Fallen Spire feedback

[keith.lamothe]

In contrast, the shard recovery missions are all the same. This would not be so bad if the shards weren't so agonizingly slow.

Well, one thing I could do is make the shards much faster (and thus make the actual flight-back-home mostly trivial) and have the "chase" group be a bigger one-time spawn rather than a small spawn every minute or so that the shard is 'in the air'.  That would probably result in more consistent difficulty.

That would lose some of the things I like about the current chase stuff, but it might be better overall.

And on the colony ships thing: making the colony ships available at some number of hubs without the capitol would be technically challenging as there's really nowhere to stick the tech menu (nothing in the game has both a buy and tech menu, and I don't want to try to change that).  My guess would be to make the capitol available at 3 hubs and have the signal for the final shard not show up until you had 4 cities (but that 4th would be built without a shard recovery, though I'd probably have to reduce the cost of the colony ship tech, etc).

Another more interesting thing to explore is random variations on the actual missions, but that involves a lot more coding, etc.  Mostly I'm looking for relatively simple solutions that remove "barriers to fun" rather than complex ones that try to actually extend the original scope (that could be even more fun; but I've already got a main project).

[Sunshine!]

Making the shard faster, with an immediate exo-galactic spawn (split into various attack groups for attacking the shard, as well as player planets) may make things more interesting, because then it's less "babysit the shard" and more "oh crap, the AI is upset" - gives more to do with having multiple fronts to try to defend, rather than just funneling all your dudes into the same system as the shard.

[keith.lamothe]

Making the shard faster, with an immediate exo-galactic spawn (split into various attack groups for attacking the shard, as well as player planets) may make things more interesting, because then it's less "babysit the shard" and more "oh crap, the AI is upset" - gives more to do with having multiple fronts to try to defend, rather than just funneling all your dudes into the same system as the shard.

Well, even now the mid/late chase spawns also send battlegroups after your homeworld, etc.  But yea, I get the general idea.

[BobTheJanitor]

For shard retrievals, as far as what makes them somewhat grindy to me, is all the lead-up to the process. There's a ton of preparation. In general, I have been sending in a big fleet and completely flattening each planet between me and the shard. Guard posts, fleet ships, everything. Even taking out the wormhole guard posts. (which may be pointless, but I want the AI to reinforce as little as possible on the way back) Then I'll leave a guard force there to mop up reinforcement spawns, or if it's next to one of my planets I might just build a beachhead and turret it up completely. If the planet has anything remotely useful on it, I'll just go ahead and capture it, even if maybe it's not something I normally would have put on my to-capture list. That might not be the case though, so I just end up with a few neutered worlds in a row. Then I usually take the last world, although I'm starting to think that's pointless too. I don't think the survey ship requires supply? Maybe I should go back and check that. But it helps to be able to build some static defenses there. So anyway, now I've spent an hour or two killing guard posts without any return on my effort except for a string of worlds that I can't really do anything worthwhile with.

Once I actually bring in the survey ship and find the shard, then the happy fun time starts. I don't think anyone is expressing distaste with the actual retrieval once the shard is in motion. Then it's all excitement and ships racing in from every direction while you try and crawl it on home. It's just the prep time is a lot of work without much of a hook to keep you at it. And your forces are so concentrated on that work that you can't really expand anywhere else. I was taking a promising line of planets with a couple ARSes and a fab, but I had to stop that because I just couldn't split my firepower that much and keep the FS story moving. But that's a side point.

The main thing that separates shard retrieval from deep striking for a normal goal is that you have to bring it back home. Leading to all the planet neutering. Now I mentioned earlier, maybe I'm being too careful and we're supposed to be bringing them back across active AI worlds. I could surely give that a shot, but between the forces that warp in to chase the shard and the existing forces, guardians, and guard posts on a full AI world, it seems like a bad idea.

