Fleet Ship vs Starship general balance discussion

[x4000]

Yeah, it's true that Zombie and Self-Destruct by nature are more anti-fleet ships.  I'll have to make some more anti-big-stuff guardians if there is time.  If folks have ideas on those, feel free to submit them in mantis, or I'll cook up something.

Oh, and actually the Implosion Guardians and Implosion Guard Posts that are coming are both anti-big-ship already.  So that's one.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I wonder how much of 'the problem' is siege starships... once you clear the warp gate & immediate area, the sieges jump in and it doesnt even matter what type of guardians and guard posts the AI has.  Splat, siege'd. That'll go for any anti starship stuff that gets introduced too, 'less it has some means to counter sieges.

Self Destruct guardians are particularly unfortunate in this regard since sieges one shot them from a hojillion miles away.

[Wingflier]

one shot them from a hojillion miles away.

Oh that's a mathematical term I've never heard before

[Diazo]

Attrition is the major reason i use starships

On further thought, I suspect this entire discussion boils down to this.

This is why I made the change I did to doubling the starship costs.  Not because I was disbelieving about their cost-to-benefit ratio, but because I'm focused on player behavior and perception rather than the raw numbers.

It comes back to the whole "starships don't die" thing. Even if it's a soft target I badly outgun, I can expect to lose a few fleet ships using them to attack where-as starships wouldn't take more then a couple % points of damage.

You can talk about repair and original build costs, but the fact that at the moment starships (generally) don't die and fleet ships do makes starships more attractive then the numbers suggest.

Back before the starships build times got slashed, you protected your starships with fleet ships because you couldn't allow them to die, 10 minutes to replace a dreadnaught (that's with 15 engineers assisting) meant that losing a starship was not an option.

With the short build times as presently exist, losing a starship is an annoyance, it's maybe 2 minutes to replace it and get your fleet back up to size.

Having said that, I agree with the resource cost increase. It will make losing a starship a bigger deal which will tip the scales towards fleet ships somewhat.

The other change of adding more starship counters for the AI is what will be the actual fix however. At the moment starships are the goto option simply because that's what the situation demands because the system you are attacking has a fleet ship counter, but not a starship counter.

However, do bomber starships really need an HP buff? The Mk III has 16 million HP already.

More to come once I get back to my gaming computer and can actually pull some numbers out of it.

D.

[Sizzle]

So thinking outside the box  (I'll leave it to Chris / Keith or others to decide if they like it... I just want to get ideas on the table):

If the objective is to encourage the players to take a mix of both fleet and starships, make the two interdependant.

Play up the fleet buffing capabilities of starship.  Tune fleet damage downwards when not in the presence of appropriate fleet buff ships.
    Fluff:  Starships have much better sensors and communications arrays than fleet ships do, leveraging those allows fleet ships to maneuver more effectively.

Play down the survivability of starships when not supported by the fleet. Give them an armor "debuff" effect when not escorted by fleet ships or give fleet ships a +starship armor aura.  (Both ammount to the same thing).
   Fluff:  Starships are vulnerable if they don't have their escorts.  Enemy ships can easily line up attacks that the starship can't dodge unless their "attention" is distracted by fleet ships.

Create specific combinations of fleet + starships that will do certain effects, like electric shuttles can combo with starship X to do an electric nova. (not necessary, just looking for other ways to increase interdependance, and encourage combined arms).

[TheMachineIsSentient]

I like the idea of having some recipe of ships needed for some special attack... Excites the RPG side of me.

Not sure that would solve everything, but you have some good ideas that may be just.. Good all by themselves. :-)

[x4000]

Well, I don't want to require players use both in a really explicit fashion.  There are times when starships should go lone-gunning, or times when the fleet should be out there without a centerpiece.  But, taken in aggregate over the course of the game, players should be using both tools to varying degrees based on the campaign itself.  Rather than just always defaulting to one or the other based on personal preference and never using anything else.

It's much the same with the turrets, really: you don't have to use any of them.  You can go mobile ships all the way, and never build any turrets or especially never unlock any.  It's probably not the best course of action most of the time, but that flexibility is there.

