Discussion: How to make "blobbing" a less viable tactic?

[Mánagarmr]

This is a breakout of the discussion that emerged in the thread Somewhat silly question for old timers....

In the thread (which you should read) emerged the disussion on the concept of "blobbing" and wether AI:War can change in any way to prevent this behaviour, or at least make it less viable. Or, wether AI:War needs such a mechanic at all. Blobbing in any RTS is generally seen as a cheap and uninteresting thing, since it's just using overwhelming firepower to wipe out a weaker enemy, rather than strategize and use real tactics to take out a difficult target.

So far suggestions have been made to add additional similar to the AI Eyes, buffing Guardians A LOT, or maybe allow Special Forces to react to alerts (my suggestion).

So, discuss!

[chemical_art]

It depends on what you mean by mindless:

If for example I pick a suicidal unit that is cheap like autobombs or nenzul parasites, or I pick a cheap unit in general like a nenzul youngling. I then pair it with an enclave that moves as part of defensive fleet blob. When I attack the "standard" units crowd around the enclave protecting it, while I send the suicidal units out on FRD.

Now tell me, is this blobbing, because I have units being made on FRD, or is it unit synergy, because the enclave is best suited at making cheap units that need replacing with a unit that is strong but one time use?

Some blobbing is mindless, but not all, and not all mindless is not blobbing either, for I can send a suicidal raid on a planet and they cap or so of units are just popping the guardposts so as to cause the defenders to go to threat. It's not blobbing but pretty mindless in that there is no more strategy then pressing shift + clicking on each guard post.

[Mánagarmr]

The Neinzul is a special case, as they are pretty much "living missiles" moreso that actual fleet assets. They're kind of designed for mindless FRD and blob attacks.

[chemical_art]

The Neinzul is a special case, as they are pretty much "living missiles" moreso that actual fleet assets. They're kind of designed for mindless FRD and blob attacks.

I'm still pursuing the elusive question of what is blobbing, and what is the point where it is bad.

How is blobbingwith units made for it different from blobbing with any units. And if the ai counters blobbing, how does it differentiate the two. The ai treats all blobbing counters the same (waking up all defenders, ai eyes).

[Wingflier]

Simply selecting your full cap of ships and sending them over to another planet, possibly even using FRD if you want to be extra lazy.

I think the definition of blobbing is dependent on who you are. To some, it's simply a bunch of units against a smaller bunch of units. To others, it's the lack of micro in a bunch of units.

To me, "blobbing", is lack of tactics in favor of raw firepower. If you don't need to think and can just send your "blob" of ships against the enemy ships without any risk of losing anything significant, that is blobbing.

I agree with both of these definitions.

To actually expound upon Moonshine Fox's definition, some strategies even OPERATE simply by putting your entire army on FRD.  Enclave Ships + Neinzul Ships can basically win the game this way.

The best strategy now (that I've encountered) is to take your entire blob, move it to the enemy planet, then fight until you start getting overwhelmed.  Then you leave and since you've probably alerted everything on the planet, you can bait the whole enemy force into your turrets and crush them easily.  That's not very exciting or strategic, since you can do it the same way every time.  Eyes add a little more diversity, but that's basically another formula of sending your Raid Starships in to kill the Guard Posts, then going back to the first strategy.

My theory (keyword here is theory) is that the game would be a lot more interesting if you didn't WANT to wake up the entire enemy hornet's nest at once.  And in fact, this is the way it used to be before it changed somewhere around 4.0ish.  Something should encourage you to only send the necessary fleet to attack the planet, clearing out bits and pieces of its forces until you've removed most of the major threat, then you can send in your entire fleet.

A fun strategy that a lot of people miss is the "Beachhead" Strategy, which really isn't useful anymore except in a few rare situations.  To bring back a scenario where you feared to awaken the whole enemy planet, Beachheads would become a lot more useful and ideal than they are now.

But then the question becomes, how do we punish the player for simply waking up the entire enemy planet?  My answer is simply Guardians.  I think Guardians in their current incarnation are rather boring and homogenized.  Though they have cool and unique abilities, they basically only act as a force multiplier, and you deal with them all basically in the same way (blobbing), so they've lost a lot of their personality.

I think if you made EACH Guardian extremely powerful and difficult to deal with, the game would be so much more enjoyable and interesting.  Instead of assaulting Guardians head-on, you'd have to fight around them, only activating each Guardian when you had the right counters in the right places.  Activating a planet full of Guardians would spell disaster, as even bringing them into your defenses would bring swift defeat.

