Knowledge Raiding: Too easy/boring?

[keith.lamothe]

Side note to that: Remember you have to take multi-connection system to get it to be optimal.  That means you're on every interstellar highway, and still take planets to do it.  Just a minor note to help offset the evil plans you have.

Yes, I know it doesn't totally remove the need   Long time ago you could actually k-raid anywhere.

This is true, making it overly complex has other issues.  But even there it's not so much the complexity that shuts down a strategic option as the ways in which that complexity bounds it.

Apologies Keith, that comment wasn't necessarily directed at you, just a general warning.  As gamers many of us GM/DM paper and pen with house rules we understood and etc etc... It's real easy to rewrite a system that way to the point that noone outside knows it.

No offense was taken, it's an important thing to remember.  It was part of the reason for the change to carriers a few versions: not that it's really less complex now in total, but the complexity isn't in the form of some special conditional rule of why you literally can't fire upon the target when X.

+1.  I've never gotten it to the point of wanting to shut it down if I use it. Well, unless it's "I'm bored and I'm near the floor".

5.027 is out now; I don't think those changes will change that fundamentally but at least now if you let it get out of control there's a chance you'll lose  

Side note: Fallen Spire campaigns, it's ludicrous.

Oh yea, saw a save the other day where two players had full FS fleets camping the ST.  It had capped out on the 500 mkV ships spawned every 15 seconds, and those spawns were dying in like 3 seconds.

The thing is: if you have that kind of FS fleet, why do you care about AIP?  Of course, if you have either/both AIP-provoked exos enabled or are playing on a very high difficulty, etc...

[Burnstreet]

Side note: Fallen Spire campaigns, it's ludicrous.

Oh yea, saw a save the other day where two players had full FS fleets camping the ST.  It had capped out on the 500 mkV ships spawned every 15 seconds, and those spawns were dying in like 3 seconds.

The thing is: if you have that kind of FS fleet, why do you care about AIP?  Of course, if you have either/both AIP-provoked exos enabled or are playing on a very high difficulty, etc...

well, you are probably referring to the game I posted. Why did we do it? Curiosity, mainly, and to keep the spirecraft exos down as they were the ones containing H/Ks when the FS exos were consisting mainly of Spirecraft and golems.
Other reason was that we had nothing else to do while the cities and more FS ships were building, getting more systems would have meant having to wait even longer for that crystal to arrive, not that the AI had any chance to destroy it with our fleets guarding it.

btw, could you enable the Arty Golem to shoot H/Ks? Currently they are immune to it's shots due to Command Grade Armor.

[Shrugging Khan]

I've been doing some extended K-Raiding right now, and I do declare...it IS a boring waiting game. When the raid starts, all is a question of finding out how much firepower I need in place to hold off the zombies. As soon as superiority is established, the enemy does not even come close to harming the station, and has no tricks or tactics to change that. They just keep on spawning, we keep on killing them. It's like chicks being ground into mcnuggets.

[jeisler]

I just came back to check on AI war after having not played for quite a while.   Picked it up forever ago, and I always felt like "knowledge raiding" was an unintended thing - due to the previous mentioned effect of it allowing you to bypass AI progression.


Forgive me if I'm spouting something that was already discussed and rejected.   I saw there were proposed "reactive attacks" and such in response to knowledge raids.


How about a simple thing:    Remove the free progress.     Just make it so gathering knowledge at a planet with an active AI gate / command post gives AI progress. 


Make it scale up.   Like the first 1000 you gather gives 1, the next 1000 gives 2, and so on.... so once you've gathered from 4 or 5 planets then, you're getting 20-30-40 AI progress tacked on for each planet you raid.


This would allow a few planets to be knowledge raided with relatively little consequence, but quickly cost more AIP than just blowing up the AI gate/post first.


Something to that effect, at least....   just as a thought.

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the forums

And sorry, the whole point behind K-raiding is to be able to get K without AIP, so that you have a chance to dig yourself out of a hole without making it deeper.  Some of what's been talked about will make it so that you can only play that "dig out" card so many times before it gets too dangerous (and so if you play it out before you're in a hole, and then get in a hole, you're out of luck), but ultimately if K-raiding always gave AIP it would be simpler to just remove it from the game, because you can already get K for AIP

[jeisler]

Aha - gotcha.    I guess I'm out of touch with things a bit.   I had originally been under the impression that knowledge raiding was (originally at least) an unintended tactic, since it let you get knowledge for planets without actually colonizing them (and taking the AIP hit in the process).


I guess my beef with k-raiding was that it felt like it bypassed a game mechanic (trading AIP for your own progress), and that without any real retribution, it becomes a tactic that would be necessary for an "optimal" strategy.   As in, you can choose to either get free tech progress, or choose to not get free tech progress.    Sure it requires you moving in to defend the lab or whatnot, but it had no lasting repercussions and just required some time.

Most other strategic moves that advance your situation (taking a planet, removing a gate, etc) have permanent consequences in terms of AIP.


Just my two bits on it            I haven't actually played to speak of since the Zenith Remnant, so I'm pretty out of the loop.   I should probably play a few games and see what all has happened before shooting my mouth off, heh heh heh.

[dotjd]

Reading the current patchnotes, and wow.  I contributed to this topic before, but seeing it all written out like that is scary.  This will rather seriously change a lot of things.  And now I'm tempted to see just how far I can take these mechanics.  Those wild rides sound... let's say worth experiencing at insane levels.