[Lancefighter]

I think I can forgive you for the recent cost increase because of the upcoming zenith/spire buffs..


But id really prefer not to have to go from full caps of resources down to no resources because i lost a bit of my starship fleet

[x4000]

They were surprisingly underpowered lately, I noticed when looking at something else.

The resource cap is much higher now, recall, by the way -- and it's less about stored income and more about income-per-second, anyway.  If you're using the highest starships a ton (or the mark IV fleet ships, come to that), you'll need a hefty economy to support them.  If you use the lower-tier ones, the economic requirements aren't nearly so high.

This is notably different from in the past versions because there the cost scaling between the various tech levels was so much less severe.  That made it easier to have a bunch of mark III or IV stuff early in the game, for example.  You can still do that now, but you have to be more careful with your stuff since it will hurt your economy to have to replace it continuously.  This seems about right to me, really.  There ought to be a progression, and the acquisition of resources ought to be an ongoing strategic concern even late into the game.

[Lancefighter]

I lose two mk2 siege and 2 mk2 bomber, suddenly I'm out of half my resource cap...heavens forbid I lose the entire mk2 group!

[Kron]

I only barely count as an AI War player, but I'd still like to throw in my two cents on this discussion.

First off, this:

2. The goal is to have players using fleet ships and starships to survive, with failure to use either one resulting in loss or at least a difficulty spike. It seems that is largely what is happening.

... is probably our key concern here.

Right now, fleetships and starships are basically interchangeable. This means that someone's going to figure out which has the most cost effective dps (a swarm of fleetships or a squad of starships) and then just build that.

We want to generally incentivize a mix of the two kinds of ship; kinda like how players tend to build a mix of the primary triangle when they build fleet blobs. How do we do this? I'm not sure. I dislike Sizzle's solutions because they feel very tacked on; interdependence and escorting should be emergent tactics, not explicitly given bonuses.


Anyway, I'm posting because I want to bring everyone's attention to a new perspective on this:

Unit Chunkiness

"Chunkiness" is an economic concept that relates to how finely one can divide a good into smaller segments. For example, a ton of rice is extremely fine (you can split it up into fractions and sell those with ease) while a painting is extremely chunky (you can't cut a painting in two and sell the pieces at half price).

I think this is the crux of the difference between fleetships and starships. Starships are chunky, fleetships aren't.

This mechanically amounts to two things:

• The less chunky a unit type is, the faster you can get some DPS out of it. In the time it takes to build one scout starship, you can probably build a small army of scout fleetships and scout your corner of the map thrice over.
  
• The less chunky a unit type is, the more places it can be at the same time. Your Siege Starship can only be in one place at any given time, while your equivalent unit cap of Heavy Bombers can launch an assault on every bordering AI world simultaneously.

I'd recommend redesigning the (basic) fleetship / starship interplay to be more of a "flexible" vs "specialist" dynamic.

There are some problem with this idea however:

• Player attention span. Players can focus on sieging one planet fairly easily. Players will have a load of trouble trying to actually track fifteen simultaneous raids consisting of small groups of fleetships.
  
• Unnecessity of flexibility. Players are not incentivized to attack multiple locations simultaneously. Players are highly incentivized to focus overwhelming force on singular planets in series. Even in the occasions where players aren't supposed to focus extreme firepower (like the AI Eye), they're still supposed to focus loads of attention on the planet by using tiny guerrilla squads or something.

I'm... not sure how to solve this?

Maybe by adding new features? I do know that if there were, say, two separate AI installations on different planets that had to be taken down at the same time, fleetships would rule for those missions.


So, to summarize: I think the current way AI War is designed is heavily slanted in the favor of giant singular set-pieces of destruction. The more chunky a unit is, the more damage it can take and dish out... and right now, straight up firepower is far more important than cross-galaxy mobility / flexibility.

So everyone builds starships.

We have an internal checklist for estimating the success of a balance change.  Checkbox #1 is labeled "Player Rage".  Normally we don't get to check it before the change is released

AI War is ruined FOREVER! D:

[Kron]

Okay, new post to break up the "theory" from "ideas" (and also because I hate editing posts to add in extra content).

