Author Topic: Fallen Spire - 9/9 early troubles  (Read 4030 times)

Offline Peter Ebbesen

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Re: Fallen Spire - 9/9 early troubles
« Reply #15 on: June 21, 2014, 12:39:31 pm »

On FS, the original implementation's consequence (which held for some time) was that an FS capital fleet could function independently as basically the-hammer-of-thor.  It couldn't generally take on an AI HW by itself until at least to 5-city-size (getting the BB's and DN) but at that point it should become feasible (depending on core post choices, etc).
Yes, well, if that's still anything near a goal, then I'll have to agree with ArnaudB that they are way too wimpy as is. I had eleven cities and all the Spire Fleet that comes with that and the spire fleet would have been wiped out in seconds if I'd attempted to fight the special forces head on. Heck, I am pretty sure that merely taking on a single Mad Bomber wave head on near the end of the game rather than strafing it while it was under fire from the fixed defences would have wiped out my spire fleet.

I'll have to say that now that I'm in possession of this information, I'd have to support most of ArnaudB's suggestions as well, if you intend to return to those goals: My suggestions were all based on the assumption of the spire fleet supplementing the regular fleet, not based on it effectively supplanting it.
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Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Fallen Spire - 9/9 early troubles
« Reply #16 on: June 21, 2014, 12:48:24 pm »
I wouldn't expect a spire fleet to stand toe-to-toe with a fully-armed-and-operational special forces fleet, at least not on diff 9 versus an SFC.  That would still be more a matter of "send normal fleet to distract SFC somewhere, then hit the target with the Spire fleet".  And I wouldn't expect a spire fleet to survive intact going head-on with a 10k+ wave, either, but as you found it doesn't have to.

Anyway, yea, I'd like these to be more of a solid hammer, like they used to be.  That may lead to interesting balance issues, but we'll see.
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Offline ArnaudB

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Re: Fallen Spire - 9/9 early troubles
« Reply #17 on: June 21, 2014, 01:32:12 pm »
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Personally I'd like to quadruple the FS cap-ship stats (health and attack; maybe add some % resistance to implosion) and see what happens, but other feedback indicates many players think them borderline-OP as-is, so I'm not sure about that.
Well, it would be appreciable if the Spire armada from the transceiver didn't have many, many times the damage and hit points of the similar spire designs. I remember that this was done because the AI stalemated the spire armada in some cases... but really if an army who is regularly throwing multiple times our cap of spire fleet PLUS the super-dreadnought can't break through the AI forces without being itself massively buffed... well there is something wrong there.
Peter described that feeling very well in his AAR. Now, myself I had already done the transceiver when that massive buff was implemented. From a gameplay standpoint it's perfectly logical.

For a player however, it feels really annoying to be told that the spire ships are awesome, painfully unlocking them through the campaign... then see the exactly same design taken up, not just to eleven, but to sixteen, be required to break through the AI forces. (Despite having the super-dreadnought.)

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Personally I'd like to quadruple the FS cap-ship stats (health and attack; maybe add some % resistance to implosion) and see what happens, but other feedback indicates many players think them borderline-OP as-is, so I'm not sure about that.
By themselves,  I would say the spire ships are considerably far from OP. Context would be nice there. It's true that spire fleet can be overpowered, but that's mostly if you cheese the heck out of the them with the various combinations including protector/Shield-Bearer/ZenithMedic... but that tend to requires massive investment in non-spire stuff. Generally by that point spire ships only make battle faster and with less loss, rather than really being overpowered.

I had some ideas to give the frigate some kind of small secondary attack, so as to deal with easily with straggler all over the place (their main problem till beam-destroyer come around... though we never have enough destroyers). Seems like an overly complicated solution though.

Anyway, one thing I use to gauge to see if a Fallen Spire game is going well is whether killing an eye outright, totally ignoring the guard post, is a workable technique. (Also tend to involve transport-distraction to draw the AI defenders away.)
Unfortunately, full human-spire starship seem to do a large part of the job for a long time. I used to do this at lower difficulty, and it makes me feel kinda sad that the spire ships can't do anywhere near a good job at that alone. Blowing up the eyes through sheer, mind-blowing beam and overwhelming strength is a wonderful feeling, one that seem completely in line with Fallen Spire being meant to blow everything out of proportions. (Larger battles, lot more ships, lot more of firepower.)

