Chokepoint Balance

[Toranth]

Those miniforts are glancing nervously at the nerfhammer.

(not that I want to employ it in this case, we'll see how things go and there may be a more... inventive solution to Hearteater's temerity in this case)

Eh, I hardly think it needs a nerf.  I do this a lot in Fallen Spire games for mid-game control while I retrieve shards and build cities.  It works fine when the AIP is low and AI ship-types are right.  Bombers, Space Planes, Mini-Rams, Guardians, and a few other are all quite good at taking out the Mini-Forts.
Once the AIP gets up there the reinforcements simply become too large and too frequent for the Minis to survive, even with turret and FF support.
It doesn't even help prevent reinforcements elsewhere, unless you do it to a lot of planets while capturing none yourself.  There are simply too many reinforcement pulses to saok up using this strategy.

Another time I build Mini-forts in an AI system is when K-raiding or doing Ship-Design hacks.  Or ST runs, but those are usually a lot more involved.  I'd hate to have enhanced AI response to the already mean Hacking response.

Of course, my absolute favorite trick was to do this with a few turrets, a FF, an Engineer, and a Leech Starship on FRD, but that already got the nerf hammer 

+AIP on CS, which I assure you, will never happen

I was actually seriously considering adding an (optional) AI Plot to that effect.  +1 AIP and a temporary but sharp "blood in the water" wave boost or something like that.  Similar reactions when it kills an AdvFact or it detects you really got hammered by that last attack (no +AIP on that one, just a temporary "if I give a little more push, can I win?")

This sounds more like a new AI type than a plot.  The Bloodthirsty AI.  Or maybe... The Berserker AI?  (If you want the lawsuit)
Would need to be Red, of course.

[Hearteater]

I wouldn't make it red unless it was +20 or more AIP.  AIs like Sorched Earth are much worse and not even red AIs themselves.

[ZaneWolfe]

Just for history, a Dyson-10 is completely shut down by a Mk II Laser Guardpost.  Those new guardposts are mean.

This ^ so very much. While I don't find them too hard on myself personally (I use spire blade spawners to destroy posts while my starships cover them. With corvettes and riots to shield, along with the slows from riots, I have few worries from average systems) I did find that they shut down neutral Dyson's entirely. There is almost always going to be at least 1 Laser Guardpost, no matter the mark level, within at least 2-3 planets, if not on the same one as the sphere itself. This makes the usefulness of even Dyson-10 very limited. Once you free the system its still a free source of defense ships,so it has some use. But guard posts really shut them down now, (lasers just do it faster) and unless there are no AI worlds between your space and the sphere then it doesn't amount to much.

While I know this would need to have some kind of nerf to the gattlings or something to balance it out, why not allow the gattlings to attack guard posts? Then they wont be shut down quite as hard, or it would at least take a MKIV system to do it. (I don't see any issue with having a MKIV Laser post just up and 1 shot a gattling) I would ask that there be a check so that the sphere isn't on or within 2-3 hops of a MKIV system, at least so it would do something then. Other idea, why not make the sphere always try spawn within a set amount of hops of a human home cs? This way if you want the sphere to do something you could free it and clear a path to your space without taking too big of an AIP hit.  Final thought is to just buff the gattlings in somewhat, but I don't have any ideas on that one. As they stand they are VERY vicious alone, with heavy stats and a chunk of immunities (including FF immunity). And if they are in large numbers, they can devour even starships with some ease.

For the sake of argument, how is this different from a chokepoint?  You still lose if your single fortress world falls; it just takes a minute or two to die if your non-HW fortress world is destroyed.

Because if your home command station is actually within the field of battle, it can be killed by a force which would not have been able to actually defeat your forces in a straight-up battle.  Raid Starships come to mind.

Actually given that exos are pretty focused on certain things, even if they don't break your fortress world they can STILL cost you the game. Eyebots and Raids are both FF immune (nor are they alone in that) and if any get through you have a very real danger of losing. If they are exo forces they are going right for their target, and there is a good chance they are going to get it. If they are not exo forces they might just kill any CS they can beyond your choke point, and that might just shut down your chokepoint and let even more forces through. (Not sure if turrets turn off or just FF turn off when you're out of power) Either way, there is still a clear risk if something break's the chokepoint. It IS safer to have the fortress system NOT on your HW, but its not a perfect safety net UNLESS you also have backup defenses in place. As for me, I always play with FS on, because that's what I enjoy. Get the biggest, baddest toys I can get my hands on and throw down with the AI on even terms. I have four exo sources and I WILL have to build a choke or it is game over. And I only play on 8/8, just a tad over the balance point. Could I win without FS? Yes. Could I win without a choke? Probably if I was playing with only 1 exo source, and on 6/6. I found that without exo sources, even on 7/7, I didn't need one. Spire Cities were mini chokes on their own and I could put them all in between me and the AI. And before I started using FS I didn't have anything that offered too much of a threat to warrant having a chokepoint. Granted before I started playing with FS I only played 6/6 or lower.

