Author Topic: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?  (Read 9289 times)

Offline ZaneWolfe

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #15 on: April 22, 2014, 03:38:01 am »
Most 10/10 involves significant cheese anyway.

Isn't part of the point of a 10/10 game that you CANNOT beat it without significant cheese?
Yep.
But then again.. what counts as "cheese"? I'd say Fallen Spire, Champions, some bonus ships, multiple homeworlds, lazy ai and some other settings, full visibility, easy golems and easy spirecraft. Maybe Area Minefields, Assault Transports and Core Turrets. (No Riot Control Starships are not cheesy) EDIT: disabling Core Shield Generators might be cheese too.

All true, but it is never just one type of cheese that allows 10/10 victory, but a combination of cheeses.

Offline Draco18s

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #16 on: April 22, 2014, 10:40:24 am »
All true, but it is never just one type of cheese that allows 10/10 victory, but a combination of cheeses.

A cheese salad, if you will.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #17 on: April 22, 2014, 11:01:46 am »
All true, but it is never just one type of cheese that allows 10/10 victory, but a combination of cheeses.

A cheese salad, if you will.
More of a Quattro Formaggi . Except there's often more than 4 cheeses involved.

As far as what counts as cheese:

- There's the obvious "Lobby Limburger" like the "No Waves" modifier, setting your own handicap to +300% and/or hammering the AI with a nerfing handicap.  If one of these is in play I don't consider the result of the game to have a serious bearing on the balance of the game.  At the same time, I feel no need to deny those choices to the players: it's pretty obvious what you're doing, it's an intentional choice, and it doesn't take any inordinate amount of your time to accomplish.
-- turning on golems-easy AND spirecraft-easy, and the friendly factions to intensity-10 with no counterbalancing hostile/mixed factions would also tend to cause me to not take the result terribly seriously from a balance perspective.  More mild combos of that also tend to contextualize the result for my purposes.  Please have fun with it if you like, though.

- Then there's the really-stinky-cheese in-game exploits like (in the past) having a massive FF net that you could repair while other parts of it were under fire (required a lot of micro, but you could stop almost arbitrarily large amounts of fire that way until the rules were added to make an entire FF net unrepairable for X time after any part of it had taken damage), or the much more recent example of RockyBst's keeping over 10,000 threat occupied essentially indefinitely with a single jumpship and some lightning torpedo frigates.  Those I need to fix because they can trivialize pretty much _any_ size of challenge that is thrown at it, and thus trivialize all other responses to said challenges except in the matter of how much micro/wall-clock-time is required to execute them.

- Then there's the "hilariously overpowered" things like Martyrs.  It's no secret that Martyrs are overpowered.  They've actually been nerfed several times over the past few years, but their sheer threat-stopping power is incredible.  I'll probably take another whack or two at them before too long, but ultimately the point isn't to redefine them to some actually-balanceable role.  Because they're too much fun as they are, and even they have limits that can be overcome by a sufficiently powerful AI or a sufficiently big player mistake, and their nature prevents the player from relying on them to the total exclusion of other tactics.  So even if someone is spamming martyrs like crazy I still pay attention to the balance implications of the game.
-- Area mines might go in this category, or the next one, it's not clear to me yet.

- Then there's the more mild-cheddar types of units.  I'd put Riot Starships and Neinzul Railpods and various other such things in this category.  They're really strong if used right, and if used in combination can defeat absurdly larger forces.  If a strict balance were a priority for me, I'd have to nerf these.  But again, too much fun the way they are.  So there are occasional efforts to moderate them without redefining them, but overall it's ok.


And there's a bunch of stuff I didn't mention.  Overall the target is fun, and making sure nothing is so out of balance that it's reducing fun.  After that I try to make 10/10 just-barely-unbeatable (on normal challenge, against the top players), 7/7 a stiff challenge to a new player, etc.
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Offline Kahuna

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #18 on: April 22, 2014, 12:53:29 pm »
Except there's often more than 4 cheeses involved.
I'd like to know what you consider to be cheese. Just so I know when I feel like taking the next 10/10 challenge.

