Fallen Spire - 9/9 early troubles

[ArnaudB]

Good evening players of AI war. As the topic title's indicate, I have recently hit a wall in my attempt at doing fallen spire games.

Now, to give some context regarding my level. I tend to do mostly 9/9 games, with 9/7 when I am feeling lazy. I have won a fair amount of those, including those against red. My last non-Fallen game was a TechnoRaider(9)/TechnoSledge(9), which I won in 8h32, or 4h34 real time.

Then I went back in my attempts to win the dammed Fallen Spire campaign (4/10) in 9/9, encouraged by the recent buff to spire cities, and went for Neinzul Nester + Thief (9/9). No handicap. I have done a few games with that setup, and yet I just couldn't manage to get to my first spire city, sometime not even to the first outpost.

I have tried various bonus ships, as well as various combination. Used beachhead to cover neighbooring enemies AI before getting the shards coming. Used combination of Laser/Beam/Missile turrets, with and without tractors. Tried various setup including less fleet ships and starships in favor of more towers.

Nothing to do, the AI comes calling with overwhelming force and screw me. Military station doesn't suffice, pouring metal into energy for more units and turrets doesn't cross the threshold. Taking out (or not) warp gates nearby to gain the shard time isn't enough either. Pretty much the only thing I haven't used so far are warheads, but I feel really silly when it comes time to use them to get the first shard home.

So, are there people here who have an idea how to manage to deal with the AI response?


My aforesaid double techno non-FS 9/9, for any interested.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=259879859

[keith.lamothe]

I'm not sure, but I'm guessing recent increases in the difficulty of the game are cutting in to your margin of not-dying-ness   It may be better to fall back on 8.3/8.3 and see if that makes the difference, then perhaps work up from there.

A recent successful 9/9 FS game, if you're looking for a setup that did work: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,15693.0.html

[ArnaudB]

I am having a look at that post, thank you Keith.

My... problem, I suppose, is that I thought, hoped, that Fallen Spire games was about putting aside the (long) early phases of scouting target/raid/resources gathering of typical games in favor of a more "brawling" game. Much so because the four spire frigates that the outpost give are useful, but not strong enough to take the beating that the AI can dish out.

However, it seems that getting to the first spire city (or even the outpost) requires outright the player to seize multiple 3-4 systems at a minimum, with often the clearing of eyes and such for data center and troublesome things. Now, that's what I do in my non-fallen games, usually with a warp jammer for far-away takeover of systems. Often I use my homeworld as a defensive position for this (Damned Co-Processor, stop spawning before my homeworld!)

For Fallen Spire campaign games however, I kind of hoped to do the clearing and raid with a (possibly small) spire fleet. But in order to get those spire ships, I need to do the clearing beforehand without them!
That's kind of why I feel sad. The AIP problem too. I hunt data center and such to avoid getting an overly high aip, yet Fallen Spire was apparently designed to make the AIP "relatively" irrelevant compared to exo-forces. Plus taking out warp gates to manage the attacking AI waves when getting shards home...

Worse, I end up wasting an enormous amount of time and resources getting the shard home, then clearing the AI threat, at each step. I compared in a game, saving where I went Fallen spire (which ended up with me getting stuck dealing with ships after ships rather than getting the spire ships), and in a second attempt where I didn't go FS.

The FS-orientation got stuck, barely reaching the first spire city thank to copious amount of area mine, beam cannons, and a few warheads after three hours (real time). Comparing in the non-fallen-game where I cleared the map of Data center, Co-processor, took an archive system, and had warp-jammed station ready to use as springboard to attack anyplace of the map within 2h20.   

The recent changes doesn't seem to alter much there. I still manage to do double-nine without too much troubles (even with no minor faction, and no "cheesy" blade spawner ships)... as long as I don't go fallen spire.
There might be something I don't get, but at the moment Fallen Spire just feel like: "More complicated, more hassles, not enough fun" than anything else.

P.S: I do know about Kahuna's guide, and do use the combo defensive setups as well as beachhead.

[Peter Ebbesen]

That's kind of why I feel sad. The AIP problem too. I hunt data center and such to avoid getting an overly high aip, yet Fallen Spire was apparently designed to make the AIP "relatively" irrelevant compared to exo-forces. Plus taking out warp gates to manage the attacking AI waves when getting shards home...

I can vividly recognize your situation.

The single greatest threat in my Fallen Spire AAR game was the special forces fleet, the second greatest the regular waves. The Fallen Spire exo-forces, while certainly dangerous as such, were much less of a threat as they were infrequent and easily prepared for. Throughout the game, AIP was the real danger and what dominated strategic planning, not the Fallen Spire campaign's response to my actions.

