Try playing a Starship heavy game. 10,000 Energy EACH.
Yea, you can play ultra-low-planet-count, and you can play starship-heavy, but you can't really play both without running into the energy wall pretty hard. Is there a problem with that? There are three choices you can make to resolve that impasse: more planets, fewer starships, or more energy (make sure one of your planet captures is for a ZPG, invest in econ so you can support more converters).
Using just the freebies, that's 19 starships, for 190,000 energy. That's more than you have from your homeworld, including the Energy Collector and up to 40 Cryogenic Pods.
Sure, but why would you build every single starship available before capturing a single planet? I'm not saying there aren't reasons you'd do so (though do you really need more than 1 or even more than zero cloakers and/or enclaves at that stage?), but it's certainly not "every game must start this way" by a long shot.
Neinzul Enclaves start at 15K, and actually go UP in energy costs.
I didn't realize that, I could bring them down to 10k (non increasing, not much increases e-cost with mark nowadays), though there may have been a good reason for it at the time.
Using nothing more than the starting 10,000 knowledge to enhance my starships, I can get to the point I require 390,000 energy without including Nienzul, cloakers, or scouts. That's more than 2 planets of energy, for what should be my starting fleet.
Why should it be your starting fleet? What gave you that impression?
If you want to toss those kinds of starships around, capture more planets. It even makes lore-sense: if you focus on the little guys, you don't need as much infrastructure/territory; if you want to build bigger ships, you need more resources and can't keep as "quiet".
10,000 Energy? That's 25% higher than the point where the Impulse Reaction Emitter hits the MAX CAP of the damage multiplier.
The IRE is significant but balance-wise we don't adjust the energy system to fit the IRE-mechanic (which is just a lone bonus ship, and now a champion module line), we adjust the IRE-mechanic to fit the energy system.
That said, is there a problem with the IRE getting max multiplier vs starships? They're bigger stuff.
As for those various AI energy costs you mentioned (guardians, motherships, etc), those could use adjustment but it's more of a "typo" problem than anything to do with the balance of the energy system. Sure, the mothership should have like a million energy cost, it's just an oversight of mine that these things don't reflect their relative size. Mostly it's that way right now because those costs are
irrelevant except where the IRE mechanic is involved, and as you pointed out the IRE's multiplier caps out pretty low so once an AI-only (i.e. non-reclaimable) ship is that high it is
completely irrelevant how much higher its e-value is.
Basically, the energy changes made brownouts a more likely, and more dangerous.
Which was one of my explicitly stated goals for the changes. Ironically, I don't know that it actually happened, but I'm glad at least some people think so
So people developed workarounds (CHEESE!) already
What workarounds, and how are they cheesy?
but that's just more micro - exactly what this was supposed to avoid.
Ideally it should avoid unnecessary micro in general, yes, but the primary goal was to make sure that the remaining micro was
actual in-game decisions, instead of "how much wall-clock-time do I want to spend pausing and wrestling with the interface to twiddle low-power-mode?"
I think it's pretty clear the overall level of micro is substantially reduced, and certainly the purely-wall-clock-time part of it.
At the same time that the energy changes were forcing expansion, while increasing AIP effect and decreasing reducers, they made losing a system more painful, which forced people to consolidate to fewer ingress points - at the same time that changes were being made to attempt to force people to spread out and allow more ingress points.
With a few exceptions I don't make changes to "force" one choice or another. I try to make changes that make all the choices
meaningful. Multi-ingress vs Single-ingress is a very important decision in AIW, and I've tried to make multi-ingress more viable so the decision isn't automatic. But the need to address other issues with the game has pushed against Multi-ingress's viability in other ways. That kind of design tension is inherent in a complex game like this, and is an indication of "problems" in the sense of "if you go to math class, you get math problems" rather than "brokenness" problems.
Sorry for the minor rant
I don't mind, if we don't get criticism the game doesn't get better. At the same time I need you to hold yourself internally accountable so that your feedback best reflects what is actually true and necessary. Don't stand your ground just because it's the ground you've stood, be prepared to recognize when you're wrong on a particular point (or a more general issue).
Are some of the energy costs in need of adjustment? Sure. Starships might do better at 9k instead of 10k. Fortresses might do with a 10k-reduction to e cost. MkII and MkIII fortresses almost certainly would do better if brought into linearization with the MkI stats (without increasing e-cost, as per normal). The AI-only ship e-costs are a mess (but have minimal impact on the game, thus not being dealt with yet).
But is the system broken? Emphatically, no. It's doing it's job better than I expected, actually, given the period of refinement it's seen thus far.
That said, please keep the feedback coming (while considering the feedback you yourself receive), it's necessary for finding the steps forward to making it
better.
