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

[TechSY730]

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

And we are trying to give buffs back to the player to help offset the loss of those strategies/techniques. Sadly, I don't think the strategies/techniques can be reintroduced without reintroducing the abusive "cheesiness" that they implied.

[Cyborg]

I never considered it as abuse. It's been in the game for a really long time, and as far as I can tell has been openly discussed and encouraged on this forum up until this update. It's not like the developers didn't know we were doing it- and doing it for the last who knows how many months. If that's an exploit, then it is the most tacit approval exploit I have ever seen.

Now that that is out of the way, moving a giant force field with a fleet around a planet… I don't march around with force fields. If I'm going to do it, I'm going to set up stations of force fields that are spread apart but within the same path from the wormhole to the command station and just park my units under that until it falls over. If you want to march around, that's cool, but fiddling around with x is such a minor issue in comparison to ripping out player strategies and giving nothing back.

It's not that I am opposed to the change. Not completely (although I disagree something is an exploit if you openly see people doing it for years). I just think if you are going to nerf the player, which has been done fairly heavy-handedly in the past as well as the present, we should get something back. There were other ways to have handled it, such as increasing the repair cost.

[x4000]

I don't have time or inclination to get into a debate about the merits or demerits of whether something is an exploit or not.  But regardless, just because something has been around a long time doesn't mean it's helpful to the game design, which is really my only criteria here.  Does this make the game feel more interesting and balanced all around, or not?

Does this allow players to circumvent a large part of the difficulty of most scenarios if they know this one trick, while making it really much harder for anyone who doesn't know the trick?  If the trick is suitably obscure or counter-intuitive, or sufficiently glicthy-feeling or overpowered-feeling, then trick probably needs to go, and then everyone is on the playing field. "This strategy always is best" strategies are always going to be nerfed around here.

Beyond that, if the nerfing of such a strategy causes too much hardship, then either:
a) the player was potentially playing on an inflated difficulty level and needs to either adjust the difficulty or find a substitute strategy now that this crutch is gone; or,
b) if this is affecting a lot of folks and generally making the game harder for even people that didn't use/overuse the direct trick in question, then something else needs to be done to compensate.


We've increased the health of forcefields, increased the forcefield cap, increased their effectiveness against teleporting ships, and added a hardened line of forcefields.  And solicited feedback on balance.  To claim we've given nothing back is disingenuous and unhelpful.  If there's something specific that you want to see added in counterpoint, please let us know what it is and I'm sure everyone will weigh in.  If it's popular and makes sense to everyone, it's in.  But we're relying on other folks here to do the playtesting and let us know what they think at the moment, and if nobody says anything then there's not much we can do.

Right now the only suggestion raised has been about short-range ships losing their penalty while being under forcefields.  So now the question is what constitutes "short ranged."  If there's something else you feel that needs to change in addition to or instead of this (AND everything else we've given to players in counterpoint to the recent changes), then suggest away.

[Cyborg]

I wasn't addressing you, in particular, because you usually respond with short-tempered remarks every time I point something out or blatantly refuse obvious solutions. We can't have any critique of your patches without you getting upset. You are not the first game designer to be met with resistance to nerfing the player. My resistance was half-hearted at that and willing to accept it, maybe with some convincing that the kinds of things I do with the game are still allowed. That's really the worst part about developers nerfing games, where it feels like you're being guided into playing a certain way.

Anyway, I'm not worried about the difficulty level (I have no problem adjusting it), and I don't feel I was disingenuous at all. You can give us buffs on a lot of units- that's not giving us mechanics that would enable strategy. It just means "spam these units." The new forcefield type is just another layer to place on top of that.

We all know you are busy with the other game right now. I'm trying to get at the following from other players:

I was conversing on what the focus was around short-range ships. What solution is this going to solve? Which strategy does that enable? Are we just focusing on my giant fleet versus the AI's giant fleet? I mean, it would be such a tiny buff in the grand scheme of things that has nothing to do with what we just lost. Ships and defensive structures sitting beneath force fields have always been debuffed, and it hasn't been a problem.