But how do you accomplish this?  It's simple, you just take the Guardians in their current form, and buff the hell out of them.  For example, to approach a Lightning Guardian with a swarm of units, you'd lose most of your army instantly.  Instead, we give it the "Light" Hull Type and make it so that Frigates are intended to kill it from afar.  You could approach a Flak Guardian with your whole army, but it'll eat smaller stuff alive, so instead send your Starships and it will do rather crappy damage so you can take it out.  Sniper Guardians become long-range harbingers of death, so blobbing with one of these on the planet means you'll lose most of your army from a distance.  Instead, send a group of Fighters to activate it and take it out.

Some Guardians would still require "blobbing", or using your whole force.  For example, Vampire Guardians would literally steal so much health that with insufficient firepower you couldn't defeat them.

In other words, how you dealt with each individual planet completely depends on what fleet ships and Guardians on that planet.  Each planet is a different and unique foe that depends on what Guardians and forces are there, and how you need to deal with them.  Instead of most planets having 10-15 weak Guardians, most now would have maybe 2-3.  But to activate them all at once (by sending your whole force) would spell disaster.

I think this makes the game a lot more interesting because every scenario, every planet is a different experience.  There's no "best" way to deal with each planet.  That highly depends on what units you have and what units they have.  That's just my opinion though, some people seem fine with the current "send everything and retreat when necessary" mechanics, I just find it very grindy and formulaic.

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Just gonna post what I said in the other thread.  Basically, some people enjoy blobbing, but I don't really think anyone argues that there's much strategy or tactics in doing it.  I think we could make the game a lot more interesting by encouraging the player to react to each situation in a unique way.

[keith.lamothe]

I'm still pursuing the elusive question of what is blobbing, and what is the point where it is bad.

There are at least two kinds of blobbing:

1) Strategic Blobbing: sending your entire mobile military force on a single attack (or defense, I suppose, though people haven't used this term to describe that, I think), rather than doing multiple attacks and/or keeping a defensive reserve.  This has nothing to do with how the ships are actually handled once at the target planet.

2) Tactical Blobbing: within a single attack/defense, simply selecting all your mobile military forces on that planet and giving them all the same orders (whether it's "attack X, attack Y, etc" or "FRD" or "Attack Move to X, Attack Move to Y, etc").  This has nothing to do with how many other engagements are happening on other planets at the time or being prepared for, etc.

The FRD case (and somewhat the others, unless you're group moving) of the second kind, I think, shows that the term becomes misleading: on FRD your forces will probably become far more dispersed than most intentional tactical approaches, and almost certainly not a single "blob".  For this reason I think a more accurate term is necessary, which also clarifies exactly what is considered potentially-not-ideal about the situation: "thoughtless".  That may be more pejorative, and it isn't intended to be, often "not having to think about it" is a good thing.

Basically all the objections I've seen to those approaches have been based not on what the ships are doing but on the lack of the player having to think about it.  Of course, since AIW tends toward the "grand strategy" end of the "gs <-> rts <-> rtt" spectrum, and since the lack of a need to micro is a pretty big part of AIW's concept, this is not inherently a bad thing.  The question is whether the right balance between "you need to micro" and "the game plays the battles itself" is being struck, and how specifically it could be adjusted to be more fun in some situations.

I don't think anyone here wants to have to micro an engagement between 20 mk*caps of their ships and a previously unalerted mkII AI planet with nothing special on it.  But I think several people here would like more need to consider the tactics of how they attack a mkIV world or other more-hardened target.  And I think that's happened on planets where the special forces will respond, to at least some degree.

[Wingflier]

Absolutely agree that the Special Forces changes have been a HUGE step in the right direction.

The reason why I'm so willing to make such a radical personal suggestion (the Guardian changes) is that I can see nothing bad coming from it.  Blobbing is still encouraged on the lower difficulties for people who like to play that way.  It takes nothing away from the game (that I can see), it only adds more for people who like more strategy.

[chemical_art]

Gotcha Keith.

I will then reiterate that the tactic of sending in a raiding force of smaller size (raid starships or whatver tickles your fancy), telling them to attack each guardpost, then run away, is mindless in my mind aside from having to press "shift" when clicking the posts. And that will eventually clear out a planet as the defenders turn into threat as their post is destroyed.

[Wingflier]

I agree with that too Chemical_Art.  Both of the current mechanics for tackling a planet (Raiding against Eyes or Blobbing against anything else) seems pretty mindless.  The question is how much that mindlessness bothers people.

