AI War Beta 5.016, "Hardened Forcefields," Released!

[x4000]

Hmm... does Arcen Games have a CPA?

Yes, I think we can say that AI War 4.0 was our CPA.   People around at the time would agree, I'm sure, haha.  We all needed a break after the whole engine porting and all that intense, intense refactoring of the game.

In terms of complaining about exploits, most of our exploits have been fixed thanks to some enterprising souls finding them and then telling us about them, so we thank you.

[mindloss]

I'm looking at the side-by-side stats here and I'm a little confused. Seems to me like except for in a few edge cases (I dunno... artillery golem?), hardened FFs are effectively just 25% better, with the added benefits of non-shrinkage and a whole new ship cap. Not complaining about that, I think more FFs is a good thing for sure, just unclear on the difference. If it is the case that there is no other substantial difference, shouldn't they cost slightly more to own and operate (the additional initial 1k kp notwithstanding)?

Not even a full day in and I'm trying to ruin things again! I'll shut up and go actually try them out.

[x4000]

That analysis is pretty well spot on, yes.  That's what Keith was going for, I do believe.

[Ranakastrasz]

I saw that same thing for the hardened forcefields. I actually had thought of an interesting twist to it having armor. Negative armor!

Basically It would have insanely MORE health, but also take dramatically higher damage from attacks. This would mean that rapidly attacking ships would be more effective, possibly moreso than bombers.

[TechSY730]

I'm looking at the side-by-side stats here and I'm a little confused. Seems to me like except for in a few edge cases (I dunno... artillery golem?), hardened FFs are effectively just 25% better, with the added benefits of non-shrinkage and a whole new ship cap. Not complaining about that, I think more FFs is a good thing for sure, just unclear on the difference. If it is the case that there is no other substantial difference, shouldn't they cost slightly more to own and operate (the additional initial 1k kp notwithstanding)?

Not even a full day in and I'm trying to ruin things again! I'll shut up and go actually try them out.

There is one was where they would be worse, ships with chunky armor piercing. However, it would have to be a pretty darn high armor piercing rating in order to see this though.

[Ranakastrasz]

There is one was where they would be worse, ships with chunky armor piercing. However, it would have to be a pretty darn high armor piercing rating in order to see this though.

All of the ships that used to ignore shields have the *cap* armor piercing, so I don't think that they would have that issue.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, you pay more knowledge for the Hardened generators, so they can be a bit better.  Though my intent is that really armor-piercing stuff should be a significant concern to anyone relying on the hardened fields; running across zenith polarizers or spire armor rotters or whatnot should be a problem

So we may need to drop the armor values a bit, I think a million would cause problems with some supposedly armor-nemesis types that only have 100,000 AP.  Or maybe those need more AP, dunno.

Suffice it to say more balancing on the Hardened fields is certainly appropriate

[TechSY730]

Yea, you pay more knowledge for the Hardened generators, so they can be a bit better.  Though my intent is that really armor-piercing stuff should be a significant concern to anyone relying on the hardened fields; running across zenith polarizers or spire armor rotters or whatnot should be a problem

So we may need to drop the armor values a bit, I think a million would cause problems with some supposedly armor-nemesis types that only have 100,000 AP.  Or maybe those need more AP, dunno.

Suffice it to say more balancing on the Hardened fields is certainly appropriate

Yea, a million seems excessive. Pretty much nothing in the game will get much more than 1/5th of the damage (aside maybe from polarizers). Some of ships built for armor peircing it seems like should fare better against the hardened forcefields then they would do to normal forcefields. Someone will need to check what the "normal" AP value of ships built for AP is, though.

[Orelius]

Aside from artillery golems, spire capital ships and maybe assorted AI superships like avengers, there is absolutely no mobile unit that can do more than 20% damage against a hardened forcefield as of now; armored golems do bursts of 5x1million, and polarizers can negate only 10% of the armor on the forcefield; even with 1 million armor, it's unlikely for a polarizor to be able to break 1 million points of damage.  Armor rotters would make an absolute mess of a hardened shield, though; a single cap of mark I armor rotters would rid the shield of its armor in five salvos or 10 seconds(49 ships doing 5000 armor damage every 2 seconds), leaving it open to being instantly annihilated by bombers.

To be honest, I think armor rotters are too good at their job, but it's too good in the sense that it's too niche to be overpowered.

[mindloss]

Question/problem with the new shield mechanics:

It's so disconcerting to see enemies freely traveling around "inside" my shield. But the issue is, what about when I want to engage said enemy?