I'd have loved to ignore AIP to play it as a wargame, but the game is so brutal if you try that on 9/9 before killing off data centres, co-processor, and taking down the superterminal that I don't see anybody doing it successfully unless they have the Zenith Trader enabled to buff up their homeworld/chokepoint for tanking.

(That Radar Jammer II allowing gravity turrets to affect wave-ships from way beyond their firing range is probably the single most powerful of the trader toys so long as it is backed up by copious spider turrets to kill the speed of ships split off from the carriers.)
[/list]

[keith.lamothe]

I think the main issue here is the difficulty level, in that I think you could probably go hog-wild with FS on 8.

That said, I understand that non-FS on 9/9 is apparently not so hard, so you might say it's misaligned.

How might this be addressed?  My first guess is to ease up a bit on the shard chases until the first city is built, and substantially buff the FS capital ships (so they can deal with the waves).  On the other hand, Peter expressed that killing massive-AIP waves with FS ship micro became mindnumbing.

So perhaps the reinforcement contribution to waves needs to cap out around 1000 AIP or something like that.  Basically at 1000 AIP you're either playing a really low difficulty, playing FS, or dead.

Thoughts?

[Peter Ebbesen]

One easy approach to this, if it is desirable from a design perspective that Fallen Spire be played more like a conquest game, and make the normal waves less relevant would be something along these lines:

First, buff the size of the FS exo-forces across the broad after the second city has been built. They are wimpy now, when you know they are coming, and this gives new players some time to learn the spire city buildings and use of the spire ships before it gets hard. Handwaving, something like a 20% buff to strength after the second city is built, 30% after third, 40% after fourth, and 50% buff from the fifth and onwards for the rest of the game would not be out of hand. Heck, you could double that and I wouldn't mind, though others might. Warheads should be an essential part of the FS player's arsenal.

Also buff the Transceiver waves significantly to make them a real threat: What I faced there was a joke, and I only had base game and Fallen Spire superweapons to combat them with; You could probably double or triple the strength of all Transceiver waves without anybody wimpering (much). Worst case people will just have to use mark 1 nukes to stop transceiver waves that defeat their shell of outer defences. (Heck, you might even end up with players winning due to the foresight of stocking up on mark 2 nukes, or the rare bird who decided to save the galaxy in the last minute or two of the countdown by firing off the Doomsday Device. )


Second, to address the AIP issue, reduce the size of regular waves/reinforcements/special forces growth based on the number of spire cities built (multiply current by a^nOfCities seems to give a reasonable progression for a~0.93 ). Justify it by the AI concentrating its forces into the exowaves.

As an interesting alternative to that way of addressing the wave issue in a conquest game, and one that it some ways works better with the existing game mechanics, how about having each completed spire hub immediately subtract 50+(10-difficulty_level)*10 AIP? Just say that the spire is using their awesome tech to jam the AI's subroutines. Since spire hubs are immortal and guarantee an increase in FS exos forever after, this should be difficult to game (dangerous words, I know), and it would help allow players to continue growing while increasing the FS danger and keeping regular wave sizes somewhat under control.

EDIT: The more I think about it, the more I think this is a better approach than the direct wave reduction from my first suggestion (a^nOfCities)., since this way of dealing with it is completely transparent to the player - if he's used to wave sizes/reinforcements being a certain size at a certain AIP given the difficulty level and AIs chosen, they'll also be the same at those levels with FS enabled - it is just that there's one more factor affecting the AIP gain and loss.



In both cases you'll still have the normal game's normal waves working as they always do until the time you build your first spire city, but that's fair - up to that point you can stop at any time and continue on playing without any negative side effects from having Fallen Spire enabled. Indeed, you could stop with the Refugee Colony and have a permanent 4 Spire Frigates and a strong HBCIV outpost without any negatives whatsoever, so reducing regular waves at that time would be a significant mistake.

[ArnaudB]

Misaligned is probably the word. One thing I thought when I played was that the AI response during shard event felt more appropriate for a 7/10 fallen spire setting than 4/10.

First though, let me establish my view of the FS-campaign gameplay as to avoid confusion on that point. Fallen Spire games are about larger battles, (much) freer conquest of systems, managing movement of the main (spire, and hopefully overwhelming) fleet for both offense and defense, higher (knowledge) spending on turrets/defenses/supportships versus less spending on "classic" fleets/starships (Fighters/Bombers, Zenith/Raid Starship). Add in dynamic control of territory (systems lost/regained to keep overflow of enemies at hold while Spire Fleet is on the offensive, further enhanced by spire cities requiring clean neighborhood).