[chemical_art]

I don't mind either. I only brought it up because blobbing seems to be a problem all of a sudden to some but the other tactic of raiding is not complained about. Yet that is mindless too so if blobbing's problem is mindlessness then raiding is just as bad.

[Mánagarmr]

Basically all the objections I've seen to those approaches have been based not on what the ships are doing but on the lack of the player having to think about it.  Of course, since AIW tends toward the "grand strategy" end of the "gs <-> rts <-> rtt" spectrum, and since the lack of a need to micro is a pretty big part of AIW's concept, this is not inherently a bad thing.  The question is whether the right balance between "you need to micro" and "the game plays the battles itself" is being struck, and how specifically it could be adjusted to be more fun in some situations.

This. Since the discussion came up, I think we still need to discuss the issue and see if improvements can be made. Possible, there are no improvements to be made, because it's quite frankly not needed. But I still think a discussion would give some insights needed.

[Wingflier]

True.  The main point of the Guardian buff suggestion is to make the game less mindless.

If you've got 15 Guardians who you have to deal with in 15 different ways, but whom can be combined with each other, creating even more unique situations, plus dealing with whatever fleet ships may be on the planet as well...that's hundreds or thousands of different possible scenarios you could end up with.  Each situation is completely unique and has to be handled differently.

[Mánagarmr]

I don't mind either. I only brought it up because blobbing seems to be a problem all of a sudden to some but the other tactic of raiding is not complained about. Yet that is mindless too so if blobbing's problem is mindlessness then raiding is just as bad.

This is true. As long as there is a "thoughtless" tactic that can be "fire and forget", there is a problem in my opinion. Or maybe there isn't. I don't really know. It's a difficult spot since, as Keith said, AIW is about the big picture, the strategic decisions and much less about the minute "on the fly" tactical desicions. So does AIW really need more tactical decisions?

[Professor Paul1290]

I agree with Wing's idea of buffing guardians.
If I remember correctly, guardians were pretty powerful and achieved a similar effect at some point in the past, but it seems to be rather suppressed in the current game.

I would also like to chime in with some other suggestions to help the blob situation.


I used to play a lot of mil-sim games and still do occasionally. If you happen to be playing a CO in those games, to make a long story short the units you command often act as "blobs" of sorts in that they're groups of mixed units that don't separate from each other most of the time.
Despite this, there are a number of things in such games that can cause a CO to use more complex strategies and separate his "blob", some which might also be applicable to AI War.

Sometimes you have terrain which creates the need to use more complex tactics, but we don't have much terrain in AI War since we're in space, so that's out for the most part.

Sometimes you need to deal with things that are particularly deadly to your "blob". This can include weapons like artillery, some weapons mounted armor and aircraft, and other such things.
Guardians in AI War can fulfill this role somewhat if they were significantly buffed. Weapon emplacements could do this as well with some adjustments (Ion cannons come to mind).

There are also times where you have multiple targets or objectives that are time sensitive for whatever reason. This is something I think can be improved on a lot in AI War. While in real life and in mil-sims these situations tend to arise on their own and they don't come as easily in this AI War, I think there are some more game-ish ways you can encourage similar situations.


With the latter in mind, what could help a lot is to have more targets that, while vulnerable to the usual fighter-bomber-frigate blob, are not practical to engage one at a time.
-You could have emplacements or groups that can do a lot of damage from very far away, but cannot attack if they are being shot at, creating the need to separate off groups to attack them to reduce their effectiveness.  (somewhat like the idea of suppressing fire, but expressed differently here)
-There can be a greater threat of the AI sending large groups of reinforcements combined with larger number of softer targets, introducing some degree of time pressure to attack more than one target that is easily destroyed and regrouping to repel the counter-attack.
-Perhaps you can also have certain units that are vastly more powerful when grouped together, and that are more easily destroyed when attacked individually while they are separated.

Essentially, you might be able to encourage more tactical use of units that make up a blob after it comes through the gate. You can create situations that already assume the "blob" to be the default, but then use it as a starting point where more varied tactics jump off from.

[Wingflier]

So does AIW really need more tactical decisions?

I think it does personally, because I don't see the harm in adding them. 

If the player gets overwhelmed with choices, they can simply lower the difficulty.  In other words, there have been no complaints that difficulty 1 is too hard, but tons of complaints then 10 is too easy.  To make the lower difficulties more used doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.