To sum the chokepoint issue, from my point of view at least, if you are not playing above 7/7, (on non-red AI Types) you might never need one. If you don't have exos, you might not need one. If you're are playing with high diff AIs (8 or higher), playing with exos at 4 or higher (or using more than one), or playing with the FS on, you will want to use chokepoints. I personally do NOT see a problem with this. Playing above the 'balance point' that is 7/7 is a choice. Playing with exo sources on is a choice. And playing FS is also a choice. Nothing that causes you to require chokepoints is forced on you. Do I feel that exo sources or FS requiring chokepoints is imbalanced or unfair? No. Should their be an alternative to chokepoints for dealing with those things? Perhaps. But that doesn't mean that chokes need to be nerfed just because they are that good at allowing you to survive that craziness that is exos and FS.

And that is all for now. I'm not done reading all of this and I need to get back to work.

Edit-Since I am back from work

There's always the Fire Control booster that buffs X turrets in a system, but is itself limited like Mini-Forts.  So for maximum turret firepower you'd want to spread your turrets out over multiple systems, but nothing would change in a single system besides 50-100 of your turrets would do double damage (obviously this would need to stack with Military CS boosts or turrets would need to be immune to all other munitions boosts).  This is the best my search-fu came up with, though I'm sure there was more discussion of this and several variants.

This sounds like a neat idea, but we have quite a few things that can boots firepower. Why not rather than boosting firepower, it did something just as useful but unique: Reduce Reload Time? If you half the reload time by X% then IN THEORY you get the same effect as an identical X% to firepower. I grant you that coding that thing will be much harder, (statement based only on own programing experience and with no knowledge of actual code for AI itself) but I think it would be more useful. The only turret I see not getting major benefit from this is the Lightning Turrets, as if I recall they have a hard cap on how many/often they can fire on the same world.

[Kjara]

This sounds like a neat idea, but we have quite a few things that can boots firepower. Why not rather than boosting firepower, it did something just as useful but unique: Reduce Reload Time? If you half the reload time by X% then IN THEORY you get the same effect as an identical X% to firepower. I grant you that coding that thing will be much harder, (statement based only on own programing experience and with no knowledge of actual code for AI itself) but I think it would be more useful. The only turret I see not getting major benefit from this is the Lightning Turrets, as if I recall they have a hard cap on how many/often they can fire on the same world.

Well, one concern is that then this scales quadratically with firepower boosts (aka 2x speed + 2x damage = 4x dps), which might cause balance issues (namely that these will give you much for bang for the buck on military cc planets).  I suspect that code wise it wouldn't that hard, just have a lookup table for each unit for the fire speed for each different possible boost level (as I suspect they do for firepower boosts, as each ideally would only have a few, precomputable multiplieries avail).


More on topic, I tend to not chokepoint much unless playing with the fallen spire, but I tend to prefer to play with golems or spirecraft on medium rather than hard to force the macro choice for golems, rather than dealing with the exo penalty.   I also tend to ride the bottom of AIP as much as possible though, which makes a small number of turrets (10-15 mk1 missile, mrls, basic and laser), a military or logistics station and the miniforts are able to take care of all waves for quite a while, usually the first 4 hours or so.  I suspect having a per planet cap would make things considerably easier for the way I play.

[keith.lamothe]

On reload time, one problem is that it has to be in full seconds.  In earlier versions of the game it was tracked per-frame, but since the number of frames per second became variable (to support the varying "Performance Profile" options) it's had to be full-second.

Also, something having a reload time of 1 second isn't great, though we do it in a few cases.  But 2 is usually as low as we go.

Anyway, it's not a very granular stat so most forms of boosting it (while easy enough to code) would lead to a lot of unintentional under/over effects, and possibly even break something

Now, in theory we could boost salvo size, but that wouldn't work for some specific weapon types (zenith beam, heavy beam, photon lance, major electric).  And again it's not very granular for a lot of things so anything short of a +100% boost would have a lot of over/under problems.

[Kjara]

On reload time, one problem is that it has to be in full seconds.  In earlier versions of the game it was tracked per-frame, but since the number of frames per second became variable (to support the varying "Performance Profile" options) it's had to be full-second.

Also, something having a reload time of 1 second isn't great, though we do it in a few cases.  But 2 is usually as low as we go.

Anyway, it's not a very granular stat so most forms of boosting it (while easy enough to code) would lead to a lot of unintentional under/over effects, and possibly even break something

Now, in theory we could boost salvo size, but that wouldn't work for some specific weapon types (zenith beam, heavy beam, photon lance, major electric).  And again it's not very granular for a lot of things so anything short of a +100% boost would have a lot of over/under problems.

Not sure how feasible it would be, but to simulate 2.75 seconds, you could always go 3,3,3,2: aka building up credit each time it shoots at the slower speed (3 seconds in this case), then once it has built up enough credit, take a faster (2 second) shot.