My first guess is to ease up a bit on the shard chases until the first city is built

I would suggest both ease the AI response during events, as well as making it strong/weaker depending on Fallen Spire setting intensity.

Also, it would be good if we could use spire ships to raid the road to the next sub-signal early on, rather than having to unlock starships for knowledge just like in normal games.
->My recommendation here would be to make spire frigate available just a step quicker. Put in a lower cap for spire frigates, but make each step between outpost and spire city increase slightly the spire frigate cap, making every step completed worthwhile in itself while making the player earn every bit of that firepower.

and substantially buff the FS capital ships (so they can deal with the waves)

A hit-points buff would be very welcome on that regard. By the time you can acquire the spire frigate, the AIP waves tend to be so powerful that the spire-ships firepower is laughably awful.

Literally the only way to make the fallen spire fleet useful is to use cheesy combo with shield bearer/gravity ripper/ riot+spider, etc...

They cannot at all survive on their own, far less serve as a raiding force to clean guard post... without a combat starship fleet that we already use in normal games. (It's silly that the human spire-starship variant, despite being more expensive, is tons of time more durable and useful for raiding than a full cap of spire frigate.)

On the other hand, Peter expressed that killing massive-AIP waves with FS ship micro became mindnumbing.

A good way to avoid dealing constantly with AIP-massive waves might be to make the AI borrow ships from the Cross-waves/on galaxy ships for the AI response events, that way we would avoid cross planets-waves after every fallen spire event piling up ships till it's a tedious cleaning-up of the threat ships.

Exo-waves could use the same mechanism, draining strength from cross-planets or on-galaxy ships to buff itself.

*****

Reading Peter message after he posted it, and brainstorming some more ideas.

One was about the spire city neighborhood. It's true that the requirement to clear all nearby systems from AI presence is very annoying, but that should get better if the AIP get less relevant during FS-games.

My first thought involved the fact that the spire-city level up requirement significantly favor chokepoint maps such as X, trees, or those with few branches. So I wondered if it wouldn't be possible to add a way to make more attractive spire cities in heavily connected systems.
Right now there is way too much downside to placing spire cities on systems with 5-8 wormholes: enormous AIP from clearing all systems around, the need to clean those aforesaid systems which are sometime heavily protected, plus the 2 systems between spire cities part. In contrast, it's not only much easier to chokepoint in places with 2-3 wormholes, but also make much easier future spire city placement.
At first I was thinking about something like "need X system allies/neutral connected to level up" or "Need to have maximum X AI controlled systems neighboring" but that didn't quite fit, made too easy to clean warp gate around and tank everything on the main system. Then I read Peter's comment, and thought of the AI core shield generators.

So alternative idea: make spire cities generate a "invulnerability field" to command station of the neighboring systems. Include home, economic, and logistic command stations of all mark. Exclude military station (too cheesy), undecided on warp jammer command station.
To be clear, it would protect ONLY the command station of systems neighboring the spire city, metal and energy generators are fair game. Losing the command station of the spire city (or alternatively, losing all spire-buildings) would break the protection.

That would make rebuilding in neighboring systems far less of a chore. At worst it would be entirely possible to just leave an economic or logistic station alone in the system. Being unable to keep an energy generator could be compensated by avoiding building defenses there, and exo-harvesters would be back in the game as an interesting choice.

->The image of an AI war player having build his spire-city on a 8-wormholes system, confronted with his limited knowledge funding, split between unlocking mark II economic or logistic station when military III are already used to defend spire cities, was the kind of dilemma that inspired me for this. Between knowledge and limited station cap, it has so much potential for hair tearing. And of course, if the player lost the spire city-system... thing could suddenly become so much worse for all those suddenly no longer invincible stations.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Misaligned is probably the word. One thing I thought when I played was that the AI response during shard event felt more appropriate for a 7/10 fallen spire setting than 4/10.

Interesting.

Not have much else to compare against, those seemed pretty weak to me. The first exo wave that seemed impressive - and unfortunately the only one that seemed impressive throughout my game - was the immediate exo upon completion of the first city hub, and that was easily dealt with once I knew how to counter armored golems.