Looking at the scenarios that we lost, entrapment, blockades and hostile knowledge raiding are what got hit hard. It was replaced with forcefield spamming. I'm obviously not thrilled about anything that's going to make waiting for resources even longer- I dislike that more than losing strategy. Thinking about rebuilding my fleet and rebuilding force fields everywhere..most of your players that are playing on lower difficulty levels probably aren't going to care. But when you're facing really large waves and events, it's a bigger deal. It's worth talking about and criticizing, and in the end I may even agree with the change.

[Orelius]

I wasn't addressing you, in particular, because you usually respond with short-tempered remarks every time I point something out or blatantly refuse obvious solutions. We can't have any critique of your patches without you getting upset.

I don't see any of these solutions of yours.

Anyway, I'm not worried about the difficulty level (I have no problem adjusting it), and I don't feel I was disingenuous at all. You can give us buffs on a lot of units- that's not giving us mechanics that would enable strategy. It just means "spam these units." The new forcefield type is just another layer to place on top of that.

Extensive micro to maintain a shield bubble is not strategy; it's more along the lines of, well micro.  Strategy is placing defenses in key positions; not continual pausing, right clicking, and unpausing.

I was conversing on what the focus was around short-range ships. What solution is this going to solve? Which strategy does that enable? Are we just focusing on my giant fleet versus the AI's giant fleet? I mean, it would be such a tiny buff in the grand scheme of things that has nothing to do with what we just lost. Ships and defensive structures sitting beneath force fields have always been debuffed, and it hasn't been a problem.

You're missing the point.  Short-ranged ships are now weaker against AI ships when they're around force fields because they are now often unable to take shots at enemy ships that are inside your forcefields without being in the force field itself.  This problem never existed before because AI ships could not be inside your force fields.
To be honest, I personally don't think that the change is that vital; but then again, I haven't been playing as often as I used to.

Looking at the scenarios that we lost, entrapment, blockades and hostile knowledge raiding are what got hit hard. It was replaced with forcefield spamming. I'm obviously not thrilled about anything that's going to make waiting for resources even longer- I dislike that more than losing strategy. Thinking about rebuilding my fleet and rebuilding force fields everywhere..most of your players that are playing on lower difficulty levels probably aren't going to care. But when you're facing really large waves and events, it's a bigger deal. It's worth talking about and criticizing, and in the end I may even agree with the change.

Entrapment and blockades are still very possible with the infinitely more efficient gravity and tractor turrets.  Do you really want to spend four or five or your valuable force fields to blockade a wormhole or use them to protect your command stations and structures?  Entrapment and blockades with force fields are highly overrated; especially since the same could have been accomplished with a handful of tractor or gravity turrets under a force field or two.  It's never been a viable strategy, and I personally don't miss it one bit.

Hostile knowledge raiding is meant to be hard, to the point where I don't even bother with it because it's too much trouble to deal with.  It's perfectly possible to win a game without knowledge raiding at all.  You aren't losing strategy at all; you're just losing the ability to make an effectively invincible barrier wherever you want with enough micro.

Also, if you have to constantly rebuild your forcefields everywhere, it looks like you aren't defending them properly at all.

[keith.lamothe]

We can't have any critique of your patches without you getting upset.

That is not true in the general case.  But do bear in mind that we are imperfect folks with a finite amount of patience, emotional energy, etc, and there are various other pressures acting upon us.  So we can't maintain complete emotional equilibrium particularly when faced with criticism we see as overstating the point (implying that you've not gotten anything back, etc).  I'm not saying it's right, just asking you to bear with us.  And in all honesty I think we try a _lot_ harder than most other developers to get past our own imperfections and the various problems with internet communication to genuinely work with our community.

Anyway, we'll keep thinking about the issues and trying to find ways to make the game better (notably in areas that may have been damaged by recent changes, though we obviously think that damage was less than the gains involved).

