Fallen Spire feedback

[keith.lamothe]

But the Biggest problem with LotS campaign was that I actually had to intentionally NOT finish the game normally and just wait for the last two shards so I could get a LotS victory, and no, this wasn't some low diff game, something 7-7.6 or so harder and easier AI - I could've finished the game at least five hours earlier with my spire fleet had I not wanted to see what the LotS campaign endgame has to offer.

The thing is, that's not a problem.  The campaign is supposed to be such that you don't necessarily have to go after the alternate victory.  If you can win earlier, do it.  The game actually encourages this in the journal text, and recognizes it as a separate achievement.

That's by far the biggest problem, that my offensive fleet became so powerful relatively early on that I could've ended the game whenever.

This is probably out of whack, yes.  My initial design was much more difficult, and notably had the AI react much more strongly to you using Spire capital ships against them, but the early beta testers were wailing in pain   So the difficulty was nerfed, they were still in pain, so nerfed again, and so on.  Then people stopped saying (much) that it was too hard.  So I figured it was ok.  I guess I was wrong

Anyway, I did do some nerfing of the spire capital ships late in the dev cycle (made them much more dependent on the shields for hp) and I can do more, but in general they're supposed to be at a different order of power than the normal stuff: that's why the AI is trying to stop you before you get many of them:  once you have a big enough spire fleet, the AI has basically lost.  There are many ways I can have the AI "ramp up" with your number/usage of those ships, and initially it did just that, but people were really not happy with that kind of "treadmill" feel where they weren't actually gaining any net advantage.

[keith.lamothe]

Oh, forgot:

The shard-recovering missions feel the same, I only did the five that is minimum for the galactic capital. Although it seems you can do more if you fancy more hubs.

Actually once you have the capitol you can research how to build the colony ships and build them at a shipyard, no shard recovery required.

[Ozymandiaz]

Those multi golem + starship waves the AI sent was fun!

[keith.lamothe]

I've always looked at it that the AI is considering the Spire completely different than the human. As such, the way the AI responds to the Spire is as if they Spire have their own AIP that is separate than the AIP the AI gives to humans. (Yea, I know its not like that in the code, but it is a nifty way to think about it in story terms). Because it is hinted that the Spire have already given the AI so much greif, you could say that the AIP for the Spire race is MUCH higher than the AIP for the human race. As such, the disproportionate difficulty of the waves due to humans and the waves due to Spire makes perfect sense.

Yes, this is very much the case.  And even in the code, though it's not called AIP for the Spire, it's a different kind of counter that determines the size of the event-attacks.


In my testing game the normal AI attacks were significant challenges, but they did it by stalking from outside my space.  Must have been the Cross-Planet-Waves thing  I perpetually had 1k-2k blobs of AI ships piling up just outside my territory.  And that was on low caps.  Several times in that game something would "shake loose" one of those blobs and they would throw themselves against my city+capital-fleet.  Often, they would overrun the position (even a Spire Dreadnought can only destroy so much), even without assistance from an event-attack (though they would often wait until the event-attack had entered the system and then come in; clever little beepitybeeps) and I would have to whittle them down over a rolling-defense all the way back to my homeworld where I would finally take them down.

So perhaps even when Cross-Planet-Waves is off the wave deployment code needs to have some realization that "uh, there's no way we can take that planet" and spawn in AI space.  I think that would lead to lots of bug reports, though, even if the wave warning explicitly said why it was doing that

The stalking had a relatively easy counter when I had time to use it: emp I/II and fly my spire fleet through to do a turkey-shoot.  So there's some room for improvement there.

[zebramatt]

But the Biggest problem with LotS campaign was that I actually had to intentionally NOT finish the game normally and just wait for the last two shards so I could get a LotS victory, and no, this wasn't some low diff game, something 7-7.6 or so harder and easier AI - I could've finished the game at least five hours earlier with my spire fleet had I not wanted to see what the LotS campaign endgame has to offer.

The thing is, that's not a problem.  The campaign is supposed to be such that you don't necessarily have to go after the alternate victory.  If you can win earlier, do it.  The game actually encourages this in the journal text, and recognizes it as a separate achievement.

That's by far the biggest problem, that my offensive fleet became so powerful relatively early on that I could've ended the game whenever.

This is probably out of whack, yes.  My initial design was much more difficult, and notably had the AI react much more strongly to you using Spire capital ships against them, but the early beta testers were wailing in pain  So the difficulty was nerfed, they were still in pain, so nerfed again, and so on.  Then people stopped saying (much) that it was too hard.  So I figured it was ok.  I guess I was wrong

Anyway, I did do some nerfing of the spire capital ships late in the dev cycle (made them much more dependent on the shields for hp) and I can do more, but in general they're supposed to be at a different order of power than the normal stuff: that's why the AI is trying to stop you before you get many of them:  once you have a big enough spire fleet, the AI has basically lost.  There are many ways I can have the AI "ramp up" with your number/usage of those ships, and initially it did just that, but people were really not happy with that kind of "treadmill" feel where they weren't actually gaining any net advantage.