Of course, I did start shard collection and city building later that I'd have preferred to do, precisely because I knew that I'd be better off setting up a strong empire before starting the FS, so getting started on shard chases from the very start of the game would have been much harder, but even then, once I learned how to use warheads, I can't imagine that it would be all that difficult to do first 4/10 9/9AI  shard chases even after only picking up some initial 4-5 systems to form the core of my empire.

If I tried again, which I have no intention of doing anytime soon, based on knowing how the FS campaign plays out I could easily see myself doing the part up to and including the first spire city rapidly, burning AIP on lightning warheads to speed the process, and then using the initial spire fleet and non-spire ships to expand rapidly beyond that, going for the data centres, co-processors, and super terminal some times after the first city was built, either directly afterwards or in between building up the next cities. Sure, it might end up costing me a few AIP, but it would have saved me many hours as all those hunt and destroy missions as well as expansion would have been much, much, quicker with a spire fleet on hand. Doing so when I didn't know how the campaign worked would have be criminal folly; Not doing so when I do makes little sense to me.

It really shouldn't be all that much AIP from warheads to defeat those initial chases up to and including the first city construction exowave. 10-15 tops, and probably less than that.

Do you have some sort of aversion to using warheads? As a fairly new player, I took to them like a duck* to water when playing the FS campaign.


EDIT: Rereading your original post you do have some weird aversion to using warheads, which I really don't understand. Rationally, they are part of your arsenal and are there to be used, where it will save your arse or advance your entertainment by working as a time saving device.


* a heavily armed duck, admittedly.

[ArnaudB]

First, good morning and thank you for participating in this discussion.

Not have much else to compare against, those seemed pretty weak to me. The first exo wave that seemed impressive - and unfortunately the only one that seemed impressive throughout my game - was the immediate exo upon completion of the first city hub, and that was easily dealt with once I knew how to counter armored golems.

Based on your ARR Ride The Lightning, you went for it after conducting heavy scouting and taking some systems. In my games, I was attempting to do the retrieval nearly right off the bat. To me, going Fallen Spire is something that should not require you to go through the heavy scouting/raiding of non-fallen games. Spire ships, and later fleet, theoretically giving you enough firepower to do that whole raiding a whole lot faster.
That is not presently the case in Fallen games, it plays nearly the same as normal games, except it get tedious clearing AI ships all the time. (Yes, even with warheads)

Sure, it might end up costing me a few AIP, but it would have saved me many hours as all those hunt and destroy missions as well as expansion would have been much, much, quicker with a spire fleet on hand. Doing so when I didn't know how the campaign worked would have be criminal folly; Not doing so when I do makes little sense to me.

It's actually possible to do that... except it doesn't work well. I did such a game where heavy use of lightning warhead allowed me to clear out ships by the thousands (turret grav 3 helped a lot in that regard), straight to unlock the spire city. Your comment about my opinion regarding warhead is kind of funny considering what happened afterward.

It ended up in a warhead reality show all over the entire galaxy. 4k ships in system? lightning warhead. Mark III shield covering every guard post? EMP warhead.

And thus was the spire fleet completely useless.

No, I am serious. I got blade spawner of all marks thank to a design, planted a spire city into a super-terminal system, and slaughtered my way through the AI homeworlds through copious use of lightning warhead mark III... by which I meant that I threw them at the strategic reserve until it was exhausted. Then I sent my fleet along with MORE warhead, and the first AI pretty much threw the white flag at that point.
With that done I went back, taking the time to take out 40k+30k ships while my fleet was on transit , with one nuke and a dozen lightning. The surviving warhead regrouped to the second AI core world, where I threw an EMP before jumping in with my fleet, greeted again the strat reserve with lightning and went on my way to finish the second homeworld.

It took a couple fleet rebuilding because there were two wraith lance, but it got done.


So that's pretty much it. It wasn't a Fallen Spire game so much as it was a Warhead game. Except that for those I don't really need Fallen Spire, I use warheads in normal games and do pretty well using half a dozen over the entire game.

Spire felt kind of underwhelming. I had advanced protector starship, flagship V, blade spawner I-IV, speed-booster experimental, plus the entire riot line to support my spire fleet. (long live hacking.) In the fights, my non-spire (enclave+missile frigate+slow ships) fleet did nearly as well as my fully supported spire fleet, and most of the time I didn't even bother because warheads were just faster.