If I had to only pick one, I would take more planets for the K and then superterminal my way down by quite a lot, but hmmmmmm.  It's time to start thinking about what unlocks are absolutely necessary.  It's a shame, I was looking forward to trying the new fleet starships in my next 10/10.  With 4 instead of 2 of the zenith and spire starships, that munitions boost effect could go a lot further... but that's what, 5 and 7K each?  On top of 2k for flagships.  Or in real terms, 4-5 planets.  Hmm.

[Wanderer]

Wow , that's going to be pretty brutal.  Heheh.

[Wanderer]

Keith: Surges need more power and need to ramp with difficulty.  I'm inhaling the ST at max Core + surge with the fleet.  It might be I'm overreacting but as they are now it's still pretty easy to handle (what appears to be) the cap of 250 Mk Vs or so.

[dotjd]

uhhhhh

fleetships
scout mark ii: 500 K
triangle ships + bonus to mark ii: 9000 K
triangle ships + bonus to mark iii: 24000 K

starships
flagship: 2000 K
zenith starship: 5000 K
spire starship: 7000 K
raid mark ii: 4000 K
riot mark ii: 4000 K

economy ships
engineer mark ii: 1000 K
econ cs mark ii: 4000 K
econ cs mark iii: 5000 K
mil cs mark ii: 4000 K
mil cs mark iii: 5000 K

support ships
forcefield mark ii: 2000 K
hardened ff mark i: 1000 K
hardened ff mark ii: 2000 K
fortress mark i: 3000 K

turret ships
basic mark ii: 750 K
basic mark iii: 1500 K
lightning mark ii: 1500 K
lightning mark iii: 2000 K
gravity mark i: 750 K
tachyon mark i: 250 K
hbc mark i: 500 K

TOTAL: 89750 - 10000 starting K = 27 planets

And.... it's mostly just a combination of low-hanging fruit + things i think would be pretty useful without going too overboard + things I want to try because i haven't tried them before and/or they changed =((( .  I mean come on, I'm barely unlocking any turrets at all.  No lasers, no missiles, no snipers, just lightning because the new FF changes make them seem worth trying in a serious whipping boy, and at high difficulties something needs to put out a godawful amount of damage =/

Clearly I am very used to getting most everything I want.  I think tomorrow I'm going to go back to the game I had going (9/9 with hybrids and every zenith/neinzul minor faction) and kraid the hell out of the cluster I was in the middle of nabbing ARSs and golems from.  It's already got 17K in the bank, and there's at least 5 planets left to hit up.  And then I'm going to go take the cluster surrounding an ARS and leading to a homeworld, which should give me more than enough new toys to play with at least once before the mean nasty devs break them with hammers.

[Wanderer]

Keith: Surges need more power and need to ramp with difficulty.  I'm inhaling the ST at max Core + surge with the fleet.  It might be I'm overreacting but as they are now it's still pretty easy to handle (what appears to be) the cap of 250 Mk Vs or so.

Hm, at ~ 500 reduction or so it starts to get dangerous.  Particularly if you surge multiple times in a row (I think that's what happened there).   I had a head start on reduction from the Co-Ps and Data Centers, so it didn't take too long to get there with the whole 2 down 1 up bit.  I'll bleed it off until I hit floor and see where it ends up.  Currently having to ignore a 2500+ ship CPA that's wandernig the galaxy, heh.

[Wanderer]

Alright, at around 580 reduction it gets nasty.  The surges are just enough to start pushing over a fleet, particularly if you start running low on funds to replace shpis.  Without being able to shutdown the ST, it forces a destruction eventually, particularly if you need to rebuild at any point.  You also can't leave.  One shot usage, unless you're willing to have massive core fleets in your rear quarters.

I wish I could have hit it earlier, before I'd built up so much reduction.

[dotjd]

I thought it didn't count reduction in general, just reduction from itself?

[Wanderer]

I thought it didn't count reduction in general, just reduction from itself?

Nope, currently works off overall reduction.  At 200 Reduction it started midway into the Tech III build.  In the new hacking mechanic that will be true.

[keith.lamothe]

Keith: Surges need more power and need to ramp with difficulty.  I'm inhaling the ST at max Core + surge with the fleet.  It might be I'm overreacting but as they are now it's still pretty easy to handle (what appears to be) the cap of 250 Mk Vs or so.

Yea, as you discovered later they do get teeth (and they are more powerful on higher difficulty), but they aren't enough.  If someone's getting 400 AIP reduction off the ST that's basically gg for the AI if the scenario is at all winnable for the human.  If the human had to fight a totally apocalyptic battle for a few hours to get that 400 reduction, well, I can accept that; but just moving the whipping boy there and waiting a while... yea, it needs to shake them up more than that.

In my diff 7 tests with the new 5.028 mechanics, I did a couple of k-raids and then went for the ST.  At about 60 ST reduction things started to get hairy.  By 120 it was getting pretty apocalyptic (max spawns every second).  If I'd survived the AIP reduction was enormous (each tick still does the full reduction, even if the recharge was shortened) but I don't know how a player could normally survive that.  Had I done no k-raiding at all, I could have squeezed another 100 reduction or so out of it before reaching those points, I think.  The balance probably needs work, but it's getting into the ballpark.

Nope, currently works off overall reduction.  At 200 Reduction it started midway into the Tech III build.  In the new hacking mechanic that will be true.

I hadn't actually changed it in 5.028 to not go off total reduction for base strength, but thinking about it I do think it would be better to have it go off total hacking antagonism instead of total reduction for base strength.  We'll see.  This way the "order of operations" will be less important, which is probably a good thing.

FYI, some of the new stuff still needs more work and testing, so it's probably going to be next Monday (the 6th) before 5.028 makes it out; I've got to focus on AVWW during the week.