AI War Beta 4.037 Released!

[wyvern83]

Yeah, I hope there is a least a little regeneration.

I'd probably try to horde them otherwise which I don't think is the general idea.

[orzelek]

It seems that we are not meant to be winning - all nice toys have some drawbacks...

I'm waiting to see if they are capable of self regen - but I guess if they regen in few hours time it won't help much.

[wyvern83]

I must say though that this expansion really impresses me. The sheer amount of stuff  blows me away.

The new maze maps are fantastic looking and I'm very interested in playing with the new spirecraft and spire fleetships when I can get the time.

[Giegue]

just took a look at the graphics and noticed something: each of the shield modules in the expansion have their own folder, but their graphics are exactly the same...

[x4000]

:\ you cant repair spirecraft from asteroids?

will they regen at all? maybe? a little bit?

No, I think not.  We'll see how these things feel in practice, but asteroids are pretty plentiful and the idea is for these to be single-use consumables that you have a limited store of.  There's not very much of that sort of thing in the game, and I think that sort of "high opportunity cost" ship is a positive addition.  And I can't stress enough the awesomeness of these ships in terms of health, etc -- the highest-mark ones are actually larger than a lot of golems.  The mark V shield bearer has 70m health and doesn't reduce the shots of ships underneath, for instance.  I mean, that's just devastating.  Adding repair-ability to that would let it just be an ongoing sweep that would never be balanced.

Bear in mind these spirecraft don't cost you knowledge or remove your ability to use any of the other ships you already are used to using.  The DO cost quite a lot of metal/crystal, but the results are worth it even if not something you can continuously farm for the rest of the game.  I hadn't decided to make them unrepairable until today, but I think that's pretty much a needed hook for them.  The alternative is to make them boringly low-key instead, closer to starships.  And starships are awesome, of course, but we already have a ton of those.  I also figured this solves the issue of people being overly paranoid with these units, which can't be rebuilt after being built the first time (well, unless you find new asteroids of the appropriate sort, but those are finite also as you know).

With golems, there are only three of those per map, so having them be (expensively) repairable and with strength that is somewhat constrained by their beefing of the AI in reinforcements/waves, and their being tied to enemy warp gates for supply, makes those work reasonably well.  By contrast, here we have something that is built on a finite resource, but there are dozens if not a hundred or more of asteroids in big maps, and you don't have to capture planets in order to farm them -- so you can raid enemy territory to get these without even costing any AI Progress to take them!  That's really different, and why I felt like they needed to be not only based on a finite resource, but also finite in and of themselves.

In summary: they'll be suitably awesome while they're alive, they don't stir up the AI, they don't cost knowledge, they don't increase AI Progress, or anything else.  But they require the finite resource of asteroids, and quite a bit of metal/crystal, and when they're gone, they're gone.  This makes the spirecraft, in essence, trump cards.  Very interesting trump cards.

I think that's a lot more interesting than making them more like golems with heavy ongoing costs, or weaker like starships.  These are something new, and I think people will like it.  There's no reason to fear using these, because not using them is as bad as losing them or not having them to begin with.  So I don't think we'll see people avoiding these like we did with the golems at the start.

[Kron]

Personally, I'm opposed to the Spirecraft being more powerful than the Zenith.

• It feels too much like Power Creep Power Seep. I certainly hope that successive expansions don't keep trying to 'outdo' the previous ones.
  
• It feels like it breaks the lore a bit. The Zenith were supposed to really powerful Ancient Precursor types. "Zenith" = "Highest point". And now a contemporary race has better ships? What?
• This feels like it's a ham-handed attempt to 'fix' Golems. No-one uses Golems? We should modify how Golems work then! Not design Golem replacements and let the originals sit unused in the corners of our solar systems.

[x4000]

Personally, I'm opposed to the Spirecraft being more powerful than the Zenith.

• It feels too much like Power Creep Power Seep. I certainly hope that successive expansions don't keep trying to 'outdo' the previous ones.
  
• It feels like it breaks the lore a bit. The Zenith were supposed to really powerful Ancient Precursor types. "Zenith" = "Highest point". And now a contemporary race has better ships? What?
• This feels like it's a ham-handed attempt to 'fix' Golems. No-one uses Golems? We should modify how Golems work then! Not design Golem replacements and let the originals sit unused in the corners of our solar systems.

The Spire have always been better than the Zenith, that's not new.  That was the intent from the outset with this game, and is why the Spire Starship was always the most powerful rather than the Zenith one.  Yes, I'm aware of the meaning of Zenith, but it was originally "Zinth" and was changed to "Zenith" because everyone kept mis-typing it.