That might be why I sound like I have an aversion to warhead in Fallen games. I am fine using them, but when the only way to win fallen in anything like a timely manner is to spam them like no-tomorrow and ignore even the spire fleet.. well, there is a problem.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Now, that's a funny story. Thanks for sharing, ArnaudB.  >D


EDIT: Still, I cannot help but think that asking for the initial waves to made weaker because you deliberately choose not to use tools from the base game that are readily on hand is a bit of a slippery slope towards making FS much easier for those that do not limit themselves like that. I mean, your initial "4/10 felt like 7/10" will, given that information, be better understood as "4/10 felt like 7/10 because I chose for perfectly valid reasons of my own to fight with one arm tied behind my back". I guess we differ on that - my immediate reaction to your story was, "and that's yet another good reason to BUFF the FS exos".  >D

That said, I see the spire fleet more as an alien supplement to the regular human fleet and human tech rather than something that is supposed to supplant it in importance, i.e. victory is won by human and alien working together, not just the alien fleet cleaning house unless you go for the Transceiver victory and call in overwhelming forces, so if you choose to emphasize the human tech and win that way, that's fine.... and if that's not the design intent and the spire fleet is supposed to truly dominate the scene, surely the best way to address it is to increase the power of both the FS ships AND the FS exos, not to start reducing the FS opposition in power.


EDIT: Another consideration:

Of course, buffing the FS ships still runs into the issue that anybody who's not intending on playing Fallen Spire through would gain even more power simply from playing up to and including the Refugee Colony, then using those goodies at zero cost forevermore so long as the colony wasn't lost, something that would be even more tempting if the initial shard chases were made easier as you suggest.  I do not know how much this weighs into the developers considerations, but it may have some importance - there's a sharp line between this is powerful and free except for time, but I have to jump through many hoops to do it so mostly I won't despite it increasing my odds of winning and this is powerful and free except for time, but it is so powerful or takes so short time that mostly I'll do it despite not really having fun jumping through the hoops there are.

EDIT2: OTOH, perhaps that consideration is less than I immediately thought. After all, it is possible to enable Spirecraft medium and get zero downsides whatsoever; Yes, the Spirecraft don't repair and they cost more energy, but you can use them or not as you see fit once enabled, and they are an strong additional capability added to your arsenal with zero downsides for enabling - they even allow you to produce Martyrs (limited only by number of asteroids), which are like lightning warheads, only better in every way.

[ArnaudB]

Now, that's a funny story. Thanks for sharing, ArnaudB.  >D

Misery love company!

EDIT: Still, I cannot help but think that asking for the initial waves to made weaker because you deliberately choose not to use tools from the base game that are readily on hand is a bit of a slippery slope towards making FS much easier for those that do not limit themselves like that. Guess we differ on that - my immediate reaction to your story was, "and that's yet another good reason to BUFF the FS exos".  >D

Do note that double nine with only fallen spire 4/10 setting isn't something to gawk at. The only other I had were hybrid 2/10.

Add in hunter, shark, or (God help us all) astro-trains, along with an exotic AI plus The Core. Suddenly you have a... somewhat suicidal interesting game. Dark spire can be pretty fun too when you lightning-warhead a few dozen thousands of ships at once.
(That once led me to use lightning warhead.... to kill the dark spire ships  )

Starting Showndown with four spire city can be pretty fun too...

Anyway, my idea above was to drain the waiting AI ships in the galaxy to buff the Exo. That's more to avoid stalling (because the ships are actually attacking rather than forcing you to hunt/trap them all the time), than to nerf the opposition. So:

not to start reducing the FS opposition in power.

I actually consider a double-nine no minor faction/no AI plot to be a fairly tame game. The spire fleet should at least be doing well by itself, hurting mostly when it suddenly run into a 4/10 hunter plot.
Alternatively, for exo-forces fun, try Botnet+Broken+Spirecraft on hard in a Fallen game.

As it's, it's more an issue of getting roadblocked. The spire city can survive a lot -with proper defense-, but the spire ships doesn't give enough firepower to deal with the reinforcement from AIP.

i.e. victory is won by human and alien working together

I don't mind working together, I mind more cheesing such as Shield bearer or advanced protector being pretty much required for the (relatively slow) spire fleet to do anything. Especially before you can get your hand on multiple capital spire ships with maxed out shield. Most of the issue can be solved by a hip-point buff. I wouldn't mind spire frigate with half the damage but double the firerate either.

[Peter Ebbesen]

I actually consider a double-nine no minor faction/no AI plot to be a fairly tame game.

Yet another good reason for increasing the difficulty of the base game!

The more I hear veterans writing about how easy the game is on the higher difficulty settings if they don't load themselves down with nasty minor factions or AI plots, and the more I consider how my 7/7 win was ridiculously easy and how my 9/9 win should have been much harder (given my still fairly limited experience with the game when playing it), the more I am convinced that the game is just too darn easy now compared to what the difficulty settings claim to be.

