Impossible to lose the game as long as you hold 1 planet

[Wingflier]

When I first started playing again, I played with the traditional method of attempting to expand and defend many planets, but when that failed, I noticed something interesting and instead decided to wall off my homeworld with so many defenses that it would be nearly impossible to kill.

I had a somewhat strange realization when I did this, namely that it became impossible to lose.

What do I mean by that? Well traditionally in AI War, the way the game was originally designed, holding multiple planets was not only a method to ensure success, but also to keep the energy and power of your empire stable. The energy mechanics were designed in such a way that losing on multiple planets during an attack meant that all your shields were down, and there was very little you could do about this. Losing was inevitable at that point.

With the introduction of the new energy mechanics, in which effectively infinite matter converters can be placed on your home planet, there is absolutely no need now to ever worry about losing as long as your home planet is intact. In addition to that, the new "scrap" mechanics ensure that even with only 1 planet (even much later into the game), the player can quickly rebuild his force such that there is very little drawback to even losing his other planets whatsoever.

Now this isn't necessarily a problem, I thought I would bring it to our attention. In my current game I'm playing with basically exo wave possible turned on. I've got Golems, I've got Fallen Spire, I've got Champion Nemesis, hell I even turned Advanced Hybrids for good measure and I've been hacking way more than I should. Regularly, during exo attacks, hacking responses, or reprisal waves, I'll lose every other planet I own. In fact, I've even got 'Shark B' turned on so that when I lose all my other planets, I should be getting punished heavily.

In fact, all it does is make it so that the enemy sends me more scrap to rebuild everything since my Homeworld has so much defense put on it, it has become practically unassailable. Obviously all of this defense comes at the cost of quite a bit of technologically, and in some ways, defense on my other planets, but why does that matter? As long as I can't lose, eventually I'll win a war of attrition.

This is the problem I have with it. This isn't supposed to be a game about a war of attrition, the humans already lost that a long time ago. I feel like the mechanics should not reward a person who intentionally puts all their efforts and defenses on one planet and can casually ignore the rest except for metal purposes when needed.

I believe AI War was designed that as your empire grew, so did your reliance on your empire. It wasn't enough that you simply held your Homeworld, if you had a goodly number of planets, losing all of those also meant losing the game. To me, the mechanics which make it basically impossible to lose as long as you fortify one planet enough now are not in the spirit of what the game was originally meant to be about.

That's what this discussion entails and I'd like to hear your opinions. Of course, a player which is incredibly concerned with this could always just turn on "Shark A",  but that's a pretty extreme solution. My inquiry is not whether this "problem" is impossible to work around using game mechanics (for example choosing a Homeworld with 8 wormholes or turning on Backdoor Hacker), but whether a player should have to in the first place.

[x4000]

Incidentally, you are right on the money about why energy was there originally.

[Wingflier]

Incidentally, you are right on the money about why energy was there originally.

I figured that was part of your design. I have been around since the beginning and so, upon realizing this paradigm shift, I became deeply concerned.

[x4000]

When this shift was batted around it didn't occur to me that this would pop up, for whatever reason.  But yep, that is nonideal at the moment, for sure.

[Wingflier]

It's sad because the new mechanics are awesome in so many ways, in terms of increasing the pacing of the game, making it much more streamlined and intuitive for the player, and decreasing the amount of time spent twiddling one's thumbs.

Perhaps a potential solution is limiting the number of matter converters which can be placed on a single planet.

[x4000]

Something along those lines is most likely it, yes.  Generally speaking, being able to do too much on any one planet is a bad thing, hence a lot of the past mechanics.  And in terms of the general streamlining, it's sounded like a great thing, so I'm sure it's a matter of iterative tweaks, not wholesale abandonment or whatnot.