A list of powerful stuff:
Mark >= II Military Command Stations
Heavy Beam Cannons
Core Turrets
Area Minefields
Assault Transports
Chokepoints
Disabled CSGs
Cloaker Starship + Warheads
Mark III Force Fields + Mark II Tractors + Flak and Lightning Turrets
Champions
Modular Forts
Zenith Trader
?
set /A diff=10
if %diff%==max (
   set /A me=:)
) else (
   set /A me=SadPanda
)
echo Check out my AI War strategy guide and find your inner Super Cat!
echo 2592 hours of AI War and counting!
echo Kahuna matata!

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #19 on: April 22, 2014, 01:03:58 pm »
Except there's often more than 4 cheeses involved.
I'd like to know what you consider to be cheese. Just so I know when I feel like taking the next 10/10 challenge.
Mainly the things that would make me not take the result seriously for balance purposes are the sorts of things one picks in the lobby.  If you want to run a lobby setup by me to check, I'm happy to answer.

The only other things would be heavily exploiting a known exploit (like RockyBst's Jumpship Dance) before I get a chance to fix it.  Or if there's some obvious bug that's gutting CPAs or something like that.

Those are the only forms of cheese I'd actually advise avoiding for a serious game.

There are much milder forms of cheese that players are expected to get all they can out of, particularly if playing on 9+.  The AI's certainly not pulling any punches up there.

Quote
A list of powerful stuff:
Mark >= II Military Command Stations
Heavy Beam Cannons
Core Turrets
Area Minefields
Assault Transports
Chokepoints
Disabled CSGs
Cloaker Starship + Warheads
Mark III Force Fields + Mark II Tractors + Flak and Lightning Turrets
Champions
Modular Forts
Zenith Trader
?
Those are all fine, though I do put "games without CSGs" in a different category, and my balancing for "games with no or minor superweapons" is distinct from my balancing for "games with significant superweapons (say, a couple champions, or a champ and golems and/or spirecraft, etc)", which is also distinct from my balancing for "games with radically-game-altering superweapons (Fallen Spire,  or 8 champs, that kind of thing)".

Anyway, if any of the things you listed turn out to be simply smashing balance completely to pieces then I'll change them, but I'm not asking you to not use all the tools in your toolbox.
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Offline Kahuna

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #20 on: April 22, 2014, 01:40:21 pm »
Ok cool. Thanks.
set /A diff=10
if %diff%==max (
   set /A me=:)
) else (
   set /A me=SadPanda
)
echo Check out my AI War strategy guide and find your inner Super Cat!
echo 2592 hours of AI War and counting!
echo Kahuna matata!

Offline RockyBst

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #21 on: April 22, 2014, 03:27:24 pm »
Hey now, that jumpship dance wasn't a known issue before I bought it up. And I only really used it the once. Everything else was just good strategy ;)

The instant-knowledge-hacks on the other hand, that I'd call an exploit.

Offline Kahuna

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #22 on: April 23, 2014, 01:58:11 am »
The instant-knowledge-hacks
Please explain.
set /A diff=10
if %diff%==max (
   set /A me=:)
) else (
   set /A me=SadPanda
)
echo Check out my AI War strategy guide and find your inner Super Cat!
echo 2592 hours of AI War and counting!
echo Kahuna matata!

Offline RockyBst

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #23 on: April 23, 2014, 03:24:17 am »
There's no limit to the number of covert knowledge extractors you can place at once, and the first tick is currently at 0 seconds rather than 15. See:


Offline Kahuna

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #24 on: April 23, 2014, 04:01:22 am »
Wouldn't that also increase the hacking response?
set /A diff=10
if %diff%==max (
   set /A me=:)
) else (
   set /A me=SadPanda
)
echo Check out my AI War strategy guide and find your inner Super Cat!
echo 2592 hours of AI War and counting!
echo Kahuna matata!

Offline ZaneWolfe

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #25 on: April 23, 2014, 06:50:50 am »
As far as what counts as cheese:

- There's the obvious "Lobby Limburger" like the "No Waves" modifier, setting your own handicap to +300% and/or hammering the AI with a nerfing handicap.  If one of these is in play I don't consider the result of the game to have a serious bearing on the balance of the game.  At the same time, I feel no need to deny those choices to the players: it's pretty obvious what you're doing, it's an intentional choice, and it doesn't take any inordinate amount of your time to accomplish.
I rather enjoy my 300% modifier, because it makes building my precious FS fleet take under an hour rather than several of them. Still, with the new changes to econ, it might not be a requirement anymore. But I'm probably never going to change it anyway. Might bring the AI up further though now.

