Fallen Spire Balance

[Ozymandiaz]

No, they shouldn't apply the damage debuff, since they don't actually prevent movement.

OK cool, makes sense since they guns are needed for defense . I plan on building one of the cities on my choke point

But it seem only 1 habitation center is ever needed on my cities (just to get 6 mods), right? the rest of the spare spaces (1 slot after the two ship yards + shard) should the probably be divided among the rest of the cities for yards + shards for even more ships .

[keith.lamothe]

Yes, initially I had plans for another level of city growth requiring no AI planets within 2 hops and a second hab-center, but when I got to the end of the progression I realized that 5 cities with 6 nodes each was about right in that I only wanted it to support 1 dreadnought and 2-3 battleships.

So only one hab center is necessary for getting to the 6 node size.

Do note that hab centers now provide a goodly chunk of resources, though, so conceivably you may want more than absolutely necessary.

But the expectations is that players will want to absolutely maximize the number of spire capital ships, which means splitting all available space between reactors and shipyards

One thing to note is that a shipyard only requires that it's supporting reactor be somewhere in the galaxy, rather than on the same planet, so you can fill your "frontline" cities with 1 hab center and 5 reactors to get extra defensive modules, and fill your "backfield" cities with the corresponding shipyards.  Those cities won't be as well defended by modules, of course.

FYI, just checked these in for 4.040 :

* Heavy Beam Cannons buffed:
** MkI beam count 1 => 3
** MkII beam count 3 => 6
** MkIII beam count 7 => 12
** All Marks armor piercing from 2000*mk => 8000 (flat, not multiplied by mark)

* Fallen Spire Stuff:
** Spire Shard Reactors, Habitation Centers, Shipyards, and the Galactic Capitol now have a primary armament; the Capitol's is similar to a Spire Dreadnought, the others' are between a Spire Destroyer and a Spire Cruiser.  For all of them, the base range is roughly double that of the capital ships.
** Spire city laser-cannon and heavy-beam-cannon modules are now significantly more expensive and much more powerful.
** Spire city shield generator mkII health doubled to put it more in line with the mkI and mkIII (the ship-based versions used by Spire capital ships and Hybrids are intended to have a big jump from mkII to mkIII).
** Combined with the 4.039 changes, this probably actually makes things too easy on defense, but not trying to correct for that (possibly non-existent) problem yet.


The first bit about HBCs is for the base-game ones too, but is relevant to the Spire stuff since they use those quite a bit.

[Nemo]

1.)  Fallen Spire waves in many ways trivialize the actual waves once they start.

Yes, this is to some extent normal, as the AI takes the Spire much more seriously than it takes you.  One thing about the progression is that you need to take a lot of territory to really follow it through, which tends to lead to higher AIP and thus wave-tech-level, making them (hopefully) somewhat less trivial.  But yea, once you deal with your first gang-of-golems you won't look at the normal waves the same way

How much territory are we talking about? I tried building my first hub city with five planets captured on a lattice map about two and half hours into a game and got slaughtered from multiple directions (I would have done it in two hours had I not needed to build a Z Generator to handle my power problems for all of the ships and defenses I was trying to build). I had intended to build a black hole generator to keep the event wave in the doorway system but this didn't work out exactly as intended...

On the Spire defense platforms:

Yes, I was hoping that by making the city hubs basically indestructible you'd be far more willing to take advantage of their defensive capacity.  You see, I really like the whole multiple-nodes-of-multiple-modules-each starbase thing, and I want you to want to use it

I would never have thought to use them for their defensive capabilities because I didn't know how to go about replacing them in the event I lost it, so making them indestructible would be very nice.

[orzelek]

Reposting this pretty gem here :
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=1558

Caused my spire plot win to be kind of paused for now.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, that's classic, thanks for catching it.  Fixed for 4.040.

[orzelek]

All the final attacks were around 440k points. I guess they are planned to not obey the caps.

The attack seem to be constant - threat mostly keeps quite constant number and for few hundred that die another come. I really hope that coming ships will help with the spawns I still have or it may turn to worse. I already lost 10 out of 27 planets. Threat is around 1k or so - will these spawns continue constantly now?

[Ozymandiaz]

I have not tired 4.040 yet, but I am building the 3rd city in my current game. And my huge choke is holding remarkably well so far. I guess it was a bit overkill.

I like the new beam changes, makes them have more bang again, even at Mk I

But I got a question on the spire cities, placement are they intended to be 2 systems apart or 3? (or did you mean 2 system inbetween them?). It seems I had to have 2 systems in between them now. Maybe its my understanding that 1 WH jump menas only 1 jump to the next system, and 2 WH jumps means 1 system inbetween. Currently I am lucky and my systems that are defended can actually support 5 citied behind the choke, but alas I could not build a defence at the choke due to my first city being only 1 system inbetween away. Not that its really important (imo, since 80 is the standard), but would not this mean that on very low planet maps you could not build all the spire cities, or that you actually need to capture lots of planets to build all cities?

[Lancefighter]

its intended you may need to spread out more to build cities, as it is an alternate win plot after all

[Ozymandiaz]

its intended you may need to spread out more to build cities, as it is an alternate win plot after all

I am ok with that, after all I got like 20 planets in my current game, I just understood 2 WH jumps as two actual jumps, not two systems inbetween (if I knw I would have arranged for my super defence to be even more super, but seems I have enough overkill as is ^^ )

But it will make it harder on small maps, if not impossible on the 10 planet maps ;P

[keith.lamothe]

All the final attacks were around 440k points. I guess they are planned to not obey the caps.

The attack seem to be constant - threat mostly keeps quite constant number and for few hundred that die another come. I really hope that coming ships will help with the spawns I still have or it may turn to worse. I already lost 10 out of 27 planets. Threat is around 1k or so - will these spawns continue constantly now?

When the transceiver is on its 30-minute countdown it multiplies the accumulated counter by 1.5 every minute.  As the math would tell you, this is pretty dramatic   It leads to more or less constant spawns with like 7-8 minutes between each (iirc), and can lead to the counter overshooting the threshold by quite a bit, leading to the 440k thing you're seeing.  With 5 city hubs and a capitol your max threshold is 360k so in theory it could go as high as 540k or so before tripping the attack.

The "assistance" that comes is supposed to provide some defensive assistance too, yes, though I'm not sure if it'd be enough in your case.  I'll go ahead and buff that up quite a bit, and make sure all human home command stations get a goodly defensive force out of it. The idea at that point is that you're not supposed to lose unless they're literally already beating down your home command station's forcefields.

[keith.lamothe]

On the city spacing, I think I shouldn't have used the "hops" terminology   No city hub can be planted on a planet with a city hub, that is adjacent to a planet with a city hub, or that is adjacent to a planet that is adjacent to a planet with a city hub, whether or not Jack built it

[Ozymandiaz]

Here is my game btw with the overkill defense. I am in the process of building City 5. (And th Galactic Capital, since I could actually start building it before the last city was finished (so I paused it for now, also posted in mantis)).

So far I have not actually needed my fleet in defense, but then again I used an excessive amount of resources and knowledge to build that defense (and time), so its not really representative of any normal game