A good friend of mine from the Paradox forums has picked up the game now that I am proselytizing its virtues, and I felt rather silly having to recommend that he play his very first real game after some 3-4h to learn the interface on 8/8, simply because I know that the 7/7 I started out with was much too easy for my first game, so he'd probably have the same reaction.

And then I look at all the difficulties up to 7 and tell myself, "at one time these probably made sense, and at one time the advice to start at 6/6 or 7/7 if you were a veteran strategy games player probably was good, but surely that's not the case now."

[ArnaudB]

EDIT: Another consideration:

Of course, buffing the FS ships still runs into the issue that anybody who's not intending on playing Fallen Spire through would gain even more power simply from playing up to and including the Refugee Colony, then using those goodies at zero cost forevermore so long as the colony wasn't lost, something that would be even more tempting if the initial shard chases were made easier as you suggest.  I do not know how much this weighs into the developers considerations, but it may have some importance - there's a sharp line between this is powerful and free except for time, but I have to jump through many hoops to do it so mostly I won't despite it increasing my odds of winning and this is powerful and free except for time, but it is so powerful or takes so short time that mostly I'll do it despite not really having fun jumping through the hoops there are.

A good concern, doing the outpost is something I see people doing on 7/7. Though on higher difficulty, the ships aren't really worth the hassle. One idea that popped up could be to make the AI unlock some ships designs when going through Fallen Spire campaign (to reflect the AI responding to the spire threat.)

EDIT2: OTOH, perhaps that consideration is less than I immediately thought. After all, it is possible to enable Spirecraft medium and get zero downsides whatsoever; Yes, the Spirecraft don't repair and they cost more energy, but you can use them or not as you see fit once enabled, and they are an strong additional capability added to your arsenal with zero downsides for enabling - they even allow you to produce Martyrs (limited only by number of asteroids), which are like lightning warheads, only better in every way.

Very true, it took me a long time before I realized the true potential of spirecraft, and started using them in earnest.

Regarding time, I would like to point out the AIP/per X minute. The recommended setting is 1 AIP per FIVE minutes. That makes taking the time to go through Fallen Spire a very different proposition, similar to when you have Civilian leaders hanging around.
I haven't seen many players allow for a high AIP/Xminutes ratio, most often I see 1 per 30 minutes or 1 per 60 minutes. That might be the thing.

Also do note that when I say: doing Fallen Spire

very early

. I meant to use beachhead, mark IV beam canon unlock, area mines, and as many defensive weaponry as you can straight from the beginning. (Which mean that the only powerful offensive possible without spire ship is by beachheading, and that economy tend not to be in a good shape.)
That is not quite I would call "weak" defense, even for double nine.

The more I hear veterans writing about how easy the game is on the higher difficulty settings if they don't load themselves down with nasty minor factions or AI plots, and the more I consider how my 7/7 win was ridiculously easy and how my 9/9 win should have been much harder (given my still fairly limited experience with the game when playing it), the more I am convinced that the game is just too darn easy now compared to what the difficulty settings claim to be.

Which has more to do with those "veterans" not increasing the AI difficulty beyond 9.0 than anything else. naked 9.0 is supposed to be winnable, it's naked 10.0 which is mean to be utterly impossible.

Also: Multiplayer games.

One thing that is very important regarding winning all those double nine is that people like me and you know the mistakes not to make. It isn't so much as we're owning 9.0 as we know the trick the AI use, and thus follow a guideline to victory. Your RideTheLightning AAR reflect this, it was lack of knowledge regarding both hacking and Fallen Spire that led to your doomfall in multiple instance.

Multiplayer however, show that this "path of victory" doesn't apply. Errors in double nine are very expensive. I had more than one multiple game where that was painstakingly proved, taking the wrong worthless, turning a bunch of systems into alert while screwing up the defense and salvage. Sending a fleet in transport to take out guard posts with a threatening eye... unloading the transport at the wormholes instead of flying the fleet to the guard post, thus triggering the eyes for over ten minutes.
Those mere mistakes can cost the entire game, as they tend to accumulate due to different knowledge, growing irritation regarding those errors, failing communication. Then AI laugh and laugh as the players each goes on their way, failing to coordinate blow, leaving the systems under-defended.

Until the AI ultimately win, often not even by taking out the players's home command, but through sheer

frustration.

