Thoughts on viral shredders/how do their build points work?

[Martyn van Buren]

Just got viral shredders for the first time, and I'm a little confused --- is the cutoff where they start producing ships per planet?  As in, once you have them, does that mean you basically get a cap for free on every one of your planets?  That's pretty nice if so, especially considering that they pop out of Zenith reserves so you don't need them as a bonus ship.

That leads me to two follow-up questions --- one, do they have some major drawbacks I'm not seeing, besides speed?  Or are they balanced just by being fairly easy to get ahold of without taking them as a bonus ship through parasites and Zenith reserves?  And two, what are good counters when I run into that inevitable fight where the AI winds up with a few hundred shedders of its own?

[Commiesalami]

Energy is a pretty big issue, they can quickly outgrow you energy production if you don't keep large 'stocks' in low power on your core worlds.  At ~1500 the amount of BP for every shredder to reproduce begins to get exponentially high, making somewhere around there the effective cap.  I'm not sure if this affected by their mark level.

If your facing a computer using shredders, gravity turrets and flak turrets are your best friends.  Your best bet to counter shredders on AI planets are fighters focus firing on them. I dont remember if Shredders have Infinite Engine health or not, If not Riot ships would work amazingly.  (The Tazer on the Riot Mk2 would also work great if they aren't immune to paralysis)

[keith.lamothe]

The growth rate of shredders is ratcheted back by high concentrations of shredders on that particular planet, yes, so you can grow a bunch of different "batches" and maybe later combine them into one sky-darkening swarm (though in such a swarm their spawning rate will be _extremely_ slow so expect high net casualties).

Shredders like all melee ships have infinite engine health, so engine damage doesn't do anything there.  I forget about paralysis immunity, though.

[BobTheJanitor]

Any game with shredders will end with a ridiculous number of shredders. I assume they're balanced around that. I've always been kind of ambivalent about them. They're a fun unit, but when I see that 90% of my forces consist of nothing but a sea of viral shredders, it starts to get a little silly. I'm not sure if they need to be fixed or if having them as-is is just OK with everyone. I've raised the point in the past but the thread probably devolved into a discussion about some other random topic, like they do.

[keith.lamothe]

It's possible they're unbalanced; I could certainly add a total-owned-by-player point at which their replication rate falls off a lot.  But it doesn't seem that those massive swarms have really changed the overall balance of the game.  Let's just say that I'm not likely to think they need nerfing more than Martyrs do

[Philo]

Nah, they're fine. They can't really be used as an offensive force anyway so having them work as defenders is cool with me. And they cost a hell a lot of electricity for what they deliver. Which in turn costs you money.

I think they're balanced right now by being a little unbalanced. Don't let the AI have it all  It's not like they stop exowaves or cross planet attacks by themselves right now.

[Nalgas]

It's not like they stop exowaves or cross planet attacks by themselves right now.

In my Fallen Spire game recently, the shredders were borderline worthless against the exowaves, but they almost single-handedly took care of everything else in the first half of the game, along with a few turrets to back them up.  In general, if you get matched up against AIs with ships that they're strong against, you will nearly always come out with more than you went into a fight with.  There are a bunch of situations they're pretty hopeless in, though, and they're nearly worthless when attacking rather than defending most of the time.

If you have the resources to power a huge swarm of them, it's pretty frickin' funny to park them over a wormhole and watch everything die as it comes through, but they're definitely not going to win the game for you or anything, and they seem to get progressively less useful the further into the game you get, as you face larger numbers of tougher ships and your shredders' spawn rate can't keep up.

[BobTheJanitor]

What they're really good at is mopping up swarms of small ships. They can pretty easily eat a whole wave by themselves, but you do have to watch out for any bigger ships, where they are obviously powerless. They're nice for softening up a system before you send in your main attack force. Sometimes I'll just send in a few hundred to a hostile world and put them on FRD, and then come back a few minutes later to bring my actual assault force through to mop up the guard posts. What I tend to abuse them for the most is beefing up my apparent firepower on a world. If I need to move most of my strength out of a system, leaving a few hundred shredders hanging out will keep the AI wormhole campers from suddenly deciding it's a good time to pop in. That's risky, of course, because if even a single guardian comes through it can easily have its way with the world unless I've built up a good turret defense.

So no, they're not terribly out of whack, although sometimes they do confuse me about my own ship numbers. I think I have a great force to take a world because it shows 500 ships there on the map, but then when I look at the world, I find that it's actually 499 shredders and a single fighter.

[keith.lamothe]

499 very hungry shredders and a single very nervous fighter.

Fixed that for you