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Good point on the AI concentrating its forces into the exos, taking away from waves.  I think I'd have it reduce the frequency of waves (by 20% per city, or something like that), and/or possibly have it the above-200-AIP reinforcements get redirected into exo strength rather than wave strength.  Though previously AIP had zero impact whatsoever on FS exo size, and perhaps that should remain true.
That seemed a relatively interesting solution to me. Beyond that it's up to you, at this point I am unsure which path would be best.

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Sure, just saying, 9.0 it is labeled as "very hard", so if veterans treat 9.0 as trivial unless they enable ai plots to make it even harder, then 9.0 is probably too easy compared to its difficulty level description, even though there exist even higher difficulty levels that are still supposed to be winnable.
It's worth noting that double nine is done a lot mostly because of steam success. Otherwise, it's quite probable that a lot of players would go more in difficulties between seven and nine.

Nine isn't forgiving to mistakes. If it makes you reload previous saves a few times per game, then I say it's working as advertised.
To relate with below:

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You can generally count on my telling readers of my AARs when I do anything to break the gameflow like reloading, because defeat makes a much better story than unending "and then, and then, and then" success stories.

I appreciate that this is not the case for everybody and that some people like playing hardcore for all sorts of different reasons, but personally I had enough of that with Nethack, Angband, and ADOM 15-20 years ago: Hardcore modes requiring backtracking to step one in case of mistakes do not increase my enjoyment, which generally concerns itself with learning from my mistakes, a learning process slowed down by hardcore.
Yes, from a story-telling perspective, being able to reload is a great thing. For judging the difficulty of the game however, the action of reloading is also very telling.

I myself only like hardcore to a limited degree, that say I like optional hardcore. Player with a non-savescumming is extremely revealing about the actual skill of a player to a given difficulty. You can't just ignore a mistake, save time by reloading from a fleet wipe.

Or as in X-com, revive your colonel from a Thin-Man headshot.

My point anyway is that by savescumming, we are effectively using a cheated intelligence. You can't be truly surprised by an AI attack, because you can almost always reload before it happens, then act to counter it. This make the apparent difficulty far lower, but doesn't the fact that the AI got you with your pants down before you reloaded.

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Yep, make a mistake, learn from it, and move on. Multiplayer is undoutedly much more demanding in that respect due to cooperation issues. On the other hand, multiplayer does also from what I've read of the mechanics provide significant benefits to players that are absent in SP, something that will be much needed to compensate for reduced strategic and tactical efficiency when compared to singleplayer.
If you have a very prepared team, then yes, there are enormous advantages to reap. Need great coordination though, so that isn't always easy.
But fun anyway.

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I wouldn't expect a spire fleet to stand toe-to-toe with a fully-armed-and-operational special forces fleet, at least not on diff 9 versus an SFC.  That would still be more a matter of "send normal fleet to distract SFC somewhere, then hit the target with the Spire fleet".  And I wouldn't expect a spire fleet to survive intact going head-on with a 10k+ wave, either, but as you found it doesn't have to.
To be clear, I also don't believe that the spire fleet should be able to take on the SF fleet head-on and slaughter it. That's where running distraction, transports, warheads jumping from wormholes come in.

The spire ships however should, more or less alone, be able to take a mark III or slightly damaged IV world non-heavily protected by the SF presence and come out ahead. As it stand, it does happens that the spire fleet (mostly alone) get quickly slaughtered even without particularly nasty opposition.

Craft spirecraft is telling in that regard. It's actually fairly easy to take out or wormhole-slaughter the spire ships from that AI, as they're a bunch of half-decent glass canons.

******

Now another idea that stuck me. Not nearly as important as the general spire balancing, but it stuck me:

So I was thinking about the early phases of Fallen Spire, and a particular point jumped at me, which produced more ideas. I think people who used the below exploit are going to be a little annoyed with me. In particular: The "refugee ship" event.

I was searching for a way to make this particular event more interesting, in the Chinese sense, and that was where the importance of the person aboard stuck me. It stretched my disbelief that this particular person was in the weakest ship of the spire navy, that had always been a sore point for me.

As for the exploit, it's... quite simple: the spire ship is TRANSPORTABLE. Which mean that, compared to shards, this event is utterly trivial as long as you have a transport ready beehive straight to your homeworld.

