Balancing Champions

[Dichotomy]

One thing that I would like to see adjusted somehow, is that Champions become just as worthless as None-spire fleet ship around the third Spire city and there is nothing you can really do about it. Even the top level ship just dies when an Exowave shows up and I tend to find them more useful in the fact that they can release a non-AIP Tachyon pulse more then anything after that point. They just can't survive long enough to do anything worthwhile without being a part of the main Spire Fleet at that point.

You're playing Fallen Spire, the minor faction designed to dominate all else. The champion shouldn't be able to stand against an exo; only extensive fortifications are supposed to.

I don't like the idea of something to directly counter the champion. The point of minor factions is interesting tradeoffs. It would be like the AI response to golems being golem-killers on all the AI planets.

Not in favor of a champion exo. It's yet another "pull back whole fleet 3 minutes before IMPENDING DOOM and wait it out" mechanic (CPAs and all the other exo sources).

I agree that the offensive aspect should not be like the golem/spirecraft/FS exos. However, I can see low/no warning attacks working.

They CAN attack while a champ is hiding inside of a completed nebula.

No. The nebulae are balance with no outside interference. This includes right after you've apparently won.

I'd rather see a cost to Champions than an AI response

No.

Of all the ideas here, I like threatfleet champions best, with wave-level warning micro-exos second.

[Confirmation_Bias]

I agree with XANA Dichotomy on all points, particularly

Of all the ideas here, I like threatfleet champions best, with wave-level warning micro-exos second.

[Eternaly_Lost]

One thing that I would like to see adjusted somehow, is that Champions become just as worthless as None-spire fleet ship around the third Spire city and there is nothing you can really do about it. Even the top level ship just dies when an Exowave shows up and I tend to find them more useful in the fact that they can release a non-AIP Tachyon pulse more then anything after that point. They just can't survive long enough to do anything worthwhile without being a part of the main Spire Fleet at that point.

You're playing Fallen Spire, the minor faction designed to dominate all else. The champion shouldn't be able to stand against an exo; only extensive fortifications are supposed to.

I am not saying that the Champions should be strong enough to just stand against it outside of fallen spire. I was saying that it would be nice if the cities granted modules that could let it do so, or at the very least give it a bit more strength. Even the final Champion just dies when I sent it though any wormhole without sending the fleet in first around the time of the third city.

Basically when you get the first city, you get the first level of a special fallen spire only line of modules that can only be increased in level by gaining more cities( 2 citys = mk2 unlocked and so on). Although the more I think about it, the less likely something like that is going to happen, as I think part of the design is to keep the expansion stuff more or less isolated to one DLC, and what I am suggesting here would basic require 2 DLC, Light of the Spire and Ancient Shadows.

[LaughingThesaurus]

No. The nebulae are balance with no outside interference. This includes right after you've apparently won.

The point is that this attack is a strictly ganking maneuver that then goes after your actual planets. It won't kill off any of your rewards. The only real problem with hiding in a nebula is that your own fleet can't save your champion if the attack strikes just then. That's also why I've said that it was merely like an exo as in... it's just its own special kind of ganking attack. It doesn't have the strength or magnitude of an exo by any means. It's supposed to be hard to defend your champion from it.

[LintMan]

It needs to be kept in mind that not every player might have a champion.  Sending typical exo-waves against planets places the burden of defense mainly on command-station players rather than the champion players.  The champion players are what we're trying to balance here, so that's where the focus should be.

In other words, whatever the counter-balance is, it should place the responsibility primarily on the champion players to deal with it, or at least somehow require the champions to be involved.

Some ideas:
* Champion raids:  After each nebula mission, the AI creates 1-4 special exo-raid-spawner structures PER CHAMPION PLAYER scattered on AI planets at most 3-5 hops from the player worlds.  Each of these threat spawners produces an escalating set of small exo/raid waves that beeline to player planets and then cause havoc there.  They start small and weak, but are scaled by the number of spawner structures remaining and by how long they have been in operation.  Leaving these spawners active will eventually result in devastating large scale core-level fleet-ship attacks.   The spawner structures have extremely high health, but are especially vulnerable to the Champion's weapons

* Mega-beachhead exo/CPA wave: Pre-announced well in advance of the actual attack, the AI generates a fleet of mixed ships plus a mega-beachhead on one of its planets 4-5 hops from the player worlds.  The mega-beachhead blocks player supply but also generates a constant EMP-effect, disabling all non-EMP resistant ships on the planet.  It has very hight health, but is again especially vulnerable to the Champions.  This wave waits 10-15 minutes and then launches its attack, making its way to the player territory.  The player can wait and deal with it once it arrives on thier planets, or they can be proactive and try hunt it down and  take it out before it gets there.

