Incentivizing Guerrilla Raids

[Sunshine!]

Vinraith: I addressed your point here:

This is important because if you attack the post with less than 50 ships (a difficult prospect), then there is 0% chance of setting the post off.  The easier, but more risky, route would be to attack it with your entire fleet blob with a 50% chance of setting it off.

Frequently, sending just 50 ships onto a planet will likely not accomplish your mission, especially as the game progresses.  The easiest way of determining how problematic this (to match incentives with difficulty) would be to test it since it would be easiest to start up a game and just launch all your cross-planetary raids with 50 ships.

[Red Spot]

I do like some of the ideas, however I feel the whole game already says(begs) 'guerilla raids'.
If you clean out the planet nextdoor you may be in supply (big deal for your fleet .. ), however if you take on the next planet it wont reinforce .. by the time the AI realises you are hitting that planet it has been stripped of posts and possibly the CC. Effectivly it is how I play the game, if possible, neuter the planet next to nextdoor planet .. before I actually take the planet nextdoor, which in turn was already cleaned of posts before I took the planet I now own nextdoor.

[Sunshine!]

Are you using your entire blob for that kind of stuff Red Spot?  Because that's not so much a guerrilla raid as a full-on frontal assault.  The whole game does not beg guerrilla raids; outside of AI eyes, there is nothing in the game that provides an incentive to use 50 ships instead of your entire fleet.

This is not about neutering planets either.  This is mainly about surgical strikes on key AI installations to deal with particularly problematic AI defenses that happen to be underdefended (counterattack posts, alarm posts, raid engines, etc. that aren't under forcefields, or are on poorly defended planets).  If you send your full fleet in (as you currently do), that stuff is going to trigger, guaranteed.  If you send in a small strike force, you can get around that trigger but it's not always going to be possible, and you can't have a giant fleet on the planet next door either.

This is very much not the way you just described how you play the game; you say you wipe a planet clean, then wipe the next planet clean before you take the first planet.  Doing that (under the Strong version of this incentive) will cause you to take full AIP penalties at both planets.  If you sent a small strike force to the second planet before you take the first planet (and you haven't alerted the second planet through any of the given means), then you can take the planet for about half the normal AIP at the cost of not having it be neutered already, and not having the planet between you and your new planet be neutered until you send your fleet to clear that one.  If you're willing to attempt the small deep strike force, you can take 2 planets for 31 AIP instead of 40 AIP, but you'll have to deal with the counterattack when all the guards go on alert and attack.

Edit:  I've made this change to the proposal, as a counter to potential abuse.

For the "strong version," destroying an AIP increasing target on an unalerted planet will decrease the AIP gained by 5, to a minimum of 5. That way it applies to larger things like Command Stations, the occasional Raid Engine, Black Hole Machines and Grav Drills, but it won't let players willy-nilly run around and destroy all the warp gates in the galaxy for 1 AIP each.

[NickAragua]

I would argue that your entire force is a little guerilla raiding party compared to the force that the AI is able to marshal at any given time. While I'm (in principle) in favor of things that reduce AI progress, this approach tends to give incentive to "suicide runs", rather than "hit and run attacks". Let's face it, if you send 50 (or whatever arbitrary number of) bombers to attack an objective deep in AI territory, they're probably not coming back (transports or not). Not to mention, they're not likely to actually be able to destroy their targets, unless some neutral dudes just waltzed through and cleaned the AI guys out for you.

[Shrugging Khan]

Why again can't we just send 500 guys?

[Red Spot]

Are you using your entire blob for that kind of stuff Red Spot?

Cap of bomber/raid starships - bombers/fighters/frigates/... - whatever has a bonus vs the target.
As long as the planet has never been on alert is has very little in defence and small raids work sort of in your favour .. the planet stays undefended.

Every so many planets there is one that needs to be blob'ed though, but in general you are best of when you clean a planet and its adjacent planets before you take it.

Edit: See the screeny I attached on how a late game raiding-party looks in my game. That gets you through most mk4 planets in about 20sec .. ehm, there is again a reason I send in the cloaker

[Sunshine!]

I would argue that your entire force is a little guerilla raiding party compared to the force that the AI is able to marshal at any given time. While I'm (in principle) in favor of things that reduce AI progress, this approach tends to give incentive to "suicide runs", rather than "hit and run attacks". Let's face it, if you send 50 (or whatever arbitrary number of) bombers to attack an objective deep in AI territory, they're probably not coming back (transports or not). Not to mention, they're not likely to actually be able to destroy their targets, unless some neutral dudes just waltzed through and cleaned the AI guys out for you.

Why again can't we just send 500 guys?

You can send 500 guys, you can send as many guys as you want, you are not at all being penalized for playing how you've been playing this entire time.  It's simply that there is a bonus IF you can pull off a very difficult attack that flies under the AI radar.

