Force field mechanics?

[mindloss]

I feel like I'm spamming up the board, but for every answer there's three more questions. This is a deep game.

So, force fields: I got my answer to my first couple of questions by searching wiki/forums (damage mod stays at 1/4 even under multiple fields, military command also affected, and I assume therefore ion cannons as well). However, a couple of questions remain -- when you have multiple force fields, how does the game determine which one a weapon hits? Is it simply the field with the boundary first encountered on the path of the weapon? It feels like that's not the case, especially when I have my mob of shield bearers being attacked by another mob of guys.

Incidentally, this strategy seems to be closest thing to an "exploit" I've run into yet, although it's not THAT strong... if you get shield bearers relatively early, build cap, and build cap of mk3 engies, you can just load up a big blob of fields with units and walk right into and usually plow over anything short of heavily reinforced core worlds (assuming a little micro finesse), and if you're doing it right you don't lose a single unit. As for using the fieldblob defensively, it stops huge waves cold, again without losing a unit. [Also there's a fun math problem -- what arrangement of randomly shrinking smaller circles provides the best average total coverage of a larger circle?]

But I digress. Last little question is how the forcefield repair works... my best guess is that if a field isn't hit for a couple of seconds, then an engie is welcome to repair all he wants, but up til then no amount of repair has any effect... but it's tough to tell for sure.

Thanks for your patience!

[x4000]

I feel like I'm spamming up the board, but for every answer there's three more questions. This is a deep game.

Hahaha, definitely deep.  And thanks for that.   Anyway, no worries on the spam, and the fact that you're making multiple questions is actually helpful to other players then later looking for the same answers.

So, force fields: I got my answer to my first couple of questions by searching wiki/forums (damage mod stays at 1/4 even under multiple fields, military command also affected, and I assume therefore ion cannons as well). However, a couple of questions remain -- when you have multiple force fields, how does the game determine which one a weapon hits? Is it simply the field with the boundary first encountered on the path of the weapon? It feels like that's not the case, especially when I have my mob of shield bearers being attacked by another mob of guys.

Yes it also affects ion cannons, but when they are doing their insta-kill damage that doesn't matter (infinity divided by four is still infinity).  In terms of the force fields that are stacked, it tries to hit the "outermost" one.  Aka, whichever forcefield is largest at the time, which is determined partly by how damaged they are.

In terms of "weak force fields" like on the shield bearers, it still tries to do the above, but based on the throttling of the forcefield calculations for performance reasons, you'll often see that not happen exactly as you expect. 

Incidentally, this strategy seems to be closest thing to an "exploit" I've run into yet, although it's not THAT strong... if you get shield bearers relatively early, build cap, and build cap of mk3 engies, you can just load up a big blob of fields with units and walk right into and usually plow over anything short of heavily reinforced core worlds (assuming a little micro finesse), and if you're doing it right you don't lose a single unit. As for using the fieldblob defensively, it stops huge waves cold, again without losing a unit. [Also there's a fun math problem -- what arrangement of randomly shrinking smaller circles provides the best average total coverage of a larger circle?]

Sounds pretty effective, but bear it won't work in literally all situations.  If it seems too overpowered we might need to do some tweaks on the energy costs or repair times of shield bearers, but I'm not sure what difficulty you're playing on or exact circumstances, etc.  Shield bearers have been something that a lot of the better players have ignored for a while, so we had buffed them not that long ago, but I'm not sure how much real-world testing their balance has had -- for things specifically like what you mention.

But I digress. Last little question is how the forcefield repair works... my best guess is that if a field isn't hit for a couple of seconds, then an engie is welcome to repair all he wants, but up til then no amount of repair has any effect... but it's tough to tell for sure.

Same as with any other ship, engineers can't repair a forcefield that has been damaged in the last... I can't remember if it's 3 or 5 seconds.  But one of those, and the wiki says which.

Thanks for your patience!

You bet!

