Forcefields a bit of a lackluster?

[Mánagarmr]

Have anyone else been feeling that forcefields are rather lackluster these days? 20 bombers (which the AI easily gets in just about every wave these days) can get a forcefield from full power down to alarmingly low, and the forcefield will hold up for a maximum of 30 seconds. I find myself spamming forcefields on important targets, and I mean spamming. 4+ Mk II and a full cap of Mk Is. Even that doesn't help against a regular wave, unless I have the fleet nearby. The second that fleet reaches the forcefield, WHAM! It goes down and the AI kills whatever is under. (Unless he has blade spawners, in which case he simply slices the thing out under the forcefields)

On the flipside, trying to take down a Mk III forcefield on an AI world takes forever with our limited ship caps. It feels very much like Forcefields are extremely underpowered in the hands of the player, and decent to OP in the hands of the AI.

What's your thoughts?

[Vinraith]

Human forcefields do seem too fragile these days. They amount to a 5-10 second delay in the face of any significant AI aggression, even in the presence of a 2:1 advantage in fleet firepower. They shouldn't be as powerful as AI forcefields, for a number of reasons, but they shouldn't be quite this weak either IMO.

[x4000]

Well, I'm willing to consider changes for sure, but here's something to note: since you can repair forcefields, I'd rather they were too weak than too strong, because when they are too strong that actually winds up meaning "practically invincible" since the AI generally doesn't do sustained attacks early in the game.

I'm actually fairly happy with them the way they are -- though I've not played much in the last few weeks, so they may need a small buff in light of other very recent changes.  The reason I'm happy is that for true protection, you generally want to have buffer planets between your most-important stuff and the AI, and I think that's a sensible situation.  Border worlds should feel more risky.

Again, that's not to say I think it's not a good idea to make some tweaks, but I do feel that it's at least in the general correct ballpark.

[Mánagarmr]

Well, as the situation stands, a single volley from 40+ bombers will take down a forcefield to about half its size, and with the next volley turn it completely useless for protecting anything (speaking of Mk I here). A little more of a buffer would be great so that you at least have some time to react.

[x4000]

40+ bombers... that's a huge number of them.  To me, that sounds about right.  Tractor beams for the win, there.

[TechSY730]

I know Mk. I ff are supposed to be weak, but they could use a little toughingning up. (40 Mk. 1 bombers is nowhere near as rare as you might think,  x4000 , and with the proper fleet coming with them, those tractor turrets won't last long enough) However, it shouldn't be a whole lot more HP.

Mk. II ff are where I start to complain. When up against the firepower of bombers, they aren't much better than Mk. 1 ff. Certainly not enough to justify their knowledge and crystal costs. These could use some good buffing.

IMO, Mk. III ff are spot on. Really tough without being brokenly so. Even Mk. III bombers take some time to eat through these. Which is more than can be said for the lower Mk ff and their respective bomber marks.

[x4000]

I'll take a look and see what I can see, thanks for the notes.  That's actually really interesting.

[NickAragua]

Forcefields still protect just fine vs a lot of non-bomber craft, but anything that gets bonuses vs structural (?) shreds them no problem. As I recall, last time I played, I had a full fleet of fighters shooting it out with about 400 or so high-ship-cap MKI bombers, and they almost took a MK I force field down - probably about 3 or 4 salvos. Granted, the bombers were getting wiped out pretty quick, but still.

What's worse is that those damned marauder dagger frigates also shred force fields. Dammit, I want some of those in my fleet, their range is insane!

[x4000]

Ok:

* A couple of force field rebalancements:
** The health of mark I and player home force fields has gone up from 9 million to 14 million (and thus the AI force fields mark I have gone up from 45 million to 70 million).
** The health of mark II force fields has gone up from 18 million to 30 million (and thus the AI force fields mark II have gone up from 90 million to 150 million).

[m_hermann]

It's more of a bonus multiplier issue than a total health issue, IMHO

[x4000]

Well, it's sort of a matter of how specialized we want them to be.  In this case I used the mark III as a guide for making a more natural progression from mark I through III.  Next steps, if this still seems imbalanced, would be to adjust the bonuses against structural rather than increasing health.  But they were out of line in terms of their progression.

