Author Topic: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?  (Read 13792 times)

Offline x4000

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Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« on: September 06, 2016, 01:12:52 pm »
Sparked by this:

This kind of sounds like the Reprisal mechanism.  Which, while I don't like it when used for Reprisal (when the accumulation trigger is "Player loses ships"), could actually be a good way to do a retaliation mechanism when the accumulation trigger is "Player does offensive stuff".

This is an interesting point.  Keith's explanation of salvage and reprisal (kinda related to one another, but not completely) was:

Quote from: keith.lamothe
Basically the literal mechanic is that:
- an AI ship dying on a human planet increment that planet's salvage counter by some portion of the ship's metal cost
- each second, a certain % of the total salvage on the planet is reclaimed by the player; the efficiency (% wasted) of that depends on which command station is present (home gets best; logistical-III next, on down to military-I)

The flip-side mechanic is reprisal, where:
- a human ship dying on an AI planet increments that AI's reprisal counter by some portion of the ship's strength (roughly corresponding to metal cost)
- when that passes a certain threshold (relative to normal wave strength) the AI schedules a reprisal wave a few minutes later; and when that launches it sends all the accumulated strength back at the player in a wave (the Mimic AI type actually sends back the same types of ships that the player lost, which gets !Fun!)

The meta-goal being that if your fleet wipes you won't have to sit around for half an hour (real-time) waiting for it to rebuild; instead you have a few minutes to prepare for a nasty counter attack, which will either kill you or give you lots of extra metal to help rebuild your fleet.

The secondary meta-goal is that tactics based on throwing away entire fleets have a trade-off other than real-time waiting. This doesn't tend to hit neinzul tactics very hard (I still use "dock cannon" tactics with them and the reprisals aren't too bad), but it does make the loss of a core of starships, or the careless handling of any fleetball, hurt more.

In other words: you still set the pace of the tennis match, but the AI will return your last serve

I'm not sure if anyone has objections to salvage or thoughts there, but if so honestly that should be a different thread I think.

The motivations behind reprisal are interesting and make sense to me, but I can also see the objection to it.  The AI reacting to you doing "offensive stuff" makes sense, but also the AI reacting to "hey you jerk that just keep throwing walls of dead bodies at me" makes sense from a balance standpoint.

Perhaps more relevant would be honestly a morale system for ships that are in a battlefield where they are just getting routinely trounced.  Aka, morale goes down by x amount for every squad death above n on a planet.  And then morale improves by y amount per second if morale is dampened on a planet.  Effectiveness of the human ships on that planet are dampened in some way by z amount based on morale being lower that x amount.

This would only apply to AI planets, since on player planets that would be maddening.  Everyone hates morale systems most of the time, and I am one of those people.  But in this case, it would be one way to stall the too-cheesy tactic of "just keep throwing little rocks at the big rock over and over and over with no consequences until it breaks."

With (potentially) the new system of techs, this would also be a non-ship-focused area where you could potentially invest some science, basically to make your pilots have less negative response to morale drops.  (Yes in this game I see the ships as potentially being piloted, whereas in AI War Classic they were not).
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Offline chemical_art

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Re: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« Reply #1 on: September 06, 2016, 01:15:37 pm »
I would be fine with this with the caveat that suicidal units or alien units (neinzul) do not affect this mechanic both in contributing to it and do not suffer from it. They are meant to die so if any unit was to be autopiloted it would be them.
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Offline x4000

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Re: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« Reply #2 on: September 06, 2016, 01:17:14 pm »
For sure, there would have to be some exceptions to that.
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Offline Cinth

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Re: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« Reply #3 on: September 06, 2016, 01:23:15 pm »
As someone who burns really big fleetballs repeatedly, I don't like it.  :P
Quote from: keith.lamothe
Opened your save. My computer wept. Switched to the ST planet and ship icons filled my screen, so I zoomed out. Game told me that it _was_ totally zoomed out. You could seriously walk from one end of the inner grav well to the other without getting your feet cold.

Offline Orelius

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Re: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« Reply #4 on: September 06, 2016, 01:28:27 pm »
Personally, I think that if you have the economy to sustain it, shutting down the killbots by overflowing their kill counters should be a viable tacticc.

Refleeting is already really expensive and painful, if someone really wants to inflict that upon themselves then that's punishment enough.

Offline chemical_art

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Re: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« Reply #5 on: September 06, 2016, 01:34:12 pm »
As someone who burns really big fleetballs repeatedly, I don't like it.  :P

Personally, I think that if you have the economy to sustain it, shutting down the killbots by overflowing their kill counters should be a viable tacticc.

Refleeting is already really expensive and painful, if someone really wants to inflict that upon themselves then that's punishment enough.

I would imagine that the timers decay, so that by the time you could refleet a whole big fleetball the counter would be reset.

If your economy was over the top, just throw the fleetball somewhere else next time, then come back to the first one?


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Offline Cinth

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Re: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« Reply #6 on: September 06, 2016, 01:38:18 pm »
That would depend on the star map layout.

