Fab hacking insanity

[chemical_art]

I dont think expodentials are necessary

Given player caps, a linear increase in reaction causes a much greater difficulty. So expodentials simply overkill. A multiplitive reaction at most is needed for negative turf hacking. This is steep already relatively.

[keith.lamothe]

Linear is a bit too nice for my tastes here.  But we can go with 1.5x per "step" instead of 2x and see how it goes.

Another thing is that as more variety of hacking is added you'll have more things you want to spend it on, and there'll need to be a good counterbalance to keep you from doing too much of any one thing.

The approach I'm taking with HaP is that it's basically "AntiRNGium", giving you limited ability to hit back when mapgen or whatever just nails you to the wall.  But there's also more standard "dumps" like K-hacking and ST-hacking (and less direct situations where you're hacking an AdvFact not because the RNG put it in some absurd place but just to save the AIP of capturing it) for if you're basically fine with the hand you've been dealt.

[keith.lamothe]

FYI, my hope is to add a few more hacking types before the next prerelease, and to get that prerelease out sometime Monday.  With the other changes (from a 2.0 exponent to 1.5 and with base response being AIP - HaP instead of just AIP) we'll see how things should go from there.

[chemical_art]

Sounds good Keith. 1.5 sounds like a good middleground. Considering more things are drawing from the hacking resource, its not a complete buff to the ayer.

The AIP - HaP matter is just to ease the player, and will make negatives more vicious. I like how it os done though, because it makes smaller negatives easier but more extreme hacking harder.

[madcow]

If you want more ideas on types of hacking, what about one as an alternative to scouting. Not necessarily to cut out scouting, but one that would reveal certain important capturable structures, for instance the location of ARS, data centers, coprocessors, fabricators, shield generators etc.  not all at once of course, and not a permanent replacement for scouting - but I could see for instance hacking a map node (or whatever it's called) to get the equivilant of a scout in all the ARS systems for a second.

[LaughingThesaurus]

I would suggest giving a look at the new types of hacking before making any drastic decisions about the response's growth rate. I was just thinking the same thing. Each individual form of hacking is much harder to stack heavily, but just imagine how many appealing types of hacking their could be that would in fact encourage you to spend your HaP on a variety of things. That could very well be a significant improvement to the system on its own without messing with the numbers quite yet.

[LintMan]

Generally, I think it'd be better if the hacking alternates were all desirable enough for it to be a tough choice which to use, rather than  having a cost punishment mechanism to force people to diversify.  But the 1.5x cost multiplyer seems reasonable for now.

The other thing that occurred to me: is there any way to know in advance how much HaP a given action is going to cost, or any warning in advance that you might go negative?

From what I understand, if you have a planet with 3 fabs, all get hacked at once, and you pay the full HaP costs for all 3.  It seems like that could be a potential disaster for someone if they miscalculate and end up going negative, especially for a new player who might not be up on all the details of how it works.  It'd be nice if there was a way to know in advance what the cost will be - perhaps the buttons on the hacker ship could list this info in specific for the planet it is located on?  And even maybe pop up a warning dialog if it will take the player negative?

[chemical_art]

Hacking response needs to increase if one speializes in a specific form. This is is needed similarly to.why K costs dont increase linearly: the acceptable sution is to min max on your needs. This is hard to balance  wheb passively the desire is to specialize in your needs. Imagine the superterninal with no scaling, the desire at first is to spend all points on that. Increasing costs prevent this.

In the end, increasing costs encourage but does not force ayers to take advantage of the various avenues of hacking.

[Zeyurn]

So I finally did my first hack (advanced research redirect hack, first hack of the game) with the new system (our usual Trio of players).  Unfortunately I also had the Shark B plot on.  We found out Shark B in 3 player multiplayer at 230 AIP with hybrids and advanced hybrids on (4 and 2 severity respectively) means any planet loss means you have to savescum (whee).

Basically what came about for us were all the waves that people are complaining about, which I agree that there's a problem with the AI response being solely based on the AIP when you haven't hacked much but that's not really my problem.

My problem with hacking response was they were doing 4-5 deep counterattacks with _30_ seconds warning.  This is completely unfair on just about every level, especially when you have the Shark plot on.  Normal counterattacks are 9 minutes warning, and normal waves are 3ish..  Why are the hacking normal waves 2 minutes warning and the counterattacks 30 seconds?

At the least, this should be reversed.  There should never be such a thing as a 30 second counterattack, that's just cheap and there's literally no way to prepare for it.  We had to pause the game, build like 20 engineers each and ring the command stations (which were also largely mil 3 so it's not like they were defenseless..) with gravity turrets and pray we bought enough time for somebody's fleet to free up to attack.

That said, I really like the concept of the new hacking, but if it remains at 30s counterattacks apparently anywhere it completely destroys our playstyle and we'll basically never hack.  Without Shark B on we could probably live through it but it's just too annoying to be useful, especially given how many waves they deploy in multiplayer.

[keith.lamothe]

The counter-waves are not supposed to be happening as early hacking responses, but rather much later as part of the "we're getting into srs bsns" phase.

And they don't have to be 30 seconds.  That just seemed like a good idea at the time a few months ago

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, actually, looking at the hacking response logic all the ones that specifically use the counter-wave logic say to launch it in 240 seconds (4 minutes).  The normal waves can actually shift elsewhere through other rolls but have a 120 second countdown.  The only branch where it's 30 seconds is when it's waving the planet being hacked itself.

So not sure what's going on there.

[Zeyurn]

Hmm, actually, looking at the hacking response logic all the ones that specifically use the counter-wave logic say to launch it in 240 seconds (4 minutes).  The normal waves can actually shift elsewhere through other rolls but have a 120 second countdown.  The only branch where it's 30 seconds is when it's waving the planet being hacked itself.

So not sure what's going on there.

240 seconds is totally enough seconds

But I guarantee you it was launching multiple (2 for our 3 player game) counter-attacks with 30s warning 4-5 deep.  I don't know if it's a multiplayer thing or something odd, I could try to fetch you a save but I don't know if you can use it if it's a 3 person save.

[Zeyurn]

Hmm, actually, looking at the hacking response logic all the ones that specifically use the counter-wave logic say to launch it in 240 seconds (4 minutes).  The normal waves can actually shift elsewhere through other rolls but have a 120 second countdown.  The only branch where it's 30 seconds is when it's waving the planet being hacked itself.

So not sure what's going on there.

240 seconds is totally enough seconds

But I guarantee you it was launching multiple (2 for our 3 player game) counter-attacks with 30s warning 4-5 deep (edit:  They weren't always that deep, but that's the maximum I noticed from a warp gate.  The 5-deep one was within 2 of a neutered and de-warp-gated planet, I'm 95% sure it doesn't have a warp guardian but just thought of that).  I don't know if it's a multiplayer thing or something odd, I could try to fetch you a save but I don't know if you can use it if it's a 3 person save.

[keith.lamothe]

But I guarantee you it was launching multiple (2 for our 3 player game) counter-attacks with 30s warning 4-5 deep.  I don't know if it's a multiplayer thing or something odd, I could try to fetch you a save but I don't know if you can use it if it's a 3 person save.

A save from just before it starts doing that (though the random rolls go different every time, I could probably get it to happen) would work.  I can use MP saves in SP just like everyone can: load, use manage players to disable all players past the first, and play

[Zeyurn]

Good luck living with this save   But if you do it should probably happen within a couple minutes.