So no, the AI difficulty is perfectly in line with what is announced. The only reason "veterans" win those naked 9.0 is because they know to avoid (generally) the mistakes that would cost them the game.

I would also VERY much like to know how many savescumming those "easily" won game took? AI war need a hardcore mode like The Last Federation, because many AAR features such a save/load scenario. In such scenario the game wasn't easily won, it wasn't even won, it was lost

A good friend of mine from the Paradox forums has picked up the game now that I am proselytizing its virtues, and I felt rather silly having to recommend that he play his very first real game after some 3-4h to learn the interface on 8/8, simply because I know that the 7/7 I started out with was much too easy for my first game, so he'd probably have the same reaction.

And then I look at all the difficulties up to 7 and tell myself, "at one time these probably made sense, and at one time the advice to start at 6/6 or 7/7 if you were a veteran strategy games player probably was good, but surely that's not the case now."

And then you stumble upon a player who play AI war like a tactical game, like warcraft.

Or God help me, a RPG! (Yes, I have seen such one person.)

[keith.lamothe]

On the difficulty, I'm sure more adjustment is needed but I don't think 7, 8, and 9 are way off.  We still get a lot of stories of people hitting 7 like a brick wall on their first try, as they figure out the basics of the game.  There've even been some complaints from long-time community members that 7 is too hard for the intro purpose, though I took those with a grain of salt.  Still, I've largely left 7 as-is difficulty wise during the recent difficulty buffs, where 10 has gotten waaaay harder.  With interpolation between.

An accomplished strategy gamer who's done some moderately extensive research on AIW could probably start on 8/8, sure, or they could start on 7/7 without the research and die their way to victory


On FS, the original implementation's consequence (which held for some time) was that an FS capital fleet could function independently as basically the-hammer-of-thor.  It couldn't generally take on an AI HW by itself until at least to 5-city-size (getting the BB's and DN) but at that point it should become feasible (depending on core post choices, etc).

But with the guard posts being buffed to scariness, and the special forces being made into a coherent force, and the general upward creep of stats, that ceased to be true.  Now an FS capital fleet can actually take serious casualties against a normal MkIV planet.

Personally I'd like to quadruple the FS cap-ship stats (health and attack; maybe add some % resistance to implosion) and see what happens, but other feedback indicates many players think them borderline-OP as-is, so I'm not sure about that.

The reason for reducing the pre-city FS exos is that before you get the city and start building a genuine capital fleet you don't have much beyond the base-game stuff to hold off the hordes.  I'm ok with it being relatively easy to get the outpost and its frigates, that was actually a pretty common early-game play for a while.  It requires "getting out of your shell" and isn't particularly trivial either way.

And yea, buffing the other FS exos along with the above would be good, the idea being that the cities and fleet can offset the pain to a large degree, and the pain keeps the fleet from being an auto I-win button.

Good point on the AI concentrating its forces into the exos, taking away from waves.  I think I'd have it reduce the frequency of waves (by 20% per city, or something like that), and/or possibly have it the above-200-AIP reinforcements get redirected into exo strength rather than wave strength.  Though previously AIP had zero impact whatsoever on FS exo size, and perhaps that should remain true.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Regarding time, I would like to point out the AIP/per X minute. The recommended setting is 1 AIP per FIVE minutes.

AIP/min increase is for people who like to work under time pressure. I'll play without it and have a less stressed life, thank you very much.

Amusingly, I thought 1 AIP/30 min was the recommended setting, as that IIRC was what it was set to when I had just installed the game, but reading the tooltips now that you've pointed it out I can see that the recommended is 1 per 5.

That makes taking the time to go through Fallen Spire a very different proposition, similar to when you have Civilian leaders hanging around.
I haven't seen many players allow for a high AIP/Xminutes ratio, most often I see 1 per 30 minutes or 1 per 60 minutes. That might be the thing.

Yep, I wonder when that 1 per 5 tooltip was last updated. Based on the AARs I've read here, it seems none of the AARs that are used as input for balancing discussions come anywhere near 1 per 5, which strongly suggests that the tooltip is outdated and that the game is currently balanced based on a much more lenient or entirely missing automatic AIP increase, which, if I am guessing true, means that the tooltip needs to be updated with another recommendation.

The more I hear veterans writing about how easy the game is on the higher difficulty settings if they don't load themselves down with nasty minor factions or AI plots, and the more I consider how my 7/7 win was ridiculously easy and how my 9/9 win should have been much harder (given my still fairly limited experience with the game when playing it), the more I am convinced that the game is just too darn easy now compared to what the difficulty settings claim to be.