I should clarify, I don't care for a morale system.  Reprisals are fun and salvage should be a bit more even across the board for the different cc.
Quote from: keith.lamothe
Opened your save. My computer wept. Switched to the ST planet and ship icons filled my screen, so I zoomed out. Game told me that it _was_ totally zoomed out. You could seriously walk from one end of the inner grav well to the other without getting your feet cold.

Offline chemical_art

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Re: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« Reply #7 on: September 06, 2016, 01:42:45 pm »
That would depend on the star map layout.

I should clarify, I don't care for a morale system.  Reprisals are fun and salvage should be a bit more even across the board for the different cc.

I agree, I have had my share of Snake Fallen Spire games  ;)

So I imagine that for this idea either:
A) The timer on this is static, so that in the early game it is discouraged but the last third of the game refleeting times are larger then the timer itself, so that it doesn't matter anyway.
B) There can be techs to shorten this timer, so again that it keeps up with the economy of the player.


Just to be clear I am a huge fan of the blunt strategy of fighting. I had one 10/10 game where I defeated the AI so soundly that their CPA's were failing for they were out of ships (bug abuse is real).
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Offline Cinth

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Re: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« Reply #8 on: September 06, 2016, 01:50:13 pm »
Nah, this comes from beating Aid with fleets of mk 1 fleet/ss balls.  It takes a whole lot of those to crack some planets   :o

Timers just encourage netflix time.
Quote from: keith.lamothe
Opened your save. My computer wept. Switched to the ST planet and ship icons filled my screen, so I zoomed out. Game told me that it _was_ totally zoomed out. You could seriously walk from one end of the inner grav well to the other without getting your feet cold.

Offline chemical_art

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Re: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« Reply #9 on: September 06, 2016, 01:58:01 pm »
Nah, this comes from beating Aid with fleets of mk 1 fleet/ss balls.  It takes a whole lot of those to crack some planets   :o

Timers just encourage netflix time.

But...MK II units from a performance standpoint are just as good (2x the cost for 2x the benefit...)

And...that isn't a whole fleet ball, that is the cheapest fleet ball. Which seems wasteful late game. (cheap is not always good)

I must disagree with your wave tactics. The current reprisal mechanics already hurt you bad over this. (never thought I would say that.)

(This is all in light heart)
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Offline Cinth

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Re: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« Reply #10 on: September 06, 2016, 02:03:47 pm »
It's not always about min/maxing your play.  Sometimes I do things just because I can.  Also, going full defensive on K spending doesn't afford you much in terms of offensive units.

No worries CA.  Posting from my phone,  so keeping it short.
Quote from: keith.lamothe
Opened your save. My computer wept. Switched to the ST planet and ship icons filled my screen, so I zoomed out. Game told me that it _was_ totally zoomed out. You could seriously walk from one end of the inner grav well to the other without getting your feet cold.

Offline kasnavada

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Re: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« Reply #11 on: September 06, 2016, 02:06:33 pm »
If you abused the reprisal mechanics, like for example letting your heavily defended homeworld open to waves, then losing ships actually made you gain metal if the difficulty level was high enough, which in turn let you feed the war effort in the first place.

One of the reason why I think salvage needs to go.

About the reprisal idea above, morale, not sure. That means that you'll have to stop fighting from time to time ? Not sure I like that.

Offline Tridus

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Re: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« Reply #12 on: September 06, 2016, 02:09:10 pm »
The thing I don't like about morale is that it's timer based: if it goes down, I need to wait it out.

Reprisal gives me something to do if I get wiped out: scramble to prepare for an incoming attack instead of just waiting for the fleet rebuild timer. Given that the AI is using my own salvaged ships to do it, it's effectively "free" on their end in terms of resources, so why wouldn't they use it? It's not costing them anything from what they're doing elsewhere.

Salvage on the human end I think would have worked better if the spread between Command Station values wasn't so high. I probably want the AI attacking a military command world (to help survive the reprisal), but those give so little salvage that it's largely meaningless.

I think they accomplished what they set out to do pretty effectively.

Offline chemical_art

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Re: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« Reply #13 on: September 06, 2016, 02:10:58 pm »
It's not always about min/maxing your play.  Sometimes I do things just because I can.  Also, going full defensive on K spending doesn't afford you much in terms of offensive units.

No worries CA.  Posting from my phone,  so keeping it short.

I appreciate it, but just came up with another exception for this rule:

If a planet can only be approached from one way (technically it would be two, one from player and one from AI) then it would also be immune from this mechanic. Sometime you just have to storm a position, no matter the cost.
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Offline Orelius

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Re: Tell my your thoughts on reprisal! ....morale?
« Reply #14 on: September 06, 2016, 02:15:55 pm »
I have a feeling that if someone really wants to take down a planet with suicide attacks, it's going to be possible using whatever exceptions exist.  In that case, I see no real reason to limit it to certain shiptypes, like railpods.  If I can spam railpods to get rid of that rudegesture ai subcommander, why can't I do it with transports of fleet ships?

 

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