Disclaimer: I think the correct solution to everyone's current problems is to rebalance the numbers behind the starships / fleetships (damage, cost, caps, time-to-build, etc.).

These are just some long-term ideas for future implementation that may breathe new life into the interplay between fleetships and starships.

• Gigantic overkill guns. This is the easiest; have a gun that does an incredible amount of damage to a single target. This will murder starships but barely dent a fleetship swarm.
  I think AI War may already have this... people keep referring to "OMDs"? Orbital Mass Drivers?
  
• ROF based shields. Imagine an installation protected by a special shield that takes a drop in energy / radius each time it's hit... with little notice to shot damage. Hitting it with a gigantic cannon of doom that fires once every ten seconds will barely phase it... but swarming it with 300 ships that fire once a second will obliterate it!
  
• Directional defences. This is a play on the general mobility advantage I suspect fleetships have over starships. What if an AI installation has a half-circle shield in the direction of the wormhole your ships are exiting? bombers can quickly circle around the shield, but large starships can't.
  
• Cross-planet missions. Force your fleet to be in two or three places at once to accomplish something!

Hmmm, should these go in Mantis or something?

[Lancefighter]

there are cases when i need to deploy my fleet to three different places simultaneously, but these are often within the same planet (and thus the same theater of operation)
Fortunately, I can divide my group into three separate units to establish goals.. if I wanted to do a forth, however, I either need to separate apart some of my starships, or start using fleetships.

Thankfully, I havent found a planet with more than 3 OMDs on it yet. 
(note: this technique almost guarantees a loss of some magnitude, sure, its mitigated by micromanagement etc, but the "OMD perfectly strikes your siege starship, wrecking for instakill" potential is always there. And those things are a pretty penny to replace nowadays :\

I've conducted similar multiplanet raids in the similar way, but there is currently no mechanic to force you to do things at exactly the same time - coprocs encourage this, but the ~10 minutes it takes to knock down all of them is usually trivial.. And people dislike it in multiplayer when I pause to micromanage my fleets

Yeah, OMDs are a zenith remnant addition, to counter golems. Which I imagine they do slightly better nowadays..


I've probably said this before - as i turn the difficulty up, I tend to use fleet ships more. Maybe I'm just really under-playing at the moment at 8, that I dont need to use fleet ships that much, and undervaluing them because of it. 

[TheDeadlyShoe]

The Zenith / Spire buffs were totally unnecessary and imo OTT.

The Zenith Starship is now better at combat than the Fortress Mk III, including for cost. It's cheaper, it can warp, it has a MUCH better armor type, it has more firepower+armorpenetration, it has more hitpoints... And it has 2 shipcap to 1.

The problem with starship spam has always been Zeniths and Spires, the buffs they are incomprehensiblez.

Also: Starfleet commander just went from horribly strong to ZOMFG OP.  Plz to be upgrading to Red.

[Ozymandiaz]

The Zenith / Spire buffs were totally unnecessary and imo OTT.

The Zenith Starship is now better at combat than the Fortress Mk III, including for cost. It's cheaper, it can warp, it has a MUCH better armor type, it has more firepower+armorpenetration, it has more hitpoints... And it has 2 shipcap to 1.

The problem with starship spam has always been Zeniths and Spires, the buffs they are incomprehensiblez.

Also: Starfleet commander just went from horribly strong to ZOMFG OP.  Plz to be upgrading to Red.

I think that is more of an issue boosting fortresses, they fold rather quickly as is now to any decent sized AI fleet not kept at bay by tons of tractos and grav effects .


All in all I want to shoot in that not all players uses starships. I quite consistently find that fleet ships suits me better and I tend to use a mix. Some fllet starships mixed in with the fleet ships is great, and I use thinkgs like bomb starships and sieges less. I use the free Mk I of course, but I only unlcok later Mks once I get the needed fleet ships to MK III first.

Wit hrecent announced changes to the fleet ships it seems it might be different very soon so I will reserve final judgment unitl then.