About 'dem spawner ships, especially in AI hands

[LordSloth]

That's why the incredibly awkward idea of instituting yet another hull type. In summary, my (awkward new hull type) idea would be to give them a much diminished and more niche role, making them less useful overall. If you feel you're losing some regular damage potential on your chokepoints, shift the burden to (buffed?) lightning turrets.

Alternatively, a thought exercise, since I'm not that great at judging ranges once you get below three thousand. Would flak turrets be more effective if they were more like plasma siege starships? That is, instead of an area attack, you would damage X nearby units. As long as drones come out one by one, rather than like a hive golem, you'll have potential spacing issues unless the drones happen to be targeting something at your position. Would this allow more effective screening against passing elements than ships grouped around their targets? I've been much happier with Plasma area damage, but that might be due to a shiny effect and visible engine damage rather than anything objective.

[keith.lamothe]

Alternatively, a thought exercise, since I'm not that great at judging ranges once you get below three thousand. Would flak turrets be more effective if they were more like plasma siege starships? That is, instead of an area attack, you would damage X nearby units. As long as drones come out one by one, rather than like a hive golem, you'll have potential spacing issues unless the drones happen to be targeting something at your position. Would this allow more effective screening against passing elements than ships grouped around their targets? I've been much happier with Plasma area damage, but that might be due to a shiny effect and visible engine damage rather than anything objective.

Actually the plasma siege shots are basically electric flak   Same mechanic for hitting-more-than-one-target, except that the plasma-siege does way less on the aoe parts (and gets the special thing against forcefields).

[TechSY730]

Right, if you have flaks in a situation where they can't hit their max targets per shot, they're going to stink.  Same with Lightnings against much less than 40 ships.

Problem with this is that the splash radius of the flak is so small, it usually only hits 5 or 10 units even in noderatley tightly packed situations.

Or at least I think so. The graphic indicating splash radius of the flak is broken (it doesn't draw) on my machine, so I can't tell for sure how much it is doing.

[keith.lamothe]

Right, if you have flaks in a situation where they can't hit their max targets per shot, they're going to stink.  Same with Lightnings against much less than 40 ships.

Problem with this is that the splash radius of the flak is so small, it usually only hits 5 or 10 units even in noderatley tightly packed situations.

Or at least I think so. The graphic indicating splash radius of the flak is broken (it doesn't draw) on my machine, so I can't tell for sure how much it is doing.

Flak's radius is half that of siege plasma, and can hit a max of 4+mk targets, so if there's 5 in that radius a mkI is doing max.

[TechSY730]

Flak's radius is half that of siege plasma, and can hit a max of 4+mk targets, so if there's 5 in that radius a mkI is doing max.
[/quote]

Oh wow!
I didn't realize the last AOE radius buff went that far. That certainly improves my opinion of them. Too bad about the graphic issue (which may or may not be local to my machine), which caused me to think it was much less effective than it really is.

I still see them somewhat overshadowed by lightning turrets, and would still like to see them get better base DPS, even if they have to lose some of their new HP for it, but I no longer think flak turrets as they are now stink.

[keith.lamothe]

I don't think anyone sees an actual radial area display of the flak's detonation.  There used to be one but iirc a lot of people didn't like it so Chris replaced it with a more normal explosion (which may or may not stand out from other explosions).  Though iirc I think I've seen them go off with no graphic at all.

[Wingflier]

There's an awful lot of stuff in the game that's annoying to someone

Taking out all the "annoying" stuff sounds kind of like Riot's design philosophy.

Unfortunately, when you remove all the "annoying" stuff, you also remove a lot of the depth, and the entire game just starts merging together into a blob.

[keith.lamothe]

Taking out all the "annoying" stuff sounds kind of like Riot's design philosophy.

If they ever get rid of last-hitting I may give it another try

Irony, I know. 

