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

[Ozymandiaz]

love the new ion cannons so far. far more teeth, and worth taking into account when i attack planets

also nice in defence

[Kittens]

Regarding the AI-ships-in-FF-space...

Is it possible to remove the damage penalty if the target is in the 2D space of the same FF that the attacker is under? (Keep the penalty for stationary units though.) I suspect that it might not be efficient enough, but it should fix the problem without affecting anything else. Although...  people could then blob under an FF and just move the FF-fleet over invading enemy ships... ugh.

I like the idea of just making melee ships immune to the damage penalty because it's difficult to abuse that, but making fighters immune 'because their range is kinda shorter than everything else' seems a bit arbitrary and inconsistent. It could lead to situations where players micro all their fighters under a forcefield just because they can. It might still be the best solution though.

Alternatively, is it possible to allow AI ships to move from one side of an FF to the other but not allow them to remain in the FF space? Like, shove them out after a few seconds? Or would they just move back in?

This is harrrrd. 

[Lancefighter]

cant we just like, assume that ships 'under' a forcefield dodge in and out of the forcefield to shoot? Thus eliminating the need for it to matter ...

Then, stationary stuff like turrets could still receive the penalty for whatever reason

[TechSY730]

cant we just like, assume that ships 'under' a forcefield dodge in and out of the forcefield to shoot? Thus eliminating the need for it to matter ...

Then, stationary stuff like turrets could still receive the penalty for whatever reason

I think something like that was already proposed. After a MOBILE ship attacks, it loses ff protection for some yet to be determined amount of time, but in return does not receive any damage reduction. I could support that, and it makes sense thematically too.

One nagging question, considering how huge and slow fortresses are, and considering they have a role and act like turrets for the most part, should they be considered always protected but getting the damage reduction?

[TechSY730]

Now that we got a few ideas to compensate for forcefields no longer holding ships out, should I start a poll to gauge public support of the various ideas proposed?

[mindloss]

Some sort of visual indicator of the health of hardened shields would be nice, but it hasn't really been a problem yet. However, a small request: please at least tint them a different color or something than regular shields?

[Lancefighter]

cant we just like, assume that ships 'under' a forcefield dodge in and out of the forcefield to shoot? Thus eliminating the need for it to matter ...

Then, stationary stuff like turrets could still receive the penalty for whatever reason

I think something like that was already proposed. After a MOBILE ship attacks, it loses ff protection for some yet to be determined amount of time, but in return does not receive any damage reduction. I could support that, and it makes sense thematically too.

One nagging question, considering how huge and slow fortresses are, and considering they have a role and act like turrets for the most part, should they be considered always protected but getting the damage reduction?

Not even losing the protection or what not; Just dealing damage without issue. Fortresses, I think have to be stationary to fire (havent used them in forever, might be wrong), so just always applying the damage reduct to them wouldnt be terrible.

[TechSY730]

Not even losing the protection or what not; Just dealing damage without issue.

Admittedly, this is very similar to the system the AI uses. But what is to stop the player from sticking their armada under a bunch of forcefields and creating a trivially easy defense against almost everything? This is especially true if the player chose or got a long ranged bonus ship. It's basically reintroducing in a different way the original problem with turrets under forcefields, which is why the damage reduction mechanic was introduced in the first place. The damage reduction makes players choose between safety and firepower, as having both leads to broken strategies. Without that, their would be no reason not to put your ships under forcefields unless they were ultra short ranged ships.

Actually, now that I think about it, mobile ships should keep their ff protection even when firing, as when creating a beachhead in enemy territory, you frequently don't have time to build turrets before the ff would go down, so you need to protect some of your fleet.

As someone else mentioned, this is a tricky problem.

EDIT: Second paragraph did not make this very clear, but wanted to say that I retract my earlier support of having mobile ships drop ff protection when firing.

[TechSY730]

Yep, another double post. 

How about a compromise? Something like,

Damage cap under a human strong forcefield is:
100% (no damage reduction at all) if the object has a 0 ranged weapon (aka, a melee ship)
50% (does half damage) if the object is mobile and not a fortress (possibly OMDs could be put under this catagory, making them a little better in human hands)
25% (does quarter damage) if the object is stationary or is a fortress (and maybe infinite range mobile ships too)

[mindloss]

I haven't figured out a good answer to this new wrinkle yet, but I do have one opinion: whatever solution is picked, it should be clean and simple. Any of the more convoluted suggestions here would probably be a headache to implement and then cause even more problems. This change didn't really change that much: enemies can now be in your force fields, and before they couldn't. The only reason it's potentially a problem at all is that that makes it a little more likely your units will also be firing from within your force fields, unintentionally or unavoidably. So, what's the minimum change possible that brings behavior back in line with how it was pre-change (which people seemed to be happy with)?

[keith.lamothe]

So, what's the minimum change possible that brings behavior back in line with how it was pre-change (which people seemed to be happy with)?

This is my main approach, yes.  Our chance of doing something that actually significantly increases the number of rules or the number of nuances to each rule is pretty low.  So something like "all mobile ships don't get the 25% multiplier" or "all mobile ships except the obviously turret-like ones don't get the 25% multiplier" is likely, but adding anything that cares about whether the target is under the same ff (which involves almost as much cpu pain as repelling them to begin with) or multiple tiers of mulitipliers... not as much.  Though I don't know where Chris is on this currently.  Honestly we need to focus on AVWW right now

[x4000]

Honestly we need to focus on AVWW right now

Yup and yup.


In terms of this, I think that "any mobile ships with a range less than x" would be the simplest thing.  That wouldn't be ideal for all forcefields, etc, but it would handle the bulk of cases the bulk of the time.

[TechSY730]

In terms of this, I think that "any mobile ships with a range less than x" would be the simplest thing.  That wouldn't be ideal for all forcefields, etc, but it would handle the bulk of cases the bulk of the time.

OK. I can live with that. If you want, I can gather some range data of some important short ranged ships and natural enemies of forcefields to help determine a good value for x.

[Cyborg]

are we really that bothered by the range of x? We just lost two strategies- minimum. I'm more worried about that.

[Lancefighter]

Well, yeah. Whats to stop the player from doing it is that, last i checked, forcefields trigger a 'all ai ships respond' threat of some sort.

Additionally, they are incredibly slow, cant use wormholes, and still suffer from the same stacking issues as before.

In effect, the only difference this would make as far as using them in a fleet goes, the only change is that it takes 4 times shorter to walk over stuff with a forcefieldblob than before.. The forcefields still cant be repaired while taking damage (pretty much the largest exploit regarding forcefields was fixed).. Which means its not impenetrable, its merely difficult to break. And the AI excels at throwing around brute force.

And turrets would still get the 25% reduction in damage, and those are kinda a huge part of defense, under forcefields or not.