A few thoughts based on my experience with the units thus far. It took me a while to adjust to how Siege Starships work against how I thought they should work, of course, and as others have pointed out, you kind of end up with a fragile, expensive ship that's really useful against mostly Guardians.
A few ideas:
- Siege Starship as a planetary defense turret: Redefine "Siege" from the offensive idea of bashing down walls to the "starve them to death" idea. A Siege Starship on a planet that is player-controlled gains the ability to engage any target. Gives you a mobile, powerful, yet fragile and tenuous way to lock down a wormhole so that your strikeforces can hit the planets.
- Anti Radar-Dampening: Siege Starships gain the ability to offset a percentage of a target's radar dampening, at the expense of some damage, up to -100%. By default, the unit logic would seek the -50% point, but you could micro them to tweak it. So, against a target with Radar Dampening 5k, you could instead hit it from 7.5k at half damage.
- Anti-Forcefield Damage: Unless I'm doing something wrong, manually setting a preferred target for the Siege Starship still doesn't let it fire into the forcefield; it'll just move to close range, not fire, and get destroyed. Instead, have the Siege Starship be able to fire through a forcefield, again, at the expense of damage.
My thought is that, while I understand and agree with the battlefields-within-battlefields mantra, I do see artillery units as something outside that. Much like a "real" battlefield where an artillery piece could provide support fire to multiple fronts, I feel that artillery units should be able to provide that fire to all battlefields on a planet. Like a real battlefield, too, where you need boots on a hill to capture objectives, AI War's artillery units should be hard pressed to actually
finish battles, but well-equipped to
support multiple battles in turn.