* Champion Slayer: The AI creates one of these PER CHAMPION PLAYER after the 3rd, 6th and 9th nebula missions, entirely focused on making life hell for any champions that venture into AI territory.  It is extremely fast, with high health and devasting attack damage against champions.  The Slayer partly exists in the Shadow realm and so is invulnerable to non-champions, but it also is unable to damage non-Champions.  The Slayer is non-repairable, so a Champion can eventually take one down.   They also spread out, avoinding having more than one Slayer on any planet at any time (to avoid ganging up too badly).  Whenever the AI spots a Champion in its territory, it will send immediately send the nearest Slayer after it, which will track down and destroy the Champion wherever it goes (even back into player territory).  When the targetted Champion is killed, the Slayer retreats back to AI space until a Champion is again spotted.  This repeats until the Slayers are all dead.

In general, the counter-balancing for Champions needs to be based on the number of Champions and the number of nebulas done (and possibly even the success of them).  It should not be based on AIP.

[Lancefighter]

Id like to see something like advanced hybrids - Something that requires me to actually be on the offensive, proactively. (on that, i also feel like hybrids need to be more offensive, but thats another slightly different story).

I'm thinking of some sort of ai response fleet that roams around in ai territory. Specifically roams, like ... well, trains probably. Ideally I dont want to see these stationary particularly long. I just want to see something that I need to actively track and destroy, with some sort of planning maybe.
They should probably respawn every so often, (as to give the player an incentive to be active), and be very dangerous if ignored.

I really dont want to see counterwaves on nebulas or something, those feel far too reactive. As it stands, aiwar is already a really big waiting game. Id like to have a reason to not watch netflix and browse forums for hours on end.

[Marmu23]

 How about new hunter dudes that can capture champions and put them to work for the AI until they are freed (by getting shot of course) by the rest of the fleet?

[KDR_11k]

Things that hunt champions are rather pointless because the champion is practically free.

Using the champ is a lot of fun but it's a powerful unit with zero risk associated with using it, if it dies it respawns within 20 seconds at most. That makes using the champion on the offense preferable to using your main force because you don't need to pay for replacing losses. Since you still get all your regular ship caps you can keep a whole army at home and ready to defend against counterattacks while your champion is out there guerillaing stuff. Yeah, it may not be the fastest at clearing out whole systems but it's disposable and using it does not expose you to counterattacks.

Also it's really fast so it can rush to aid where it's needed.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, ok, thanks for all the feedback  

Generally I think there's a lot of resistance to anything that hits the nebulae post-completion.  Though I think it could work if the rewards were balanced appropriately, the nebula bases auto-repaired after the scenario, and you had some kind of lead time to respond before the attacks hit.

On anything that hunts human champions I agree that it really doesn't help the AI a whole lot since the champions are free (or, if it's so effective that it shuts down the champions, well, that kind of removes their ability to act independently).  That said, it could be one of the tricks in the bag.

Anyway, what I'm leaning towards right now is to do both of the below:

1) For each human champion, the AI gets a threatfleet nemesis unit that respawns (on the AI HW) after a moderate delay (unless the AI HW is under serious attack, probably; I don't want these making the HW assaults all that harder).  I'll probably keep these frigate-sized like the AI-HW defenders and scale up their numbers according to human champ max hull size.

2) Over time, the AI builds up points for a new dirty-tricks-bag, with the rate being based on:
- Number of human champions
- Max hull size of human champions
- How low the AIP is (the same way the nemesis defenders are: if your champ gets really powerful while the rest of the human forces are still considered a non-threat, the AI responds more forcefully to your champ)
-- Edit: It'd probably be good to make sure the dirty tricks points don't start counting up until maybe an hour into the game, and/or are very low while your max champ size is still frigate.  Not wanting this to just gank players at the start of the game, but rather to add a risk to ultra-low-AIP+Ridiculo-Champ strategies.

