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

[x4000]

Incidentally, if you go back to I think 3.x, but definitely 2.x, you DID flat-out run out of energy depending on your territory.  Originally you could only have a couple of large, small, and medium energy reactors on every planet.  It made it so that if you didn't have a certain amount of territory, you also couldn't have an army above a certain size. 

And it made it so that if you wanted to support a huge turret mass, you also had to have a lot of territory that you held onto in order to support that.  If you lost that territory, then the force fields would shut off, and I think at one point so did the turrets. 

So your impenetrable bottleneck world could be broken if something slipped the line and busted up your energy enough.  Hence the really feared nature of the raid starships at the time.

[Wingflier]

I currently have 32 matter converters on my Homeworld and so many resources that I can't possibly use them all. I could probably add 15 more without making a dent. Perhaps the Spire Habitation Centers are contributing to this problem because the AI usually ignores them and goes straight for my HW after a point, which means that I'm receiving a ton of metal from those as well. I'm not sure how the situation would look attempting to use this "strategy" on a normal game, I was just excited to try the FS campaign after all the changes you made.

By the way the "hacking" changes are fantastic, I really love it as a mechanic.

[keith.lamothe]

Incidentally, if you go back to I think 3.x, but definitely 2.x, you DID flat-out run out of energy depending on your territory.  Originally you could only have a couple of large, small, and medium energy reactors on every planet.  It made it so that if you didn't have a certain amount of territory, you also couldn't have an army above a certain size.

Really?  I think by the 3.x days, or at least late-January 2010 when I started working on the game, you could build any number of any mark of reactor on any of your planets.  But each past the first got hit with an increasingly harsh inefficiency penalty.  Though that penalty would only go so high so past a certain point there was a particular mark of reactor that you could just put down hundreds of to get as much energy as you needed.  At the expense of having an economy, of course, and that's where turning them off and on came in.

But perhaps in the 2.x days this was not so.

I currently have 32 matter converters on my Homeworld

So a per-planet cap of 10 would at least cause you to need to be more nuanced about this?

Perhaps the Spire Habitation Centers are contributing to this problem because the AI usually ignores them and goes straight for my HW after a point, which means that I'm receiving a ton of metal from those as well.

Ah yes, those were recently buffed like 60% on their metal output, which was already pretty high.  I think they now give 1000 metal per second.  This may be excessive, or perhaps the AI needs to be more deliberate about killing them.  In general I've not encouraged the AI to scour defeated spire cities, as needing to rebuild them from scratch isn't precisely fun.

I'm not sure how the situation would look attempting to use this "strategy" on a normal game, I was just excited to try the FS campaign after all the changes you made.

I suspect things would be different, but it's a valid concern that it works on FS.  This is Diff 8, right?

By the way the "hacking" changes are fantastic, I really love it as a mechanic.

Glad you're enjoying them   Though they're part of what lets you get away without holding much territory, as you can hack fabs/etc to gain those designs permanently, whereas previously you'd have lost all your fabs long ago, etc.  But hacking is also finite, especially on repeated applications of the same kind of hack, so it can be balanced.

[liq3]

I feel like a few balance changes would 'fix' this without needing a per planet cap for Matter Converters.

1. Matter converters actually need metal to work.
2. Spire Hab centers don't provide metal without supply.
3. Reduce the salvage percentage on the home world? Seems to be a common issue that it's so high.

[x4000]

There were so many iterations of the game that some of it runs together in my mind, honestly.

[Draco18s]

There were so many iterations of the game that some of it runs together in my mind, honestly.

There were two different energy systems inside just 3.x

The one Keith is referring to was the second.  Although I will freely admit that I'm not actually sure what it was before that, as I played incredibly few games prior to...3.5 or so.

[Cinth]

Going to go out on a limb but I think nerfing the salvage "value" of stuff in Exo waves might be in order.  Of all the sources of scrap metal floating around my choke points, normal Exos are the biggest contributors.  I would guess cutting it by a third would still keep Exos as top salvage earners.  And it seems like Wing has 4 normal exo sources (Champ nemesis exos don't earn a lot of scrap).


@Wingflier: Missing some important info;  What intensity are you running the Exo stuff? What AIs?  How much AIP?

@Keith: I think normal energy is at a good place.  I can't build everything everywhere and I can't throw up planet cap turrets everywhere I want early. Spire habs needed the income buff IMO.. building the late game fleet became a chore, rebuilding it was painful.

[Wingflier]

So a per-planet cap of 10 would at least cause you to need to be more nuanced about this?

Seems fair. It would basically mean that losing all my planets would result in me having to self-destruct most of my fleet in order to keep my shields up.

