anybody want to specifically enable a minor nuisance faction, when the faction is supposed to be one single ship that devours everything around it? Also, if it dies, its weird to have it respawn. Might as well make it neigh-indestructible, and if somehow you manage to kill it, then congrats. |
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Honestly if you want a more threatening Devourer Golem... give it a small set of supporting drones that it maintains. And then bump its durability up a bit A small group of Harvester tractor drones that drag units to the Devourer for "processing". A couple Basilisk paralysis drones that suppress larger targets and/or turrets so the Devourer can deal with them or bypass them. A singular heavy duty Oculus beam drone that emits tachyon and carries a heavy beam weapon that gets a bonus against very large ships. |
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I like CRC's drone idea. Although instead of a bit more durability, I'd say a lot, and a larger vampirism ratio on it's damage. I'd also prefer roaming to infinite range. Possibly it could have some interaction with Spire Debris - chowing down on some would certainly be in character, after all. If the devourer is getting buffed however, it would probably be a good idea to do something about it's current interaction with the hunter, warden and praetorian fleets. Right now, they treat it as any other ship - which is fine when it's stronger than them, since they flee it, but when they are stronger than it, (which is easy in higher difficulties right now even in normal play, and will remain easy for all but the apocalyptic one when Fallen Spire is being played.) they have no idea what to do - they move to engage it, but then they aren't allowed to actually fire at it, so it just slowly grazes on an all you can eat buffet of AI ships. If you can trap it behind an AI homeworld (Since it's not currently allowed to enter an AI homeworld), it can slowly eat all the AI praetorian dragons. Also: Ravenous Golem for the little one, the middle one keeps it's current name, Mundivore Golem for the big version? |
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So, I DO have a use case for the baby devourer golem. I sometimes attempt to win a very ally heavy AIW2 game, despite allies generally (notwithstanding the changes since the patch after in-combat shield regens for all, which was later changed) contributing more to the AI's side of the war than your own (curse you Exogalatic War!!) I don't know why I find joy in losing like that, but hey. The important thing is that I started adding the DEVOURER GOLEM in the role of Galactic Hoover specifically to clean up the several hundred to multiple thousands of threat created by the combined actions of the Scourge, Marauders, and Civ Industries(I know, I know) plus myself. I would like to continue to have a galactic hoover I can ally myself to without it doing permanent damage to the AI, and I do concur that right now it's less of a hoover and more of a galactic duster. I think that's about all I have to say on it, but if I'm kind of outside scope for the new devourer, I won't shed many tears. |
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Personally, I would really prefer to keep the devourer golem to just a single unit, since that has been "kind of its thing," if you know what I mean. This thing is basically Unicron, and while sure Unicron did create Galvatron at one point, that didn't go so well. ;) I suppose having it roam around planets more would make sense, but one of the original design ideas behind having it go straight through wormholes and only having but so much range is that you could hide in the "lee" of places where there are not wormhole intersections. A planet with many wormholes all to one side, or few wormholes in general, is a safer planet, since there is less area for the devourer to come and get you as it goes on its way. I think that there's something really threatening about it never stopping to chase you but just inexorably moving around the galaxy still wrecking stuff, too. The infinite range idea would be something for basically a shifted concept of devourer, where it's just supposed to devastate entire planets as it passes, and the point of that would be that death is inevitable and sometimes you just need to be somewhere else. It kind of reminds me of the scorched earth option in the first AI War. I don't know if anyone actually wants a mode like this here, but this is something that I was thinking would be a singularly scary thing that people know at least exists, where it's just scouring planets pretty much bare as it moves around. I definitely am a fan of you folks who play with lots of allies and make the war get really huge and interesting, and allied minor devourer makes a lot of sense to me. So I'll definitely make sure that there is a version that remains what the current version is. I guess for the beefier versions... this gets a bit hard. Ideally a couple of things remain true: 1. In an ideal world, for me at least, it is one unit and doesn't have drones. Drones aren't hard, but lots of things have drones. It feels less special. 