View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0003130 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - Balance Tweaks | Mar 28, 2011 7:56 am | Mar 28, 2011 7:15 pm | |
| Reporter | Red Spot | Assigned To | keith.lamothe | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | no change required | ||
| Product Version | 5.008 | ||||
| Summary | 0003130: Exo-wave imbalance | ||||
| Description | Exo-waves "can" be rather imbalanced at the moment, imo. See the sceenshot for an illustration. Still at mk1-waves, when I get hit by 2 exo-waves (Golem & Spirecraft - hard). -One wave spawns an armored golem at 250M health -One wave spawns a black widow golem at 80M health First time I utterly lost, so reloaded an got a normal(balanced) wave with siege-towers/implosion artillery. Reloading again gave me again an armored and black widow golem, which I managed to beat losing "everything" (forts, FFs, fleet, Martyrs .. all gone).. hope I can rebuild before the AI sees what situation I am in :) | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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The composition logic is such that it can produce pretty variable results, yes. That's not a bad thing ;) And there's a particularly variable piece in that it has a chance (50% for Broken-Golems-Hard-provoked attacks, 20% for Spirecraft-Hard-provoked attacks) to eschew the usual spend-one-third-of-points-on-lead-ship rule and instead spend two thirds of the points on the lead ship. From your experience, it did that in the Armored Golem and Black Widow case, but not in the middle one. This makes it harder to prepare for an attack because you don't know if you're going to be up a balanced force or a weaker force collected around a much nastier ship. The only thing I can see needing changed here is the relative costs of the golems. Currently all event-attack-eligible golems are (for the purposes of event-attack composition only) Light-Dreadnoughts, I could bump the widow down to Heavy-Battleship, or the armored up to Medium-Dreadnought. However, the pick-lead-ship logic is very attached to picking the very highest tier it can get for its money, and if Armored was sitting all by its lonesome in the Medium-Dreadnought class, that means it would _always_ pick the Armored one if it had enough points for it (until it got enough for a higher tier, and iirc there's only one event-attack eligible ship that's higher). |
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Oh, another thing in that lead-ship-heavy case is that it tends to concentrate everything into a single battlegroup going after your home command station rather than making multiple separate ones going after both your home command station and up to 10ish normal command stations. Depending on your setup one may be significantly more dangerous than the other. |
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I do have to say though. Is it possible to get golems to cost more for exo-waves? I am playing on spirecraft-hard. My previous exo-wave from that had 2 mk. V spirecraft and 2 armored golems. For comparison, the one before that had like 6 to 8 mk. V spirecraft. Admittedly, there was a +100 to AI progress between the two (I had successfully destroyed on of the AI homes between the two waves), but still, that seems like a BIG jump, which seems to indicate to me that the golems "cost" for exo-waves is too cheap. When you gave the AI the non-health nerfed versions for exo-waves, did you remember to increase their costs a bit? (Not 10x, that would put their threat in exo-waves back to where they were before, aka, very little. Just a moderate increase) Also, how many mk. V spirecraft siege towers is a single armored golem worth in exo-waves? Also, what should this ratio be balance wise? |
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The cost did go up quite a bit with the change non-health-nerfed (well, not as nerfed, at least). A Light-Dreadnought (as all event-attack-eligible golems are) costs 16384 points. A Heavy-Corvette (ex: MkV Bomber) costs 32 points. Whether an armored golem is more or less dangerous than 512 MkV Bombers (on high caps) is a perhaps dependent on the case, but my guess is less-dangerous. A MkV Spirecraft Siege Tower is classed as a Heavy-Battleship, one step lower than the golems, and costs 8192 points, or exactly half as much. My guess is that two of those are rather less dangerous than a golem (despite having 20 million health each). But it's really not intended to be finely balanced, there are big bumps in the road as the total threshold increases and larger stuff becomes available, and there are even bigger bumps from the random choice between "do I make a bunch of battlegroups spending 1/3rd the total points of each on its lead ship" and "do I make a single battlegroup spending 2/3rds the total points on its lead ship". So when you see the next attack counting up inexorably, you don't know if it will be only moderately worse than the previous one (or even a bit easier, depending on circumstances and rolls) or a possible game-ender. This uncertainty is intentional ;) |
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I think the imbalance comes from the point that the tools you get, which trigger the exo-waves, have a hard time dealing with these golems at the time/amount they come. Send 512 mk5 bombers and I have a martyr/botnet golem waiting. Against a golem I can just try to pick of as many fleet ship with a martyr and concentrate fire on the golem, which takes a lot of assets with itself before dying. Early game, or when there are too many you just arent able to recover from it/rebuild during the attack fast enough. Personally I feel they need a small nerf in how much they cost in regard to exo-waves. Partly because waves with or without golems now make a big difference. I would say; thats my vote, but I can no longer vote :) |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 28, 2011 7:56 am | Red Spot | New Issue | |
| Mar 28, 2011 7:56 am | Red Spot | File Added: Screenshot_2011_03_27_22_34_40.png | |
| Mar 28, 2011 7:57 am | Red Spot | Description Updated | |
| Mar 28, 2011 9:39 am | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0011534 | |
| Mar 28, 2011 9:40 am | keith.lamothe | Status | new => closed |
| Mar 28, 2011 9:40 am | keith.lamothe | Assigned To | => keith.lamothe |
| Mar 28, 2011 9:40 am | keith.lamothe | Resolution | open => no change required |
| Mar 28, 2011 10:21 am | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0011535 | |
| Mar 28, 2011 6:01 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0011547 | |
| Mar 28, 2011 6:30 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0011549 | |
| Mar 28, 2011 7:15 pm | Red Spot | Note Added: 0011555 |