[DrFranknfurter]

One 'fix' to an easy game with no energy problems would be some form of nerf to matter converters. Options as I see it:

1. Per planet cap. 1 or 2 per planet would make them harder to stack and more vulnerable but also a little more fiddly. (on the positive side it's harder to defend and scales with AIP and systems taken).
2. Each after the first gives diminishing returns. It would reduce energy produced but it wouldn't really solve anything. (in the situation of metal being non-limiting energy would also be non-limiting)
3A. Galactic cap. Give them a cap of 4 and you simply can't stack dozens of them. (May hurt superweapon games, but that could be a good thing as superweapons have gotten a little out of hand with golems, spirecraft and FS fleets)
3B. Multiple marks with mk II, III, IV versions for people running low on energy even after using econ stations. (Perhaps have the highest mark be per-planet vs galactic, more useful for those superweapon games where you really want to use all your new toys)
4. Be extra mean. +2 AIP on death for energy collectors and matter converters (give you a strong reason not to build them everywhere and rely on econ stations instead)

I'd suggest 3A+B, Galactic cap of matter converters with additional marks unlocked with knowledge. It could make energy management a bigger problem while giving more options for dealing with it. (every ship or building should have a cap!)

[keith.lamothe]

With the introduction of the new energy mechanics, in which effectively infinite matter converters can be placed on your home planet

Iirc previously you could place as many energy reactors of any mark you wanted on your homeworld.  They got really inefficient but even stopped getting worse after a point so you could just keep placing them.

How is the matter converter fundamentally different from that?

Now this isn't necessarily a problem, I thought I would bring it to our attention. In my current game I'm playing with basically exo wave possible turned on. I've got Golems, I've got Fallen Spire, I've got Champion Nemesis, hell I even turned Advanced Hybrids for good measure and I've been hacking way more than I should. Regularly, during exo attacks, hacking responses, or reprisal waves, I'll lose every other planet I own. In fact, I've even got 'Shark B' turned on so that when I lose all my other planets, I should be getting punished heavily.

How many other planets do you have?  How well defended are they?  What happens if a really big attack launches and you've not re-colonized (and redefended, etc) those other planets?  Can your homeworld defend against those attacks when they haven't been blunted by a defense-in-depth?

If so, you could probably have achieved the same effect with a setup that's been around for rather a while in AIW's history: the chokepoint   It's not been at all uncommon that players have managed to establish positions from which they can't lose. 

This is the natural consequence of the game letting the player control the pace, which is one of the core design goals (Hybrids break that up, as well as some other things, but generally can be kept under control). 

Sometimes they even keep that unloseable position case the whole way to victory, though on the higher difficulties you generally have to take deeper risks to actually get in range of winning.

In fact, all it does is make it so that the enemy sends me more scrap to rebuild everything since my Homeworld has so much defense put on it, it has become practically unassailable.

Salvage is still being balanced, true, though bear in mind your homeworld's total amount of salvage "not yet collected" is capped by your total metal storage (2x that, iirc), so if you only hold one planet that's a max of 4M salvage "in the air" and 2M that you can actually collect (50% HW salvage efficiency).  So at some point a larger attack isn't going to add a benefit for you.

Obviously all of this defense comes at the cost of quite a bit of technologically, and in some ways, defense on my other planets, but why does that matter? As long as I can't lose, eventually I'll win a war of attrition.

I do not think that is true.  As soon as you take down a core guard post, the AI homeworld defense exos will start and you'll need to kill that HW within an hour or two or you'll die.



One change that would make sense is to put a per-planet cap on matter converters of, say, 10.  But I think that would mess with some significant use cases so I'm not sure it's a good idea

[DrFranknfurter]

I'm pleased with the recent work to make the harder difficulties harder and looking forward to the next expansion. (Looking forward to those 10/10 AARs that are even more epic and rare). But I do think that energy isn't what it could be, being far too easy to amass, defend and juggle around cheesily. (Infinite converters with no efficiency drop for having dozens of them, all stacked behind a choke or distributed defensive setup)

That said, putting the superweapons on medium does make matter collectors essential and the turret changes make you more likely to be running close to the limit on energy with lots of turrets hiding on backwater planets. I remember playing a game once with the old energy system... IIRC several marks of energy producing buildings, 1 per mk per planet with a soft cap based on diminishing returns... fiddly and still isn't limited when metal income is high. Salvage now produces less metal than initially but still lots and much more smoothly so no real risk of blackouts during attacks.

I mentioned changing caps so, other ideas:
Increase energy cost of working factories dramatically (so you may have to switch them off during an attack)
Add a beach-head like enemy building that provides a pulsed energy drain, to force the issue of brownouts, blackouts and YOU LOSE.
...ok that's me done for now...