2. Also in an ideal world, I think that this thing should have the feeling of being just this slow-moving monstrosity that you can get out of the way of, but otherwise can't avoid. That's why I like that it doesn't chase you inside a planet. But I dunno, is there a way for it to stop and set up camp for a while at a planet and spew out scary drones and do whatever? Sure, I guess. On the higher difficulty ones, should it maybe take a tour of every major metal deposit and command station? Maybe sure, again. I think that would slow it down a lot on the galactic level, in terms of how long it takes to get anywhere. And the concept of any lee goes away. One of the things I want to avoid is this becoming the macrophage again. They exist because the basic concept of the devourer is too simple and only but so interesting. I am okay with that, and would like to make the most interesting version possible of that very simple concept. It should do what it says on the tin, and have a few options for folks who want the higher intensity of it, but overall the idea of a singular planetoid stalking around the galaxy impassively murdering things it comes across... appeals to me in a thematic sense, if not a gameplay one. Macrophage is where the better gameplay is at, so in terms of the doom scenarios here, how do we make that satisfy the dread and powerlessness that some folks apparently want out of this thing? ;) |
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Perhaps if it only leaves the direct wormhole route on it's destination planet? Combining that with a message "The Devourer Golem is moving to feed on DESTINATION" while you have Devourer LOS gives some notice that you should be getting elsewhere in a hurry, or moving to exploit the carnage it makes of the AI once it's moved on, as well as rewarding use of logistics (But could make the game option that keeps adjacent planets scouted feel more mandatory, I guess, which is less good :/ ). That way it keeps a decent part of it's ability to move across the galaxy, and still treats you as insignificant in most meetings. I personally would not mind it being faster generally, but it could also accelerate when it reaches it's target planet. So it moves to a target like now, grabbing food on the run if someone offers it, but not going after it, so you're fine if you stay away from the wormhole routes - but when it gets to the buffet planet, all bets are off, it enters it's feeding frenzy and makes a MESS. Run from the planet or die (Unless you're a king. Or a Flenser. Or a humongous Spirefleet/Pile of Exo War Ships/Secret DLC 2 stuff that could fight a Flenser on an even footing.) I personally probably wouldn't play any setting that permanently removed resources (Except once if it was an achievement. :) ), so I don't think I have any feedback there. |
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Buffing the golem with various settings sounds awesome. It feels so pathetic right now, especially as the game progresses. I wish it had some ways to eat big ships like exowar ships and spirefleet. They basically pretend it doesn't exist. Id be for having an inf range option, totally wrecking whatever planet it passes through sounds amazing. Something worth noticing as it plows through the galaxy. |
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Yeah, I agree it does feel like quite a pushover as it is and doesn't really match the description of its power, but it does sound difficult to balance as a stronger version of it would likely hurt the Ai more than it would you which would in effect make it an ally to the player on all setting minus being allied with the Ai, so something would need to be changed in its behaviour to make a be a little biased toward target planets own by the player. |
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It should also avoid killing things like GCAs, zenith power generators, and such things that can cause AIP on death as it would make it impossible to defend them when the cookiemonster is set to a high setting. |
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This is a fun redesign to brainstorm about. I think it would be interesting if (except on the easier setting) the Devourer actually grew in size, speed and overall power as it feeds, even to the point of gaining special abilities like teleporting around. Nice impending doom theme - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrQ-zQuGFLI&feature=youtu.be&t=152 This way you could actually manipulate it to your advantage by triggering the Dark Spire or Dyson Sphere in its vicinity to give it more food. Aesthetically, I was always a bit disappointed to see it shoot things. It doesn't look like it's devouring them. Is it possible to give it tractor beams or a gravity field that actually sucks in units in a certain radius? And make it deal infinite damage on contact so instead of going "pew pew pew", it just leaves a big empty trail of void if it runs straight into a big bunch of ships. Another interesting mechanic would have to have it compete with the player for certain capturables. It would makes sense that it's fond of delicious abandoned fleets. The player would get a notification that the Devourer is heading to planet X to eat the capturable fleet there. This puts time pressure on the player, a bit like Instigators do - and since you're stuck on the planet while hacking, it's likely to create tense moments when you're trying to finish the hack as the monstrosity approaches. We also know that it devours stuff, but does it excrete anything after "digestion"? It could leave useful things in its wake instead of just doing wanton destruction. For instance, let's imagine it's only interested in eating the plastic or the radioactive materials in reactors, and leaves behind metal-rich asteroids in the system it traverses. They can either be pick-ups, which would be a novel concept for AI War 2 - fly a flagship on it and get an instead increase in metal reserves. Or it could mean additional metal mines on there if you do capture the planet. This would combine well with some kind of mechanic to attract the Devourer somewhere on purpose, perhaps baiting it with some tasty high-energy ships it likes to pursue. It doesn't have to be a friendly trail though. It could leave behind a trail of "space acid" like a space snail from hell, which would mean one or more buildings per planet that slowly decay, but cause constant damage per minute to any ship that happens to be on the planet. We could also combine the beneficial and dangerous trail. Another idea along the "dangerous but useful" route is that the Devourer is this incredible power source, granted the planet it's on 300,000 energy production as long as it has fed recently (energy could also be proportional to how "full" it is, with slow digestion constantly reducing this). Now if you give the player a way to bait it so it remains on your planets, and you manage to either produce enough ships to keep it fed, or to bait enough minor factions or AI waves to provide the food, you have yourself a nice if temperamental power generator. Perhaps some "moods" where it becomes more difficult to direct as you want would spice up the experience so you don't "tame" it and just enjoy the benefits once you've mastered the method. Exploring another direction, could be hoovering up a lot of ships from space and even directly from hyperspace, but not immediately destroying them. Instead, it slowly digests them for a thousand years ;) . The twist is that the Devourer eats way more than it needs to. From time to time it regurgitates a large amount of ships it hoovered up along the way, resulting in a lot of chaos in the target system as ships from multiple factions (and even strange alien stuff that happened to be traveling the hyperspace on its path) suddenly get released together and try to fight each other while fleeing from the Devourer. This allows making the Devourer faster with a larger radius, since after all it's not perma-destroying units, it's gonna release most of them elsewhere - if a little damaged from the digestive process. A lot of ideas above can of course be combined. Or we could even let the player the desired behaviors in the game lobby, "a la carte". --- A very alternate idea (though it could be a final evolved form rather than a different mode) would be that the Devourer is an actual planet. A kind of space spider, if you will, that moves around the galaxy connecting its wormholes to neigbouring worlds to create a path that ships might want to use - except traversing this world is incredibly dangerous and full of cloaked hazards (the spider's "web"). It might even bait visitors with rare alien tech it picked up somewhere else. So basically you get a map-altering wandering shortcut and pinata in one, and you get to see other factions wander into that planet either because it happens to be the shortest path at the moment, or because they want to conquer it (marauders, dark spire, macrophage, AI reconquest waves...). The player can try using it as a shortcut, salvage tech from it or hitch a ride to launch raids from it, or even try and beachhead it - but keeping units there for any prolonged amount of time should be a real nightmare. This of course involves a bit of work to allow dynamically moving a planet around and create and remove connections to neighbouring worlds, but it would be cool. |
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Yet another direction to make the Devourer interesting is that it stays pretty easy to avoid just like now, but it has a massive impact on local conditions while it's on the planet. A bit like the buffs Astro Train provide to the AI, but it affects everyone. Those effets could change over time, either randomly, according to which ships it ate recently (interesting to manipulate by the player) or just increase in strength and number as it feeds. Ideas: - Decloak everyone. - Every ship on the planet slowly decays as their matter is absorbed. - Every ship gets slowed down or even immobilized and its damage reduced - good luck running away, little prey. - Every ship is paralyzed - Or on the contrary, every ship gets a big damage buff due to the ambient energy from the Golem - causing a big bloodbath between factions which ultimately benefit it. - Same effect as Black Hole Generator - Completely scrambles the albedo, mass and other values of ships. - Amplifies the damage bonuses to a ridiculous levels (i.e. you get x20 vs high albedo instead of x6) so you're playing AI War 1 for a while on that system. - Every ship turns into an anti-everyone zombie on death. - Shields become overcharged and deal damage on touch - Every ship has only melee range. - Every ship's weapon is suddenly replaced by a harmless tractor beam (this is how the Golem protects itself), resulting in chaotic hilarity. - AOE range from every AOE weapon suddenly becomes a lot larger. - All ships become berserk and attack friend and foe indiscriminately. The player might still be able to slowly move them in some direction to try and evac them. Funny random idea: the Devourer is a kind of space mimic. You know about those if you ever played a traditional roguelike like Nethack or DCSS. It hides inside various juicy interesting capturable or hackable tech to attract the player, or masquerades as an AI guard post, or other building from minor factions, and then comes out of hiding and goes on a rampage before teleporting to another planet you haven't explored and lying in wait again. This might reduce its overall impact a lot depending on whether you find its hiding spot or not, so it could be smarter and teleport to spots you look interesting in as you move around the map. |
