View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0002679 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - Balance Tweaks | Jan 28, 2011 5:32 pm | Feb 7, 2011 5:02 pm | |
| Reporter | TechSY730 | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | considering | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 5.000 | ||||
| Summary | 0002679: Give raid starships and raid gaurdians a new shot type | ||||
| Description | Reposted (with modifications) from http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,8091.msg70294.html#msg70294: I suggest a new "raider shot" type (technobable name to be determined) to raid starships and raider guardians. Possible also give this shot type to raider feet ships and spirecraft penetrators. Then, give an immunity to these shots to Home Command Stations, AI Home Command Stations. If you think it is reasonable, maybe also give this immunity to fabricators, Mk. IV factories, and MAYBE a few fallen spire irreplaceable buildings. The devs will need to stand firm that once they have figured out a good SMALL list of things that can get this immunity, they should not be giving more things this immunity just because players find it tricky to defend and start wining about it. Yes, a single raid starship is easily taken out. However, if several raid starships sneak in at the wrong time (such as when there is already a 1000 or more wave on the planet), there is little you can do about it. Losing the game because of that is not fun. The reasoning for this is that although raid starships and the like are supposed to laugh at defenses and forcefields, losing an irreplaceable unit (or worse, the game) because of that is not fun. Notice though that this immunity list is VERY short. Normal command stations are still completely vulnerable, as are most human and AI exclusive stuff. Thus, raid starships maintain their usefulness for both sides. Only the things that losing because defenses are ignored would cause excessive cursing instead of being a learning experience are on that list. Also, the AI home gets this as well, so we cannot bypass their forcefields with great raiding ships to win, just like they wouldn't be able to do to us. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | |||||
|
|
This is probably just a case of your needing more defense in depth. And if this were granted, it would NEVER be given to the human home command station. If raid starships even get on your home planet after the early game, that's your problem there. |
|
|
So many interrelated issues here regarding raid starships. No warning when a ff immune unit heads towards your home. Ships not prioritizing targets that are heading towards your home, even if they can shoot through ffs. The inability to set target priorities when that target is not around, so you can't be proactive to tell your turrets to focus on raid starships. Etc, etc. The raid starship itself is pretty well balanced. Its just that it is frequently it is way to hard to see coming until it is too late, and under the right circumstances your defenses won't help much, even if it is defense in depth. This makes this issue rather complicated. EDIT: I rarely get "ninja defeated" by raid starships, but I can understand why it would be so aggravating to people. Especially when they did take good defensive steps and still the raid starships got through due to he defenses getting "distracted". |
|
|
Having the AI being able to sneak-kill your home command station is something I like very much. You do have to watch out for that. |
|
|
The issue is pretty complicated. I'm sure we'd all value dev input in that thread, although I wouldn't be surprised if you guys are too busy to read through all of it at the moment. A specific shot type and immunity to that shot type actually seems like too much of a brute force solution to me, and it kills the Raid Starship for its primary role of a quick strike unit for taking out high value targets. I had some other random ideas in that thread which might be worth considering, or they might be dumb. The main issue is that there's not a really good counter for them right now, outside of knowing where they are ahead of time and micro managing your defense to go after them. It's not impossible to deal with them, just... not much fun. |
|
|
REPEAT. It does NOT take out the value of using it for taking out high value targets. ALMOST everything of value will still be vulnerable. I do see your main point, but I wanted to correct that one bit of misunderstanding. |
|
|
Sorry for the double post, but there are good counters for raid starships. Sniper turrets and (well placed) missile turrets. Both of them have good armor piercing, and both of them (I think) have a decent multiplier to the hull type that raid starships have. Of course, like all turrets, they can easily get "distracted" and it is a little painful to override their auto-targeted target. |
|
|
I do understand the issue, I would like to add that you do have: -a pause key -a summary of whats on the planet on the right side of your screen -speedboosting assets that allow you to catch a raider that did broke through There is enough available to prevent this even becoming really frustrating, however I can understand that in the heat of battle this can easilly be overlooked (for too long). |
|
|
I'm going to continue the discussion about raid starships in general in the original forum post, so we don't clutter up this report. EDIT: See http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,8091.msg70504.html#msg70504 for my response. |
|
|
