Tractor Platforms as AI's Starting Bonus Ship

[Weapon Master]

All I have to say about this is I hate them. They love to grab ships and take them off to other worlds to cause a deadly chain reaction, even in the first minutes of gameplay. There was even a Mk4 world bordering my homeworld in a match that had 21 Mk4 Platforms on it 2 minutes into the game, and with 120x tractors a ship, they could tear up fleets of over 2k ships.

I think something needs to be done to balance these, because anymore if I see TPs on the AI team I just quit the match and reseed. I do have an idea that seems like a good idea as of right now, and that's to make TPs unable to move through wormholes if they have ships tractored. People may argue that it's the main purpose of the TP's to be able to break up fleets onto different planets, but I think they could still do their job just by running away from the main battle to protect their ships. Any other ideas though?

[keith.lamothe]

What version are you playing on?  I don't think an AI planet is supposed to be allowed to have 21 platforms of a single mark, but there were problems with those restrictions until the most recent version (and may still be there, but I don't recall a specific report since then, and it looked fixed to me).

[Red Spot]

They are very beatable. Slow them down/keep your fleet away from the gates and manually target them 1 by 1/etc.
Swallowers are harder to counter... (I hate them late-game).

Oh, and build your fleet to the max before you start harassing mk4 planets, specially when they have ships like tractorplatforms/swallowers/[most of the spire-ship].

[Sunshine!]

I can confirm Weapon Master's frustrations, and I believe I commented on it before (with a suggestion to scale # of tractors by ship scale so that tractor platforms don't absolutely trash low-scale fleets), but I guess it got lost somewhere and I didn't post it to the bugtracker.  Another part of the issue is they have a ridiculous quantity of hitpoints, and I believe the highest cap-DPS in the game per mark, so when the AI gets their hands on them it's no bueno.

[keith.lamothe]

To some extent there's not a lot I can do until I get an idea for how bad they are with the population caps working correctly, or for whether the population caps ARE working correctly.  Making balance changes based on impressions from an older state of things isn't a great idea

[keith.lamothe]

But yea, making # of tractors on non-scaled ships scale with unit cap has become necessary.  I was avoiding it, but I see that the platforms make it less optional

[Weapon Master]

I was playing on the latest beta at the time (5.010?). In this next screenshot I have the planet seed that I used and the AIs set to what Random Non-Tech had picked. http://cubeupload.com/I'm/u3N1re.png Sure there were 9 wormholes on that planet (playing lattice maps), but that shouldn't mean that the AI should get 19 Mk 4 TPs on game start. For more info, I was playing against two 7.3 AIs, one was a Thief, the other Support Corps.

[keith.lamothe]

Sure there were 9 wormholes on that planet (playing lattice maps), but that shouldn't mean that the AI should get 19 Mk 4 TPs on game start.

Well, combined with guard posts and command station, it means they can   Were they all attacking you at once?  It should have been placing just one or two at each wormhole/guardpost, and unless you did something to provoke the whole planet they shouldn't have all come rushing at you.  Did they?

For more info, I was playing against two 7.3 AIs, one was a Thief, the other Support Corps.

Yea, the Thief type is absolutely brutal with the tractor platforms, that's one of its specialties.

[Weapon Master]

I can't say keith because I didn't attack that planet, and I never want to try to. If I try not to aggro everything at once and use a small abount of ships, they either get tractored away or killed by that 28k X 21 damage (98k DPS per ship), and then end up getting counter attacked and killed. Or I can send all of my ships at once, and have my fleet tractored away and sent to different planets, and then face attack from 4 planet's worth of ships.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

you could use a starship heavy fleet. AI war is about counters after all.    Raid Starship Mk2 is a great early investment for example, and raid SS have 90k armor. 

Conversely, the AI could have started with Polarizers, in which case raid starships would asplode constantly. 

If you really just dont like a start you just restart. Some shiptypes just make me AHRGGggg... namely Z bombards. Heh.

[keith.lamothe]

Weapon Master, thanks for the follow-up feedback.  Before I make balance changes I really have to make sure the feedback is based on the actual situation rather than an older-version or an incorrect perception, etc.  Otherwise I wind up balancing a different game   But it does sound like the platforms are being a bit much numerically.  98k DPS per MkIV is correct, but 19 of those on a single planet is probably excessive.  I'll look at their per-planet and per-guard-post caps and probably adjust them down a bit (my guess is that it's 2 per guard post now, I'd shift that down to 1).  If that proves to be too much of a nerf then the individual stats can be buffed up a bit, which has the side effect of making them better for the human player.  Since the human player gets so very few of them that's not a bad thing. 

One mechanic to keep in mind is that if you cover your fleet ships with a forcefield (either a normal ff generator or a riot shield or one of the other similar things), they're immune to tractoring.  Granted, that can get very dicey if the ff suddenly takes a lot of fire and those fleet ships are suddenly not covered anymore, etc (multiple overlapping ffs help).  But it's something to keep in mind, particularly if you happen to have the shield bearer bonus ship, or access to spirecraft shieldbearers or fallen spire capital ships.