Chokepoint Balance

[keith.lamothe]

I dont know how threatfleet works, though, is it able to travel between systems?

Yes.

If yes, why doesnt the AI send it against weaker systems that are wave-safe?

Oh, they do, they do   If it's weak enough, and there's a path that doesn't involve going through a too-tough planet, anyway.

Also, how is the AI's current turret power evaluation? It used to underestimate them alot, IIRC, is that still true?

I removed the underestimation entirely, so a full stack of all turrets will tend to lead to really big threatballs/threatfleet if you don't clean it out.

And if we can increase the threat build up with that wave leech, how about also decreasing the CPA timer for each such wave?

We could do that.  I'm trying to avoid a solution where "AI detects chokepoint, AI gets tons of free units", and instead abstractly re-allocate its resources (like the current mechanic of waiting longer between waves to launch proportionately larger waves).

Defence of Helm's Deep doesnt feel epic if the Orcs dont make it past the outer wall.

True, but if it were a tactical game you know the guys here would commonly have all the orcs dead from claymore minefields and such before they got within a mile of the wall (and anything that looked like a bomb-igniting orc would be focus-fired like no tomorrow).  Until Saruman was buffed to have 200k orcs and give the fort a run for its money, but then nothing could ever survive outside the fort

[chemical_art]

For a second i was thinking about grabing some rope there keith.  the only thing worst then the current situation of me not relying on them because i cant depend on iss the.thought of a zombie.that when it dies causes aip.

I'm sorry we players are.giving such contridicting opinions.

[keith.lamothe]

For a second i was thinking about grabing some rope there keith.  the only thing worst then the current situation of me not relying on them because i cant depend on iss the.thought of a zombie.that when it dies causes aip.

But losing is fun! (response: "so is getting lynched!")

I'm sorry we players are.giving such contridicting opinions.

Haha, no worse than requirements elicitation on the enterprise projects I used to work on.

At least in this case I can basically tell y'all "ok, no consensus, no changes; go figure it out"

[TechSY730]

Sorry to keep "tooting my own horn", but what about teaching AI how to deepstrike?

Yes, this alone would not be enough to address the "problem" (still not convinced there is one), but it would allow the AI to punish players rely too much on a chokepoint and not enough defense in depth.

Of course, this would be a new AI behavior, which seems like it is rarely easy to code.

Heck, it could also be applied to threat-fleet, in addition to waves. In the case of threat-fleet, if a group determines it needs to retreat, how about giving it a small chance that it will retreat "deeper" into human territory rather than away, provided the planet they are looking at doesn't seem like it would also "eat them alive"?

[Hearteater]

The funny thing is, at +1 AIP per CS, I'd actually generate less AIP per game than +1 AIP/30 minutes.  And even +1 AIP/30 minutes is nothing, being 20-30 AIP over 10-15 hours.  I think people freak out about it without realizing how little it really is.  +20 AIP is like spawning one less DC (two less on 9/9).  I'm working up towards +1 AIP/10 minutes which I feel is a good pace, so I'd probably be quite happy with +5 AIP/CS...but I didn't want to explode anyone's head, or get Keith killed in the backlash .

[keith.lamothe]

Sorry to keep "tooting my own horn", but what about teaching AI how to deepstrike?

I don't see how it would help.  Chokepoints would be better able to stop the deepstrike than non-chokepoint setups.  In fact, it could be a royal terror if you didn't play chokepoints.

[orzelek]

Only game I actually finished was FS in which I had 3(or 4) defense lines. It's quite simple why it worked - it was while FS was still in beta. There were some epic fights there with in depth defense to whittle down exos - something that has been effectively removed from game after FS got finished.

How was it removed from the game?  I remember doing multi-layer exo defense on two fronts around that time and it worked fine (well, "fine" as in "I sometimes almost died", but that's kind of the point).

One of main reasons was just removed - it was the complete lack of ability to slow an exo with logistical station(at least if I understand correctly removal of immunities).
I would need to try and play FS and see how it goes currently

[Diazo]

Actually, how do minor factions scale?

I'm specifically thinking FS and golem exo-waves here, but are they tied to the AI's difficulty at all?

Exos scale with difficulty, faction intensity, and human homeworld count.  The FS ones (the preannounced ones) also scale with how many city structures you have, and the Golem/Spirecraft ones scale with AIP.

