Making All ARS Unlocks Attractive v2.0 - Come Vote

[superking]

Radar dampening was not in your initial mantis proposal. Still a bad idea though.

I'm not sure what game you're playing, but this is the list of guardians where the % reduction from even 12k armor will be relatively small/none/useless:

rudeness aside, you neglect to post with consideration to the points made in the post above regarding gaurdians with high penetration

stronger attacks are intended to be a counter, although most gaurdians and gaurdposts do not do so much damage that 4000 armour takes the damage well under insta-gib levels when the unit in question has 20k HP; those that do have the capability have a low rate of fire, low population per planet and/or low HP; they are also capable of instagibbing many other ship types, while radar dampening reduces the ability of such units to fire on spacetanks from the other side of the map.

four varieties of gaurdian that penetrate such armour do not represent a large population on any given planet; artillery gaurdians will also instagib pretty much all fleet ships- what is the issue there? also note that human Missle turrets will punch through the proposed armour of spacetanks with perfect ease, as will light starships & all MK of fighters, all of which frequent the players armoury and do not require K expenditure to use: I dont perceive that as the ball in the AI's court.

I am not going to reply to your counterposting again unless it becomes less polarized and more sustained with evidence of measured consideration.

[Suzera]

Radar dampening was not in your initial mantis proposal. Still a bad idea though.

I'm not sure what game you're playing, but this is the list of guardians where the % reduction from even 12k armor will be relatively small/none/useless:

rudeness aside, you neglect to post with consideration to the points made in the post above regarding gaurdians with high penetration

stronger attacks are intended to be a counter, although most gaurdians and gaurdposts do not do so much damage that 4000 armour takes the damage well under insta-gib levels when the unit in question has 20k HP; those that do have the capability have a low rate of fire, low population per planet and/or low HP; they are also capable of instagibbing many other ship types, while radar dampening reduces the ability of such units to fire on spacetanks from the other side of the map.

four varieties of gaurdian that penetrate such armour do not represent a large population on any given planet; artillery gaurdians will also instagib pretty much all fleet ships- what is the issue there? also note that human Missle turrets will punch through the proposed armour of spacetanks with perfect ease, as will starships & fighters.

I am not going to reply to your counterposting again unless it becomes less polarized and more sustained with evidence of measured consideration.

"although most gaurdians and gaurdposts do not do so much damage that 4000 armour takes the damage well under insta-gib levels when the unit in question has 20k HP;" entirely misses the point that extra armor above bombers really won't do much of anything unless it's going to have 40-50k vs guardians. Laser guardians (which don't have a low rate of fire) would be able to instagib these tanks far better than they currently instagib some bombers, and artillery guardians will far better instagib tanks where they do not currently instagib all bombers. They also get an overkill reload refund if I am not mistaken, and this would happen MUCH more with these tanks than bombers. Guardians ARE a significant if not majority portion of the power on AI planets. I'm not even going to drag in if the AI gets something like polarizers.

The issue is that it having more armor than bombers already have is less useful for humans, but is significantly advantageous for the AI. Theoretically, ANY stats will do SOMETHING, but more armor is typically less useful for humans than the AI. If the goal is to have all the bonus ships be as good or better than bombers for humans, this is NOT going to do it.

Don't talk about measured consideration if you're not weighing the usefulness of the ship against even just bombers nor thinking about AI vs Human use.

Think about Raid Starships. These would be Raid Starships: Fleet Ship Edition. Pain for humans to kill, AI blows them up with impunity (before the radar change at least, and they may yet still).

[keith.lamothe]

Basically, the electric bombers were causing problems equivalent to if it were say, 10 bombers to 1 electric bomber of the same mark.

Yep, they have 0.1 ship cap so that sounds exactly right

Overall, I like how they're balanced, but the AI just gets sheer numbers of them and that makes them extremely hard to deal with.

Yea, I think you've identified the main problem here: AI reinforcements (not waves, reinforcements) can result in disproporitionate representation of low-ship-cap types.  On one hand it isn't really any worse for an AI planet to reinforce with 40 zelecs than it would be for them to reinforce with 400 bombers.  In practice, the 40 zelecs tend to happen much more easily for some reason.