How about this: Would there be anything to the idea of finding the shard and then building a sufficiently advanced teleportation device that only works for spire shards in order to teleport it back to the nearest city hub (thus only possible once you've got a city hub)? You could give it a specific time-to-activate that can't be sped up by engineers (because of its spire specific technology involving the growing time of warp-attuned crystals or somesuch explanation, I'm sure you can come up with something good) so you have a set time delay during which you can have angry AI ships converge on that planet to beat the stuffing out of it. You could increase the time for later shards for increased difficulty. Then you get the same effect of a delay before the shard is safe while fighting off AI ships, but it still allows the player to play it out much more like a normal deep-strike mission, instead of a veterinarian assault. (Which is the term I've just invented for neutering a whole lot of planets in a row)

Making the shard faster would sort of do this, depending on how fast we're talking. If it's fast enough, you hardly need to escort it, you can just zip it back home and deal with the problem there. But the challenge for waiting on construction time for a teleportation device is that your forces are out there, away from reinforcements, so you have to plan ahead. If it could race back to the homeworld and then you could just defend it there, you're already at your seat of strength. I like the idea of feeling cut off and holding off increasingly stronger assaults while you desperately watch a clock tick down to the final second when you can safely teleport your shard away. Of course, at that point your remaining forces at that planet probably get turned into a fine paste... but hey, that's what it's like to be a hero sometimes.

[keith.lamothe]

veterinarian assault

That made me laugh really hard

Anyway, yea, that's good feedback.  It's not just the shard speed.

And in general the goal is that those retrieval missions should be possible without neutering every world in the middle, or capturing any of them.  Capture can certainly make things easier, particularly for getting supply so you can set up forcefields to block wormholes, etc.  But you certainly shouldn't have to do it universally.  I may not have succeeded in balancing it properly for that

Though I imagine that in the later ones it's almost trivial to have your capital ships vaporize any guard post on the path to the target planet.  But getting all of them could take a while.

I like the idea of having an option to "warp" the shard back, but having to actually stand your ground in order for it to work.

[Draco18s]

Here's another question, and possible alteration that might reduce some of the hair pulling:

Do shards ALWAYS show up 2 jumps out?  If so, part of the frustration stems from the "do the scan now, then expand" because it sets the shard's location in stone before the player has committed to taking new worlds, allowing the first (one, two, three) shards being in "friendly" space, so to speak.*

Making it highly advantageous to do the start of the campaign early, rather than waiting until the midgame when it becomes "easier" to fend off the strike forces, but at the expense of having to murder/neuter extra systems and incurring the respective AIP cost.

*"Oh I was going to take that planet anyway." vs. "I took the planet and the shard is over there, frak."

[Sir t]

Well, that's not true. My homeworld just died right now and the shard was not even at the first wormhole. This was the second shard, ie the one you need to make your first spire colony.

Also last night the game I was running, the third shard was destroyed (I think, I had to leave it to get my ships back to save my home planet) and there was no respawn of as shard, so losing a shard seems to end the campaign. That caused me to restart.

Some comments from someone very new to AI War (I actually played it early last year around the time of the zenith retirement but got sidetracked) and from someone pretty crap (I could not kill the AI in the tutorial when i restarted last week! I scouted the AI homeworld with transports (LOL) and got flattened by the counterattack, and it started reinforcing like mad after...  )

First, once i got my city i had not done any turret research (gee i wonder why i kept losing my colonies) and there was no indication that the spire guns were tied to turret research. It said I had to research better gun and shield tech and I was at a loss as to where to do it. I didn't realize it till I snuck a look at the walkthrough.

Second don't take out the first shard mission. Its not bad at all and the building you get at least gives you some resources once you build it, which you need and is a decent reward for doing it. And it does at least warn you that the AI comes after you hot and heavy once you get a shard, though maybe not to the extent that it does.

Third it takes too bloody long to build the spire buildings. Cutting that in half would help the grind aspect immensely.

Fourth it does take a long while to bring the shards home, and defending the shard and running home defensefor such an extended period is beyond my present capabilities. The game last night I got it the first home simply because I actually had a Hive Golem escorting it, but in the second one I had the Golem at home running home defence against the AI raids. With the second mission, where you find the refugees, I simply dropped the ship in a transport and ran for it. No problem,, enjoyable slightly different to the first one.

