Some Negative Feedback [Sorry]

[Sir t]

There are several names you could give Siege Starships to exemplify their newer role. "Monitor" comes to mind, or Gunship, pocket battleship, Artillery Destroyer, Ship Destroyer. I guess it should have destroyer in its name as thats pretty much what it does. But the fact is for the cost I'd rather have a bomber starship, which is faster, cheaper and can punch forcefields and can wollop starships. ts also competing with raid starships that can just ignore shields, hit hard and get out of trouble. For the amount of use it has on attack its just too slow to follow a fast moving attack fleet and will get devoured by the AI if you have to run, and its not a massive amount of use on defense as once the AI starships are gone its basically sitting there. I think its pretty much a victim of the same thing that resulted form the splitting of Leech starships from raid starships, only the dreadnought got split and split again leaving this big, really expensive slowfiring gunship that's really without a role as it cant really punch forcefields anymore and is too slow to bring along. You could think of a new role for the model. Maybe make it something like a weaker version of an orbital mass driver to emphasis the "big long range gun" aspect. The AI no longer uses turrets so using it as an anti sniper turret ship is out as well.

Flagships are good for the boosts they give the surrounding ships. I cant comment on the overall firepower but that alone justified me bringing them along as its hard to separate their work from the fleets. They do seem a touch fragile though.

Raid Starships are a little too good at killing stations, as evidenced when the AI uses them en masse...

Blade Spawners are pure hell when the AI gets them and has moderate numbers of them on its worlds. They can literally pound your fleet to death from the other side of the map. Not sure what could be done to alter that though, but they seem a mite powerful compared with the other spire ships the AI can get. Even stealth battleships are not THAT harsh.

Other than that I haven't seen any major issues with the ship balance since the Artillery Golem was make invulnerable to radar damping in 5.0003.

[TechSY730]

until the spawning of reinforcing ships is in some way proportional to their shipcaps- eg, spawning a shipcap=15 ship costs the same as spawning 6x shipcap=90 ships (or is 6x less likely), the AI unlocking low shipcap units is always going to artifically up the difficulty.

Thankfully, they do. If a unit has only 1/2 the ship cap of the "normal" ship cap, then the AI will only be able to spawn half as many of them under the same circumstances as if they tried to spawn a ship with a normal ship cap. There are a few exceptions to this ratio(currently, neinzul ships, bombers, and frigates), and as noted, a few ships do have a hard cap, but for the most part, ratios are obeyed by the AI.

I think the real issue is that the Spire ships have like a .05 ship cap compared to the norm, but have power more along the lines of a ship with a .03 ship cap, thus, even with their absurdly low ship caps, a ship cap of them is overall more powerfull than a ship cap of other fleet ships. This most certainly needs to be tweaked.

Also, although ship cap ratios are obeyed by the AI, ship build times are not. Say the spire tractor platform has a max of 5 the AI can use on any one planet (this is on top of the normal massive penalty they have on thier spawn rates). Fine, that can be dealt with. But the AI can get almost all 5 of them in a single reinforcement. Thanks to their ludicrously high build times, humans cannot spawn their 3 or whatever anywhere near as quick. In other words, the AI can rebuild them much faster than the "build time to averager build time" ratio wold imply, making the early game (when this ratio very much matters) unnessecarily tough. Maybe a max number spawned per reinforcment cycle, in addition to their hard cap, needs to be introduced to the Spire fleet ships. (And also maybe, the Z elec bomber, the Z sentinal frigate, and the sniper ship, as they have similar inflated stats)

EDIT: I am not saying that the AI should obey build times, that would be silly. But just as the crazy low ship cap fleet ships have a hard cap on max numbers, maybe the crazy high build time fleet ships should have a hard cap on rienforcement rate.

[BobTheJanitor]

Siege Starships definitely have a personality problem now, I'm not happy with them not being able to shoot ff's, etc.  That was so much of the point behind the Siege Starship as opposed to the old Dreadnought that it came from.  Now it's back to being an anti-starship (and anti-guardian) starship for all intents and purposes.  Which is ok, I suppose, given that the Bomber Starship was added to the human arsenel after the Siege's transformation, but the Siege is no longer a Siege, and probably just needs to be renamed again and given appropriate changes to give it a more compelling role.

Very much agreed on the Siege's personality problem. What role, if any, are they really designed to fill now? Forcefields are out, obviously. Guard posts, maybe, but their range is now pointless with every guard post equipped with radar dampening, so they have to crawl at their sloooow speed into range before they can do anything useful. And that puts them in the guard post's range, so they probably die without fleet support, so it's faster to send the fleet over and just have them kill the guard post. Their range is just too small to stay outside of the range of a fortress, so using them against fortresses is suicide without first putting a fleet of bombers in the way to draw fire (and if you've got the pile of bombers there, the fortress is effectively dealt with already). I guess that leaves guardians and starships. Which my fleet ships can usually handle without trouble anyway. So what are they good for? (absolutely nothing... say it again y'all)

Their former glory was in killing guard posts from outside of counter-attack range, and ff-avoidance. Without those, I'm at a loss as to what to do with them. They usually don't ever get built in my games now unless I have already built everything else I need and I'm just looking for anything to sink resources in.

[Shrugging Khan]

They're useful against hybrids and trains, but only if you have those enabled.