Maybe you could grant the AIs stronger defensive capability later on, rather than just sending a whole bunch of stuff to crush the player - to avoid the treadmill effect but still make winning the game with the first set of Spire ships less than a cakewalk (and thus such an obvious choice every time).

Like an "Exo Galactic Defense Force", or something?

[keith.lamothe]

Like an "Exo Galactic Defense Force", or something?

I had been thinking that destroying (or damaging, whatever) a Core Guard Post could trigger a significant reprisal that would actually give a spire capital fleet a run for its money, yes

I just don't want to do it in such a way that the "always do this" obvious choice becomes a "never do this".

[zebramatt]

It's a fine line!

[TechSY730]

What about the old idea to re-purpose the Hunter-Killers into near home planet defenders, wandering between the home, core worlds, and maybe worlds adjacent to the core worlds. Given the crazy stats of those things, I think they could pose a threat to even the fallen spire starships.

[keith.lamothe]

What about the old idea to re-purpose the Hunter-Killers into near home planet defenders, wandering between the home, core worlds, and maybe worlds adjacent to the core worlds. Given the crazy stats of those things, I think they could pose a threat to even the fallen spire starships.

Perhaps, it depends on what stage.  With a 5-city fleet (including BBs and DN), even an Avenger dies quickly.

But yea, beefing up the AI's "final defenses" in proportion to the offensive extras seems like a good idea.  My main concern is that the player should not be penalized for using the spire ships.  We played that game with Golems causing AI reinforcements and whatnot for long enough that I know that's not the way to go.

[TechSY730]

So the challenge is to make how to make the AI defend well enough with the FS stuff, but not be too hard to beat without it. And a dynamic defensive strength based on what a player builds is generally a bad idea.

Is this the challenge?

[keith.lamothe]

So the challenge is to make how to make the AI defend well enough with the FS stuff, but not be too hard to beat without it. And a dynamic defensive strength based on what a player builds is generally a bad idea.

Is this the challenge?

Roughly.  Currently the AI does a decent job responding offensively to the threat of a Spire-Human alliance, but it doesn't beef up its defenses accordingly (to be honest, because it's already throwing just about everything at you, but I digress).  It's offensive response is proportional to the number of city hubs, and the defensive one could be too. 

But the extras shouldn't be proportional to the actual firepower possessed by the humans because then there's little/no actual gain for the human in increasing firepower. 

And it certainly shouldn't get tougher in response to offensive-use of spire capital ships.  Then we're back to the situations like when flying an armored golem onto an AI world would likely result in an immediate spawning of a ton of AI ships on that planet, seeming to defeat the whole point.

[Sunshine!]

The fetch-quests to get the shards are tedious, they take way too long.  I'd rather see the time to recover a shard decreased, and have the AI attack runs shifted to other points in the game.  Or, have the AI pursuit ships continue to spawn for another couple cycles after the shard reaches a home planet (last ditch attempt before it gives up and decides to go back to constructing massive exogalactic forces). 

Another problem is that the fixed shard speeds mean a player has to fend off significantly more attacks on faster game speeds.  By which I mean, even though the spawn rate for different game speeds is the same, the speed differential between the shard and the pursuing ships means the shard comes under attack faster on normal/blitz, with 4x the damage against it than it would experience in Epic.  It's probably taking 8x(16x) the amount of damage in normal(blitz) because of how fast the AI can respond, and the attack rate/damage boost from Normal.  I don't know which difficulty it's balanced to be played under, but it's definitely a consideration.

I agree with other posters that a player's normal ships simply become obsolete once FS gets significantly underway.

Is there any thought of adding optional campaigns for the Zenith or Neinzul in the future?  Neinzul could be to reunite the Roaming Enclaves into one hive mind and would be more dynamic/mobile gameplay rather than the static-point gameplay that Fallen Spire has (not sure how this would work), and Zenith Remnant may be something along the lines of opening up an Exogalactic Wormhole by somehow harnessing the various Zenith factions currently existing, and will focus more on providing excess knowledge (seeing as they don't have much of a military force left I guess, but tons of know-how) and maybe some limited ability to produce golems.  Maybe for the Zenith it could be a little stranger in that you need to actively protect Zenith Mining Golems from AI responses as part of it, to gather enough resources to construct a large enough power source to open an exogalactic wormhole?

