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.
Well, it would be appreciable if the Spire armada from the transceiver didn't have many, many times the damage and hit points of the similar spire designs. I remember that this was done because the AI stalemated the spire armada in some cases... but really if an army who is regularly throwing multiple times our cap of spire fleet PLUS the super-dreadnought can't break through the AI forces without being itself massively buffed... well there is something wrong there.
Peter described that feeling very well in his AAR. Now, myself I had already done the transceiver when that massive buff was implemented. From a gameplay standpoint it's perfectly logical.
For a player however, it feels
really annoying to be told that the spire ships are awesome, painfully unlocking them through the campaign... then see the exactly same design taken up, not just to eleven, but to sixteen, be
required to break through the AI forces. (Despite having the super-dreadnought.)
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.
By themselves, I would say the spire ships are considerably far from OP. Context would be nice there. It's true that spire fleet can be overpowered, but that's mostly if you cheese the heck out of the them with the various combinations including protector/Shield-Bearer/ZenithMedic... but that tend to requires massive investment in non-spire stuff. Generally by that point spire ships only make battle faster and with less loss, rather than really being overpowered.
I had some ideas to give the frigate some kind of small secondary attack, so as to deal with easily with straggler all over the place (their main problem till beam-destroyer come around... though we never have enough destroyers). Seems like an overly complicated solution though.
Anyway, one thing I use to gauge to see if a Fallen Spire game is going well is whether killing an eye outright, totally ignoring the guard post, is a workable technique. (Also tend to involve transport-distraction to draw the AI defenders away.)
Unfortunately, full human-spire starship seem to do a large part of the job for a long time. I used to do this at lower difficulty, and it makes me feel kinda sad that the spire ships can't do anywhere near a good job at that alone. Blowing up the eyes through sheer, mind-blowing beam and overwhelming strength is a wonderful feeling, one that seem completely in line with Fallen Spire being meant to blow everything out of proportions. (Larger battles, lot more ships, lot more of firepower.)
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.
That seemed a relatively interesting solution to me. Beyond that it's up to you, at this point I am unsure which path would be best.
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.
It's worth noting that double nine is done a lot mostly because of steam success. Otherwise, it's quite probable that a lot of players would go more in difficulties between seven and nine.
Nine isn't forgiving to mistakes. If it makes you reload previous saves a few times per game, then I say it's working as advertised.
To relate with below:
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.
Yes, from a story-telling perspective, being able to reload is a great thing. For judging the difficulty of the game however, the action of reloading is also very telling.
I myself only like hardcore to a limited degree, that say I like
optional hardcore. Player with a non-savescumming is extremely revealing about the actual skill of a player to a given difficulty. You can't just ignore a mistake, save time by reloading from a fleet wipe.
Or as in X-com, revive your colonel from a Thin-Man headshot.
My point anyway is that by savescumming, we are effectively using a cheated intelligence. You can't be truly surprised by an AI attack, because you can almost always reload before it happens, then act to counter it. This make the apparent difficulty far lower, but doesn't the fact that the AI got you with your pants down before you reloaded.
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.
If you have a very prepared team, then yes, there are enormous advantages to reap. Need great coordination though, so that isn't always easy.
But fun anyway.
I wouldn't expect a spire fleet to stand toe-to-toe with a fully-armed-and-operational special forces fleet, at least not on diff 9 versus an SFC. That would still be more a matter of "send normal fleet to distract SFC somewhere, then hit the target with the Spire fleet". And I wouldn't expect a spire fleet to survive intact going head-on with a 10k+ wave, either, but as you found it doesn't have to.
To be clear, I also don't believe that the spire fleet should be able to take on the SF fleet head-on and slaughter it. That's where running distraction, transports, warheads jumping from wormholes come in.
The spire ships however should, more or less alone, be able to take a mark III or slightly damaged IV world non-heavily protected by the SF presence and come out ahead. As it stand, it does happens that the spire fleet (mostly alone) get quickly slaughtered even without particularly nasty opposition.
Craft spirecraft is telling in that regard. It's actually fairly easy to take out or wormhole-slaughter the spire ships from that AI, as they're a bunch of half-decent glass canons.
******
Now another idea that stuck me. Not nearly as important as the general spire balancing, but it stuck me:
So I was thinking about the early phases of Fallen Spire, and a particular point jumped at me, which produced more ideas. I think people who used the below exploit are going to be a little annoyed with me. In particular: The "refugee ship" event.
I was searching for a way to make this particular event more interesting, in the Chinese sense, and that was where the importance of the person aboard stuck me. It stretched my disbelief that this particular person was in the weakest ship of the spire navy, that had always been a sore point for me.
As for the exploit, it's... quite simple: the spire ship is TRANSPORTABLE. Which mean that, compared to shards, this event is utterly trivial as long as you have a transport ready beehive straight to your homeworld.
Could we solve both issues, while offering the players more (
opportunities to shot their foot) tantalizing possibilities?
I think so, here is my suggestion. First, turn that weak frigate into a non-transportable but fully modded Spire Battleship (Cruiser perhaps, requires tests), then proceed with the going-back-to-homeworld event. Get the ship back alive, clear the AI ships, and then suddenly you have a choice.
Yes, you can turn this irreplaceable and slow ship into a powerful defensive structure, which gives powerful replaceable ships. Just what you need to break through that mark III world giving you a nasty plasma eye!
But...but... that very powerful refuge ship, it's very powerful. Couldn't you take the risk of sending back into this hostile galaxy, at that hostile mark III world to take it down? Certainly, if you lost this -unstransportable and slow- battleship, you would have irremediably screwed up the fallen spire campaign. But surely with that much health and firepower, you'll certainly success and get it back in one piece.
It most certainly can't go wrong.To be fair, I expect most players to take the safe approach and get the outpost. I do think it would lead to some quite 'interesting' moments for daring players, as well as show players new at fallen spire a vision of the kind of firepower Fallen Spire (is supposed to) give in the late game.
*****
With my part say, I do hope that there will be some changes in the Fallen Spire campaign. As it's, it feels too much like a more tedious version of regular games to be enjoyable.