[keith.lamothe]

The big-pile-of-forcefields-and-engies thing is one of the most effective tactics I know of.  I don't know if it's genuinely overpowered, though, because there's basically no other way I can think of that would successfully defend my home command station (or any other command station) from a truly serious attack.  But the sheer amount of perpetual repairing that the engies can do in a set of sufficiently nested generators is pretty intense, and makes me think we should increase the repair-after-damage delay on player forcefields to some degree.

And I think it does get downright exploitative when you start mixing in plays like "scrap the damage generator, re-place it, speed-build with engies".  Because newly-built forcefields start with no repair delay  With that and enough engies and enough resources and enough micro I don't think anything short of totally overwhelming force could possibly get through.

So there are a few things I'd change, but if I nerfed the tactic out of existence I don't think I'd win any more games

As for offensive shield-bearer blobs, yea, they're pretty intense.  I'd suggest increasing their repair-after-damage delay to make their durability less theoretically infinite when combined with engies.

Another thought would be to make it so that the repair-after-damage delay for forcefield generators is global per planet per team instead of per ship.  Make up some kind of radiation-pulse-interference BS   That might be a little too severe in terms of not letting engies do any forcefield repair (or speedbuilding, I would suggest) on a planet where any of your team's forcefields has taken damage in the last 3/5 seconds, but that could be rebalanced by increasing the actual ff hps or whatever, if necessary.


On another note, I should add that the "which ff in a big nested stack do I hit?" logic is pretty fuzzy in the middle of a major attack because generally the shot will hit whatever forcefield was protecting the target ship at the time the shot was fired, not at the time the shot hits.  The exception is if another forcefield is _completely_ encapsulating the effective target forcefield at the time of firing the shot (not at the time of hit), then the target will switch to the encapsulating field.  And the "which ff is protecting me logic" is also fuzzy in that it's not re-evaluated every frame and might not always be the one that's closest or whatever.

So in general in order for a single ff in a nested web to stop taking hits in the middle of a big attack it has to shrink such that it's completely contained inside another ff in the web and stay that way for a few seconds for who-is-protecting-me updates to happen and for incoming shots to clear out.

[x4000]

Actually, the "which FF do I hit" stuff now recalculates itself on hit as well as on fire.  It will tend to stop where it was when the original "when I was fired" FF is reached, and if it's not hitting another FF then it will hit the one it originally would have, but if there's another that is now larger and in the way it will hit that one instead.

I'm thinking we might want to just generally increase the repair-after-being-shot time globally -- make it 10 or 15 seconds, or something.  That would be incredibly intense for home command stations in particular, but the moral of the story is "don't let things shoot those, period."  And for most other ships, I can't think of instances where midst-of-battlefield repair is a very good thing in the hands of the players or the AI, honestly; mainly what it does is lead to exploits.

We could also introduce the can't-repair-after delay to new constructions, too, to prevent those other exploits you mentioned.  Those two relatively simple changes might be enough to solve this without going too nuts on it.

[keith.lamothe]

I'm thinking we might want to just generally increase the repair-after-being-shot time globally -- make it 10 or 15 seconds, or something.  That would be incredibly intense for home command stations in particular, but the moral of the story is "don't let things shoot those, period."

In some scenarios you don't have a lot of choice in having to defend at your homeworld, but yea.

We could also introduce the can't-repair-after delay to new constructions, too, to prevent those other exploits you mentioned.  Those two relatively simple changes might be enough to solve this without going too nuts on it.

But if the newly-building forcefield generator is in the middle of a big pile of active forcefields, nothing's going to hit it, right?  So the delay wouldn't have an impact in most of the cases where I've seen it be heavily exploitable.

[x4000]

That is true, that's a good point.

[keith.lamothe]

I guess if we wanted to be unkind we could say that engies can't assist anything that's self-building while protected by a forcefield, but I think the main result of that change would be bug reports

[x4000]

Oh god, yeah.

