Knowledge raiding has become tedious and trivial. Change it.

[keith.lamothe]

Right, I saw those;  I'm not sure that a technique which involves "flagships" and "turret ball" in hostile space really equals "easy" (at the very least, that's firepower you can't be using elsewhere), but I can see how it would feel thus.  But on the other hand, for many of these systems would it not be similarly easy to just kill everything in the system except the command station and warp gate (and other AIP increasers)?  Longer, but just as easy if you're able to maintain that kind of dominance in lower-tech systems.

As for the transports flying to the edge of the map, is that basically unaffected by the recent capping of speed for ships that are too far away from the planet center?

[keith.lamothe]

And are there other methods y'all use that make it seem too easy?

Not saying we're going to brutally nerf all of these, I'm just trying to figure out the scope of such a project

In theory we could just have something that makes end-game knowledge raiding a no-micro gimme, but I'm thinking that would just further trivialize the difficulty of the endgame since presumably if you get 70 planets worth of knowledge you can crush the homeworld unless it's been reinforcing for way too long and has 2000 core grenade launchers or something.  So I'd rather find a way of making knowledge raiding always be a risky proposition of some kind.  Perhaps a very moderate form of what golems provoke in the way of AI reinforcements.  Not AIP, though, I figure, as many players are really allergic to AIP increases

[Winter Born]

Right, I saw those;  I'm not sure that a technique which involves "flagships" and "turret ball" in hostile space really equals "easy" (at the very least, that's firepower you can't be using elsewhere), but I can see how it would feel thus.  But on the other hand, for many of these systems would it not be similarly easy to just kill everything in the system except the command station and warp gate (and other AIP increasers)?  Longer, but just as easy if you're able to maintain that kind of dominance in lower-tech systems.

As for the transports flying to the edge of the map, is that basically unaffected by the recent capping of speed for ships that are too far away from the planet center?

I just fly out of the AI turret ranges, drop 10 mk2 labs, have the transport fly a large Triangle pattern around the labs sized to return when they are done. Load and retreat. Heal everything back in the adjacent friendly system.

There are several distinct methods used by various posters from finesse to brute force -- that probably means no one combo is so overpowerd that it is a "Duhh choice".

If there was a very high random chance that having a lab enter hostile space would trigger a CPA w/o warning and/or no countdown -- Not knowing where the CPA would hit would reduce the chance of laying a easy trap for the AI.

[keith.lamothe]

Well, we have to be careful to not overuse the CPA mechanic as it does actually pull AI ships from guard posts, just not on the same planet.

I'm thinking that maybe AI command stations could generate ships in a way similar to the super terminal, when human science ships are on the planet (in proportion to the number of said science ships).  Obviously this would need to be tuned and not get exponentially out of control or anything like that, but perhaps it would be a worthwhile mechanic to explore.

What do y'all think?

[Sizzle]

I definitely think this should scale somehow with difficulty, AIP, or both.   There are those here (of at least a count of one, namely me) that don't have knowledge raids down to any kind of exact science.  To be sure this part of the community is heard (the opposite of the it's too easy, fix it crowd), I wanted to chime in.

I'd like to keep the increased challenges well towards the end-game so that we don't have k-raiding as being a boring part of the 'mop up' phase, but especially as newer players generally are feeling their way through the beginning portions of the game, I don't need the AI jumping down my throat from the get go when I'm still trying to get a handle on k-raids.

As you suggested, maybe the mechanic needs to scale to the number of research stations the player deploys -- that is a trickle of knowledge being stolen won't tick off the AI so much as dumping 30 research stations down and siphoning out the entire system as one go?

Also a question as to what 'knowledge' is.... is it literally a resource we're *stealing* from the AI?   Is it just us observing their ships?  In game terms why would they feel threatened by the science stations?  In part to keep the story cohesive, I think the mechanic(s) should be informed by the back story, to the extent possible.

[Buttons840]

I don't really want it to be harder, but this is just my opinion.

But harder is better than boring.

[keith.lamothe]

I don't really want it to be harder, but this is just my opinion.

But harder is better than boring.

Yea, I'll need to get Chris's opinion on all this, and obviously players chiming in and saying "it's not too easy, really!" is another data point (though that is an oversimplification of what Sizzle said).  But my gut feeling is that something as powerful as knowledge should not be trivial to obtain without sacrifice (once you've taken a planet it's trivial to get its knowledge, that's fine, but you've sacrificed 20 AIP and whatever to get it).  It shouldn't take micro unless it's the fun micro of an interesting battle/challenge.

I definitely think this should scale somehow with difficulty, AIP, or both.   There are those here (of at least a count of one, namely me) that don't have knowledge raids down to any kind of exact science.  To be sure this part of the community is heard (the opposite of the it's too easy, fix it crowd), I wanted to chime in.

That's a good point; if we go with the terminal-like ship-spawning it would be very much related to current AIP.  In theory it could even be tied to "how much knowledge have the humans gotten from planets they did not own at the time" but that's tracking a whole new number, etc, so only if it really makes a difference.

Also a question as to what 'knowledge' is.... is it literally a resource we're *stealing* from the AI?   Is it just us observing their ships?  In game terms why would they feel threatened by the science stations?  In part to keep the story cohesive, I think the mechanic(s) should be informed by the back story, to the extent possible.

Actually I think this is one of the strengths of the idea of making knowledge raiding more "lively": the AI should realize that the human's MAIN way of becoming more dangerous is through knowledge.  Without knowledge you simply cannot get enough extra ship cap and higher mark ships to take down a suitably defended AI homeworld.  Or at least, I'd be very surprised if someone could pull that off on, say, higher than 7 difficulty even with all the ARS-unlocks since you'd still only have mark I ships.

