Exodian Blade exos (spoilers)

[atomjack]

I've been playing the prerelease of the new expansion, trying to keep myself largely unspoiled. It may be that I'm just not a very good player, but I think there may be a balance issue with the Exodian Blade exos.

Setup: 80 planets, wheel, AIs on 7.6/7.6 (I normally play on around 8.6-9, but wanted to keep it easy for my first foray into the new mechanics), Golems hard.

I captured ~12-13 planets, neutered all of the Nomads, and took or hacked all of the fabricators that seemed worthwhile. The fleet is a decent strength, and includes 5 golems (armored, 2xcursed, artillery, regenerator). I then followed the journal instructions, and after a couple too many hacks managed to find and locate the Blade. Looking at it, it's going to take a *lot* of metal to bring online, so I start dumping excess metal into it to get the repairs started.

This seems to have triggered some sort of exo clock. The exos start off small, and my defenses are fairly beefy (all turrets up to mk III and enough energy from a couple of Zenith gens to build them nearly everywhere I'd want them) so they are no real danger. However, I'm not in a position to rush-build the Blade at the moment. I unlock Economy IIIs, which helps, and the salvage from a wave or two also helps, but it's a fair while before the Blade is complete. The journal entry now tells me that I need to assault an AI Homeworld with it ASAP.

Argh - I'm not really in a position to assault a homeworld yet. I have no staging posts near a HW, I haven't neutered any Core worlds to get a path through, and the exos are increasing in strength. The only good thing is that the exo salvage has solved the metal problems.

It's a decent while before I'm ready to go in - I've had to clear a path to the nearest HW, take a couple more planets, fortify them, neuter the nearest Core world, and so on. The exos are getting really painful at this point: a lot of strength every 5 mins. The Blade is pretty good at tearing them apart, but they're shredding my outer defenses on the way in.

I'm finally at the point to take the Blade onto the HW. I've delayed as long as I dare to build a stockpile of Warhead IIs, Armored Warhead IIs and EMP warheads, just in case, and have them cloaked and stationed to go in after the fleet, with the first fleet priority being to take out the Warhead Interceptor.

In we go.... and within 30s my entire fleet has just evaporated. Including the Blade. A full cap of MKII warheads didn't even make a dent in the response, and the Blade made it less than a third of the way to the exogalactic warp gate. Game over. The response was including multiple MKIV H/Ks every couple of seconds, supported by 3-4 golems, 50 or so mk IV or V spirecraft, and more. I've savescummed the end a few times, trying different tactics, even neutering two more Core worlds so I could come in from a different wormhole closer to the exogalactic warp gate, but nothing I do makes any difference - the Blade lasts less than 10 seconds anywhere near the warp gate, even supported by a 3K ship fleet, 5 golems and a full set of riots I-III fully kitted with force field modules.

I've since rewound to before I started repairing the Blade, and am in the process of redoing the second half of the game. I haven't completed it yet, but I'm going on the assumption that the AI HW response will be significantly tamer if I can repair the Blade and assault with it immediately.

Looking at what I faced, my guess is that the Blade exos exponentially increase in strength, and that the AI HW response is scaled to this. The result is that unless you are forewarned, your first attempt to repair and use the Blade is going to end in a lost game: you need to be prepped and ready for a HW assault before you *start* to repair it, or you're pretty much doomed. This isn't obvious from the journal text. I often play with a very high autorepair limit, so even taking the Blade world will result in an engineer dumping a few K of metal into the thing and triggering a "you have 3h until the end of the game" timer.

A couple of suggestions:

- Only start the exos once the Blade is repaired? Alternatively, limit the scaleup of the exos until the Blade is on-line: the AI is warning you not to touch the thing, but only gets really aggressive if you ignore its warnings and bring the Blade online. If you did put a limit on, you could actually start the exos once you discover/capture the Blade, which would put a nice random element in some games where you accidentally take it early on.

- Otherwise, make it crystal clear in the journal entries you get on discovering the Blade that even starting to repair it will irretrievably piss of the AI to the extent that you shouldn't think of doing so until you're ready to assault one of the homeworlds. I was expecting a response, but more along the lines of what you get from building your first Spire city.

- Don't scale the AI HW response to the blade to the exo level. Otherwise, if you wait too long you're left with effectively no choice but to scrap the Blade, as even attempting to use it is suicide.

Don't get me wrong: this was one of the most exciting games I've played, trying desperately to gather enough forces to carve a path through to the AI HW while under unrelenting and ever-increasing attack. It was just a bit disappointing to lose and realise that the root cause was an innocent mistake I made several hours earlier .

[Pumpkin]

I did a coop game with a friend of mine. Difficulty was set 5/5 and our quite unprepared assault obviously failed. But after a reload and some times spent gearing up, we ended up with a good escort. But even with a MkIII armored warhead and I-can't-remember-exactly-how-many Spirecraft Shield Bearers (but all of our I-III asteroids, plus 5 or 6 ebonite and a couple adamantite were use for shields), all stacked on the blade along with some I-III riot control, the blade didn't even walk the half of the wormhole-exowormhole path.

I think the blade's response is a bit too much. Or time is too critical in the response's calculation. Warn it more or scale it down would be two interesting options, IMO.

TLDR: me too.

[keith.lamothe]

Thanks for the feedback, I agree about the timing issue.  It's supposed to get harsher, but if it's going to kill you for taking too long it shouldn't do it 2 hours later, etc.

Probably what I'll do is cap the severity of the "during repairs" phase at some point, and the severity of the "repaired, but not yet on an AI HW" phase at some other point, and have each phase start at the cap of the previous.  That way the severity of what you face when you hit the homeworld is something I can actually intentionally balance, rather than some huge range of values depending on your metal income and the actual pixel distance from the blade to the nearest AI HW exo-wormhole, etc.

And yes, the pre-repair journals need to be clearer that you're going to want to head straight for the AI HW when the repair is done.

[orzelek]

I think that only reason I actually made it work was the fact that my wormhole into H/W was quite close to exo wormhole.
And the get your whole fleet, champion and whatever else you can there and clean up a bit before blade enters.

[Qatu]

Right now it feels like the proper way to do this is clean up the ai homeworld as much as possible before going with the new thing.

[Toranth]

Right now it feels like the proper way to do this is clean up the ai homeworld as much as possible before going with the new thing.

On Diff 9, I've only managed to get the Blade win when the exowormhole was really close to the entrance wormhole.  Even then, it took lots of tries and some cheese (drawing off the Reserve, warheads, lots of ShieldBearers, etc).  Don't even try it if there's a Wrath Lance in system - that thing melts the Blade like butter.

The best strategy seems to be "Kill AI HW 1, then repair the Blade and move it there instead of killing AI HW 2".

On the other hand, success is an instant win, so it can hardly be too easy, either.

[Pumpkin]

Well, all that sounds like "new problem -> new strategies". Thanks, Keith! (But, yeah, a little ballance would be appreciated )

[vigilo confido]

There is nothing I can do to defeat the homeworld exos. I only had to move the exodian blade through 5 planets due to a nomad planet backdoor. I have armor booster IV and over 3K ships. I have all the lighting and armored warheads. I have a nomad planet next door sending in neizingul scapegoats at an extremely fast rate. I got every fabricator on the map except one. I was still not even close to getting the exodian blade in range of the exo wormhole. I think the exos need some tuning.

I have an idea to make the win condition a bit more interesting. When the blade completes it's mission, a galaxy wide CPA is triggered with the sole purpose of making one last march against the player. I would just like to make the exodian blade assault to not require way more forces then doing it the normal way.