On a personal level, I've always been bothered by how Raid Engines, Counterwave Posts, and the 50% chance on Alarm posts are always guaranteed to happen (among others).  There's no way around them.  They're just there to punish players, and that's not really that fun if there's no way around them.  It's why I don't play against Alarmists or Retaliatory AI types, guaranteed (I think Raid Engine AI types are silly, so I'll still play horribly short-lived games against them).  The tooltips even say "unless players carefully kill these."  Yet there's no way to carefully kill them in the sense that they don't go off, it's just that for Raid Engines you need to hit them while they're recharging (meaning you're still in pain), and alarm posts it's just completely random.  Same thing with One-Way Doormaster AI types; if you want to get anywhere, you HAVE to clear the Black Hole Machines, but that guarantees a huge amount of AIP you're going to be paying for.  With AI Eyes there's at least a way to not trigger them, but with these other things you're simply out of luck.  It's just not fun to have to kill that 20th counterattack guard post in a row before you can destroy the command station and take the planet.  That's ultimately why I've proposed this, but the point of this matter is that there is nothing here that is changing the way you play in any negative way; if you do change how you play, you'll get some benefits, otherwise it'll still be the same game.  You can still take your giant blob of ships and go crush countless AI worlds into little melted puddles of various metallic substances without any problems 

Are you using your entire blob for that kind of stuff Red Spot?

Cap of bomber/raid starships - bombers/fighters/frigates/... - whatever has a bonus vs the target.
As long as the planet has never been on alert is has very little in defence and small raids work sort of in your favour .. the planet stays undefended.

Every so many planets there is one that needs to be blob'ed though, but in general you are best of when you clean a planet and its adjacent planets before you take it.

Edit: See the screeny I attached on how a late game raiding-party looks in my game. That gets you through most mk4 planets in about 20sec .. ehm, there is again a reason I send in the cloaker

When it comes to my proposal, that raiding party definitely wouldn't work since Alert is triggered at 2 starships.  I like the raiding party though, I'll have to try that with the jumpship some time!

[Red Spot]

When it comes to my proposal, that raiding party definitely wouldn't work since Alert is triggered at 2 starships.  I like the raiding party though, I'll have to try that with the jumpship some time!

That doesnt change that much, hard to hit planets would still get the same treatment. On easier planets instead of 3 raid or 4 bomber starships I just limit myself to 2 of them .... and the bonus recieved is too high for the cost. Losing 2 mk1 starships is peanuts mid/late game, saving 5 AIP/planet cause I took a minor risk is a huge bonus imo, same for not triggering a counter-attack .. at all.

The idea is good, the balance not so

[Sunshine!]

You only get 1 starship (2 puts the planet on alert).  Also, you're only going to be able to save the 5 AIP for a command station on probably 1 out of every 4 of your planets (less the more connections there are, plus the enemy counterattack from releasing the guards, plus you'll be jumping through a likely non-neutered planet if alert is changed to stick for half an hour), and a counterattack guard post has a couple million hitpoints, so taking it out with just one starship is going to be difficult.

Give it a shot, and then let us know how the balance works?  It's fully testable in-game right now.

[Orelius]

Technically, wouldn't you be able to whittle down the planet, wait for the alert to go down, and then take out the structures with a few dozen bombers?  It's not that difficult unless you make it difficult for yourself.

[Commiesalami]

Technically, wouldn't you be able to whittle down the planet, wait for the alert to go down, and then take out the structures with a few dozen bombers?  It's not that difficult unless you make it difficult for yourself.

How long does it take for the alert to go down?

[TechSY730]

Technically, wouldn't you be able to whittle down the planet, wait for the alert to go down, and then take out the structures with a few dozen bombers?  It's not that difficult unless you make it difficult for yourself.

How long does it take for the alert to go down?

Currently, alert goes down the instant the conditions for it are no longer met.

BTW, I am in full support of changing it such that a planet is on alert if the conditions to alert it have been met within the last X minutes (where X is to be determined). That alone would help encourage guerrilla style tactics, as if you "blob" your way into a planet, or worse, several planets, you will bring a lot of planets on alert for quite some time.

[Sunshine!]

I think, to go with this, there should be a maximum number of alert planets in the galaxy at once.  It should be a pretty high number to make it a risky proposition, but it would allow for some interesting diversionary tactics - send out a fleet of raid starships to just run through a giant pile of planets, and when you hit the cap you can send a much more sizable force in to take out your target.  You'll have to live with half of the galaxy being on alert for 30 minutes though.

[Orelius]

I don't think a maximum amount of alert planets would be a good idea at all, especially with the alert timer you're thinking of.  Perhaps an alert timer adjusted by how much of an "offense" you have made on that planet would work.

The maximum number of fleet ships you can have on a planet without alert is 50, and the maximum number of starships is 1.  Let's say that each starship counts as one "alert point", and 50 fleet ships counts for the same.  If the alert points on a planet are one or less, the planet is not on alert.  Going over the limit will trigger an alert for 30 seconds times the amount of excess alert points the planet has, to a cap of five minutes.

Let's say that if you go over the limit, the planet goes on alert for 30 seconds after this threat is removed, so if you have 100 ships (2 points), the planet will go on alert for 30 seconds.  If you have 350 fleet ships and two star ships, it is equivalent to 7 points over the limit , and you'll have three and a half minutes of alert.

[Sunshine!]

Having too short of an alert time (or a cap on maximum alert) would make it too easy to clean the planet, wait for the planet to go off alert, and then take out whatever problem-causing structure is sitting there (barring Raid Engines).  That's why I was suggesting half an hour, and even that may be too short but at least it gives the AI plenty of time to rack up a sizable force on the wormhole guard posts again.

I do like the concept of alert points though, the problem being that it would need to scale somehow with the relative defenses on the planet in question - 100 ships is not going to be much of a problem on a 1500 ship Mk4 planet, but 100 ships can cause plenty of problems on a 50 ship mk2 planet.