Community Input - The State of Fortresses

[Diazo]

But a fortress is designed to kill things and be really good at that.

The fortresses as they are are really good at killing things so are made really expensive in return.

The fortresses role in the game is to be what they are, I don't want extra abilities added on to the fortress to make them more interesting if that reduces how well they kill things.

(This partly comes from the fact that the game has been balanced with fortresses at this point, you reduce fortresses effectiveness you have to rebalance things again.)

Now, I do agree that the 'only bombers can hurt fortresses' mechanic is odd and that they could be given a more interesting weakness of some sort.

However, the only one I can think of is rather then making them require supply, make them require a command station so at least for the AI fortresses you had a choice of engaging the fortress or popping the command station to deal with it once it is disabled. (I'm not really sure that qualifies as "more interesting" or not.)

There is giving tweaks to a unit to make it more useful/interesting and then there is re-imagining a unit, and this entire thread has been about re-imagining the fortress.

Fortresses are so integral to many defences at the moment and re-imagining them is probably going to be a huge change for many playstyles and I currently of the opinion that it would not be worth it. (Probably because my playstyle is one that would be seriously affected.)

Having said that, if we do re-imagine the fortress my two suggestions are:

Change them to "turret command stations". With quite a low cap, similar to HBCs, these don't have an attack of note themselves, rather they buff nearby turrets, maybe have a force field, have tachyon abilities and so on. That way you have to think about turret placement to synergize with them.

The other suggestion is make the fortress the command station, similar to the new AI type. This limits it to one per system for balance purposes but because of that you can make it more powerful and have more abilities for less cost as it has a one per system hard cap.

D.

[Astilious]

No suggestions? I'll keep it simple then.

I think fortresses have their place in the game as is or in a very similar form to what they are currently. However the power of fortresses in player hands seems a bit much to me, I would like to see some changes there.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

I personally think they need a different weakness that isn't bombers. The amount of things bombers are needed for to kill is too high and I think fortresses should have a different kind of weakness. Even being weak to say fighters would be nice, in my opinion. (Just an example, not a serious suggestion).

They don't need a major overhaul imo.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Diazo, I'm of the opinion that a fortress should be some kind of very good staging area for attack, rather than a really big turret. Then again, that's my impression of fortresses derived directly from all kinds of other media. Fortresses don't just have big guns, they manufacture ships, store ships, boost nearby ships, and are all around massive and devastating. If there still needs to be a really big flame wave gun, that role could theoretically be re-filled. In fact, I didn't necessarily want to do the total conversion to Fortresses. I wanted to give Superfortresses every amenity I could think of, so that they would become very much worth the one ship cap and would amount to just a super-powered staging area for your attacks.
...actually, if you wanted to be really mean, the AI version of the Superfortress could include a warp gate bundled with it. Either take the planet, don't alert it, or make the planet next to it your whipping boy.

...anyway, I agree with your second idea if I had to come to a compromise. More powerful, but function as command stations for the sake of being like staging areas.
It could maybe even be one of the things that if the AI managed to crack it, you would gain AI Progress... just to throw an absurd idea out there. Something to consider, if it got so many abilities it needed to be pushed down a bit.

[Diazo]

I think a lot of it comes back to the fact I don't like to re-imagine units that are not broken.

(I think we agree fortresses are not broken, they are just boring/not quite what was expected.)

If you re-imagine a unit into something else, I'd rather see the old unit left as is and a second, new, unit added to the game with the ideas for the re-imagining.

Having said that, I think we are starting to see "power creep" and a lot of recent issues have stemmed out from that (really starting with the Fighter/Bomber rebalance thread I think.)

Units vastly more powerful then the basic units in the game (I'm using the triangle ships for this) are okay when they are rare and hard to get (see Golems back when they were the only super-units in the game.)

Now, we have so many way, toys and other abilities that give us super-units that the basic units can't even complete with.

This is not saying these super-units are wrong or bad for the game, indeed they are great fun, but the problem is the basic units get left behind.

Look at the fortresses originally, they were super-units that you could easily build by spending some knowledge to unlock. You did not have to capture a system and then repair them like you do a golem. Because they were a super-unit at the time, they were fine as is because they were just that awsome.

Now take the game today, fortresses are not super-units any more, indeed I'd place them no higher then "above-average" on the firepower scale of all the units currently in the game. And so they suffer as the game changes around them.

This topic about power creep really deserves its own thread, but I want to get my thoughts together for a more coherent opening post first.

D.

[LaughingThesaurus]

That's true.
I guess I would be in favor of, say, renaming the Fortress to something and fixing its issues, and come up with a 'staging area for attack' thing if anything, if my idea got support at all. I mean, Fortresses are basically massive gun batteries that can heal ships and move slightly... Not what I think of when I think "Fortress".
...the negative side to that though, is the idea that veterans are used to Fortresses, and don't want to be getting used to entirely "new" units that are just renamed.
If we must just stick with the basic model and not have anything fancy, unbreaking the bomber-only attack idea would be nice. I think maybe go for some kind of multistage attack. bombers survive the cannons, and go in for quick raids on those cannons to bring em down, before fighters swoop in and batter away at the hull, whose weapons they're resistant to. Or, better yet, Missile Frigates can outrange the hull's gun, but the cannons outrange the missile frigates. Just, something more involving than a "This ship beats the fortress" affair.

