A whiff of imbalance in the air

[Haagenti]

Having been a parasite-boy for the past few games, I have now fully and completely recanted.

In my latest game I have switched to Raiders (and I have gone over to Fast&Dangerous), and the combination was a whole new experience for me. I always thought that AI Wars was slow to start, but no longer.

The RaiderBlitz opening

I started an AI8 game vs Vicious Raider and Teleport Turtle (my favorite foes). I invested 7K Knowledge to upgrade Raiders to III at start, built 100 of them in three minutes or so and then sent them on a rampage, continually reinforcing them with more III Raiders and IIs when all IIIs were built.  

Basically, a bunch of III Raiders:
- build fast: with the starting two II Engineers, one every two seconds. And they are cheap. And they don't cost much energy, saving fortunes on powerplants and energy upkeep.
- move fast (very fast in F&D mode): where my old cruiser fleets used minutes to traverse a map, Raiders do it in 20 seconds or so. So I zip along, taking all guard posts and wormholes out, then kill the orbital/warp gate and zip off to the next planet.
- kill all normal ships fast: they massacre cruisers and bombers and are only vulnerable to fighters (and possibly some specials), but the AI doesn't mass-deploy these. Additionally, they kill fighters a lot quicker than cruisers do.
- kill everything else fast: they kill normal turrets, they have enough range to kill lightning turrets, they can bring down forcefields by themselves and they kill starships and Ion Cannons.

And they come in vast hordes (250 or so level cap) giving you a vast horde of 750 raiders to play with if you upgrade to III at start.

So in the first twenty minutes or so, you just build III and II raiders and blitzkrieg everything in sight. IV planets might be trouble, but Teleport Turtle IIIs were overrun with only slightly more trouble than Is/IIs. You move so fast that they have no chance to reinforce.

After twenty minutes or so the AI starts counter-raiding. By this time, I had already killed off four planets (and occupied one) to make sure that only my home planet is adjacent to a warp gate, with exo-FFs on all of its harvesters. This means that the raid had to come to the shielded orbital.

Defending against raids was done by:
- cheap I fighters to kill Raiders. You don't have to prebuild them, as soon as a raid with Raiders is announced, you drop everything else and build only I fighters
- I bombers against Fighters. Again, no prebuilding necessary. Fighters are unable to damage the forcefield or the exo-FF, so you can just build the bombers as the raid is announced. You'll have only a few as bombers build slow (and require 1K metal), but the fighters cannot do anything except bleed on you.
- Raiders to kill everything else. Sometimes the raiders you can build in the 2 minutes after raid announcement are enough, sometimes you may have to move a few back from the front (fortunately, 2 minutes is eternity for zippy raiders)

After the first raid, I worked on creating a raid-luring planet that is not my home planet, and added III short range turrets (to kill everything that moves). In the mean time I killed, occupied and gate-raided the rest of my perimeter.

The RaiderBlitz strategy gave me 10 planets in an hour, with defenses built. And it probably can be done even quicker: the speed of conquest took me by surprise, so colony ships were built late, resource use was sub-optimal, engineer use could be better, energy use could be improved etc.

So there is this whiff of imbalance in the air: are raiders too strong?

Comments invited.

[Fiskbit]

I've seen comments from others about these ships being too powerful, as they really only have one weakness and can tear through everything else. I think your post really pounds the point home, though; it sounds like raiders really throw off the balance and make things significantly easier than intended. I wouldn't be surprised if they were nerfed soon.

[Haagenti]

In that case, I really need dispensation for a longer signature...

[darke]

I don't think you can claim that kill, I recall the other thread was already pretty explicit that they needed nerfing.

Then again in the first hour, you only took 2 planets more then my 8-start-planet AI7.6 game (Teleport Turtle and Special Forces Commander) I just ran through for a test run. And I was deliberately playing crappy with only grabbing the MkII Fighters/Bombers/Cruisers and nothing else of offensive importance.

It looks like they need to be a little less mean, but they really don't sound too powerful. Maybe they just need a decent common counter, rather then their damage being nerfed?

And on a final note, yes Parasites have sucked since they cap at the unit limit (way too much cost for the energy) and especially now that everything builds so much quicker and you get so much more resource. It seems their only real benefit is to reinforce ships when you're out of supply, or if you don't bother building any lower level MkI units and the like.

[ldlework]

In my games with CBWhiz, at the start if the raiders are available its established strategy that one of us must take them.

[Haagenti]

I haven't played multiple starting planets, but starting from a cluster sounds easier to me, as you immediately have safe planets, substantial resources and 7 more planets to quickly research (14K). I may be totally wrong though.

This was from 1 planet.

Parasites are certainly nerfed now that you can no longer use them to build the 1000-cruiser force from missile-hell. Asking resources for repair further nerfed them, as all parasited units need to be repaired.