I think the real problem is that the shard missions are too samey. You get a location, you go there and you have to run a gauntlet again and again and Again and AGAIN. The definition of grind really is doing the same thing over and over and over again. You don't need to have less shards really, what you need is variety. For instance, how about a mission if you had to build a level 3 science station at a specified system and defend that while it ran a scan of the system, and once complete a shard would pop out a warp gate you built at your homeworld? Thats a different kind of mission that accomplishes the same thing as the long slow fightback to your home planet AGAIN) (plus you would get the knowlage the science station harvests as an extra reward). What about a human colony calls for help, and when you rescue them they give you a shard as a reward? (and maybe you have to get it back to your homeworld to use it, which at least gives you a safe starting point) Why not find another refugee ship again instead of one of the shards? That would break up the monotony

I mean, in many ways every planet in the game is the same thing fight over and over, but every planet is actually different. The small differences actually make the game interesting. Thats the key to making this campaign work. and then there is the whole AI war philossphy of forcing hard choices on the player. There might be some way of forcing a change.

As for the OMGFTWBBQ of the spire ships making the game less interesting, it would make sense that the AI would beef up its homeworlds once it realizes you are fielding spire ships. I don't see it doing that as a problem per sai.

I hope these thoughts help you guys out. I think with a little tweaking, not very much, the campaign could be really steller. You don't even have to reduce the number of cities to do it, just vary the experience a little.

What a first post..

[Draco18s]

Also last night the game I was running, the third shard was destroyed (I think, I had to leave it to get my ships back to save my home planet) and there was no respawn of as shard, so losing a shard seems to end the campaign. That caused me to restart.

Ah, so that is still there.  I think that's what happened to my 5th shard, the one time I was trying to do the campaign.

Second don't take out the first shard mission. Its not bad at all and the building you get at least gives you some resources once you build it, which you need and is a decent reward for doing it.

Not really. >.>
By mid-early game I'm actually wasting resources, not in a deficit.
It's the very early game when I'm building 8-16 tractor turrets and 2-4 Force Fields (before I'm even THINKING of looking for shards) that I run a deficit.
The only other time I hit 0 is building Z-Trader items (side note: from 999,999 you can build 35% of a z-gen before hitting 0).

I think the real problem is that the shard missions are too samey. You get a location, you go there and you have to run a gauntlet again and again and Again and AGAIN. The definition of grind really is doing the same thing over and over and over again. You don't need to have less shards really, what you need is variety. For instance, how about a mission if you had to build a level 3 science station at a specified system and defend that while it ran a scan of the system, and once complete a shard would pop out a warp gate you built at your homeworld? Thats a different kind of mission that accomplishes the same thing as the long slow fightback to your home planet AGAIN) (plus you would get the knowlage the science station harvests as an extra reward). What about a human colony calls for help, and when you rescue them they give you a shard as a reward? (and maybe you have to get it back to your homeworld to use it, which at least gives you a safe starting point) Why not find another refugee ship again instead of one of the shards? That would break up the monotony

To quote myself.

This.  Thisthisthisthisthisthis.

[keith.lamothe]

Also last night the game I was running, the third shard was destroyed (I think, I had to leave it to get my ships back to save my home planet) and there was no respawn of as shard, so losing a shard seems to end the campaign. That caused me to restart.

Ah, so that is still there.  I think that's what happened to my 5th shard, the one time I was trying to do the campaign.

Well, the bug there isn't that it doesn't respawn, it's that it doesn't tell you (discreetly) to savescum or choose to continue without the rest of the scripted stuff.  Building in need-to-respawn detection and whatnot would be very complex code-wise.

On the sameness of the missions, there are a number of things that could be done to make them more distinct.  One thing that comes to mind is having it not always be correct about where the shard is to be found.  So you go and survey a planet, and it says "sorry, now we think it's over there", etc.  That would make the whole "glass the entire path from there to my homeworld" strategy less viable.  But it might also be very frustrating, and not in a good way.  Thoughts?