As I agree that we can't just take everything "annoying to someone" out or we're left with a fairly shallow game.  Depending on the threshold of what's considered "annoying", no game at all.  Though people around here are generally tolerant enough that I don't think it'd be quite that bad.

[Faulty Logic]

I was the one who complained about these, in my most recent AAR. And I know about their counters and how to employ them.

I would like to point out that tackle drone launcher DPS goes up quadratically. A mkI drone does 17600 damage to 5 targets. MKII does 35200 to ten. MKV does 88000 to 25. And the AI frequently reaches high enough numbers to send your whole fleet (early or midgame) into the boonies.

But what really gets me is that they are so tough, and the launchers have respectable DPS of their own. And they're immune to a lot of things, notably tractors.

Super long range units should be fragile once you close, especially if they have a means of keeping you from closing.

As to immunities:

It's like when the low-cap ships were designed, someone went through what they thought those ships would be vulnerable to, and then gave them all of those immunities.

Yeah. This. Good point, me. I think that is a large part of why low-caps are so powerful.


The main point I'm trying to convey here is that cleaning a threatball of these is tedious.

[Kahuna]

TDLs can be countered by:

- FF coverage (an FF-protected unit cannot be tractored); you can accomplish this in practice by lining up your ff stuff to cover the "zone" the TDL drones will push your ships through; once your ship enters that zone it will be freed from the tractor.

- Gravity effects (slows down the tackle drones enough that they don't really take you very far)
I still remember when an AI wave had like 100 or more Blade Spawners. I had Gravitational turrets, other turrets and a pretty strong fleet but there were so many Blades they eventually destroyed the Gravitational turrets and then everything else. Perhaps Blade Spawners spawn blades too fast? Make them better at fighting them selves and nerf the Blade spawning speed? The only "mobile Gravitational Turret" is Mark III Riot SS which costs 9000 Knowledge to unlock. So AI unlocking TDL or Blade Spawner = -9000 Knowledge for the player. That's 3 planets and at least 60 AIP.

- Saturation of firepower (kills the tackle drones before they get close)
When there's 100 Special Forces Tackle Drone Launchers nothing is enough to kill all Tackle Drones.

- Long range ships; often if they tackle your snipers/zombards/whatever into the boonies, well, thanks!  Though the aoe damage from the drones exploding can still hurt
Tackle Drones have longer range than Zombards. Snipers do counter them though since they have bonus vs Medium. But again.. nothing is enough vs something like 100 Tackle Drone Launchers

- Tractor-immune ships.
Since when were we able to make Fighters, Bombers and Missile Frigates immune to tractors? "Oh but use a bonus ship that's immune to tractors." First of all I'd have to pick tractor immune bonus ship every fracking time I'd play with Ancient Shadows and Complex ships enabled because I never know if the AIs unlock TDLs or not. So Ancient Shadows and Complex ships enabled = pick Snipers or Tractor immune ships. Also the TDLs are (almost) never alone so the tractor immune bonus ships alone wont do anything except die.

- Attacking the spawners themselves at close range via dynamic entry (popping out the wormhole right next to them) or transport drops.
There are no wormholes right next to Guard Posts nor under AI Force Fields. And again 100 Special Forces Blade Spawners = pain.

And gravity, firepower, and ambushes work against the other spawner types, as well.

These are more annoying than most other AI units, but I think a degree of creativity mitigates much of it.
Multiple rows of Gravitational turrets and Sniper + Spider turrets for defense.. Speed Boosters (which are underpowered and can only be build from Experimental Fabricators which are like 10 hops away from my homeworld every time the map seed actually happens to have one of those) and Snipers (bonus ships) for offense and getting away. Yay.

There's an awful lot of stuff in the game that's annoying to someone

Me.

[KDR_11k]

The big problem with shooting down projectile-units is target acquisition, they go from outside weapon range to impact before the defenrers get to do a target fjnding cycle. A flak defense would need very rapid targeting cycles to get any shots off in time.