Tazer strength

[Wanderer]

I hate to open my mouth, but Tazers are too powerful, particularly with 6 or more + Anti-Missile Turrets.  It's a stun-lock.  It's cheap. It's too effective in combination.  It only costs 7500 k to create, 11k 12k on a single homeworld to bring out Riot IIIs.

I just shut down a 4000 ship CPA equivalent of mixed MK III/IV ships and I lost a few bombers to the starships.  I've got nothing over MK II and that's only two of my fleet ships and the Riots.

I'm not sure what the fix is offhand though.  It will stop a bottleneck cold, however.  There are a number of special anti-paralytic ships out there that I have made sure to keep AIP down so that the AIs don't get new ships.  I might be looking at a special scenario.  It bears thought however.

I'd like some other people's opinions on this tactic.  I'm wondering what your encounters were and if you've found breaks in the wall that have completely disassembled the method, or at least made it fight for life?

[keith.lamothe]

The only surprise to me is that it took nearly 2 years for someone to discover how exploitative this was.  I added the tazers in March '10, and this aspect of them hasn't changed materially since then, iirc (except to become somewhat easier when all paralysis times had to be rounded to the nearest second).  I even pointed out how it could be used at the time

I could solve it by adding one of those per-planet-aoe-throttles the electric shuttles and lightning turrets use, and making that delay longer than 1 second.  Since each tazer pulse only applies 1 second of paralysis, there would inevitably be small gaps.  So having "full" tazer coverage would decrease enemy rate-of-fire (by prolonging reload time) by, say, 50% (if the throttle was 2 seconds long, that would mean 2 Riot IIs with tazers since it's a 4-second reload; but you might bring more for redundancy), but not much worse than that.

[keith.lamothe]

Alternatively I could put a limit on the number of ships hit per tazer blast.

[Underfot]

The only surprise to me is that it took nearly 2 years for someone to discover how exploitative this was ..

Oh, we've just learned if we want to exploit something for more than five days, best keep our mouths shut! 

[keith.lamothe]

The only surprise to me is that it took nearly 2 years for someone to discover how exploitative this was ..

Oh, we've just learned if we want to exploit something for more than five days, best keep our mouths shut! 

I was also wondering when y'all would pick that up

Finding exploits and hitting the AI over the head with them is good fun for a certain period of time, then they need to be patched up so that folks who know about them don't feel compelled to play that particular way because it's so optimal.  I think this one was ok because relatively few people play MP/Multi-HW and even fewer bothered with Riots, much less tazers, much less concentrations of tazers.

[Wanderer]

Alternatively I could put a limit on the number of ships hit per tazer blast.

 

I'm personally surprised multi-player single whipping boy games didn't show this earlier, though I guess shut up and enjoy your cake may have had something to do with it.

I like the idea of limiting the # of ships hit per tazer.  The tactic should not be invalid, it just shouldn't be "I glassed the world and I still won" overpowering.  Maybe 200 ea for the Riot I's, 300-400 for the Riot IIs (normal caps)?  Since the effect has to chain for 4 seconds (meaning four tazer hits) for it to actually fully stunlock, so those numbers may not be farfetched.  5 of them though shouldn't be able to lock down 5000 ships.  Even at 500 each it would reduce the abusiveness of this combo.

[Commiesalami]

Maybe 200 ea for the Riot I's, 300-400 for the Riot IIs (normal caps)? 

I thought only Riot IIs could take tazers, and I & IIIs could take tractor beams instead.

[Wanderer]

Maybe 200 ea for the Riot I's, 300-400 for the Riot IIs (normal caps)? 

I thought only Riot IIs could take tazers, and I & IIIs could take tractor beams instead.

*blinks* Wow, my bad.  I'd just assumed they could.  So really this is only a problem in a multi-homeworld game, otherwise the best you get is a 75% reduction in firerate.  Let me rethink the fix.

Keith, is there a way to cap the number of modules that have been built, like fleet caps?

Nevermind.  To counter this to keep multi-homeworld from having such a significant advantage, this option:

I could solve it by adding one of those per-planet-aoe-throttles the electric shuttles and lightning turrets use, and making that delay longer than 1 second.

Seems best.  Perhaps a 1.3 second delay?

[Shrugging Khan]

I suggest adding a temporary paralysis reflectivity reduction buff to any ship hit by a tazer.
Now, I'm no mathemagician, but here's some example numbers:

1st hit: 100% effect, limited-duration buff (-10% paralysis effectivity) is applied
2nd hit: 90% effect (90% of normal paralysis duration), buff is stacked twice
3rd hit: 81% effect, buff is stacked three times now
4th hit: 72.9% effectivity, the paralysis duration is already cut by almost 30%, buff might stack again if its duration is long enough.