Regarding power creep, I kind of agree based on what I've seen, but I haven't yet experienced it. In fact, a lot of the game seems really reasonable when you aren't playing with minor factions. It seems more like the minor factions are what throw everything out of whack. To me, that's kind of okay, but that's just because I haven't had the experience with minor factions yet. I mean as far as I'm concerned, they're optional, and if they break the challenge, a good fair vanilla game against 10/10 will solve that problem entirely.
It's like... to use an unrelatable example, if you've played Super Meat Boy... Super Meat Boy has many unlockable characters. Almost any of them can be used to complete any level, and get full rewards from them. In fact, some characters are downright broken and completely trivialize the challenge of the game. I think this is okay, though, because the people who WANT the challenge will opt for Meat Boy. People who want to cheese things with double jump go for the Kid. People who want to teleport through literally everything play as Naija. I suppose the difference is, there, you have to earn the characters. In AI War, you just get super weapon factions if you want them.
I think a more organized discussion on power creep might be a good idea, but we need a good base line as for a "What should be balanced?" Obviously a game against the AI with everything including Hybrids on is entirely different than a totally vanilla game with only expansions and no minor factions/plots.

[KDR_11k]

Forts are fine in the hands of the player but on the AI side they're kinda lame because a human player easily recognizes "bomber time" (the AI cannot field many bombers that easily, it has to spawn a wave to do that and a wave will prompt the human to field anti-bomber defenses in the area but the AI can also simply overwhelm the fort with sheer firepower).

One idea: Make AI forts much weaker in direct combat but have them turn all AI ships on the planet invincible and perhaps spawn fun stuff like moving tachyon drones so just charging at them with cloaked units isn't as easy (gotta sneak around the detectors). That way a fortress battle is based on what kinds of other units are in the system.

[Vitka]

bombers survive the cannons, and go in for quick raids on those cannons to bring em down, before fighters swoop in and batter away at the hull, whose weapons they're resistant to.

With more and more modular stuff coming into game, it would be interesting to eventually make modules able to be separately prioritized and targeted.

[Astilious]

Just calculated this out of curiosity, thought I'd put it up here for anyone interested:

Category	Fort I	Missile II	Bomber II	Fort I vs Poly	Missile II vs Favored	Bomber vs Favored
Cap DPS	4,000,000	1,058,400	156,480	40,000	2,540,160	938,880
DPS/K	1,333.33	352.80	62.59	13.33	846.72	375.54
DPS/Energy	8.90	54.00	7.98	0.09	129.6	47.88
DPS/Resources	0.89	2.45	0.50	0.01	5.88	3.00
DPS * HP	400 trillion	21 trillion	5 trillion	4 trillion	50.4 trillion	30 trillion

[Bossman]

I don't think the player fortress needs any sort of change. Its large instant death radius to most fleet ships means it needs one glaring weakness so it doesn't turn into an "I can't lose with this" choice. Thematically, it makes sense that bombers are that weakness: a fortress is a heavily fortified structure, bombers specialize in destroying heavily fortified units and structures.

Now, making the AI fortresses require a multi-stage attack to take them down could be interesting. Say, drop their range to 18,000 and give them 4-8 perimeter defense guns spread around them at a distance of 9,000. These guns have a 9,000 attack range for overlapping fields of fire with a polycrystaline damage bonus and a light hull. Bombers can't take them down and would get slaughtered trying to run past them. But long range units like the missile frigate and Plasma Siege starship can sit just outside their firing range and take them down, opening a breach for the bombers to get in and take out the fortress.

Granted, that doesn't do anything in the "I've got an Artillery Golem/a Cursed Golem/several Spirecraft Penetrators" situation, but I haven't seen any complaints about that.

[Martyn van Buren]

That idea sounds rather cool.  I certainly don't feel that the player fortress needs any work but it might be fun for AI.

EDIT: Rather, I don't feel the player fortress is underpowered/needs a buff.

[Mánagarmr]

I can only judge by myself, and I never use fortresses. That should probably say something.

[zoutzakje]

I don't use forts much myself, but they have proven to be useful whenever I do. They help enormously with defending against waves (obviously). I have never used mk II or III forts though. I think they would be really useful, but the knowledge cost is making me hesitate. It's often a tough choice for me on how to spend my knowledge and in what order. I should consider using forts more often against AI types that tend to use a lot of small craft.'
No I don't think player forts need a change. AI forts could be made more interesting. How about giving them back the ability to move, like they can in the tutorial (IIRC)? Not letting them stalk wormholes, just chasing enemy ships in the system and returning back to it's original location after all threat has been destroyed, escaped or hidden. This wouldn't make them much more interesting, but it would be a start.

[Hearteater]

I don't see a need to change Fortresses at this time.

[Wingflier]

The fortresses as they are are really good at killing things so are made really expensive in return.

I don't know how much I agree with this.  Fortresses are expensive, but relative to how many resources you typically have with MK3 M+C Extractors (which seem to be a default unlock these days), the resource aspect isn't really a problem.  In other words, we can't balance in a vacuum.  They SHOULD be balanced in this way, but they're not.  Ion Cannons and other Trader weapons are many times more expensive, yet people use those all the time.

Fortresses are so integral to many defences at the moment and re-imagining them is probably going to be a huge change for many playstyles and I currently of the opinion that it would not be worth it. (Probably because my playstyle is one that would be seriously affected.)

Nerfing the Fortress in any way would definitely make some of the higher difficulties much harder, I agree, but at the same time, considering the rate at which we have to constantly buff difficulty 10, I don't see this as a bad thing.

Would you probably have to play on a lower difficulty for awhile until you found a reasonable alternative to Fortresses?  Probably, but what's the problem with that?  The difficulty you're playing on hardly matters, only that it's offering you a proper challenge, and I don't see how nerfing Fortresses (by removing Bomber immunity for example), in any way makes the game worse; if anything it forces the player to come up with new and creative ways to deal with AI waves.