-- turning on golems-easy AND spirecraft-easy, and the friendly factions to intensity-10 with no counterbalancing hostile/mixed factions would also tend to cause me to not take the result terribly seriously from a balance perspective.  More mild combos of that also tend to contextualize the result for my purposes.  Please have fun with it if you like, though.
I'm going to have to disagree with the friendly faction bit. Given the power that Guardposts have now, a 10/10 Dyson doesn't really do a thing anymore, and only helps if you clear a path, including killing the AI Command Stations, right back to your own territory. So that makes them somewhat decent on defense, but nothing else. And while the Dyson is neutral, its not going to do a thing to the AI, even on 10/10. Human resistance is similar, even at 10/10 I don't see much impact from them overall. It may just be me, but either they show up when I already overwhelm the AI and don't need them, or they show up and its a battle I'm going to lose even with their help. In the former case, yeah they patrol my/neutral space, but they also like to go one at a freaking time into AI worlds and die for it. In the latter, I'm usually doing a sacrifice play to raid something or thin out threatfleet. When raiding the AI goes for my forces first anyway, and then the Resistance, whom I can't control, dies anyway. Leave only one scenario where they are of any real use, which is as extra bodies to burn against threat buildup.

Of the friendly minor factions only the Roaming Enclaves are really that impressive when set to 10/10. And boy do those have an impact. Make sure they are set to prioritize defense only, and they can build up to a point where they are able to nearly replace a mobile fleet for defense. And sadly, the counter balance, the neutral and AI Allied Enclaves, are just plain pathetic. I've never seen more than 4 AI Allied on a single world, and given that its sheer numbers where they stand out, this makes them a mostly useless ally for the AI. The Neutral Enclaves are always alone, and are no stronger than either AI Ally or Player Ally. Their impact is even less than the AI Ally Enclaves. I don't see the need to tone down the player ally Enclaves, but the other 2 need a serious buff to matter. Looking at it from the far extreme, 10/10, I would find a way to double to quadruple the AI Ally Enclaves strength, or at least a way for them to come in numbers that matter. As for the Neutral Enclaves, either they need to spawn in collectives of 5+, or need to be given a power boost of 10x or more. Right now the AI doesn't even bat an eye at a single neutral Enclave. and unless they hit a fringe world and I don't have enough of the good Core Turrets, I don't even notice them either. A MKII Millitary Station by itself seems to be enough to handle them, combined with Mini Forts and/or some good Core Turrets, and I might not even need to repair anything.

Offline Draco18s

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #26 on: April 23, 2014, 09:06:05 am »
Wouldn't that also increase the hacking response?

Yes, but it's pretty much irrelevant.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #27 on: April 23, 2014, 09:26:31 am »
Yea, the knowledge-hacker thing giving a tick at 0-seconds-after-deployment is an exploitable-bug I need to fix.
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Offline RockyBst

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #28 on: April 23, 2014, 12:42:23 pm »
Because the sequence of events is

- Pause
- Construct 340 knowledge hackers
- Unpause for one second
- Delete 'em all

The AI doesn't get a chance to fire off their anti-hacking countermeasures. I haven't tried it, but I wouldn't be surprised if this works fairly effectively even when you're significantly negative on HaP.

Offline Toranth

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Re: 10/10 Scorched earth/ Scorched Earth - impossible to beat?
« Reply #29 on: April 23, 2014, 03:22:12 pm »
Because the sequence of events is

- Pause
- Construct 340 knowledge hackers
- Unpause for one second
- Delete 'em all

The AI doesn't get a chance to fire off their anti-hacking countermeasures. I haven't tried it, but I wouldn't be surprised if this works fairly effectively even when you're significantly negative on HaP.
Yes, it works fine even at -1,000,000 HaP.  All you need to do is make sure your "1-second" of runtime doesn't tick to a game-time second ending in zero (:10, :20, etc).  The AI hacking response only triggers on those multiple-of-ten seconds, so you would get x340 the response for your one second if you tried that.

Another longstanding bug is that every time you save and reload the game, all hacking countdowns advance by one second.  If you are really patient, you can complete things like Fab, Backup, or even Adv Prod hacks in zero game time.

 

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