I think strength would be best. As strength becomes more integrated across-the-board in various game mechanics, their value as a reference point goes up. Precision isn't as important when they are obstacles that you yourself cannot control, but it is very important if you directly impact when threat is unleashed. It certainly is a step in the right direction.
I had mentioned the "equvilant to X units" so as to provide a second reference point. In my case it would be a triangle unit like the humble fighter. "Response is equal to X strength, or equivalent to Y MK II fighters." This is a holdover for strength still being a...nebulous concept.
Yea, Strength is still nebulous, but I hope to change that. If there were a better metric I'd use it, but honestly I don't think there is. "Y Mk II fighters" is a useful reference point but it's not a good "primary description" of how much something is going to hurt. Partly because fighters are actually some of the easiest stuff to hold off, pound-for-pound (as opposed to, say, bombers).
So what I'd like to do is have the hacking post-response warnings, and the CPA warnings, list Strength on their alert lines, but when you mouseover them it explains that it's simply a measurement and tells you roughly how many MkI fighters that would be (on your cap scale).
and the cores get something done to them since they are so extremely overpowering and make the game almost unlosable outside of exo waves.
If that were the consensus here I'd nerf them, but in past discussions it still seemed heavily in dispute whether core turrets were actually OP.
A thought on this to see what y'all think: what if it showed a calculated or estimated strength of reprisal on the tooltip of the hacker itself?
You mean the text that pops up when you mouseover the hacker? Just checking, but why would you want it there rather than the alert box? Too many things in the alert box already?
What about a new "zombie level", where they are still unreclaimable, but still show some semblance of intelligence (they can be controlled by the AI for local operations, like with focus firing, prioritization of important targets, etc; but can't join up with higher level forms of intelligence such as threat fleet and possibly seeking out weaker planets)?
That's one possibility but it's a lot more work and thus potential bugginess than simply making them normal threat. Or making them normal threat with a no-reclaim flag.
For now I want to see how much of a problem is there to be solved, rather than hitting it with a complicated solution first.
If you're going to list strength, then you also have to find a way to explain what ship strength mean...
It's simple enough for the tooltip to tell you how many fighters that means, and after a game or two you'll probably have a pretty good idea of how much pain is meant by 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 strength, etc.
AIP is 181 and wave sizes are only about 2200 even though the AI sends Infiltrators. I remembered wave sizes were about 2500 at ~180 AIP without swarmers.
Hmm. I suspect other factors causing variance. I'll make a note to log some waves in 7.024 and then similar waves in 7.025 to see if other changes have watered down the buff (fwiw, there is a wave-size multiplier that used to be 5 on diff 10, and is now 7.5).
Also. Was this supposed to be a nerf to the Gravitational Turrets? Because.. let's say 10 Mark II Gravitational Turrets.. they can tank a lot of damage. Especially if you have Rebuilders rebuilding them. Also their health was buffed. So I wonder how deliberate are the AI ships about killing Gravitational Turrets exactly? Because I was surprised to see how few losses my fleet took.
Zoom in and look at the Bombers and the Gravitational Turrets. It looks like they really want to get rid of those Gravitational Turrets. Now Gravitational Turrets can be used as Force Fields. Kind of.
Hmm, good point that such heavy-handed "go kill this now" instructions typically lead to non-ideal behavior. I'll probably have it only do that for half the AI units, maybe 1/4, so the rest will plod on through the molasses in case that's what's best for them to do.
I really like the new Warheads.
Glad that's working out
They are generally more flexible now.
Why are some Carriers ssoooo damn tanky? (...) Also how is the damage calculated? When I shoot at the Carrier the ships inside take damage. Do "all ships inside the Carrier "have Ultra-Heavy hull" like the Carrier"?
The damage is calculated exactly as if you were shooting the carrier itself. So the Carrier's hull type and armor and so on are what's used. The hull type and armor and whatnot of the contained units are completely ignored for this purpose. They're just a chunk of Health.
At the point in the code where the damage-to-carrier is translated to damage-to-internal-units, it doesn't even know that the damage came from a shot at all (sometimes it didn't), let alone what vs-hull multipliers that shot may have had.
What may be causing such consternation is that you as a player can't tell whether the "next" unit inside the carrier is a fighter or a starship. If it's a starship it's going to take a lot more hits to knock the carrier's "(102)" down to "(101)".
So perhaps what it should do is use that "next" unit's max health, and the damage done to the carrier since the last internal-unit-kill, for the carrier's health bar. That way you'll see it zoom down to nothing, then the (102) will count down 1 and the health bar will refill, and then it zooms down to nothing, and it counts down another 1, etc.
Thanks for the feedback, everyone