Just so X sees this: I lost a game after about...2 hours, I had claimed 2 additional planets (plus 2 home planets) and was about to claim a third (after clearing its neighbors) still leaving me with about...5 fronts, three of them to homeworlds. Roughly 140 AIP, IIRC. Then a wave and a spire wave hit me at about the same time, on the same planet, on a homeworld, and a single raid + 2 light starships + a zenith starship (the other starships are relevant due to munitions boosting) ate my home station while I was busy trying to kill all of the spire minirams before THEY did the same thing. 24 spire minirams CAN and WILL kill a home station as I found out recently (game just after the above), as they'll just sit on top of it doing repeated ram damage without moving off like EVERY other melee ship has to. |
|
|
I think spire mini-rams (and several other suicide units) are currently bugged so they don't actually die when they attack. This is making spire mini-ram a little overpowered right now. Is the bugged behaviour of some suicide units on mantis right now? It is one of bugs that can really hurt balance. |
|
|
Good point. If spire rams nuked themselves even when doing 0.01x damage against a command station, I wouldn't see them as a serious threat. |
|
|
I guess they're only taking that 0.01x damage as well so they can still transfer their whole HP into damage, it just takes longer. |
|
|
If that is the case, that is a little broken. I think this happens with all self damage units though; the health they lose is multiplied by the relevant hull multiplier, in addition to the damage actually dealt. |
|
|
I suspect that is the case, which is a little...mmm...frustratingly unclear. Especially since they're so hard to stop when part of a multi-type wave. They're fairly fast, immune to tractors, immune to gravity effects, and immune to force fields. |
|
|
Even before FF immunity they'd just rip right through your home command's FF anyway. |
|
|
True. Its that they're immune to all of the general "slow stuff down" stuff (likewise, Raid Starships) and the 0.01x damage vs. Command Grade doesn't actually [i]mean[/i] much. As a side thought: how many sniper turrets does it take to kill a Mk3 Raid? |
|
|
Sniper turrets do 7,200 damage with a 6x multiplier for ultra light hulls (so 43,200 damage per shot in this scenario) and a 6 second reload speed. Mk3 Raid Starship has 4.8 million HP and a 90,000 armor rating. Sniper Turrets have 200,000 armor piercing, so that cancels out. This is from ship data towards the end of the 4.x betas so it should still be correct now. I can't just check the in game reference at the moment, so this is what I have to go with. Unless I'm missing something, that means you'd need over 100 sniper turrets to be able to one-shot them. (Assuming no other turrets, mines, fleet ships, etc. etc.) Edit: I forgot about the game speed modifier which I have no clue on. The wiki only indicates the a multiplier is applied for epic, normal, or blitz, but doesn't actually assign a numeric value to any of them. |
|
|
I think the speed multipliers are 0.5, 1, and 2 respectively. Doesn't matter much for this though. I just care about the number of shots. So yeah, 100 snipers to alpha strike a Mk3 Raid. Cap is....44 (on low)? So 3 reload cycles at 12 seconds each...means a player tops out at being able to handle about 3 Mk3 Raids before needing to apply other damage sources (which will not be nearly as effective, due to the lack of bonuses against ultra-light that the Raids are vulnerable to). |
|
|
What about missile turrets? They have armor piercing and light armor bonus too. Yea, they don't have radar dampening immunity, but that can be worked around with smart placement. |
|
|
Problem with missile turrets is that they tend to get used up in other places for killing bombers (because they're the only turret with a bonus vs. polycrystal). |
|
|
And, realistically, if we're using our cap of sniper turrets plus most of our missile turrets (nominally long ranged turrets clumped up around a wormhole or on the path to our home command station) then we're back to admitting that there's simply a flaw in the lack of strategic options for dealing with Raid Starships. |
|
|
So one of the issues is the inability for raid starship's intended counter turrets from working well. From what I can see, there are 3 reasons or this. 1. Raid starships are immune to almost all forms of stalling, which turrets need to be effective due to their immobilty and low firing rates 2. Turrets tend to get distracted by the less important stuff 3. Although the Mk. I starship is pretty well balanced, the Mk II is questionable and the Mk III is so tough that even a full ship cap of all turrets that have a bonus against light armor will take some time to kill it, time you don't have thanks to thier nature. It gets pretty much impossible when the AI sends 2 or more Mk. IIIs, not at all unlikely in the late game. So basically, short of nerfing raid starhips to uselessness, conventional weapons are fundamentally inadequate to deal with higher level or muliple raid starships. Thus, some sort of new mechanic accessible by the player is nessecary to form an adequate counter to higher Mk raid starships. EDIT: I may wan to copy some if the points recently brought up in this discussion to the relevant forum thread. |
|
|
Or maybe Mk. II and Mk. III raid starships can be balanced. Most of the unstoppable instadeath raid starships raids have been because of the higher marks. That may be less drastic. |
|
|