[BigJake]

I'm glad to hear Mk 1s are getting a little boost.  Aside from closing internal wormholes to cloakers/other infiltrators, I've been struggling to find a use for the things.  A handful of Mk 1 bombers just melts 'em. 

[Zeyurn]

I finally got around to making a forums account so I could comment on some of these things.

I generally play AI War with my wife and a mutual friend, so we're doing a multiplayer game with 1 homeworld each.  We were previously able to play on difficulty 9 with some success and actually had a foray in a difficulty 10 where we were making good progress on it.

Now I'm finding a lot of trouble even on difficulty 8 (1 Neinzul Viral Enthusiast and 1 Sledge Hammer, we backed off from Assassin and Bully after being slaughtered).  We each took 1-2 planets at the start for economy purposes so we're sitting at 8 planets and 130 AI progress.  What I'm finding is that even at this pretty mild AI progress, we're getting 3 waves of 800-1000 mark 1 ships (from each AI) attacking us.  I researched a lot of turrets and this works for the most part, but how anemic the force fields are is really making the game rough (I haven't really tried with the bump in health but I'm not sure it would matter).

The AI can easily decide it wants to send 2000 bombers at me (and has before).  Sometimes it will drop these in a carrier which is completely invincible because they have over 2000 units there even though from a strategy purpose I absolutely need that carrier dead immediately so my tractor beams will pick up the bombers.  So what killed us in previous games was that either the 2000 bombers break through because it's still only the first hour and we can only muster 1/8th of that in defense, or that a relatively 'mild' amount of bombers like 300 of them make it to our shields and can plow through 5-6 forcefields with ease.

I mean this is kind of a tri-complaint against carriers (I like the concept but the invincibility thing frustrates me), the AI sending humongous waves at basically tiny AI progress (I don't think in a multiplayer game 3 people each capturing 1 or 2 planets to start out with is too much to ask), and forcefields.  Basically my force fields are completely immune to absolutely everything the AI will send at me... except bombers.  And then it's like they're not even there.  I kind of feel like there ought to be a better balance where the bombers can't totally thrash my forcefields but I feel some sort of sense of danger from the other ships floating around my planets.  (requisite note:  I am not playing with Light of the Spire yet, I just bought 3 copies yesterday but have yet to start a game with it on)

I have to make my entire strategy in AI Wars in every game I play lately 'research everything for the sole purpose of killing bombers' because nothing else with the exception of eye bots and the rare raid starship poses a threat (cutlasses can kill my energy but they can't take out the command station and are pretty easy to kill in general) because force fields are so strangely balanced.  Because I can layer forcefields and repair them as they get damaged, I can hold out against even 2000 fighters just swarming like crazy over my home planet where 100 bombers would kill me.  I'd much rather see forcefields be much stronger against bombers (just the fleet ships, the AI starships generally don't come in waves of thousands and therefore are negligible as far as this is concerned), weaker against other things, and not repairable while there are enemies in the sector if that's what it has to be.

Again, I don't know if this is an issue from playing multiplayer because when one of us gets overrun the other two can come in to help as long as the first person has killed the bombers and maintained the forcefields around the home planet.

[TechSY730]

I finally got around to making a forums account so I could comment on some of these things.

I generally play AI War with my wife and a mutual friend, so we're doing a multiplayer game with 1 homeworld each.  We were previously able to play on difficulty 9 with some success and actually had a foray in a difficulty 10 where we were making good progress on it.
... (snipped for length)

Hey. Welcome to the forums!

First, for the most important question, what version are you playing? Several of the balance issues you mentioned have been played around a LOT in recent betas, fixing the worst of them.

About those hundreds to thousands of bombers, what are you doing to prompt the AI to send those? If it is something you triggered, well, don't do it. A big portion of AI war is learning to know what causes the AI to send "death blobs" at you and then avoid doing that.