I need to revisit the AI-per-planet-cap mechanic to fix its artificial constraining of the count of those types in a wave, and then I can apply it to zelecs, etc.  Basically the way I intend to use it won't let the AI have more than a ship-cap's worth of a specific big-bruiser type on guard duty on any one planet.  That's still enough to be scary, but should keep things at least under some kind of control.

[Suzera]

Does it cost more reinforcement points to pick the low ship cap units?

[keith.lamothe]

@Suzera & superking: vigorous debate is good for the game, sustained personal rancor is not.

Armor + radar-dampening + lowish/moderate health sounds ok as the survivability side of the space tank's stats.  Nothing extreme, since none of the stats work well in extremes.

[keith.lamothe]

Does it cost more reinforcement points to pick the low ship cap units?

It works a bit different than that, but basically yes.  Honestly I don't know quite how reinforcement works off the top of my head   But my understanding is that once it picks a planet to reinforce and picks a type (or types) to spawn at a particular guard post (or command station), the raw number of ships to spawn is then multiplied by some factor that's at least related to ship cap.  I'm not sure if it's really the ship cap or reliably related to it, though.

[Suzera]

It's not doing something like schizo wave minimums were was it? I always thought that was the problem. Except in this case the minimum was 1. Since it reinforced each ship separately. This is just conjecture.

[keith.lamothe]

It's worth checking but I don't think that's it.  Schizo-wave-generation and reinforcement-generation do actually share a remarkable amount of code

[Sunshine!]

Having faced Sentinel Frigates in isolation now (without the AI having electric bombers), I can safely say that Sentinel Frigates are just as much a nightmare to fleetships as Electric Bombers are to playing defense.  19 mk1 sentinel frigates on normal/normal are putting out ~160k dps, and it doubles for every mark increase.  Given their retreat mechanic, and also the rest of the forces on an AI planet, this makes assaulting large/high mk AI worlds an extremely difficult proposition.  For this ship, you might want to have really low AI cap per planet (6 per mark?), since unlike with electric bombers you kind of do have to face all the sentinel frigates at once due to their range, and it'll take forever to catch them if you don't have access to raptors or something similar.

That being said, like Electric Bombers, Sentinel Frigates are now actually worthwhile to use, so the ship balance seems to be appropriate, just that they're more painful in AI hands when compared to AI use of other fleetships.

[superking]

Laser guardians (which don't have a low rate of fire) would be able to instagib these tanks far better than they currently instagib some bombers.They also get an overkill reload refund if I am not mistaken, and this would happen MUCH more with these tanks than bombers.

yes, laser gaurdians would be dangerous, but remember gaurdians have not yet been balanced against the new fleetships. no, iirc overkill refund was removed due to excessive refire rates on units like artillery gaurdians.

Guardians ARE a significant if not majority portion of the power on AI planets. I'm not even going to drag in if the AI gets something like polarizers.

debateable, numbers remain the same lategame while garrisons get huge, also ships all over the show from various mechanics

The issue is that it having more armor than bombers already have is less useful for humans, but is significantly advantageous for the AI. Theoretically, ANY stats will do SOMETHING, but more armor is typically less useful for humans than the AI. If the goal is to have all the bonus ships be as good or better than bombers for humans, this is NOT going to do it.

I dont understand, how is armour more advantagous for the AI then for humans?
armour is just a mechanic that punishes low damage and high RoF attacks typically found on smaller, spammier ships.