And the tricks it could play when the counter hits the threshold could be:
- Spawning a champion-hunter group (probably more nemesis units, but these would use galaxy-wide-chase logic against the nearest human champion on an AI planet)
- Spawning a nemesis-generator on a planet say 3 hops deep into AI territory; you'd get an alert with a timer and which planet it's on (if scouted, though maybe it should just tell you in this case), but if the generator was still alive when the timer hit zero it would spawn some threatfleet nemesis units, spawn another generator, and reset its own timer.  With a cap of say 10 generators per planet to avoid CPU collapse.
- Triggering a counter-attack-wave of nemesis units with the normal counter-attack-wave timer length.
- Quietly setting a flag that makes the start of the next nebula scenario trigger an automatic double-wave from the AI's.  That might be a little too mean
- Spawning a special nemesis unit equipped with an EMP-when-on-human-planet module and send it at the nastiest human chokepoint or something like that.

I could be meaner, but I'm not sure you want that

[chemical_art]

Edit: It'd probably be good to make sure the dirty tricks points don't start counting up until maybe an hour into the game, and/or are very low while your max champ size is still frigate.  Not wanting this to just gank players at the start of the game, but rather to add a risk to ultra-low-AIP+Ridiculo-Champ strategies.

Considering just how little impact the frigate champion can do, for balance sake maybe not have the points start simply until the next level hull is unlocked? Would make it simpler to balance I would think and reduce bug reports.

[Hearteater]

I could be meaner, but I'm not sure you want that

I'm sure I could think of something fun .  But it doesn't have to do with champions, and is probably technically out-of-bounds.  But I just played an amazing game of Isaac, so excuse me for having this on the brain.

But seriously:

It sounds good to me.  Have you considered tying spawning the threatfleet nemesis to the player's Champion death?  So basically, the spawn interval is reduced by X minutes each time you get your Champion killed.  That would create an additional reason not to just throw away your champion.

[Diazo]

Reducing the nemesis fleet spawn time whenever the champion dies actually sounds like a good idea.

One of the oddities about balancing champions is you have to also balance for a player who chose champion only and does not have regular units or an economy that this balancing can affect.

That makes things like subverting the champion from a few posts ago not viable, while the champion is subverted, the player who's only controllable unit is the champion has nothing to do.

To keep the early game stomp from happening and to keep the player informed about it, this nemesis fleet would not start spawning until the second hull size was reached at which point you would get a Journal entry along the lines of the AI starting to become concerned about the Champion, and after that the first time your Champion died you would get another Journal entry warning you about the AI being able to use the debris left behind when your champion warped home to speed up their response.

Now, there has to be some incentive for the champion to fight this nemesis fleet. The normal human forces do need to be able to handle it, but there has to be some reason for the champion to get involved. Otherwise players will just let the fortress systems handle it.

The EMP effect in human systems has potential, at the bigger hull sizes maybe the Beachhead supply block effect?

Both of those mechanics make you want to engage the nemesis fleet on the AI's territory, something you would get the champion involved in.

Or make the nemesis fleet really fast, like 300 speed, unless the champion is in the same system and its weird Shadow Drive affects the nemesis fleet so it only has a 40 move.

D.

[keith.lamothe]

Now, there has to be some incentive for the champion to fight this nemesis fleet. The normal human forces do need to be able to handle it, but there has to be some reason for the champion to get involved. Otherwise players will just let the fortress systems handle it.

If they use threatfleet behavior they won't attack a planet without at least something like comparable-firepower.  So if you just rely on an impenetrable chokepoint they'll form the core of a nasty little remote threatfleetball and wait for you to do something stupid

[Faulty Logic]

[current probable solution]

Sounds good.

[LaughingThesaurus]

I'm liking that solution.
So, the champion hunting... will that likely end up kind of like ganking the hero in a MOBA (strategical stuns and slows and disabling moves to make killing trivial)? You make it sound like it will, but I'm really just hoping it isn't a pile of ships thrown at the player.