A better way to handle that might be to make it so that the "last hit time" from force fields gets passed down to any ships underneath them -- such that if it's more recent, that ships take on that attribute from their parent, anyhow, and stall out.  That way the whole "cyclical repairing" thing goes away in general.

Now that I really like, actually.

[keith.lamothe]

That would help in general, yea, though in a big nest it may be that only 2 or so out of 20 ffs are taking damage, and lots of the units underneath (including newly constructing generators) are protected by 1 of those other 18, and thus aren't being delayed.  Due to the early-out nature of "which ff is protecting me?" computation, it's possible that the player might be really confused why repairing is working in some cases and not others because it's really not obvious which ff is protecting something.  This is why I wanted to go with it being global for all ffs for that team, because it's not ambiguous.  It does require a bit of new code, though (my guess is that when an ff takes damage, where it would normally just set its own delay it loops over all allied forcefields and sets them all; that's a lot more cpu time for that but in the overall picture not much).

But it's certainly not perfect either.  Anyway, just trying to think my way through this as I work on AVWW

[x4000]

Okay, that's a good point there.  Let's leave this be for now, it's a borderline thing and I don't want to get sucked into something so huge right now when we're trying to get the AVWW beta out in the next 3 weeks.

[mindloss]

Whoa, apparently some agreement! Fun to see the dev back-and-forth on forum.

The inheriting-delay idea sounds like a viable solution. As I've been dicking around with my forcefield blob, I found that group-move was effective for usually keeping them in tight formation (all encapsulated), which is good for taking light fire -- but when under serious combat, you can indeed take advantage of the overlapping fields and essentially click or v-click randomly around and the result is a lot of chaotic shifting field positions and near-guaranteed recovery time for several of your shields thanks to your 10-15 magically teleporting engies. I found what worked great for knowledge raids was popping up a medium or large turret forcefield, running the blob around outside it, and then taking refuge inside (next to your sci lab)  for several seconds while all the shield bearers recuperate. The diabolical part is that once you pop your blob back outside and run around for a few seconds drawing fire, the engies will usually repair the big field back to full size.

One other quick note on the efficacy of this general tactic which ties in nicely to my SuperTerminal question earlier... a teammate and I decided to go for a SuperTerminal in a dual-7s game. It was midgame, I had Mk1-3 frigs/fights/bombs/shields and some Mk4, PLUS an armored golem, and my teammate had what appeared to be "a whole lot of ships". Anyway, I was able to provide field coverage for all of my units and most of his, and not only did we end up with a negligible attrition rate, we found that we had no problem hanging on at aggro cap. I was able to go out for a smoke while the 200-400 MkVs per minute or whatever it is pounded away ineffectually. *That* does sound like a bug, or at least, an imperfection, albeit an unimportant one. We kept it up for as long as patience allowed (i.e. ~170 points, enough for us to hit floor) and moved on with fleets fully intact.

[Hearteater]

With significantly less than you had I've been able to knowledge raid without any difficulty.  Really the main deterrence to knowledge raiding is time.  To do it successfully will require a fairly large commitment of your resources for a noticeable chunk of time.  Sometimes you need to knowledge raid to get out of a situation, but in generally there are better uses of your time.  If you are knowledge raiding when one or two other events pop up you can still find yourself in trouble.

[keith.lamothe]

With significantly less than you had I've been able to knowledge raid without any difficulty.  Really the main deterrence to knowledge raiding is time.  To do it successfully will require a fairly large commitment of your resources for a noticeable chunk of time.  Sometimes you need to knowledge raid to get out of a situation, but in generally there are better uses of your time.  If you are knowledge raiding when one or two other events pop up you can still find yourself in trouble.

Yea, heavy k-raiding used to be a basically optimal strategy and lots of people felt it made the game grindy, etc. 

(to be read in the voice of the Frogstar Prisoner Relations Officer)
So we nerfed it into the ground, oh yes.  Disconcerting, isn't it?


But it's still viable if you really need a bit of extra K without any extra AIP.