Apart from that, yeah. Since everything is either radar dampened or antimatter immune...

[zebramatt]

If you wanted to repurpose them in a 'siegey' sort of way, you might make them much more hardy, with a vastly higher damage output but incredibly slow rate of fire.

Something else to consider might be a partial immunity to dampening (e.g. it's only half as effective on them) but that presents familiar problems.

[Sunshine!]

How would people feel if Stealth Battleships were given Missile ammo instead of Flame Wave?  It was the solution used for Eyebots, which I think worked fantastically, and players seem to be pretty content with the stats for Stealth Battleships so I'm not sure if I'd want to fiddle with them.  It's an expensive solution (knowledge-wise), and it's a hard-counter on defensive (which may not be desirable), but Stealth Battleships are sneaky enough (and dangerous enough) that such measures may be necessary.  It would certainly give more utility to Counter-Missile Turrets, which are probably under-used right now for their knowledge cost.

Giving Raid Starships missile ammo might work for the same reason - you can spend a ton of knowledge to deal with them, or you can put up with them.  They're not prevalent enough in AI fleets that doing so would be a huge damper on AI efforts, but since a lot of players REALLY REALLY hate raid starships, it would give them options.

Siege Starships - I've beat this one like a dead horse with regards to targeting restrictions    Along with the increased targeting capabilities, also boost speed and lower range inverse to each other, and repurpose it as a "Destroyer," and I think we'll be good.  Depending on how much range is reduced by, might actually be able to give it back its previous multi-shot capabilities.

[TechSY730]

They're useful against hybrids and trains, but only if you have those enabled.

Apart from that, yeah. Since everything is either radar dampened or antimatter immune...

They are also great gaurdian and spire ship killers.

But yea, this spamming of radar dampening and anti-matter bomb immunity is easily the number one current balance complaint in my books.
I understand Chris' desire to keep a "battlefields withen battlefields" feel, but one of the whole purposes of artillery style units is to break out of that style of combat. Forcing artillery units to conform with this style significantly decreases the desirability of artillery units.

The partial radar dampening immunity sounds like a good idea, but that adds a whole new variable that needs balancing. I think they have enough variables to balance as is.

EDIT: One easy fix would be to increase the radar dampening of guard posts (thus allowing them to be fired upon from a further distance) This would help out the longer ranged units some without destroying their intended "battlefields withen battlefields" rational.

[Red Spot]

Counter-Missile Turrets, which are probably under-used right now for their knowledge cost.

Finding yourself facing large waves of Frigates, and being able to completelly put them out of play I think those turrets are more than usefull as they are.
Same as Counter Dark-matter .. Bombards? What Bombards?

If you unlock them to counter border hostilities, I can imagine you find them expensive.

[Sunshine!]

Ah, sorry, I play on Schizo and forget most people play with homogeneous waves.  For counter-missile turrets, I only ever unlock them if I see Eyebots, or when the AIP hits ridiculous levels and there are 400 or so mk2/3 missile units in every wave along with all the other junk being thrown at me.  I've seriously never seen any ship take out my turrets as fast as MLRS do.  Ugh.  I don't generally see people talk about unlocking counter missiles though.

[Red Spot]

Not often, but my last game the AI was literally trowing everything at me with an AIP in the 2k.
8k Frigates became commen so I re-familiarized myself with them, and similair for the Dark-matter turrets in order to halt the large waves of mk4 Bombards. Kind of fun when you actually relax when you see a wave being called "few, just 8k mk4 Frigates, and not 8k Maws/Bombers/etc"

[BobTheJanitor]

EDIT: One easy fix would be to increase the radar dampening of guard posts (thus allowing them to be fired upon from a further distance) This would help out the longer ranged units some without destroying their intended "battlefields withen battlefields" rational.

The problem with that is that it's really a binary proposition. Either the dampening range is less than the guard post's attack range, or it's not. Currently it dampens to within its own attack range, so everything has to get close enough to be fired upon before it can damage the guard post. If changed so that dampening range < attack range, then you might as well not have any dampening, because it has no effect except making you move ships a bit closer to attack it. So why have it at all?

[Sir t]

Bobs right. Even as it is guard posts only get off a couple of shots before dying in most cases. The only other choice is getting rid of damping altogether and doubling or tripling the range of guardposts to compensate, but that will mean that guardposts in a lot of cases have interlocking fields of fire so that multiple could be firing at you as you are assaulting one.

One thing could be that Siege starships could be immune to radar damping from ships but NOT guardposts, which leaves them as a defense against stealth battleships and Marauders. That removes their offensive role (which they cant really fill due to their slow speed anyway) but gives them a role as a mobile defender against those raiders which turrets cant really deal with. Basically a  home defence monitor starship.

[Shrugging Khan]

How about taking it in a different way...beef the Siege Starship up, give it a higher damage output, make it immune to radar dampening, BUT require it to sit still to reload, AND, when it attacks guard posts or other high-value targets, generate specialised anti-artillery waves from the local CC that target the SiegeS specifically.

[Sir t]

If the AI could or would do that for one ship, why isn't it doing that for the big hunky fleet that's tearing the system apart?

I can live with some decree of abstraction, but at some point the level of bolloxium radiation kinda reaches lethal levels for me. 

[Shrugging Khan]

AIW ships have maximum speeds. If that didn't kill you already, you'll survive anti-artillery responses