Which has more to do with those "veterans" not increasing the AI difficulty beyond 9.0 than anything else. naked 9.0 is supposed to be winnable, it's naked 10.0 which is mean to be utterly impossible.

Sure, just saying, 9.0 it is labeled as "very hard", so if veterans treat 9.0 as trivial unless they enable ai plots to make it even harder, then 9.0 is probably too easy compared to its difficulty level description, even though there exist even higher difficulty levels that are still supposed to be winnable.

One thing that is very important regarding winning all those double nine is that people like me and you know the mistakes not to make. It isn't so much as we're owning 9.0 as we know the trick the AI use, and thus follow a guideline to victory. Your RideTheLightning AAR reflect this, it was lack of knowledge regarding both hacking and Fallen Spire that led to your doomfall in multiple instance.

Yep, make a mistake, learn from it, and move on. Multiplayer is undoutedly much more demanding in that respect due to cooperation issues. On the other hand, multiplayer does also from what I've read of the mechanics provide significant benefits to players that are absent in SP, something that will be much needed to compensate for reduced strategic and tactical efficiency when compared to singleplayer.

So no, the AI difficulty is perfectly in line with what is announced. The only reason "veterans" win those naked 9.0 is because they know to avoid (generally) the mistakes that would cost them the game.

If merely knowing how to generally avoid mistakes means that the losing on naked 9.0 is rare, than 9.0 can surely not be termed a very hard difficulty setting, can it? Something is very hard when, despite knowing how to deal with it, you

I would also VERY much like to know how many savescumming those "easily" won game took?

The 7/7 game that was won roughly within the first week of playing, 2 reloads very early in the game. Then I got the Zenith Trader on my capital, cleaned it out for goodies, and nothing ever came close to killing me, as I fortified the hell out of my homeworld, on which I tanked everything. The game ended with the destruction of both AI homeworlds at 598 AIP, 1158 AIP total. By that point my homeworld was tanking 7-11k regular waves and 2x118 spire frigate nemesis waves without requiring my presence, waves of a size Keith said should never happen on 7/7.

The insane spire frigate exo champion nemesis was because I'l enabled the just released alt champion mechanic at 9/10 and the alt nemesis at 9/10 too, because the first tooltip said I should choose at least 9 to get all the champion toys, and the nemesis tooltip suggested that one should choose at least the same level of nemesis as one had chosen for progress. (These tooltips later got changed.)

The 9/9 game I lost the first few times I tried before I started the attempt I chronicled, Ride the Lightning, each time learning interesting new ships and how to deal with building substantial defences without the Trader toys. That was a a VERY rude awakening, I can tell you, as was facing the Mad Bomber/Reservist in general. So much power so early - the solution was to build harder defences.

In the Ride the Lightning attempt, I reloaded from at earlier attempt the time when I wrote about it, but my home station was never in any danger from anything while playing, because I (once again) fortified the hell out of it in the early game by spending between 5:2 and 2:1 knowledge on defence compared to offence, and always had lightning warheads in reserve. I ended up not having to use any for defence during the time before the first spire city (though I did use them on that memorable ST hack), but merely having them as a guarantee against defeat made me feel much safer.

There was one thing of what happened that could have killed me, though, if the timing had been different: If the SFC had unlocked Eye Bots before I built the first Spire City rather than after, i.e. when I was still tanking directly on my homeworld, I'd probably have been defeated. It took me two waves of Eye Bots and seeing them kill off a military station to realize fully just how great a threat they were, requiring them to be kept under observation at all times or risking station destruction, and if I'd had to learn that while tanking on the homeworld? Destruction would probably have ensued. But once I got my basic defence in depth setup up and running, nothing the AI chose to throw at me stood a chance at victory. (I did not know that at the time, of course - this evaluation is based on the strength it did actually throw at me, something I had no real idea of beforehand).

AI war need a hardcore mode like The Last Federation, because many AAR features such a save/load scenario. In such scenario the game wasn't easily won, it wasn't even won, it was lost

You can generally count on my telling readers of my AARs when I do anything to break the gameflow like reloading, because defeat makes a much better story than unending "and then, and then, and then" success stories.

I appreciate that this is not the case for everybody and that some people like playing hardcore for all sorts of different reasons, but personally I had enough of that with Nethack, Angband, and ADOM 15-20 years ago: Hardcore modes requiring backtracking to step one in case of mistakes do not increase my enjoyment, which generally concerns itself with learning from my mistakes, a learning process slowed down by hardcore.