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It doing stuff like eating neutral fleets sounds like something I would rather not have in my games. I play without instigators just to disable the aip increasing one - all the other ones I might be fine with and might even be interesting to keep, but I don't have a way to separate them out. The previous idea of it eating metal harvesters was not as big of a bother since they don't matter so much, but if the golem started eating neutral fleets I'd probably never play with it. I wish there was an option to have it be on a very high setting (inf range, very big damage, threat to even large ships like spirefleet and exowar) without permanent damage. |
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Worth also noting that the devourer messes with pathing; the default pathing mode ("take a reasonably safe path") can make ships take weird routes since the devourer is so powerful. The game tries to avoid the Devourer, so your ships fly into AI planets. |
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I think the main problem with the Devourer is that it's just a random obstacle. It doesn't do anything to achieve any particular goal, it just drifts around being a nuisance. It can be quite a big nuisance, admittedly, but it's still mostly just a nuisance. To improve the play experience, perhaps it could have different behaviour modes, which it cycles through over time? For example, the Devourer could normally start in Roaming Mode, which sort of resembles its current behaviour; it aimlessly wanders the stars, eating anything that trips over it, but not making much effort to do anything in particular. Over time, though, it'll get hungry, and so eventually it'll switch to Hunting Mode, in which it speeds up a little and paths directly to a nearby place where it can feed (probably someplace with a bunch of active ships). Once it gets there, it shifts into Feeding Mode, in which it becomes especially powerful for a brief time, and goes on a rampage through the assembled targets (perhaps it only powers up its longer-ranged weapons in this mode?). Once its rampage is over, it'll switch back to Roaming Mode and wander off. The player will get notified when the Devourer switches modes, giving the player a warning of the Devourer's target. At that point, there might be interesting decisions to make, along the lines of "Should I run away now, or keep fighting for a while to pin the AI forces here for the Devourer Golem to eat?" Finally, the Devourer Golem doesn't need to be stupid; if it finds itself threatened (under some % of max HP), it could automatically trigger Feeding Mode as an emergency defensive measure (presumably on some kind of recharge timer). That should lead to a strategy along the lines of "provoke the Devourer Golem, flee its wrath without feeding it too much of the fleet you used to break its outer defences, then engage it again in its window of vulnerability"... and should the player manage to beat up the wandering boss monster, they should be rewarded for their trouble. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 30, 2020 1:16 pm | Ymir | New Issue | |
| Sep 30, 2020 3:55 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Sep 30, 2020 3:55 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => feedback |
| Sep 30, 2020 3:55 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0058811 | |
| Sep 30, 2020 3:59 pm | ZeusAlmighty | Note Added: 0058812 | |
| Sep 30, 2020 4:04 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0058813 | |
| Sep 30, 2020 4:04 pm | RocketAssistedPuffin | Note Added: 0058814 | |
| Sep 30, 2020 4:14 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0058816 | |
| Sep 30, 2020 4:26 pm | Mac | Note Added: 0058817 | |
| Sep 30, 2020 4:32 pm | CRCGamer | Note Added: 0058818 | |
| Sep 30, 2020 4:51 pm | Lord Of Nothing | Note Added: 0058819 | |
| Sep 30, 2020 5:20 pm | ParadoxSong | Note Added: 0058820 | |
| Sep 30, 2020 6:46 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0058822 | |
| Sep 30, 2020 7:38 pm | Lord Of Nothing | Note Added: 0058823 | |
| Sep 30, 2020 11:39 pm | crawlers | Note Added: 0058830 | |
| Oct 1, 2020 12:10 am | Carozanty | Note Added: 0058831 | |
| Oct 1, 2020 10:03 am | crawlers | Note Added: 0058835 | |
| Oct 24, 2020 1:46 am | Asteroid | Note Added: 0059362 | |
| Oct 24, 2020 2:22 am | Asteroid | Note Added: 0059363 | |
| Oct 24, 2020 11:59 am | crawlers | Note Added: 0059368 | |
| Oct 29, 2020 3:32 am | BadgerBadger | Note Added: 0059410 | |
| Oct 30, 2020 8:07 pm | Endovior | Note Added: 0059428 |