For the record, it was an exploit, and I exploited it and openly advised others to do so for quite a while.  Wasn't anything tacit about it   In my use of the term, it's still an exploit   But I can see why other definitions of the term would exclude that usage, and perhaps would be more correct than mine.  Anyway, we thought it was hurting the game, a lot, and it came out.  Onward

[keith.lamothe]

I wasn't addressing you, in particular, because you usually respond with short-tempered remarks every time I point something out or blatantly refuse obvious solutions. We can't have any critique of your patches without you getting upset.

I don't see any of these solutions of yours.

I think he was referring to previous cases where there had been a problem and he had suggested something that he felt was obviously a good solution and saw that it was refused.

Also, if you have to constantly rebuild your forcefields everywhere, it looks like you aren't defending them properly at all.

I wouldn't say that.  At least, my ffs get hammered pretty badly; the shrinking ones don't generally get destroyed (the hardened ones do have a bit of trouble on that point, as someone suggested it may be better to have them shut down at some low health to avoid dying a lot).

[x4000]

What was the obvious solution I've rejected?  The problem was that players could trap ships against force fields and pin them there.  The secondary effect of this change was the lack of being able to do a blockade with multiple forcefields on your side of a wormhole, but that was never particularly my prime aim.  Anything that doesn't address the first problem isn't a solution.

In terms of blockades, you can still do those with force fields on the enemy side, with gravity turrets or tractors on your side, and so on.  If someone has another blockade mechanic idea that isn't relating to stacking up forcefields in a crazy way, I'd be open to that.  The problem is that with general-purpose units that are intended to be used one way but get used in some edge cases that are expoit-y, we tend to shave off those edge cases.  But if there's a legitimate gameplay mechanic at stake, then reimplementing it with another unit is something we've done in the past.  But, I think that already we have gravity turrets and even things like sniper turrets, etc, which pretty much serve that same purpose.

[Cyborg]

I liked the trapping mechanic. I thought it was funny, sometimes clever, and always enjoyable. Blocking and pushing units is satisfying. I understand that we aren't going to be doing that anymore. Honestly, it's not that I'm objecting specifically to the change, it's just the flexibility of strategies that I want to maintain.

I am play testing at the moment. This game takes a while, so let me get some spire going and some save files, and I can at least contribute that as a more substantive argument. That's really where things are going to fall apart, if I'm right. I want to see how far in that happens with the campaign, assuming it happens.

[x4000]

Fair enough.

I should clarify: by trap ships, I mean that a single forcefield left in the path of AI ships could cause AI ships to stick to the outside of it like flies on paper, when the AI ships were actually not interested in the forcefield and were heading past to something on the other end.

[mindloss]

This force field change was definitely a huge buff, and I was happy to see it (especially after the nerf last round). It's obvious it will take another iteration or two until things are tuned quite right, but I think it's a good direction to be going.

Besides, the answer to please everyone is obvious. New unit. One word. Walls.

[x4000]

Actually, you jest, but I used to have walls in the game prior to 1.0.  It was really glitchy and I never could get it to work in a CPU-friendly way, but I sure tried because I really wanted walls.   This was before wormholes were a thing.

[Cyborg]

Has anyone else had trouble placing hardened forcefields inside of the starting planet special force field?

[keith.lamothe]

Has anyone else had trouble placing hardened forcefields inside of the starting planet special force field?

No, though I confess that I don't think I tried placing one in that particular position (my test defensive positions were not on my HW).  What sort of trouble?

[Cyborg]

Has anyone else had trouble placing hardened forcefields inside of the starting planet special force field?

No, though I confess that I don't think I tried placing one in that particular position (my test defensive positions were not on my HW).  What sort of trouble?

It will not place. It lets you click in the force field with the hardened force field selected, and then the icon of that force field on your cursor disappears after you try and place it. Didn't know if it was not allowed to stack these?