The golems have been hugely revamped many times.  I view them as already quite fixed, and if not, more fixing would take place.  And more golems will be added in the future, I'm sure.  This is probably the last of the alien races for a while, so in future expansions I expect to do more general AI ships, more general human ships, more spire and zenith and neinzul ships, with all the various styles.  The Zenith stuff is ancient and powerful, but the spire is more recent and even more powerful, and the neinzul are short-lived but powerful in their own way.

At any rate, the Spire stuff is always at the top of the heap and always has been (just not much was around), and then Zenith is a not-that-far-behind close second.  And everything else is downward from there.  Future expansions don't have to have the most powerful ships to be interesting -- the Neinzul proved that.  But I felt like working on big ships after spending so long working on the Neinzul, etc.  And with the new emphasis on lower ship caps, guardians and such for the AI, and all the other nasty giant AI weapons, the time seemed right for this sort of thing for the humans, too.

[wyvern83]

When you put it that way, having spirecraft be expendables does seem very interesting.

I think your guess will prove to be right. The fact that being expendable is their only penalty is pretty big. Being able to steal the asteroids to make them for no AIP cost is even better.

It sounds quite liberating to me, I'm all for them being powerful.

[Vinraith]

Are Spirecraft human-only?

[Lancefighter]

you bring up some good points, and I can respect that.. however your basically making a ship that is guaranteed to get shot at often (is forcefield), which basically relegates it to serious importance things only (the few things I can think of.. escorting shard, for example). Its generally not going to see combat many times, because after its first few engagements.. its now a half-sized forcefield thats just useful to show up and be there :\

However, if what I'm seeing is true, its more a 'youll probably just end up building more of them to replace the old ones', which... well, I've made my stance on attrition pretty clear - this is exactly that... forced attrition.

I am not yet sure if this is a good thing or not.. Or what else you have planned other than the shield ship, but I am certainly interested in seeing them ingame, hopefully before I start raging about their uselessness.

[Kron]

@x4000: I still feel that the Zenith Golems are fulfilling a really awkward niche right now.

Prior to the LotS, you basically had a sliding scale of "awesomeness versus replaceability":

• Fleetships: Trivial to build, trivial to replace... trivial to destroy.
• Starships: Cost loads of time and money to build, and tend to be centerpieces of fleets.
• Golems: Cost loads of time and AI Progress to repair (you can't build them, they are that irreplaceable)... but they are truly weapons of mass destruction.

Zenith Golems felt suitably powerful, suitably ultimate.

Now we have a fourth item on that list:

• Spirecraft: Cost loads of time and special hard-to-get resources. They're replaceable, but it costs a lot... they're also stronger than Golems?

This screws with the scale.

It seems to me that players will either stick to fleetships and starships, or hop straight to Spirecraft. They'll skip Golems completely; they're a global minima when it comes to power-over-accessibility.

I was really hoping for Spirecraft to fit in a niche between starships and Golems, mostly because their difficulty of acquisition is kinda in-between starships (loads of money) and Golems (strictly finite number, AIP costs).

Does that make any sense?

Edit: I think I'll start a new thread for this line of discussion.
Second Edit: Nevermind.

[Giegue]

give golems a buff. about 10 fold should be good.



(a little bigger than I wanted it...)

anyway, golems don't cost AI progress anymore. all you have to do is capture a planet they're on and repair said golem.

for the spirecraft, alot more work is required. as well as the typical economy requirement. I'm pretty sure it balances out well.

[Vinraith]

Lancefighter is worrying they'll be useless, I'm worrying they're going to be hopelessly overpowered. Now that the overall challenge level of the game is back to the vicinity of "right" giving the player a new, very powerful set of weapons is going to require some very specific and cautious restriction to keep us from ending up back in "too easy" territory.

[Kron]

They don't cost AIP anymore? O_O

Hrngh. I wonder if I'll sound like a jackass if I say I miss the AIP cost.

[Lancefighter]

I never quite said useless, more in the range of 'very narrow situational usefulness', ESPECIALLY so for a forcefield. Imagine if the home ff you got never could be repaired...

I think the aip cost of golems is what made them powerful.. when it only became a matter of picking it up off the street, giving it a new set of clothes and pointing it at stuff to kill.. they became a little lame. With that said, I personally hardly use them as is, but this is possibly due to that I will not go out of my way to pick up a golem. Oh, and last time i tried to use a golem, it just kinda died instantly.