I think more useful in general. Yes, siege starships are VERY useful at their niche, but two problems.
1. Their niche is small enough that their resource costs are questionable
2. A moderate size of fleet ships can perform similarly, for much better resource efficiency. As such, the opportunity cost for siege starships are almost never worth it.
Ok, their m+c/e/k costs can be changed and we can try different values. It's not the only starship that needs it, of course. Alternatively the ship could simply be made more powerful to be worth that cost, but that's somewhat trickier.
Someone (Don't remember who, sorry 
) mentioned a while back that the cutoff for fusion cutter attack immunity (or whatever it is called) also made a great logical cutoff for "large ship" determination. Maybe allowing some more of the "bulkier" fleet ships, determined by something similar to that cutoff, be allowed to be targetted by "large stuff only" shots would help siege starship usefullness quite a bit.
There are two fleet ships off the top of my head I can think of that are "bulky" ships that get fusion cutter immunity but are not considered large ships: Zenith Electric Bombers and Sentinel Frigates. There are probably more.
I just added Zelecs and Sentinels to the list they can hit in my working copy.
Basically the problem with the starship formerly known as siege is that it was made an awesome siege unit and then the Bomber starship was added to the always-available types. So there were two awesome siege units. And then when it was decided that the siege simply had too long a range we couldn't just shorten it: the bomber starship already has the short-range siege role. In some ways, simply getting rid of the siege would have made sense, but the anti-starship role does benefit from its presence.
One thing I'm thinking of now that might work is:
- Bomber Starship:
1) make shots aoe (like a grenade-launcher/flak-turret)
2) probably make it somewhat less effective against forcefields
3) make it a bit cheaper
- Antimatter Starship:
4) make it short-ranged, but still longer than Bomber Starship
5) make it faster (say, half Bomber Starship speed)
6) make it more durable (say, 3/4 as durable as Bomber Starships, if it's not already there)
7) let it hit everything that the Bomber Starship can hit
rename it back to the Siege starship
The thing I'm concerned about there is that I'm not sure adding AOE is an adequate shift for the Bomber Starship: how often does it face clumps of targets that it can hit? If the aoe burst was allowed to hit fleet ships too that would help one way but might totally unbalance the thing in another way.
Anyway, that's all based on the conclusion that the Antimatter Starship is good at its niche but the niche is too small. And frankly, the Siege Starship was way more cool.
For example, bomber starship Mk. II costs 5k knowledge to unlock, but Mk. II bomber fleet ships only costs 2.5k. There is no contest, my "bang per knowledge" is FAR better with bomber fleet ships. This is fine, as Mk. II fleet ships are meant to be unlocked first.
However even the Mk. III bomber fleet ship unlock cost of 6k still seems like a better deal than getting the Mk. II bomber starships for 5k. A ship cap of Mk. II bomber starships is most certainly not 5/6ths as useful as a ship cap of Mk. III bomber fleet ships.
Those are good points. Would it be more fun to handle that by making the starship side cheaper, or more powerful? Probably "cheaper", so as to avoid further overshadowing of fleet ships.
*As a good starting point, I would suggest reducing the 5k Mk. II starship unlock cost (and the Zenith starship unlock cost) down to 4k, and the 7k Mk. III starship unlock cost (and the Spire starship unlock cost) down to somewhere between 5k-6k. (5.5k, maybe?)
I'll think about it. I think it may be good to just crunch the numbers and look at total survivability and dps at cap for the starship types and their reference fleet ship equivalents, decide what sorts of ratios are acceptable, etc. One thing I've not found a good answer for yet on starships (and the larger fleet ships) is: if ship type A has 1/10th the cap-size as ship type B, should the survivability-per-unit be 10x and the dps-per-unit be 10x, or does it need to be lower than that due to the dynamics of ease-to-control and concentration-of-force and ships having full dps even at 1 hp, etc. If you have any thoughts on what the ratios should be there I'm listening.
I'm going to put together a more in-depth article about this, because I think I can justify a fleet ship rebalance.
I'm certainly interested in reading that, when you have it.
I think that movement speed is going to be a big part of this, because the ability to use those ships as meat but be able to pull them back will do two things.
You mean increasing movement speed, then? One thing I've noticed about the more recent history of AIW compared to the earliest days I remember is that the generally much-faster-speeds and fairly long ranges is that there really isn't much room for tactical isolation of units unless there's a grav well involved. In general intra-planet position just isn't as big a deal as it used to be, and I dunno if I like that. On the other hand, it's a strategy game, not a tactical game. Too much "depth" to the tactical side and the whole game slogs down because there are so many battles multiplied by however long each one takes.
First, it will soften the often repeated problem of having to rebuild your entire fleet (which is really expensive and takes forever when you are building a triangle fleet mark 4). And it may be as simple as decreasing the build time(while keeping the resource cost static).
That could help, yea. If mk4 built at roughly the same speed as mk1 it would have a phenomenally high /sec cost but I don't think that's a huge problem. If you can't afford them, you can't afford them.
But then there's the problem of waiting for resources. I don't know how common that is nowadays but from some of your feedback I know it's still there. Personally, I think the in-game-time cost of needing more resources is an important part of the resources system: if you really spend down, the AI gets a chance to hit you because of the time lapse. On the other hand, having that cost large amounts of wall-clock-time for the player is really not fun. Going to +10 time helps, but the simulation is just too complex (in cpu cost) to "fast forward" as fast as would be necessary to "skip" the resource-accumulation phase.
What I'm thinking there is:
1) Probably using the variable-speed stuff already in the game, try to implement a super-duper-fast-forward mode that simulates like 100x as much change as normal, by using really coarse steps.
2) Have any human vs AI combat automatically drop the game out of the super-fast-mode because there's no way that can be simulated accurately that coarsely.
3) Anything else that doesn't simulate the same way would need to be divided into two categories:
- Minor enough that the differences can be ignored by the player.
- Major enough that it needs to stop coarse-sim-mode.
4) Have some curtesy-shut-offs (even auto-pause-after-shut-off) for things like wave/cpa/etc announcements or "resources are 80% full" or whatever.
But there's a lot of question marks about that technically and gameplay-wise: would it really solve the problem? And it could be rather a lot of dev-effort and need to touch a ton of stuff (i.e. bug-potential)... but I'm thinking that could be shorter than it otherwise would be because we already have variable-coarseness and we could just add a new performance profile option after "Extremely Low" called "Powerpoint"
I am settling into the idea of triangle ships not being able to be your main fleet (you really can't live without starships, which is probably intended, but the reverse doesn't seem to be true). It's taken me hundreds of hours to accept this fact. That being said, allowing them to have greater utility value through the actions of the player seems like it would be both fair, have value that increases with skill level (hardcore gamers like this!), and not break the game because the economy would still keep a limit on it.
Yea, all your main tools being fun and (to at least some degree) necessary is definitely a goal for us. I keep thinking of ways to make it easier to get fleet ships into the battle so that it's not such a big difference from the hardly-ever-dying starships, but that's not the only thing going on here.