[keith.lamothe]

The fetch-quests to get the shards are tedious, they take way too long.

Do you find capturing distant ARS/Advanced-factory planets to be tedious?  Planet-taking in general?  Deepstriking?

I'm just trying to figure out where it's different than those.

Another problem is that the fixed shard speeds mean a player has to fend off significantly more attacks on faster game speeds.  By which I mean, even though the spawn rate for different game speeds is the same, the speed differential between the shard and the pursuing ships means the shard comes under attack faster on normal/blitz, with 4x the damage against it than it would experience in Epic.  It's probably taking 8x(16x) the amount of damage in normal(blitz) because of how fast the AI can respond, and the attack rate/damage boost from Normal.  I don't know which difficulty it's balanced to be played under, but it's definitely a consideration.

When shard speed was tied to combat style I had it spawn less frequently on epic.  When I changed the speed to be fixed regardless of combat style I removed that modifier.  It now takes the same number of real-time seconds to move the shard from the recovery point to the homeworld, and the same number of chase fleets spawn.

The chase fleets do catch you faster, yes, and on Normal combat is more deadly than Epic.  I'm not sure what could reasonably be done about that.  The shards have so much hp that it's not really supposed to be a big deal unless you just can't maintain a fleet presence around the shard.

I agree with other posters that a player's normal ships simply become obsolete once FS gets significantly underway.

If you have few enough battlefields that you can cover them all with capital ships, then yes, fleet ships won't be very necessary.  But if you're trying to fight off an attack of 1000 AI ships and you can't spare any capital ships, fleet ships and turrets still do the job.

Is there any thought of adding optional campaigns for the Zenith or Neinzul in the future?

If I can figure out what went wrong here and ways to fix or avoid those problems, then yes  Obviously up to Chris on whether he wants me to spend time on other campaigns.

[BobTheJanitor]

Do you find capturing distant ARS/Advanced-factory planets to be tedious?  Planet-taking in general?  Deepstriking?

I'm just trying to figure out where it's different than those.

You don't have to crawl an ARS back to your homeworld while under attack from all sides. Actually the attack part is fun, but the preparation seems to take forever. Maybe I'm over-defending, but it seems like I either need to take every world between me and the shard world, or at least substantially neuter them and set up beachheads with turret defenses to be sure that I can get it back safely. If it's intended that you can just send a fleet over in transports, grab the shard, and then walk it back right through fully functioning AI worlds, then I may just be making it too tedious on myself. I will say that I have not yet finished the FS campaign, but I am getting to the point where seeing that I have to rescue yet another shard is starting to elicit a groan.

[Sunshine!]

With the planet taking, deepstriking, normal fleet operations kind of thing, there are smaller parts to it that can be taken separately.  So yes, getting to an ARS may be tedious if it's 6 planets away, but picking and choosing the planets, colonizing them, neutering nearby planets, there's always something going on that's getting towards an ultimate specific goal of getting to the AI homeworld, and it doesn't always require a full fleet action.  I think the "battlefields within battlefields" thought process for how planets were constructed to be dealt with is the main point making this process not tedious.  Take out a guard post, retreat to deal with something else, pop back in and take out another few guard posts, deal with the response, there's a nice feeling of progression.  Also, once you've taken out the ARS planet and colonized it, that ARS is instantly yours - no need to drag it back to your homeworld, and it provides an immediate benefit (mk1/mk2 of a new ship type), plus the planetary benefits if you can hold it (+3k knowledge, mostly).

Shard recovery is a decent chunk of time that you need to devote a good portion of your fleet to babysitting an object, with nothing really being advanced until the shard actually gets to your home planet, and even then there are so many resources involved that just having the shard doesn't really mean anything, and it doesn't really advance a player's position in the galaxy until you've blown over a million of each resource.  I realize that playing the FS campaign is supposed to shift difficulty to the beginning/middle of the game and postpone the rewards until later (opposite the normal game, where rewards are beginning/mid with grabbing ARS and such), but some kind of immediate reward for successfully grabbing a shard would be a nice touch.

About the normal/epic discrepancy, it's not really been much of a problem, just wanted to bring it up for a balance question type thing.

Forgot to say this in the previous post, but overall I think this campaign was an excellent first attempt, and has been quite fun and different than the normal game.  Consider it AI War Campaign 1.0, and in a year or so you'll be up to AI War Campaign 3.0, with lots learned and huge changes to the mechanics to make things better.

I largely agree with bob's post above mine (ninja'd!)

Edit: I've also been on the LotS demo, since I'm waiting for it to come out on Steam (so comments on capital ships making fleet ships obsolete isn't EXTREMELY well informed), but really if there were any reason I were going to not pursue the Fallen Spire campaign, it would be shard recovery.