They are still extremely strong unit against the "AI-that-has-all-the-cloaked-units" as you basically get almost unlimited amounts of Raptors, Autocannons, EtherJets and Space Planes for free (these re-cloak when captured and therefore survive much easier). You can then use the EtherJets to grab all other specials and bring them to a parasite den.

I once had almost full complements of II, III and IV (plus some C) of Raptors, Autocannons, EtherJets, Space Planes, MLRSs, Space Tanks, Raiders and Armoreds, plus three of my own specials from ARSs, and the AI simply could not match such a force.

[Kjara]

One real problem I've found with raiders in human hands, is that their "counter" (fighters), really doesn't counter them.  Disregarding the fact that when you outnumber the fighters 20 to 1 or so, they all die before they get into range normally, even when you don't outnumber them as much, raiders have higher range and move faster, meaning you just kite the fighters till they die.  Since raiders slaughter everything else(besides shields), its insanely easy to both overun planets(or do surgical strikes) and defend with raiders.

[Haagenti II]

I agree with kjara.

Additionally, Raiders kill fighters way too easy. Sometimes my cruiser fleet fires hundreds of shots to kill a few fighters, but the Raiders have little trouble disposing of a few fighters.

So a very partial solution would be to:
a) decrease Raider range to that of fighters, and
b) make fighters a lot harder to kill by Raiders

[liq3]

Yeh, I made a thread on it, mostly recommending how to balance them. Yours drives the point home much better that they need to be nerfed.

http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,1303.0.html

[Haagenti II]

I somehow missed that thread.

I'm now continuing my game, and its a completely different game than all my other games. I'm now making knowledge raids and these cost little effort. Qondering if I should continue or try a level 10 game: it seems feasible.

[x4000]

I posted a note on the other thread, but basically a nerf for this is in 1.999I (upcoming).  Hopefully that will be all that is needed.

[Kjara]

This is sort of a thought on the role of raiders, and how their different costs can help shape this:  Warning, I ramble a bit (somewhat off topic of just raider nerfing, but its somewhat related:)).

What might be interesting is to modify the raider so that it that had extremely low initial build costs(and reasonable build time) as it did before, but considerably higher upkeep(energy) costs(since each point of energy(not counting the free energy from command posts) has a cost of at least 0.000375 crystal and mineral per second(or .0225/min).  Thus increasing a unit cost by 100, increases the cost of that unit by at least 2 crystal/metal a minute.  Thus you have two ways to increase the "cost" of a unit.  It seems to me that units that people should be incentivised to raid with, should have higher energy costs and lower building costs, while units that you want to incentive the player to maintain, should have higher initial costs, but lower energy costs.

This reasoning lets you build two classes of each type of unit, in some sense a cheaper in the short term, but more expensive in the long term, and the other class of unit has the converse be true(and of course you can have a spectra of units that fall between the two extremes).

One thing to take from this is a possible different way to balance the raider, rather than a drastic initial cost increase(which doesn't change the way people will still use them, just make them less effective early on when you more of a resource shortage--the bomber nerf will have an actual effect on how they are used). A decent energy cost increase would also nerf them, while perhaps helping to shape the role they should be taking(that of an offensive expendable unit)

I guess the takeaway message is that I would love to see at least one of the raider type units become a build extremely quickly and cheaply for the power they provide, but take huge amounts of "maintenance"(energy), so you aren't encouraged to maintain an army of them, but are instead encouraged to repeatedly throw them at the enemy.  If something like this was implemented, the hard part would be balancing it so that this strategy(turning the game into a battle of attrition) is as viable but not more clearly more so in general than the current strategy of buildup and crush through projecting an overwhelming force at key locations that we usually see(aka defeat the enemy in detail at key locations).

[Haagenti II]

The thought of having mandatory-expendable units is definitely worth exploring. Perhaps units with a single use warp engine (so they can make at most one jump and can't be re-used) plus high upkeep, making them inefficient on defense.

However, with the raiders there was no long term: the things were so bloody fast and efficient, that they were always in combat and winning the war on their own. If I play them on a map with 8 hops or so to the AI Core, they may well march to victory in an hour or two.

[Kjara]

Oh I agree, the way raiders were, they needed a major nerf.  I'm just throwing out a combo of new unit ideas and alternative ways to nerf them .

[darke]

Think I see what Haagenti was complaining about. Got hit with a wave of 2000 MkIV ships which included about 750 MkIV raiders. The forces I had, had previously taken out a few waves of similar size with about 50% attrition (replaced between waves), but they couldn't handle this wave, and when the dust had settled there was something like 600 raiders left (and a handful of other ship types), and none of my fleet or turrets.

En mass these things seem to be abnormally good in comparison to other singular masses of units. I don't think even cruisers are this killy, especially not in terms of cost anyway. (In 999L.)