Don't talk about measured consideration if you're not weighing the usefulness of the ship against even just bombers nor thinking about AI vs Human use.

weighing the ships usefulness against bombers, I am proposing a recreation of the 3.0 spacetank: a slow bulldozer.
in function,

• it is much slower than a bomber
• it can take significantly more damage from low damage/high RoF attacks
• it can not take as much damage from High damage/low RoF attacks
• it is significantly better VS other fleetships than the bomber, owing to having a much higher base DPS and bonuses vs fleetship armor types
• it is less specialised than the bomber, with weaker overall bonus VS structure and turrets

so yeah. if you wanted to kill, eg. an AI eye on a system packed full of fleetships, you might send the equivalent number of spacetanks in. they will plough through most AI ships AND be effective vs the eye, but get punished hard by anything armour peircing. the overall usefulness is of course decided by its attack and price.

in terms of usefulness for the human player, I dont see the argument; the proposed attack is the same as it is now, although with lower speed it could potentially be set much higher as before. effectiveness vs about 75% of fleetships is increased by a large margin. the ability to take punishment from various weak spam units is significantly improved while effectivness against the other 25% of fleetships with slow, powerful attacks is reduced.

Think about Raid Starships. These would be Raid Starships: Fleet Ship Edition. Pain for humans to kill, AI blows them up with impunity (before the radar change at least, and they may yet still).

that isnt a reasoned argument- how does the AI blow them up with impunity? the only strength it has over the player in this sense is gaurdians, and you might see between 3-6 of an effective gaurdian type on each planet. assuming they are not used in isolation, other ship or starship types can knock them out.

meanwhile, players can effectively kill them with:

Fighters, MK I - IV (bonus VS polycrystal & armour peircing)
Light starships (signifcant armour peircing)
Missle turrets (High base damage & signficant bonus VS polycrystal).

@Suzera & superking: vigorous debate is good for the game, sustained personal rancor is not.

I am not showing any personal rancor, nor have I been discourtious  

[Suzera]

I dont understand, how is armour more advantagous for the AI then for humans?
armour is just a mechanic that punishes low damage and high RoF attacks typically found on smaller, spammier ships.

Because humans don't get ships that do 350k damage to fleet ships right at the start. The AI do. The human player practically ONLY has "smaller spammier ships".

debateable, numbers remain the same lategame while garrisons get huge, also ships all over the show from various mechanics

I've seen the AI reinforce guardians before. I'm not sure what you're saying in the second half of this line.

weighing the ships usefulness against bombers, I am proposing a recreation of the 3.0 spacetank: a slow bulldozer.
in function,

• it is much slower than a bomber
• it can take significantly more damage from low damage/high RoF attacks
• it can not take as much damage from High damage/low RoF attacks
• it is significantly better VS other fleetships than the bomber, owing to having a much higher base DPS and bonuses vs fleetship armor types
• it is less specialised than the bomber, with weaker overall bonus VS structure and turrets

so yeah. if you wanted to kill, eg. an AI eye on a system packed full of fleetships, you might send the equivalent number of spacetanks in. they will plough through most AI ships AND be effective vs the eye, but get punished hard by anything armour peircing. the overall usefulness is of course decided by its attack and price.

The space tanks are far far more likely to die before getting to the AI Eye and blow it up. They do less damage vs ultra-heavy right now (unless you plan to revert that) and the AI will be more able to blow up proportionally more tank dps faster than bomber dps. Bomber wins.

in terms of usefulness for the human player, I dont see the argument; the proposed attack is the same as it is now, although with lower speed it could potentially be set much higher as before. effectiveness vs about 75% of fleetships is increased by a large margin. the ability to take punishment from various weak spam units is significantly improved while effectivness against the other 25% of fleetships with slow, powerful attacks is reduced.

Speed is not as valueable as you make it out to be. Going half as fast is NOT worth twice as much firepower. Again, the AI also has a significant if not majority of it's defense in guardians. 4k armor/mk will only really work against humans. If the AI gets polarizers it is all over for these space tanks.

that isnt a reasoned argument- how does the AI blow them up with impunity? the only strength it has over the player in this sense is gaurdians, and you might see between 3-6 of an effective gaurdian type on each planet. assuming they are not used in isolation, other ship or starship types can knock them out.

You say "How does the AI blow them up with impunity?" then go on to explain why they are blown up with impunity. Thanks!

If you take the time to knock those out before sending out the tanks or raid ships, you've ALREADY blown everything up without using raid star ships or these space tanks, so you may as well just not build them.

meanwhile, players can effectively kill them with:

Fighters, MK I - IV (bonus VS polycrystal & armour peircing)
Light starships (signifcant armour peircing)
Missle turrets (High base damage & signficant bonus VS polycrystal).