I suspect things would be different, but it's a valid concern that it works on FS.  This is Diff 8, right?

Yep, 8 is where I generally get my ass handed to me keep the difficulty at.

2. Spire Hab centers don't provide metal without supply.
3. Reduce the salvage percentage on the home world? Seems to be a common issue that it's so high.

I agree with these changes as well. Perhaps the salvage could scale with the current number of owned planets, through from what I'm hearing from you it already does. The Spire Habitation Centers requiring supply seems intuitive.

[Wingflier]

@Wingflier: Missing some important info;  What intensity are you running the Exo stuff? What AIs?  How much AIP?

All the Plots are at level 4. The AIs are 2 random harders, I'm not sure what specific types it gave me, I think one of them is the counter attack post one. I'm currently at ~150 AIP but I still have a lot of data centers to pop and I have 2 more "Spire Cities" left to place.

[Tridus]

Going to go out on a limb but I think nerfing the salvage "value" of stuff in Exo waves might be in order.  Of all the sources of scrap metal floating around my choke points, normal Exos are the biggest contributors.  I would guess cutting it by a third would still keep Exos as top salvage earners.  And it seems like Wing has 4 normal exo sources (Champ nemesis exos don't earn a lot of scrap).

Yeah, that seems reasonable to me. The FS exos I was dealing with were not overly dangerous to my choke Spire City worlds but were providing insane amounts of resources. I had one system with 110 engineers assisting ship construction!

[Toranth]

Going to go out on a limb but I think nerfing the salvage "value" of stuff in Exo waves might be in order.  Of all the sources of scrap metal floating around my choke points, normal Exos are the biggest contributors.  I would guess cutting it by a third would still keep Exos as top salvage earners.  And it seems like Wing has 4 normal exo sources (Champ nemesis exos don't earn a lot of scrap).

Yeah, that seems reasonable to me. The FS exos I was dealing with were not overly dangerous to my choke Spire City worlds but were providing insane amounts of resources. I had one system with 110 engineers assisting ship construction!

Golem and Spirecraft exos are significantly more difficult to deal with when you don't have FS-level stuff to kill them.  I find them to be more resource-neutral, since the frequently kill as much stuff as I get resources to build.  The change to non-linear salvage drops fixed the problem where a single Armored Golem could fund multiple Ion Cannons.

Maybe the new 20% bonus from the Spire City Hub to salvage was too much?

[Cinth]

@Wingflier: Missing some important info;  What intensity are you running the Exo stuff? What AIs?  How much AIP?

All the Plots are at level 4. The AIs are 2 random harders, I'm not sure what specific types it gave me, I think one of them is the counter attack post one. I'm currently at ~150 AIP but I still have a lot of data centers to pop and I have 2 more "Spire Cities" left to place.

That seems like it is rather early in a FS game, and you are losing all you other planets during Exo waves.  Also, it sounds like you have traded your sustained metal income for energy.  I'm wondering if you have traded FS fleet strength for income also (more habs than shipyards).  I don't think that's unusual.  Tanking on the HW is a very dangerous idea.  All it is going to take is an Exo with Raids and Infiltrator Guardians to kill your CC.  You also have the AI HWs to deal with. 

[keith.lamothe]

Maybe the new 20% bonus from the Spire City Hub to salvage was too much?

I do think that would be better at 10%, though I don't think it's the operative concern here.

HW salvage is probably also better at 40% than 50%.

[Cinth]

Golem and Spirecraft exos are significantly more difficult to deal with when you don't have FS-level stuff to kill them.  I find them to be more resource-neutral, since the frequently kill as much stuff as I get resources to build.  The change to non-linear salvage drops fixed the problem where a single Armored Golem could fund multiple Ion Cannons.

Not if you build specifically to handle them.  I can build a choke planet that is capable of handling late game Spirecraft Exo waves.  I can do it with standard stuff and Spirecraft.

Maybe the new 20% bonus from the Spire City Hub to salvage was too much?

That's not the problem.  You can't put a city on your HW.  Wing is getting the flat 50% from tanking there. 

[Tridus]

Maybe the new 20% bonus from the Spire City Hub to salvage was too much?

That's not the problem.  You can't put a city on your HW.  Wing is getting the flat 50% from tanking there.

That's not his salvage issue, but it is mine.

I think both numbers are too high. The HW one is way too high. The Spire City bonus is also too high considering it sits on top of whatever you're getting from the command center already. I had it at 32% (Military Command III), and 32% of a FS exo is an awful lot of metal.

On the HW, 50% scrap means that if you can fight there, rebuilding anything you lost is really easy. You don't need to have much in the way of income from other systems when you can harvest so much scrap.