View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0002796 | AI War 1 / Classic | Balance Issue | Feb 12, 2011 10:30 pm | Feb 14, 2011 4:01 pm | |
| Reporter | Orelius | Assigned To | |||
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 5.000 | ||||
| Summary | 0002796: Heavy beam guardians should have a number of ships hit per shot limit | ||||
| Description | Heavy beam guardians, are, well, broken when it comes to number of ships they can hit. As of now, heavy beam guardians hit everything that is within the line of fire. Normally you'd think that this isn't an issue, because ships automatically spread out, right? Well, in one of my recent games, I was using teleport raiders with a full stack of mark I, II, III,and IV teleport raiders and kiting guard posts. However, I noticed that sometimes around 700 raiders would just disappear completely. I didn't think much of it, as I could build 700 raiders relatively quickly. This action continued many, many times, and I thought the lightning guardians were the culprit, but they weren't, as my teleport raider stacks were generally healthy before they suddenly went poof. Turns out, that a heavy beam guardian managed to pull off a shot and instantly kill my 700+ teleport raiders in one shot because the moment the raiders all teleported, they were all stacked on top of each other. That made it it very easy for the heavy beam guardian to hit all of them. So i'm proposing a limit to the number of ships hit be the heavy beam guardian to be similar to the beam frigate but with more ships hit. Maybe a limit of 50-100 ships is a reasonable number? It's only in situations like teleport raiders are they ever able to pull of many hits per shot. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | |||||
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Heavy Beam weapons are already limited by the fact that they don't just do X damage to all targets on the line, they hit the first target and do damage to it, and that damage (at most, the first target's current health) is then deducted from the strength of the beam. If the beam has strength left, it hits the second target on the line, and so on. It just so happens that heavy beam guardians are pretty high on the attack side and teleport raiders are some of the flimsier things in existence (though a recent balance pass made them MUCH less flimsy). It's also possible that the heavy beam guardian has some kind of bonus against the teleport raider's hull type that's making this much worse. I'm doing a balance pass on guardians soon, will keep a special eye out for this bit of the heavy beam guardian :) But in general Heavy Beam weapons (like the human HBC turrets) are a fairly hard counter for stuff like teleport raiders, that's going to remain true. But 700 in one shot does sound like a bit much ;) |
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So does this mean a (pretty high) cap on the number of ships a beam weapon can hit is coming for all beam weapons? (of course, ones that already had such a cap will keep those instead getting raised) |
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No, when did I say anything like that? :) |
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Whew, I was afraid you were going to be scared by that edge case leading to 700 ships being killed in one hit and make sure no beam weapon can do that. Glad you are not overreacting. But is such a cap coming for the beam guardian, or is it too early to say? |
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I think the problem will resolve itself with some adjustments to the damage and bonuses vs teleport raiders, etc. In theory I might make the strength of the beam drop off by more than 100% of the damage done to much later targets, to discourage this sort of asymptotically high destruction. But much more likely, if there's still a problem, I'll try to adjust the teleporter movement code to pre-displace to along the precomputed concentric-circles-of-points already used for tons of stuff like exiting a wormhole, etc. That way the beam can still vaporize a nice satisfying slice, but it won't be asymptotically effective due to the unnatural concentration. |
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Beam and AOE weapons are great ways to abuse the sometimes delayed/paced collision resolution algorithm you guys are using. Teleport ships move VERY fast (infinity fast, in fact) and thus are especially prone to stacking. Most teleporting ships are pretty fragile. This looks like a pretty interesting corner case all right. It'll be fun to see what you will do about it. |
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Keith, PLEASE do that for all teleporters. It would fix countless painful issues for them. Piling on a single point has always been kinda... dumb.' And make sure it applys to when doing explicit-attacks too... Its really annoying when to prioritise a target you have to... yeah. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 12, 2011 10:30 pm | Orelius | New Issue | |
| Feb 12, 2011 10:35 pm | Orelius | Description Updated | |
| Feb 12, 2011 10:40 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0010312 | |
| Feb 12, 2011 11:12 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0010313 | |
| Feb 12, 2011 11:15 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0010315 | |
| Feb 12, 2011 11:17 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0010317 | |
| Feb 12, 2011 11:22 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0010318 | |
| Feb 12, 2011 11:26 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0010319 | |
| Feb 12, 2011 11:26 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0010319 | |
| Feb 14, 2011 4:01 pm | RogueThunder | Note Added: 0010356 | |
| Feb 14, 2011 4:02 pm | RogueThunder | Note Edited: 0010356 | |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:29 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Gameplay - Balance Issue => Balance Issue |