So in my opinion the AI should take a decided interest in denying you access to knowledge on planets you don't own.

[Buttons840]

You could have decloakers wonder around the system.  As long as the AI knows your there things usually stay pretty interesting.

When making it harder remember less knowledge means fewer toys and thus less fun.  IMO.

[keith.lamothe]

Well, when I noted that science ships could be made non-cloakable you said that there were other easy ways of knowledge raiding, and that would be significantly more effective than roaming decloakers, right?

[Sizzle]

<snippage>

Actually I think this is one of the strengths of the idea of making knowledge raiding more "lively": the AI should realize that the human's MAIN way of becoming more dangerous is through knowledge.  Without knowledge you simply cannot get enough extra ship cap and higher mark ships to take down a suitably defended AI homeworld.  Or at least, I'd be very surprised if someone could pull that off on, say, higher than 7 difficulty even with all the ARS-unlocks since you'd still only have mark I ships.

So in my opinion the AI should take a decided interest in denying you access to knowledge on planets you don't own.

This is exactly why I wanted to get at least a better mental handle on what knowledge is.  That is, an actual resource that is quantifyable from the AI's perspective  - such as hacking into their command center and downloading data) or passive scans of their ships / technology.  

Depending on what it IS, I can think of several ways to make it more interesting and have it at least partially scale with AIP without needing to trigger some sort of terminal-like ship spawning.

WARNING -- the following would be a major re-tooling of how knowledge works in game now... however, the more I think about it, the more I like it.

Lets say that we declare 'knowledge' as the physical hacking into of ships databases and command center databases, and examining wreckage of AI craft.

Knowledge raids in systems you own would be:

- For each destroyed AI ship in the system you would get 0.1 units of knowledge up to a cap per AI ship type seen in game.
- For the AI command center / warp gate / other capturables there would be a fixed value for pawing through the wreckage as well.

Research stations would travel around 'examining' this wreckage as a passive means of generating knowledge.  However due to the cap per ship type, this only gets you so far unless the AI gets a new ship type through AIP increases.  In order to really get AIP you'd also have to try to get live data:

K-raids in enemy systems would be to try to get your research stations near live enemy ships. research stations would get a type of 'beam' weapon similar to repair / tachyon beams.   You'd either bring your research stations in under cover of a fleet and try to get in combat intelligence, or under a cloak, and try to sneak the intelligence that way.   "Hacking" enemy ships gets you 0.5 units per enemy ship type, and some suitable multiplyer for sneaking your research stations near the AI command station.    

This would obviously get much more difficult to do the more enemy ships are swarming around (increased AIP and planet Mk level), and you could easily make it harder to sneak the research station close to key enemy structures by placing more tachyon turrets around at higher AIP and giving the AI more of a reason to attack the research station for the fleet escorted research stations.   After all, they're actually breaking into enemy data systems.

If thats not how knowledge works, I'm sure that the community could come up with other ideas (though I like mine hehe).

[wyvern83]

"it's not too easy, really!"

Well rather than keep modifying my post in light of all the new posts this thread is getting I'll just say that is all I had to say really.

K-Raiding doesn't happen for me and every time I hear of a tactic that works it gets nerfed before I can use it. Between Tachyon emitters, Ion cannons, and the large mine fields my current game has, a cloaker starship-transport combo is the only way I could even try it. As it is kill everything is the only way I've found to be reliable which means its not K-Raiding at all. Incidentally it also means I don't leapfrog worlds anymore either as I might as well benefit from the AIP increase I've caused.

[keith.lamothe]

Buttons840: on less knowledge = less toys = less fun, I agree; the point is to make sure that the effort required to get knowledge is appropriate game-balance-wise and does not include unnecessary (un-fun) micro-management.

Sizzle: those are interesting ideas on re-tooling knowledge, though that's definitely out-of-scope for what we can fit into free DLC for now; if Chris wanted to do something like that (and that's a significant "if") it would probably be part of an expansion's development cycle.  Edit: one thing you could do, though, is put up a post in the suggestion forum and get it nominated for the next DLC poll when that rolls around (that's more for short term stuff but it's also helped us get an idea for how much interest there is in certain next-expansion stuff)

Thought a bit and here's some more details on what we could do to de-trivialize mid/endgame knowledge raiding:

Every X cycles, each AI Command Station computes a number:

( (Current_Human_Knowledge_Income_From_This_Planet) * A) *

(
  (Total_Human_Knowledge / Total_Human_Players) * B +
  (AI_Progress) * C +
  (AI_Difficulty_Of_Owning_AI_Player) * D
)

and if that number is greater than zero generates a proportional number of ships at each reinforcement point in the system (command station, each guard post, each wormhole) which are already freed ( = threat).  Presumably they will attack the science ships or other human ships in the system but might do something else, dunno if we would need to give it a "hint" that it should be shooting the techies.

A, B, C, and D would have to be tuned a fair bit, of course.



Anyway, if the player consensus winds up being fairly split between those who think knowledge raiding is trivial (in mid/late game at least) and those who find it plenty hard as-is (thank you for the comment, wyvern83), this sort of system could be introduced as a new AI Plot that can be selected for one or both (or neither) AIs in game setup.  Though if we put it in such a prominent place I'll have to be more devious with it, of course

[Sizzle]

Thanks Keith, suggestion up at http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,5532.0.html

[rubikscube]

how about a control node about auto build science lab on un researched planets
 back to op, doing that is op, but will encourage people only to capture strategic planets. hey if you have to micro energy, why don't you have to micro technology?

[rubikscube]

first, i sometimes don't remember if researched or not. make special color on non researched supplied planets.
What op is saying is like auto scouting, which i don't think will happen in the game
the best thing possible is science labs has low priority so you neuter the worm hole and then go back, transports has been super powerful lately