Could we solve both issues, while offering the players more (opportunities to shot their foot) tantalizing possibilities?

I think so, here is my suggestion. First, turn that weak frigate into a non-transportable but fully modded Spire Battleship (Cruiser perhaps, requires tests), then proceed with the going-back-to-homeworld event. Get the ship back alive, clear the AI ships, and then suddenly you have a choice.

Yes, you can turn this irreplaceable and slow ship into a powerful defensive structure, which gives powerful replaceable ships. Just what you need to break through that mark III world giving you a nasty plasma eye!

But...but... that very powerful refuge ship, it's very powerful. Couldn't you take the risk of sending back into this hostile galaxy, at that hostile mark III world to take it down? Certainly, if you lost this -unstransportable and slow- battleship, you would have irremediably screwed up the fallen spire campaign. But surely with that much health and firepower, you'll certainly success and get it back in one piece. It most certainly can't go wrong.



To be fair, I expect most players to take the safe approach and get the outpost. I do think it would lead to some quite 'interesting' moments for daring players, as well as show players new at fallen spire a vision of the kind of firepower Fallen Spire (is supposed to) give in the late game.

*****

With my part say, I do hope that there will be some changes in the Fallen Spire campaign. As it's, it feels too much like a more tedious version of regular games to be enjoyable.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Fallen Spire - 9/9 early troubles
« Reply #18 on: June 21, 2014, 01:41:13 pm »
Quote
Personally I'd like to quadruple the FS cap-ship stats (health and attack; maybe add some % resistance to implosion) and see what happens, but other feedback indicates many players think them borderline-OP as-is, so I'm not sure about that.
Well, it would be appreciable if the Spire armada from the transceiver didn't have many, many times the damage and hit points of the similar spire designs. I remember that this was done because the AI stalemated the spire armada in some cases... but really if an army who is regularly throwing multiple times our cap of spire fleet PLUS the super-dreadnought can't break through the AI forces without being itself massively buffed... well there is something wrong there.
Peter described that feeling very well in his AAR. Now, myself I had already done the transceiver when that massive buff was implemented. From a gameplay standpoint it's perfectly logical.

For a player however, it feels really annoying to be told that the spire ships are awesome, painfully unlocking them through the campaign... then see the exactly same design taken up, not just to eleven, but to sixteen, be required to break through the AI forces. (Despite having the super-dreadnought.)
I think there's a basic misunderstanding here: the ally-spire ships did not need that huge buff to deal with the AI forces you would have faced if you'd skipped the transceiver, it needed that huge buff to deal with the ongoing transceiver exos after it spawned.  On Diff 10, no less.


On the refugee ship; yea, I probably need to make that non-transportable.  But as to the point of who's aboard and why is it so weak; I think the journals made pretty clear that his original ship was sent without significant escort to this galaxy by accident, and wasn't in shape to continue.  A weak ship's better than no ship at all :)
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Offline orzelek

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Re: Fallen Spire - 9/9 early troubles
« Reply #19 on: June 21, 2014, 03:16:30 pm »
I would say that part of survivability problems for spire fleet are their nice juicy heavy hulls - and shields are structure if I remember correctly. Get them near proper guard post or large amount of bombers and they would start dropping quickly - haven't played with them for some time so might be outdated a bit.
Also there is stuff like dire guardians (met my first.. ouch) that wasn't present at all when FS was added.

On the other hand... trader and his toys might actually need revising a bit. Examples from various AAR's on tanking a lot of insane stuff on HW with trader toys and resulting salvage issues might come from that quite a bit. And then for example game difficulty counts only as far as you can get your HW kited out and then it's easier.

Offline Peter Ebbesen

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Re: Fallen Spire - 9/9 early troubles
« Reply #20 on: June 21, 2014, 05:36:22 pm »
On the other hand... trader and his toys might actually need revising a bit. Examples from various AAR's on tanking a lot of insane stuff on HW with trader toys and resulting salvage issues might come from that quite a bit. And then for example game difficulty counts only as far as you can get your HW kited out and then it's easier.
The single most powerful trader toy for that as far as I've seen is the Radar Jammer II, since that + Gravity 3 turrets along each side of the mine lane of death to your command station, setting turrets such that they are are at the maximum distance from the lane so that they still overlap it, with a second line a bit further out covering the distance any AI ship with a normal medium range attack would have to move to attack the first line, means the turrets are out of range of the vast majority of ships moving down the lane most of the time and that you can in many cases get the waves slowed down to 8 for almost the entire duration of their stay. The Radar Jammer II thus effectively work as a huge force multiplier on the Gravity Turrets that already work as a force multiplier on all the sniper and spider turrets as well as forts (and other long range defences) - it gets silly really quickly when the AI doesn't have a really long-range unlock to kill the Gravity Turrets.