Light starships would be 20%ed by these tanks being mk 2, fighters wouldn't scratch these tanks unless the fighters are a mark above, and missile turrets have weak raw dps. Missile turrets may be the best anti-polycrystal turret, but they're still relatively weak raw DPS.

Assuming 4k*mk armor is high cap stats, fighters have 1k AP * mk + 1300*mk *2.4 damage which comes out to 120 damage * mk vs these tanks, which is way under 20% of 4k*mk armor. Fighters will CERTAINLY not act as a counter in the sense that fighters counter bombers, and they'll only do more damage because they have the highest raw dps.

I am not showing any personal rancor, nor have I been discourtious 

Neither have I.

[keith.lamothe]

Assuming 4k*mk armor is high cap stats, fighters have 1k AP * mk + 1300*mk *2.4 damage which comes out to 120 damage * mk vs these tanks, which is way under 20% of 4k*mk armor.

I'm not certain we're thinking of the same armor rules here:

If the fighter does 1300 per shot, with a 2.4 bonus against polycrystal, that means an effective damage per shot of 3120 (maybe you meant 3120 instead of 120).  The minimum damage a 3120 shot can do against armor is 3120*0.20 = 624.  624 is still kinda low, granted, but it sounds like you were expecting lower.

[Suzera]

Assuming 4k*mk armor is high cap stats, fighters have 1k AP * mk + 1300*mk *2.4 damage which comes out to 120 damage * mk vs these tanks, which is way under 20% of 4k*mk armor.

I'm not certain we're thinking of the same armor rules here:

If the fighter does 1300 per shot, with a 2.4 bonus against polycrystal, that means an effective damage per shot of 3120 (maybe you meant 3120 instead of 120).  The minimum damage a 3120 shot can do against armor is 3120*0.20 = 624.  624 is still kinda low, granted, but it sounds like you were expecting lower.

Post posting edit: I made a small math explanation error. It is 120 * mk damage above armor factoring in AP. That's not going to be too much of a reduction in the effectiveness of AI tank armor. AI guardians on the other hand largely relatively pretend it's not there.

When final damage goes above 20% * armor is when the reduction from armor starts decreasing and the damage per shot starts mattering in the sense of it being a reduction in armor effectiveness. This is when damage post multipliers and before armor and ap is 100% * |armor-ap|. Sorry if that was confusing.

The AI still has a tool to vaporize these tanks while the human player will need a minute or two at equal marks to destroy these tanks, unless the player always takes flagships (not light starships, but flagships) to possibly bump something like fighters over the armor value, assuming it applies the multiplier from the flagship before armor (which it seems to, but no hard tests).

This is the raid starship problem until you get mk 3 frigates and flagships or better. A bit less since the per-shot damage on frigates got bumped up though.

If |armor-ap| were applied to damage BEFORE all the multipliers this would be both a lot more obvious and more intuitive to see, but that would require some hefty rebalancing of everything in the game. It would also make AP a lot more useful in contrast to multipliers for breaking armor values. It would also prevent the "2x damage boost = 6x more real damage" problem vs current ships with armor that some ships provoke.

[Suzera]

Edited the above post a bit because I didn't explain what 120 was clearly, and that's apparently what you were really asking.

If guardians all had raw per-shot damage and bonuses equal to the ships they are based on, but just had more health/shots (but the same armor though because armor is multiplicative not additive), the issue would largely go away. Except for the fact the AI doesn't get to damage boost all game every game to break armor values with the 2x=6x problem.

[Wingflier]

I definitely have to agree with what Suzera has been saying. Having spent a significant amount of time with tanks now, it does seem as though they do absolutely awful on offense, thanks to the fact that Guardians eat them alive. However, being a counter to TWO triangle ships, as well as doing great damage to any starships with heavy hull types, they are great on defense instead. To me, this differentiates their role with bombers (a VERY offensive, assault-based unit) enough that I don't particularly consider them "overlapping".