[Tridus]

If so, you could probably have achieved the same effect with a setup that's been around for rather a while in AIW's history: the chokepoint   It's not been at all uncommon that players have managed to establish positions from which they can't lose. 

This is the natural consequence of the game letting the player control the pace, which is one of the core design goals (Hybrids break that up, as well as some other things, but generally can be kept under control). 

Sometimes they even keep that unloseable position case the whole way to victory, though on the higher difficulties you generally have to take deeper risks to actually get in range of winning.

That's what I was thinking. Salvage being so high on the homeworld has made using that as a chokepoint type fortress world more viable than it used to be, but super defensive worlds aren't new. I mean, the game I finished yesterday had an absurd chokepoint. The AI couldn't break it with a wave of 18,000 mk IV ships (that many carriers hurts though!).

The bigger concern to me with defense in depth being pushed so hard is setting up so many defensive layers that the AI can never grind through all of them faster than you can rebuild. That you can build one world the AI can't beat isn't new, it's been around quite a while. And it probably won't be as powerful as the one I set up with the Spire City.

All that said, matter converters really can be too much now that we have scrap bolstering income by such large amounts. Maybe each one you place should increase the ongoing resource cost of all of them, so they become unaffordable past a certain number.

[NickAragua]

I'm pretty sure that an AI Exowave with about twenty plasma siege starships and spire siege towers, or a giant wave with twelve carriers (because it was going to be 26,000 space planes) will still punch through any kind of static defenses unless you have your main fleet there. And having your main fleet tied up on homeworld defense means that it can't be out attacking other planets and winning the game.

I would support some kind of simple diminishing returns or planet-wide cap on matter converters though.

[Wingflier]

Iirc previously you could place as many energy reactors of any mark you wanted on your homeworld.  They got really inefficient but even stopped getting worse after a point so you could just keep placing them.

How is the matter converter fundamentally different from that?

I'm not sure what the ratio used to be, but like you said, there were severe diminishing returns before. From what I remember, placing 4-5 MK3 Energy Generators on the same planet was a massive resource drain without much benefit. I could be wrong about this, it was rarely necessary.

How many other planets do you have?  How well defended are they?  What happens if a really big attack launches and you've not re-colonized (and redefended, etc) those other planets?  Can your homeworld defend against those attacks when they haven't been blunted by a defense-in-depth?

Because it's a Fallen Spire campaign, I've popped about 12, though I only actively need 3-4 at any given time (including my HW) to provide the metal necessary to build and rebuild my fleet. Though considering how much stuff the AI has been throwing at me, it's basically impossible to every use all my metal anyway so I'm more or less free to build whatever I want whenever I want, even if I'm only limited to my HW. The only reason I even care about the other planets at this point is because the Fallen Spire campaign requires that I care, but losing them temporarily isn't really a problem for me, or hasn't been yet.

My HW has basically all the defenses that it would feasibly require, to the point that it's nearly unassailable. The other planets don't have much defense at all, save from the inherent defense of the FS bases, but even then they die often. The only waves which have even come close to the point of causing me to lose are the FS exo waves created upon building a new Spire Colony.

Having my entire fleet waiting at my Homeworld makes defending those possible though.

Now granted my HW only has 2 wormholes, but it's only logical for the player to pick a position on the galaxy map which is defensible. Why would a player pick a spot in which is difficult to defend I don't know, if we're being realistic about the plot at least.

If so, you could probably have achieved the same effect with a setup that's been around for rather a while in AIW's history: the chokepoint   It's not been at all uncommon that players have managed to establish positions from which they can't lose. 

Personally, I can't speak to this, I've never experienced it. I'm not the type of player to spend hours upon hours popping all the warp gates in a particular fashion, creating an elaborate system of worlds which will all synergize in a certain way, and funneling all the AI forces into a single chokepoint which is nearly impossible to assail. I've always been the type to simply go where the resources of technology necessary is to complete the next step of the process is (in Core Shield Gen fashion), not really concerned with creating the perfect defense. Because of this mentality or playstyle I do find myself losing a lot, but enjoying the game is more important to me than spending hours meticulously planning how to create a single, all-encompassing whipping boy. That's not fun to me at all.