If I could only buy a single trader toy in the game, the Radar Jammer II would be it in the current state.

The rest of the toys are surely powerful as well, but I wonder just how strong the chokepoint defences would be without the Radar Jammer II to help out the Gravity Turrets.


EDIT: hmmm. On the other hand, if playing with extremely low AIP so you don't unlock many, if any, fortresses, perhaps the SuperFortress is a more powerful trader toy.
« Last Edit: June 22, 2014, 07:22:02 am by Peter Ebbesen »
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Offline Arc-3N-4B

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Re: Fallen Spire - 9/9 early troubles
« Reply #21 on: June 23, 2014, 03:20:47 pm »
EDIT: hmmm. On the other hand, if playing with extremely low AIP so you don't unlock many, if any, fortresses, perhaps the SuperFortress is a more powerful trader toy.

Why not both? :D
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Offline ArnaudB

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Re: Fallen Spire - 9/9 early troubles
« Reply #22 on: June 23, 2014, 03:37:13 pm »
Super fortress still wouldn't be the most powerful trader item around at low AIP, because of its cost. Low AIP mean few systems, which generally mean little resources. Multiple homeworlds can help, but that's still an hefty thirty-six millions metal to invest, which is not exactly trivial.

Also, look below. Those images are my most powerful defensive setup to date. If you look, you'll see that the ships are getting stuck between the overlapping forceshield, keeping them in place far more effectively than any gravity turret.

Mine to damage them on arrival, tractors to divert firepower from against the shields (and offensive turrets/ships) to themselves, a tachyton. Grav turrets OUTSIDE the forcefield, to keep the raid starships, and draw fire away from the shield. This tend to get ridiculous, because it can keep in place an entire army of carrier along with dozen of starships (properly distracted) for sometime entire minutes. Of course, beware to make your own ships come from above, the unprotected parts, so that they don't draw fire to the shield or get 3/4 of their firepower reduced by being under forcefield.

The main advantage of this tactic though, is that it's a very low knowledge cost technique. Grav turrets are only recommended to keep raid an eyebot contained (a military station work well too), otherwise it's possible to build that kind of overlapping shield defense without any knowledge cost whatsoever. Very useful for multiple homeworld games, where you tend to have a lot of shield available early on.


Relevant to peter though, NEVER use radar jammer 2 with this technique. The lack of range for the enemy ships will leave the overlapping shields often as their sole target of opportunity, which tend to get the shields broken very quickly. Thus defeating the point of locking the enemy in place.
(Also, beware spire-human variant starships. Without proper distraction, they tend to make a mess of the forcefield. However, the technique is remarkably useful in keeping flagship/plasma starship away from your command stations and other valuables.)
« Last Edit: June 23, 2014, 03:47:04 pm by ArnaudB »

Offline Nodor

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Re: Fallen Spire - 9/9 early troubles
« Reply #23 on: June 25, 2014, 04:35:59 pm »
I have had a number of Fallen Spire starts recently (wanted to play with some big guns for some waves) and it certainly taught me about retribution waves quickly.

That said, winning Fallen Spire games has been more about approach control and defenses than offense.   In my last "Fallen spire" setup, (on a honeycomb map) we had one city chase that spawned waves in three directions.  This went badly.  After save scumming, we took out the planets the caused the third direction, and easily wiped the incoming waves when we only had to defend 2 fronts. (9 difficulty)   I've had numerous Fallen Spire victories on X maps in the 7-8 difficulty range, several expansions back. 

The other thing about building Spire cities is that you want to wait until you have all the resources needed, and all of your mark 2 and 3 engineers in range of the building point.  Because the aggression for City building waves is dependent on time, this minimizes the force you face.

DO NOT underestimate the value of a stack of attritioners as part of your defenses.  The spirecraft ships are extraordinarily helpful.  Cascading damage from large ships, like Golems, to all other ships is devastating to your foes.



 

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