Again, I feel as the game has progressed farther and farther from 3.8 or so, the less and less I like it as I feel more and more...fenced in. Like the game is less of the sandbox than it used to be. I [i]never[/i] died to an early game double-wave of bombers in 3.x, or even in the early 4.x (double-wave of bombers: 1 wave, both AIs sending bombers, grand total of 700, to the same planet). I never died to Raid Starships or to Electric Shuttles either. Sure, there were issues (lol, Acid Sprayers), but the game never felt like it was exploiting some trick when I lost. No, every time I lost it was because I had pushed to hard and couldn't cope with the retaliation and my defenses were slowly, but surely, over-run. These days it's always been something cheap. Rams (can't slow). Raids (can't slow, immune to most damage). Bombers (eat all defenses). Electric Shuttles (slipped in around, then exploited their AoE on the Home FF Generator, causing it to take 66x the damage I would have expected). Early Artillery Guardians (lolololol: 66,000 range, 50,000 DPS, om nom nom command station). Older Vampires (melee unit with "refractive" armor [i.e. bucking the trend] + health regen on attack + "buggy" overkill logic). Coupled with the loss of certain tactics. Deep Raiding is now a Bad Idea(TM), but identically one has to expand [i]as little as possible[/i] making large-galaxy games a paradox to win. |
|
|
To be fair, most of the issues you listed are not fundamental problems with the direction they are taking the game, but rather simple bugs and oversights that can easily be fixed. 1. They have acknowledged that many suicide units aren't suiciding (pretty big oversight) 2. They have acknowledged that overkill damage in conjunction with self damage and vampirism is currently buggy. 3. Bombers do need their bonus vs. structural brought down a tad 4. The new electric shuttle damage mechanic and how it handles stuff under forcefields was not a case they considered very well. (suprisingly large oversight considering how well they think through things in previous stable releases) 5. Keith has said one of the things to do is to go back over the gaurdians and rebalance them. 6. The chance of a bomber wave needs to be nerfed. 7. Raid starships, especially the higher mark ones, need to be reblanaced some and possibly a new defensive mechanic introduced. 8. The number of planet you can go out before the AI starts freaking out needs to be bumped up. So of all of those issues you mentioned, only two of them (5 and 7) at going to require significant thought, change, and reimagening. The rest are fix it issues. So I don't see why you are getting so upset about things that are standard bugs and oversights, not odd game design shifts. |
|
|
So in other words: every time I've lost, I've lost because of a bug? Anyway, 2 was fixed, IIRC. But it was that behavior that was frustrating, that's all I'm saying. I'm glad it was fixed, but it wasn't an issue pre-4.0 3 isn't acknowledged 4 is something I'm sure I'd have seen if I saw release notes prior to it going live (I saw multiplayer parasite issues) On the topic of 5, the game has been rebalanced [i]four times[/i] since I purchased it. 6 is a personal opinion and likely not going to change 7 is this thread, and a few others. I highly suspect that whatever change is made (assuming one is made) that they'll still be more powerful in AI hands than player hands 8 is another one of those things that I don't think will change and wasn't considered carefully. 150 AIP seems to be the threshold at what the player can realistically handle on Diff 7-7.6, compared to 3.12-3.8's 700 AIP threshold. Hell, I remember winning a game with almost 1500 AIP on diff 7.6, but now I can't even brake 200 before losing (I've even dropped my difficulty down to 7.0). |
|
|
The game has gotten harder since the 3.0 days. This was a stated goal of theirs. But your criticism is valid, they have been reinventing and repurposing so much of the game recently, they haven't taken time to fix many of the oversights and bugs that have come up that may or may not have been fixed with the next change that they sort of rushed through. They have already apologized for reinventing so much that thy haven't gotten the mechanics on firm ground. They said that polishing and fixing are their goals for the next stable version. |
|
|
Harder is one thing. Impossible is another. There's a VAST discrepency between what the player used to be able to handle (1500 AIP) and what they can handle (200 AIP). I don't mind Beachheads (I love 'em). I don't mind AI Eyes (now that they're rare). I don't mind counter attack posts (makes you think, but the timer could use a reduction: 5 minutes is plenty). I don't mind guardians (but I do object to the sheer diversity that appear on a planet). I don't mind the new Armor vs. Shield mechanic (but I do mind the value discrepancy between the AI's units and the players). I don't mind the core invulnerability generators (but I do mind the...difficulty implied in taking them--i.e. in order to have them all down a certain number of systems must be claimed, each one worth 20 AIP, enforcing a minimum AIP level, which in turn relegates a certain threshold of difficulty. One that almost certainly exceeds the player's ability to deal with it!) > They have already apologized for reinventing so much that thy haven't gotten the mechanics on firm ground. Then the game is not worthy of a Major Version Number. |
|
|
Okay, the AIP to wave size and reinforcement size relation may need rethinking too. They recently did that for the difficulty to those sizes relationship. The distributors pushed them to get a stable out soon. They never said this explicitly, but based on their statements to some of the bugs and oversights in week or so before 5.0, it seemed to me that Chris and Keith were not really comfortable pushing put major release version just yet. I am a little disappointed they didn't stand their ground and tell them to wait more, but after all, the distributors are where a lot of the money comes from. |