Exos on 10 are supposed to kill you; they're like 5x what they would be on diff 7.  Diff 9 is a lot less than that but still harsh.  Diff 8 less so.

Hmmm.

This will required testing, but I am now starting to think exo-wave difficulties should be shifting upwards.

IE: The current minor faction intensity 7 or 8 becomes the new 10 and everything in between scales.

The reason being, this will make the steps in difficulty smaller so that it is not such a huge increase when you only increase the intensity by 1.

I'll need to check the AARs to see what other people do, but at Diff 8 with Fallen Spire only at 4, I was having serious problems.

There were other contributing factors and what I was really stuck on (the first city) got a nerf just this morning, but if that was intensity 4, I'd be scared of intensity 6 and throw in the towel at intensity 8 because I'm pretty sure I have no chance.

Actually going to start a new thread on this, first indications (to me) are this is worth a look.

D.

[TechSY730]

This will required testing, but I am now starting to think exo-wave difficulties should be shifting upwards.

IE: The current minor faction intensity 7 or 8 becomes the new 10 and everything in between scales.

The reason being, this will make the steps in difficulty smaller so that it is not such a huge increase when you only increase the intensity by 1.

This seems fair; I can support this.

[Hearteater]

Looking forward to Diazo's impending thread on this.  A question I've been ponder is, do we really need 10 difficulty levels for a minor faction?  Would 5 work better?

[Diazo]

Thread's up.

And yes, my impression is that from the players point of view doing this shift will not be a big deal, but I'm asking to confirm this time.

I don't want to start another conversation that ends up being more about my playstyle (see me and lattice maps and this chokepoint thread) then something that actually needs changing.

D.

[keith.lamothe]

Looking forward to Diazo's impending thread on this.  A question I've been ponder is, do we really need 10 difficulty levels for a minor faction?  Would 5 work better?

Maybe, but basically the upper 5 of the current scale are for when you want to intentionally unbalance your game   Which you can then adjust back into balance; i.e. taking dyson-sphere-10 but going against 2 Heroic AIs or something like that.  No idea if that would be balanced or not, but I imagine it can be entertaining.

[Hearteater]

At some point a lot of the upper difficulties just feel like a sandbox for losing.  It's hard to justify that in my mind, especially because it isn't apparent to the player.  Like it would almost make sense if Minor Faction difficulty matched AI difficulty.  So if I'm playing 7/7, I could expect 7/10 to be average difficulty for the Faction.  If I'm used to playing 8/8, I could reasonable expect to handle 8/10 for the factions.  But that isn't close to the case.  I'll get into more in Diazo's thread.

[keith.lamothe]

At some point a lot of the upper difficulties just feel like a sandbox for losing

Which is exactly what a number of you are looking for, or at least it looks that way to me

Though the positive factions don't work that way; not exactly a sandbox for winning but they can be pretty helpful.  Anyway.

It's hard to justify that in my mind, especially because it isn't apparent to the player.

The descriptive text does emphasize that 10 dominates the game, but perhaps some of them could do with clearer warnings ("by 'dominate', we mean that your home command station is grass and the minor faction is the lawn mower").

[Eternaly_Lost]

Keith, given that you are more worried about checkpoints being very much required in Fallen Spire and high level game play, why don't we add a special Fallen Spire turret that is granted on a per planet basis. In fact, make a deploy-able ship that needs to be deployed next to a Fallen Spire City, or given how map layouts can go, within 2 hops of a Fallen Spire city.

Call it a special spire military base or something. Maybe even have it work like a Hive Golem with some sort of Spire craft. So when the Exo-waves hit that planet, they will auto-deploy to strike back, but against normal waves they only act if some sort of condition is hit. Such as the Command station gets blown up or a massive ships enter the system. The Spire expect you to deal with the normal threat, but they will not just stand there forever it if looks like you are knocked out of the system.

Then, rather then making the Factories and Fabs basically immortal, you make it grant them Immunity to damage well it exists. Like a Spire version of the Core sheild network that only works on Fabs, Factories and things like that.

Should the AI hit it hard enough, it can still clear the system. But it makes it a lot less likely that a large wave will just instakill those Factories.