My proposed fix for #2 works this way:
- When enough player strength is on the homeworld, the AI Home Command Station starts a countdown (say 60 seconds). For the benefit of the newbies, the game might autosave here.
- When this countdown finishes, the AI starts a second countdown, maybe 1 hour on 7/7. When this countdown ends, the AI launches a CPA/exo of epic proportions, oppa Showdown style.
- Killing the AI Home Command Station cancels the CPA/exo. In other words, you have 1 hour once the homeworld battle starts to finish the job, or the game is over.
(obviously homeworld defenses will need rebalancing accordingly)
I don't like this, because as I said above, I regularly will suicide my entire 2000+ ship fleet on a HW to kill a few Guardposts. Those first few Brutal kills, especially, cost almost everything I've got. Rebuilding from that takes a lot more than an hour, so this counter-Exo would doom me if strong enough. If not strong enough, I'll ignore it and it'll have served no purpose at all.
I think you may have missed the part where he said HW defenses would be adjusted accordingly. I suppose that would mean a severe nerf so that taking it out in time would be somewhat tricky, but not almost impossible. (Thus also solving the "max fleet, smash face into homeworld, refleet over a long period, smash face into homeworld,...,repeat until HW goes down" strategy from being the most obvious and attractive strategy)
TBH, I would also be opposed to any sort of hard timer based thing being a core mechanic in the AI homeworld defense. But on different reasons that are more fundamental than the current balance of the game.
The problem is balance. If the full-fleet homeworld smash is guaranteed to win, then there's no point in the countdown. If the defenses remain strong enough that you are likely to lose, then either the Exo/CPA is nothing/doom, depending on your fixed defenses. You'd want somewhere in between where you *might* lose, but it'd be very close. And balancing that'd be so difficult as to be nearly impossible.
I don't see how a counterattack timer is really any different than a Core Raid or Core CPA, other than the guaranteed presence. It doesn't make a fundamental change to the process of attacking a HW, unless the counter is so strong that any player that attacks and fails is doomed.
My favorite moments in the game are in systems where there's complexity in how to solve it, or when things go wrong and I need to deal with it. Stuff where I can try to solve it with ships, or transports, or cloakers, or resort to warheads in desperation. The tactical diversity on the homeworld is lessened significantly.
I think part of the problem is that it is too easy to have defenses that cover each other's weakness. For example the core wraith's only real weakness I find aside from teleporting (which requires positive RNG on the player and isn't pretty at all in practice to defeat a wraith post) is to use cloaking. However, planetary cloaking covers this weakness. So in effect, the core wraith has no real weakness, and one shots everything it touches with a very wide swath. That alone is bad enough, but then you got the other dozen or so things I mentioned also stopping you.
The anti-cloaking change basically killed anything strategy other than "Brute Force". On the other hand, when cloaking was still possible, there were so many cheesy strategies that the HWs weren't difficult at all.
The Wrath Lance's major weakness is mobbing (and game settings), I think. I'm pretty sure that each beam can only hit one ship per beam per frame, so if you reduce the frames/sec and have enough ships to absorb the damage, you can deal with the Lance. Other than mobs and teleporters, though, the Lance is about as close to a perfect defense as the AI can get.
I don't know how much subtlety there is in AI War's in-system combat beyond cloaking and kiting. Choosing your units? For a HW attack, the answer is "All of them". You can't kite, because your targets aren't moving. You can't cloak. You can't EMP. You can't nuke. What else is there?