I would agree that armor type bonuses are still a little too much of a factor in determining DPS. It's a LOT better than it used to be, but there is still a feeling over "overspecialization" of many ship types. For example, the point you made, pretty much the only fleet ships that have any hope against force-fields are bombers (or any other ship with similar armor bonuses). The balance against various types of armor, in particular structural armor, is still a little too emphasized on armor bonuses. Keep in mind though, just like in many RTSs, some units are supposed to perform AWFULLY against other types of units, so this behavior is supposed to be seen a little. (like machine guns vs. tanks in Command and Conquer, even several dozens of standard 1st tier gunning infantry are supposed to be a joke against a single well armored tank)

And what Mk. force-fields have been letting you down? Mk. I force-fields are sort of a joke, but they are supposed to be a joke. Only the Mk. II force-field and up is supposed to give you any real protection. (Though until recently, they were failing that, so they got a good buff)

About the carriers, the invincibility thing was supposed to help improve performance, to stop you from popping the carriers and releasing a bunch of ships and slow down the game until you kill some other ships first. It is sort of annoying, but carriers are supposed to have very weak guns or something, so you would want to take out the "real" ships before popping the carriers anyways. I have not seen much of carriers, so I don't know if the carriers themselves pose much of a threat.

As you mentioned, the AI was a lot easier up until recent versions. There were many bugs found that were stopping the AI from doing what it was supposed to do (such as retaliating properly, the first wave was getting ignored for some reason, etc.) Now that these are fixed, what was easy at lvl. 10 is now really hard. So that was due less to balance shifts and more to the AI doing what it was supposed to do in the first place.

Well, I've just said a lot, so I'll shut up now.


P.S. Where did you find a wife that plays AI War? That's awesome!

[Zeyurn]

We're playing on 4.054, so pretty recent.

The bombers are just the standard incoming waves at 130 AIP with 3 players.  It likes to send something like..

897 AI 1 Bombers and 2 Starships
1014 AI 1 Frigates and 2 Starships
900 AI 1 Bombers and 2 Starships

as one wave.  I'm not really doing anything except having an attackable planet.  At the moment we only have two attackable planets because we're afraid to raise the AIP any further.

I have researched the Mk 2 and Mk 3 forcefields and they are indeed a significant help (but that goes to the 'must research everything specifically due to bombers' thing I'm talking about).  It's a bit frustrating a Mk 1 forcefield, including the one they start you with at the beginning of the game, can't hold against a salvo from the first wave the computer sends at us in multiplayer.  Again.. I don't play singleplayer so I suspect in a single homeworld single player start I really wouldn't have as much of a problem, but the AI sometimes likes to disproportionately attack certain people (especially if you pick something like Assassin/Bully, obviously).

I need (or at least want) to kill the carriers automatically because my defenses are set into a killzone which is typically either around the wormhole or failing that somewhere the computer ships like to go that is on the way to my command station.  When the carrier is invincible it just sails through my defenses and will usually get far out of the killzone before I can kill enough things to shoot it.  Maybe I should just be leaving them for absolute last and ignoring them until I can bring my full mobile fleet to bear, but I'm nervous about too many bombers popping out right next to my force fields and command station where I can't pull them away.  I know it's a performance issue and I understand that, but since my computers aren't going to _have_ that kind of issue it makes carriers so far incredibly dangerous to me.  I hadn't played much and assumed they'd just eject their ships when they got close like I would do with a transport, so maybe I just need some more practice there.

I actually like almost every change that's come in (although I feel that Chris is a little schizo in the MRSes since they've been buffed and nerfed so many times) and I don't mind the AI being a challenge, it just feels weirdly grindy having to slog through thousands of incoming attackers when it feels like all the ship cap stuff was stated to get rid of these ginormous battles.  I don't like homogenous waves of tons of bombers/frigates/fighters and wish the AI would vary it up inside a wave, but mostly I don't like feeling like only one ship type is really a threat for the majority of the game due to their ability to smear forcefields.

As to the wife issue, I'm just lucky.  Sometimes she chants "AI Wars!" over and over until I will play with her.