Fallen Spire feedback

[BobTheJanitor]

Given that one can simply assign engineers to a construction to speed it up, aren't those the same thing?

Well ships do still have their base build time. A fleet ship that takes 10 seconds to crank out is different from a big spire ship with a build time of 20 minutes (or whatever it is, I didn't check the numbers). Even if you throw a ton of engineers at it, it's going to take longer. Although I still found that the biggest delay for me was waiting on my economy to catch up when building the bigger ships, so I don't know that adjusting the base build time would have that big of an effect.

Secondly, I successfully completed the Fallen Spire campaign finally. Played all the way through to what I would call the 'true' ending, building the intergalactic transceiver and all that. Very fun. Although I think with my next campaign I'm going to play something with low ship caps and less massive fleet blobs. The last 5 hours of the game I had to play on the extremely terribly low performance profile. Between full caps of every type of fleet ship and merc ship, plus ridiculous numbers of shredders, plus botnet zombies, plus dyson gatlings, the game was a laggy jerky mess. And it was still great fun!

[Red Spot]

Previous game I hit the Avenger with my FS fleet, no ships lost, but all components got "nuked".
An hour later a full cap mk2 & mk3 engies where not ½-way through rebuilding them, but the AI FS-fleet was causing massive responce from the AI ... I set myself up strong enough so I could hold out untill the 2nd AI homeworld got nuked (and I even managed to kill the 2nd Avenger), but I cant say I did not feel sorry I had to abandon my FS fleet.

It really isnt a must, just a suggestion. Simply to prevent it possibly wrecking a game cause you cant get back on your feet when you do a booboo with your FS fleet. (And I am not talking about the buildspeed of the ship themselves.)

[afguy200105]

I wanted to get in on this as well and voice my opinion.  I do like the FS campaign, but I think that the number of retrievals is a bit too high.  I know this is supposed to take longer than a normal game, and you take more planets, but I think its a little too long.  I agree that the teleporter option would help with speed, no matter which way you wind up deciding how to do that.  However, I think that if you were to take away one of the shard retrievals, from 5 to 4, would help out alot.  It does get to be quite repetitive after about the 3rd one, and I think the reduction would give more motivation to completing the FS campaign and going for the alternate victory, instead of just using the FS ships you build to beeline straight to the AI homeworld and win regularly.

[TechSY730]

Previous game I hit the Avenger with my FS fleet, no ships lost, but all components got "nuked".
An hour later a full cap mk2 & mk3 engies where not ½-way through rebuilding them, but the AI FS-fleet was causing massive responce from the AI ... I set myself up strong enough so I could hold out untill the 2nd AI homeworld got nuked (and I even managed to kill the 2nd Avenger), but I cant say I did not feel sorry I had to abandon my FS fleet.

It really isnt a must, just a suggestion. Simply to prevent it possibly wrecking a game cause you cant get back on your feet when you do a booboo with your FS fleet. (And I am not talking about the buildspeed of the ship themselves.)

Again, another sign that the FS ships are game breakingly OP, even by special campaign only ship standards.

[keith.lamothe]

They neither break the desired balance nor fun of the scenario.  The desired balance is just much rockier than the normal game.

[BobTheJanitor]

Perhaps as you reach milestones in the FS campaign you could have the AI homeworlds reinforce more heavily than normal or start building up their own patrols of spirecraft or a golem or two so that people don't feel like they could just take the AI homeworld at any time. That might mean that the last shard shouldn't spawn on a homeworld though... hmmm.

[Sunshine!]

It's been stated before that the whole point of the FS campaign is to frontload the danger of a normal game, and make the later stages easier with the Fallen Spire fleet.  Of course, if you feel like you can just flatten the AI homeworld at any point, what's stopping you from trying?  And if you can, why not add more difficulty-increasing factors?

I also think the main point being made by Red Spot is that FS ship modules should be immune to nukes to prevent weird edge cases like the Avenger from causing too many problems.  Given the build-up that's required to get access to a decent sized fleet of FS ships, I don't think I'd go so far as to call them OP. 