So that using tazers repeatedly will diminish the effect they have on a single target. It basically forces a player to make haste in taking out paralysed enemies, before the resistance buff stacks so high that tazering them any further becomes ineffective.

[keith.lamothe]

I suggest adding a temporary paralysis reflectivity reduction buff to any ship hit by a tazer.
Now, I'm no mathemagician, but here's some example numbers:

1st hit: 100% effect, limited-duration buff (-10% paralysis effectivity) is applied
2nd hit: 90% effect (90% of normal paralysis duration), buff is stacked twice
3rd hit: 81% effect, buff is stacked three times now
4th hit: 72.9% effectivity, the paralysis duration is already cut by almost 30%, buff might stack again if its duration is long enough.

So that using tazers repeatedly will diminish the effect they have on a single target. It basically forces a player to make haste in taking out paralysed enemies, before the resistance buff stacks so high that tazering them any further becomes ineffective.

Something like that would work in theory but it would increase the RAM footprint of the units hit by to some degree, and probably all units by a single 32-bit pointer.  That may not seem like a lot, but we've seen a lot of out-of-memory crashes that went away when we cut the number of fields that each unit has.  So in general I look for solutions that don't add anything to what each unit has to track.

[Wanderer]

I suggest adding a temporary paralysis reflectivity reduction buff to any ship hit by a tazer.
Now, I'm no mathemagician, but here's some example numbers:

1st hit: 100% effect, limited-duration buff (-10% paralysis effectivity) is applied
2nd hit: 90% effect (90% of normal paralysis duration), buff is stacked twice
3rd hit: 81% effect, buff is stacked three times now
4th hit: 72.9% effectivity, the paralysis duration is already cut by almost 30%, buff might stack again if its duration is long enough.

So that using tazers repeatedly will diminish the effect they have on a single target. It basically forces a player to make haste in taking out paralysed enemies, before the resistance buff stacks so high that tazering them any further becomes ineffective.

If I'm reading your idea right, then within roughly 16 seconds tazering becomes useless without multi-homeworld.  At 1 second/tazer * tazer dudes with a 4 second reload, The third hit occurs at 3 seconds, making the paralysis last only ~2.8/4 seconds, instead of 3/4.  In the next 4 second burst, you would get roughly 2/3s, so 2.3/4 seconds.  In the 3rd 4 second burst, you'd be down to 50% area, so 2/4.  In the 4th, you'd be at 35-40%, so 1.8/4 seconds.  After that it would become very slightly noticeable.  Most wave defenses will take upwards of 2-3 minutes.

I don't want to nerf the standard usage, as that doesn't cause a stunlock due to the cap of 3.  Multi-homeworld usage needs a nerf because of the stunlock.

[keith.lamothe]

FYI: in 5.025, Tazers have been tazed.

Riots got several buffs, though.

[Wanderer]

Hm, so even on 1HW they got a bit of a nerf.  2 Riot IIs with a spare, 50% overall reduction.

Yeah, that'll definately remove the stunlock.  Multi-HW will now allow for multiple location locks, but not the overwhelming silliness.

[Wanderer]

Out of curiousness, is the reason for the 2 second delay because there's not a decimal minimum on the stagger, or did you just feel a heavy hand was required on this due to all the rebalancing until things settle out?

[keith.lamothe]

Out of curiousness, is the reason for the 2 second delay because there's not a decimal minimum on the stagger, or did you just feel a heavy hand was required on this due to all the rebalancing until things settle out?

The problem is that the non-decimal part of the stagger is actually based on an assumption in the code that used to be true (and was when that mechanic was implemented) but is no longer: that all game-seconds have 20 cycles.  That changed when we added different performance profiles.  High still has 20 cycles/frame, so that's fine, but the others have widely varying.  So I could set the stagger time to "30" but then you could "game" the system by raising your performance profile to achieve stunlock because those cycles would then equal a smaller number of game-seconds.

So I set it to "2" and put in an exception in the code such that the stagger for Riot Tazers only counts down on the first cycle of each game second rather than every cycle.

If the 50% is really not enough I can probably hack out something where it will use different stagger cycle counts depending on your performance profile when the tazer actually fires, but even that has potential for exploit.  Or potentially work out some kind of way for each performance profile to know which cycle is the "half-second" cycle, and change the tazer stagger to "3" and interpret it that way.