|
|
> Okay, the AIP to wave size and reinforcement size relation may need rethinking too. 0002572 Basically: 7-7.6 is "right where they want it." |
|
|
Is it right where they want it for low AIP, or for mid game AIP? The discussion there focused on the first few waves. What the waves would be like mid game was never addressed. Also, can this discussion be copied and continued on a forum post? We have gotten WAY off topic, but I feel like this conversation needs to continue. |
|
|
Sure, we can go to the forums, just be sure to link me or I'll never find it. > Is it right where they want it for low AIP, or for mid game AIP? It's a scale. "Ships per AIP." Meaning, that it includes mid and late game. (How much AIP is in the late-game was never mentioned) |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 28, 2011 5:32 pm | TechSY730 | New Issue | |
| Jan 28, 2011 5:41 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0009787 | |
| Jan 28, 2011 5:41 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Jan 28, 2011 5:41 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => considering |
| Jan 28, 2011 5:45 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0009788 | |
| Jan 28, 2011 5:47 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0009789 | |
| Jan 28, 2011 5:47 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0009788 | |
| Jan 28, 2011 5:55 pm | BobTheJanitor | Note Added: 0009795 | |
| Jan 28, 2011 5:57 pm | BobTheJanitor | Note Edited: 0009795 | |
| Jan 28, 2011 5:57 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0009798 | |
| Jan 28, 2011 6:06 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0009800 | |
| Jan 28, 2011 6:08 pm | Red Spot | Note Added: 0009802 | |
| Jan 28, 2011 6:12 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0009804 | |
| Jan 28, 2011 6:16 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0009804 | |
| Jan 28, 2011 6:18 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0009804 | |
| Jan 28, 2011 6:18 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0009804 | |
| Feb 6, 2011 5:20 pm | Draco18s | Note Added: 0010061 | |
| Feb 6, 2011 5:46 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0010062 | |
| Feb 6, 2011 5:47 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0010062 | |
| Feb 6, 2011 6:13 pm | Draco18s | Note Added: 0010063 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 2:31 am | KDR_11k | Note Added: 0010064 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 7:05 am | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0010066 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 9:34 am | Draco18s | Note Added: 0010067 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 12:17 pm | KDR_11k | Note Added: 0010070 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 12:25 pm | Draco18s | Note Added: 0010072 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 2:02 pm | BobTheJanitor | Note Added: 0010073 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 2:08 pm | BobTheJanitor | Note Edited: 0010073 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 2:41 pm | Draco18s | Note Added: 0010075 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 3:18 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0010077 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 3:20 pm | Draco18s | Note Added: 0010078 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 3:27 pm | BobTheJanitor | Note Added: 0010079 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 3:30 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0010080 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 3:32 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0010080 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 3:34 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0010080 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 3:37 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0010081 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 3:52 pm | Draco18s | Note Added: 0010083 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 3:55 pm | Draco18s | Note Edited: 0010083 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 3:56 pm | Draco18s | Note Edited: 0010083 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 4:09 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0010084 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 4:11 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0010084 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 4:18 pm | Draco18s | Note Added: 0010085 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 4:18 pm | Draco18s | Note Edited: 0010085 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 4:18 pm | Draco18s | Note Edited: 0010085 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 4:19 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0010084 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 4:25 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0010086 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 4:26 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0010086 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 4:38 pm | Draco18s | Note Added: 0010087 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 4:39 pm | Draco18s | Note Edited: 0010087 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 4:47 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0010088 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 4:52 pm | Draco18s | Note Added: 0010089 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 5:00 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0010090 | |
| Feb 7, 2011 5:02 pm | Draco18s | Note Added: 0010091 |