What I'm saying though is that this new strategy doesn't take any planning or skill at all. Step 1. Fortify the crap out of your homeworld. Step 2. Take more planets, fortify the crap out of your Homeworld even more. Step 3. Win a war of attrition.

Now it could be true that once I hit the Homeworld Defenses, and *those* Exos start spawning, then they could become overwhelming to my HW. However, what I would be forced to conclude then is that the game only really begins at the point in which I attack the HW. Up to that point it's simply brute forcing my way through the galaxy and gaining up the knowledge and firepower necessary to begin playing the game.

[keith.lamothe]

The bigger concern to me with defense in depth being pushed so hard is setting up so many defensive layers that the AI can never grind through all of them faster than you can rebuild.

Yea, I've been keeping an eye on that.  It is certainly a potential pitfall of making defense-in-depth so much more viable.  I think it's worth figuring out as I think that approach to defense is a lot more fun and fluid, etc.

The two main things I'm currently thinking to pursue if that becomes a big problem are:
- Have the AI randomly choose to make a particular attack more focused; i.e. not sending a wave/threatball/etc to knock out one border planet but actually trying to hit your homeworld, or possibly some other secondary objective that provides direct short-term help to hitting your homeworld (going after energy production, for instance) or helps long-term in winning the war (an irreplaceable)
- Balance turret energy costs so that supporting more than 2-3 full planets of them requires a substantial amount of energy support from the rest of your empire.  I think this is largely already the case, just a matter of tweaking.

All that said, matter converters really can be too much now that we have scrap bolstering income by such large amounts. Maybe each one you place should increase the ongoing resource cost of all of them, so they become unaffordable past a certain number.

I'd really rather not go the inefficiency route again, though it wouldn't be the end of the world.

One thing, though, is that salvage shouldn't be massively increasing the number of matter converters you can run.  It's short-term income, as it decreases about 90% over the course of about 6.3 minutes.  So 13 minutes after the salvage was "dropped" you're only getting 1% of the rate you got initially. 

So I'm guessing what people mean when they say salvage lets them run lots of converters is that: they can run their normal economy negative (so energy production is literally consuming ALL their normal metal income, and even beyond that) and just rely on salvage to bring their income positive and give them the metal they need to rebuild stuff?

If so the logical thing is to just make matter converters not function if you literally don't have the metal to run them (it would make sense that a reactor with no fuel...).  So salvage would let you run more of them very short-term but not overall.

Or is something else going on here?

What I'm saying though is that this new strategy doesn't take any planning or skill at all. Step 1. Fortify the crap out of your homeworld. Step 2. Take more planets, fortify the crap out of your Homeworld even more. Step 3. Win a war of attrition.

And what, specifically, makes that viable now that didn't make it viable in, say, the 6.x versions?  Or 3.x, etc.  Is there just now more total defensive strength available?  Or having way more metal and energy to build it?

[Wingflier]

And what, specifically, makes that viable now that didn't make it viable in, say, the 6.x versions?  Or 3.x, etc.  Is there just now more total defensive strength available?  Or having way more metal and energy to build it?

Well I'm not sure when the matter converters were changed or added to the game to have an unlimited number on any planet. I must not have played much since then. I remember that, for awhile, you could only have 1 per planet.

On top of that however, the endless metal income from the waves which will inevitably hit your unassailable planet means that, unlike before, you have the capacity to rebuild your fleet within a timely manner, even though you have little to no traditional income at all. In this instance, the reprisal waves actually work *for you* instead of against you, as was intended; and the player can simply brute force their way through the game.

[keith.lamothe]

Well I'm not sure when the matter converters were changed or added to the game to have an unlimited number on any planet. I must not have played much since then. I remember that, for awhile, you could only have 1 per planet.

It's been a long time and I could be mistaken, but I'm fairly sure they were never capped, because we were trying to retain the feature of the previous design that you never ever just flat out ran out of potential energy.  Of course, energy was harder to come by in those days, so perhaps having a territory-based "upper limit" isn't a bad thing.

On top of that however, the endless metal income from the waves which will inevitably hit your unassailable planet means that, unlike before, you have the capacity to rebuild your fleet within a timely manner, even though you have little to no traditional income at all.

Gotcha.

So we're speaking concretely, just how many matter converters are we talking about here?