[zebramatt]

Perhaps as you reach milestones in the FS campaign you could have the AI homeworlds reinforce more heavily than normal or start building up their own patrols of spirecraft or a golem or two so that people don't feel like they could just take the AI homeworld at any time. That might mean that the last shard shouldn't spawn on a homeworld though... hmmm.

Yup, I believe that's one of the suggestions Keith's really keen on - check the first couple of pages of this thread!

 

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, I definitely feel like the AI should be doing something special to defend their homeworlds in the FS game (the further along the progression, the more special the something).  It should still be possible to take out an AI homeworld with a FS fleet by mid-campaign if you've played well and the difficulty is moderate.  As mentioned before, the point of the campaign isn't that you have to go all the way to the end to win, unless you're facing a fairly difficult situation.  In any event, the AI could stand to be somewhat more defense-conscious

And I'm not sure about making the modules immune to nukes.  A nuke should do serious damage to a spire fleet by killing all the FF's and DD's and crippling the armament and shields of anything bigger.  But the amount of time and resources necessary to rebuild the modules is probably quite a bit too high.  I could fold more of that cost into the base hull.  On the other hand, I do want some significant cost difference between laser modules and heavy beam modules, etc.

[BobTheJanitor]

I turned on my FS post-win save last night and just let it run for an hour or so. It's neat to see that the big bad fleet actually does go around and wipe out all the AI planets. On the other hand, the exo-waves keep coming from the exo-wormholes, and they just keep getting bigger. Does that ever stop, or if I just left it running would they eventually be pumping out dozens of golems at once? It's post-win stuff so it doesn't really have any bearing on the game, but I was just curious.

[keith.lamothe]

The exos will keep coming but they'll hit a ceiling on the point-budget for each armada.  Of course, iirc the help will keep coming too, which could eventually be a memory/cpu problem.

But yea, I spent a fair bit of time on the logic to get them to make a clean sweep

[Varone]

Just a suggestion that may not take too much coding, when the capital city is built you could set the AI Homeworld to be on permanent alert as well as it's surrounding planets. Maybe a journal message to indicate the AI feels threatened and is taking defensive measures. It would beef up its defences the normal way and be somewhat challenging.

[Red Spot]

Perhaps .. perhaps, the AI can develop its own (semi-)line of FS ships.
Bit like the Neinzul ships, but a bit meaner.

If you stand a chance to wake those up when entering homeplanets, that might hold you back for a while, at least untill you have DNs of your own.

[Sunshine!]

And I'm not sure about making the modules immune to nukes.  A nuke should do serious damage to a spire fleet by killing all the FF's and DD's and crippling the armament and shields of anything bigger.  But the amount of time and resources necessary to rebuild the modules is probably quite a bit too high.  I could fold more of that cost into the base hull.  On the other hand, I do want some significant cost difference between laser modules and heavy beam modules, etc.

The only occurrences of the AI using nukes AFAIK is Avengers and if Nuclear Command is turned on.  The Avenger is more-or-less something you have to throw a decent portion of the spire fleet at, so having that go through that and wipe your modules, that you then have to rebuild, is more just annoyance than meaningful.  This particularly since you've probably already won the game at that stage, and the only thing keeping that from actually happening is the time to rebuild the modules.

[TechSY730]

Two things.

1.

*Minor faction Fallen Spire ships buffed quite a bit.

WHY? They seem plenty powerful as they are now. 

2.

*The AI's (announced) exogalactic strikeforces provoked by the Fallen Spire stuff now also contribute points to a sort of "homeworld defense fund". If that has any points and an AI homeworld comes under major assault, a defense force is immediately spawned on that homeworld. This can prove... unpleasant.

This won't apply retroactively, will it? I am already a decent ways through the FS story in my current game, and have already eaten several FS exo-waves (and in one case, it almost ate me  ).
If it does not apply to already sent exo-waves, then I am going to wait until this patch comes out to resume my game, so I can "feel the force" of this new mechanic.