Apparently I'm Spoiled

[LaughingThesaurus]

Exploiting good luck, strengths on your end, and weaknesses on the enemy's end, this is not cheese. This is strategy.

[chemical_art]

Exploiting good luck, strengths on your end, and weaknesses on the enemy's end, this is not cheese. This is strategy.

Agreed.

Cheese is something that, more then average (luck) has more strengths then weakness by a significant margin.

[LaughingThesaurus]

I'd say cheese is where you do something outside of the realms of what was intended by the game's basic gameplay/RNG. 16 homeworld nonsense can be cheesy because the game's not balanced around that. Turning on superweapons or turning off waves or abuse of the zenith trader, etc, all of that can easily be cheesy because the circumstances generated by those don't appear in the natural world.

But sure using those strategically is totally going to give you an upper hand. Perhaps too much of an upper hand.
For instance I turned off superweapons on a game I just started on 7/7 after the guard post buff. Idk if it was the guard post buff or the fact that I don't have spirecraft anymore, but it is a completely different ballgame. Anything I can do to approach a guard post and live is met with like 4 raider guardians toasting a command station, then getting toasted by the fleet I kindly left out of range of the MLRS guard post that would vaporize them in seconds flat.

[chemical_art]

For instance I turned off superweapons on a game I just started on 7/7 after the guard post buff. Idk if it was the guard post buff or the fact that I don't have spirecraft anymore, but it is a completely different ballgame. Anything I can do to approach a guard post and live is met with like 4 raider guardians toasting a command station, then getting toasted by the fleet I kindly left out of range of the MLRS guard post that would vaporize them in seconds flat.

For better or worst, the current guardposts seem to be built around a mix or superweapons. I feel they are still glass cannons, except now they truly are more "cannon" then "glass". Guardposts still die to blobs fine, they just hit hard in the process, to the detriment of anything but a blob.

[Faulty Logic]

There are some save scums mentioned, I'm going to assume there were some more that did not get mentioned. (?)

I wrote about all the times I had to restart do to the AI legitimately getting me. I did have to restart quite a few time to prevent the cloaker blink from ruining a run on the HWs, but those shouldn't be considered for balancing/cheesiness.

As for RNG-mugging, I keep generating new seeds until I have a fleetship I like or a good map position. I usually reject 2-3 before settling.

As for complete visibility, I find scouting tedious and easy (especially on lattice or spokes, my two favorite maps) which are the perfect criteria to disable it.

I think superweapons hard 4, in general and on diff 10 in particular, are too nice to the player.

I don't have a good cheese definition: I'll know it when I see it. I didn't use any cheese by my own vague and probably biased idea this game.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, there's no particular exact definition of cheese.  Usually it's either "doing something stinky in the lobby, with no self-illusions that they're basically cheating" or "exploiting some imbalance or unintended behavior that thus needs to be fixed or rebalanced".  Occasionally I've leave something like the latter around for a while (old Riots, old Martyrs, etc) because they're really fun, but eventually it needs to be dealt with.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Yeah, I just don't like blobbing. Sure, I could just throw all of my ships at it, but I get a lot more enjoyment out of doing it efficiently. I'm a bit crazy for score attacks and rhythm games where you can generally succeed without much trouble, but doing well is the really hard part.