Example: In my game now, as an artifact from before you fixed the overlapped shield bug *grumble*, I have piles of FFs on my side of a hostile wormhole. Ships come through, ships appear roughly in the center of my FFs. My guys engage.

Are my short-range ships 'inside' of the field, while the enemies aren't? If so, this is problematic since they're taking the damage reduction, and most notably troubling for things like fighters/melee that have a shorter range than the field's radius. And if my ships are outside (above, beneath, whatever) the field while visually appearing inside, well... I also want the option to hide inside the damned thing.

[TechSY730]

Question/problem with the new shield mechanics:

It's so disconcerting to see enemies freely traveling around "inside" my shield. But the issue is, what about when I want to engage said enemy?

Example: In my game now, as an artifact from before you fixed the overlapped shield bug *grumble*, I have piles of FFs on my side of a hostile wormhole. Ships come through, ships appear roughly in the center of my FFs. My guys engage.

Are my short-range ships 'inside' of the field, while the enemies aren't? If so, this is problematic since they're taking the damage reduction, and most notably troubling for things like fighters/melee that have a shorter range than the field's radius. And if my ships are outside (above, beneath, whatever) the field while visually appearing inside, well... I also want the option to hide inside the damned thing.

Yep, that is what I was afraid of. It makes short ranged ships MUCH less useful on the offense. This is actually a BIG problem, as the primary counter of the number one enemy of forcefields, the bomber, happens to be the standard fighter, WHICH IS A SHORT RANGED SHIP.

So basically, the counter to the bombers, the thing that threatens your forcefield (on average) the most, is now made much less useful, which in some cases more than undoes the buffs to the forcefields given in this version.

[Lancefighter]

Youknow what else counters bombers really well? Zenith autobombs.........

[keith.lamothe]

Well, one question now is whether there's still a need for the 25%-damage-output-when-under-an-ff rule.  It's now much harder to indefinitely sustain the fortified position.  On the other hand, it does definitely majorly increase the survivability of offensive turrets and you'd basically never want to _not_ put them under an ff if there's no such reduction.

Another thing would be to increase the range of the fighter and whatnot, but then it would just be a micro question of whether you actually kept them out from under the field, etc.

[x4000]

Yes, the enemies are not protected and are under the force field, while your ships are under the force field and are protected but also doing less damage.

It's possible we need to introduce an "immune to friendly forcefield firepower dampening" type of immunity for the really short-ranged things like fighters.  On the other hand, if you're on defense and you're building some turrets and what have you outside the forcefield, and if you see the bombers coming from a distance and they actually stop to shoot the forcefield, generally they are outside the forcefield and so are you.  The more I think about this, the less I think this is an issue.  YOUR ships are never firepower dampened by enemy forcefields (or vice-versa), so fighters on "offense" as techsy730 mentioned, are still just as powerful as before.

On the defensive side, there is NO reason to have piles of forcefields on your side of the wormhole on top of the wormhole.  It literally accomplishes nothing except preventing AI ships from leaving your planet if that's what you want to do.  But the consequence is that they're popping out inside your wormhole.  Solution?  Short range or other turrets that are good against bombers set outside the forcefields, slaughtering anything that comes in.  And in what I've seen of them on the enemy side of force fields, the enemy almost always stops to shoot the forcefield well before getting under it (as I designed it to), making it so that your fighters can freely engage outside.  The problem is when the AI ships start inside the forcefield to begin with, and then don't have a reason to leave.  That's something that should be avoidable in most circumstances.

[x4000]

Well, one question now is whether there's still a need for the 25%-damage-output-when-under-an-ff rule.  It's now much harder to indefinitely sustain the fortified position.  On the other hand, it does definitely majorly increase the survivability of offensive turrets and you'd basically never want to _not_ put them under an ff if there's no such reduction.

Yeah, players are WAY to abusive of this, it wouldn't stop.  I've seen players put literally 500 turrets under one set of overlapping forcefields, and then drive back 12,000 incoming ships without any mobile ships to assist.  I don't think that sort of scenario would be preventable without the damage quartering, and even WITH the damage quartering about 6k of those ships still died last time I loaded up the scenario.  I can send you the save in question if you want to test with that sometime, it's one thing I use as a benchmark.  I think it was Haagenti who did that one.

Another thing would be to increase the range of the fighter and whatnot, but then it would just be a micro question of whether you actually kept them out from under the field, etc.

If we start playing with ranges for reasons like that, pretty soon everything has a really long range and thus there's no meaning to short ranged in the game.  I'd rather not go that route.