AI War Beta 3.708, "The Salve," Released

[TheMachineIsSentient]

Why not wait until the next major release before we start talking about balance, Lance? Actually think this could be a good idea, as it seems like we are moving away from giant blobs of doom towards something a little bit different. And it's not like you don't have a couple installs, right? :-)

I'm going to wait until unity release major version, and then I will jump in the pool and see how it plays out.

Because the less established a change is, the easier it is to change again. I understand that nothing is final yet, but sometimes some change just touches the wrong nerve (and you saw how much i used those cloaker starships >.> )
I honestly dont know how effective my fleet would be sans the element of surprise, especially when picking off hybrids. (and in the latest release, i certainly need all the help i can get killing hybrids ^^)

I have a video of you pulling this off posted on YouTube, and you managed to basically waltz around the galaxy unmolested by repeating the same technique. Is all well and good, but in a way, it seemed a little broken because the AI does not know how to respond to that. You completely annihilated the core planet doing this. I appreciate having tactics like this, I certainly enjoyed seeing it done (I plan on using it myself), but I think the AI needs to have some sort of counter such as a scout starship. You should have to kill the scout starship before it gets the range, or at least have some sort of mitigating factor that doesn't allow you to wipe out an entire planet with 10 ships or less and basically march wherever you want. An emergent AI would "learn" from this and at least try to mount a defense. It didn't, so yeah, I think it's broken, and I'm hoping that the fix will also be a ship counter from the AI instead of a stationary defensive structure.

And yeah, I wasn't trying to say that we shouldn't give feedback, just that maybe it's a little early to get upset about what the design is supposed to be. None of us know what it's supposed to be. I remarked just last night that I could no longer tell what the unity release was and what the children release was. The game is changing so much, it's hard to make any analysis at all. Nobody has any numbers to go on, and the tactics themselves are up for major changes.  By all means, give feedback, just don't get too upset yet because it's not done.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, we're really grateful for the feedback, and one important part is the we-just-did-this changes as there are often bugs or other unintended side-effects where it's like "oh, I didn't mean for that to happen" and it's a quick fix.

On the other hand, there are sometimes things like the no-AI-turrets during this interval where y'all just don't have enough info (on our plans) to give any kind of comprehensive feedback.  In cases like that it's blind people in the dark room with the elephant, trying to piece it together by feel   Though sometimes even that is at least mildly useful, like the person who pointed out that the AI particularly lacks ability to stop scouting without turrets.  We already knew that, of course, but avoiding duplication is not the primary goal of feedback.

What's more important is the attitude with which the feedback is presented.  If we make a change that causes a player significant distress (either due to intended or unintended effects) and they write some mournful rage post, it can be frustrating/demoralizing for us.  Or sometimes just amusing, but that's beside the point.  Anyway, y'all are great and there's very little feedback here that really fits that exaggerated description.

Negative feedback is fine.  Actually it's essential.  But the more it focuses on objective facts, concrete flaws, and concrete solutions, the better

To be clear, I'm not describing or referring to any particular feedback in this thread.

Anyway, onward and upward, I have context menus to port

[Lancefighter]

that core planet took a great deal of effort to take down, it certainly wasnt solo as far as those were concerned.. its akin to a submarine wolfpack, those siege starships - use them as such and great things happen.

note that i lost a ton of ships to other longrange stuff, forts, forts under forcefields, zenith bombard stations, neinzul spawner stations (i hate these. They need to die in a thousand eternal fires, but for the moment they arent that bad.)

it works very well for most systems, but really core systems are not as simple as it seems