[Sir t]

I think that would make it even more annoying and grindy, not less. "Oh god, I have to search all these other Fing planets now? *sounds of head walloping off table*"

I appreciate what you can actually do is probably limited by code though

Well, the bug there isn't that it doesn't respawn, it's that it doesn't tell you (discreetly) to savescum or choose to continue without the rest of the scripted stuff.  Building in need-to-respawn detection and whatnot would be very complex code-wise.

I think at least adding a Journal entry that the Shard is gone and "We have to continue with what we have" when the shard goes boom would serve that purpose, rather than silence.

[BobTheJanitor]

On the sameness of the missions, there are a number of things that could be done to make them more distinct.  One thing that comes to mind is having it not always be correct about where the shard is to be found.  So you go and survey a planet, and it says "sorry, now we think it's over there", etc.  That would make the whole "glass the entire path from there to my homeworld" strategy less viable.  But it might also be very frustrating, and not in a good way.  Thoughts?

Good if there's an alternate way to get it back, frustrating if I have to push it back at turtle speeds, uphill, in a blizzard, with AI ships nipping at my heels. With all else being equal, this would probably lead to me building an even longer path of neutered worlds. But a sort of mini-defense of the survey ship while it does its thing, hop around to a planet or two and repeat, then finally finding it and having to build a teleporter or escort it back at higher speeds might be fun. If the survey ship was changed to be able to gather knowledge (but maybe only on hostile worlds) you could get a little bonus while you were doing this, which would make it more rewarding. (Maybe limit it if that's too good? It can only gather 1-2k per planet but not everything?) Alternate thought, instead of the shard being molasses slow, it could be fast and have a speed boosting effect so you can race your whole fleet back once you find it, thus giving another way to get through AI worlds without neutering. Anything that avoids paving a highway with crushed AI ships between me and the shard is a good thing.

Edit: You could say it's triangulating the signal maybe. Go to this world, take a scan, go to this world, take a scan, then you find it, go there and grab it. But mini-rewards would be important to make this non-aggravating.

[Panopticon]

I don't really like the sound of a wild goose chase, personally.

The idea of standing ground to warp the Shard home sounds very intriguing. Different ways to accomplish the same goal is something I appreciate when it's possible. I've started my second FS campaign, and I think I'm going to approach it a bit differently this time. I think I'll try to raid for the Shards instead of securing the world the Shard is located on and a path home.

If this sort of thing is a viable strategy, maybe something that would really help with all of this is some strategic guidance in the form of some journal entries or additions to existing entries. Outline some possible approaches and also suggest that lateral thinking (as always in this game) is also an option.

[Draco18s]

I think that would make it even more annoying and grindy, not less. "Oh god, I have to search all these other Fing planets now? *sounds of head walloping off table*"

Agreed.

[Sir t]

I don't really like the sound of a wild goose chase, personally.

The idea of standing ground to warp the Shard home sounds very intriguing. Different ways to accomplish the same goal is something I appreciate when it's possible. I've started my second FS campaign, and I think I'm going to approach it a bit differently this time. I think I'll try to raid for the Shards instead of securing the world the Shard is located on and a path home.

If this sort of thing is a viable strategy, maybe something that would really help with all of this is some strategic guidance in the form of some journal entries or additions to existing entries. Outline some possible approaches and also suggest that lateral thinking (as always in this game) is also an option.

to be honest the only neutering that needs doing is gate raiding. The text says that the spawns come through the warp gates so killing some of those night affect it. most of the mobs come from outside the systems anyway

[Panopticon]

I'm thinking more along the lines of set up a quick beachhead with spiders or grav turrets in the system in between me and the system that needs to be surveyed. Have a transport with a bunch of fighters/whatever at the beachead. Cloaker Starship and Survey ship enter the system with the subspace signal. During the last moments of the survey bring in the transport and unload. Survey ends, exfiltrate the Survey ship with the Cloaker, secure and escort shard through the beachhead. Adjust as necessary. I don't want to just hit warp gates left and right. That could create a bad set of circumstances.