Martyr Balance Feedback

[keith.lamothe]

So, these got the nerf hammer in 5.015, in terms of cost.  How do they feel now (5.016 is current version atm)?  Still massively OP?  Still the obvious choice for spending any asteroid that's capable of making them?

We wanted the individual martyrs to still be "get out of jail free" cards if we could get away with it, but not have it be so easy to have as many as you want, and preferably make it more of a real decision (instead of an obvious one) when choosing between martyrs and other spirecraft.

[Nalgas]

I wish I knew.  I haven't been playing multiplayer for the past couple weeks, because everyone's been busy having weddings or sending their kids back to school.  I haven't really gotten a chance to try them on my own yet, either, most of the past week because I hurt my hand helping my girlfriend move and had to replace my game time with other activities for several days, and the past couple days...well, you know.  Heh.

We might be starting up a new game at some point in the next few days now that things are getting back to normal.  Otherwise I'll probably get around to it on my own in the coming week, since I've been meaning to get around to finishing the FS campaign one of these days for a while instead of only going halfway through it.

[zoutzakje]

I've played a considerable amount of time with martyrs the past few days. It's the first time I'm ever playing with spirecraft for real, since I just couldn't get used to it at first. Figured I'd give it another go and now I really like them lol.
I haven't played with the old OP martyrs so I got nothing to compare with, but... the martyrs as they are now seem very usefull to me, but not overpowered. It's a good choice, but not always the obvious one. I often make rams and siege towers as well. I'm currently playing against a 8 Spireling and lot of it's mark II and III ships won't die from a single mk III martyr or get tractored by it. They are however very effective against most waves. one or multiple martyrs on the wormhole and it's dealt with.

Just out of curiosity, what are the stats of the old MK I martyr? I'd like to know how much they've been nerfed.

[keith.lamothe]

Thanks for the feedback, good to hear they feel right to at least one person

Just out of curiosity, what are the stats of the old MK I martyr? I'd like to know how much they've been nerfed.

Actual ship stats are exactly the same, but previously you could get 2 MkIs from a Reptite and 4 from a Pysite, 2 MkIIs from a Pysite and 4 MkIIs from the next one up and so on.  Now you can get 1 MkII from a Pysite, 1 MkIII from the next one up, and so on (Reptite no longer produces any).  Since most martyr-heavy players basically didn't care which mark they used in effect this reduced the number of martyrs you can get from a given portion of the galaxy by about 75-80%.

So to imagine what it was like before, imagine having 4 times as many martyrs as you've been using

[zoutzakje]

ahhh I see. I do seem to remember you could indeed produce more at once in the past when I tried it out. Has the ship cap also been reduced or is that still the same?

and while we're on the subject of Spirecraft, I might as well ask something about the attritioner one. I'm sure this has been asked before, but do they stack? Let's say I wanna build full caps of all marks and put them all on one planet. Will that be usefull?

[keith.lamothe]

ahhh I see. I do seem to remember you could indeed produce more at once in the past when I tried it out. Has the ship cap also been reduced or is that still the same?

Ship cap is untouched, I didn't think there was anything overly exploity about having that much "active reserves"; might be handy to have that much mobile tractor capacity but probably not OP except maybe on low caps (though I do intend to make number of tractors on unscaled things scale).

and while we're on the subject of Spirecraft, I might as well ask something about the attritioner one. I'm sure this has been asked before, but do they stack? Let's say I wanna build full caps of all marks and put them all on one planet. Will that be usefull?

Yea, they stack.  Putting them all on one planet would certainly be interesting, I don't know if the math adds up properly to "useful" but I suspect it would.  As useful as a similar number of martyrs?  Doubtful.  Attritioners are on my list of things I want to make more useful (preferably in a more interesting way than only buffing the damage though that could happen too).

[zoutzakje]

buffing the damage would certainly be useful though

and thanks for the quick response as always ^^

[KDR_11k]

Still the obvious choice for spending any asteroid that's capable of making them?

I think that may be more tied to most Spirecraft being fairly useless. The only ones I build much of are Siege Towers and even those feel rather meh.

[zoutzakje]

oh I found out one thing that makes the martyr still a bit OP and exploitable... it's not yet immune to being scrapped. Makes things too easy, just wait for a wave to get launched and scrap it, boom wave gone. If you have to wait till it gets killed, other enemy ships might already have moved away, thus avoiding the explosion. This way you'll need a part of your fleet to support it.
So as long as you can scrap it, I think it's a bit too easy to use them.

[keith.lamothe]

Still the obvious choice for spending any asteroid that's capable of making them?

I think that may be more tied to most Spirecraft being fairly useless. The only ones I build much of are Siege Towers and even those feel rather meh.

Some folks say that most of them are uselses, where others say that the Spirecraft Scouts are so powerful they trivialize the scouting game for them and the Implosion Artillery is significantly OP.  Some even have nice things to say about the Jumpships and Attritioners   And the Ion Blasters got 400% as strong in the last patch, though the low-mark ones are still dubious at best.

All that to say that the perception that most of the others are useless is not a unanimous one, and I think will be becoming less common anyway.  But yes, that has been one of the sentiments mentioned often in connection with martyrs.

[keith.lamothe]

oh I found out one thing that makes the martyr still a bit OP and exploitable... it's not yet immune to being scrapped. Makes things too easy, just wait for a wave to get launched and scrap it, boom wave gone. If you have to wait till it gets killed, other enemy ships might already have moved away, thus avoiding the explosion. This way you'll need a part of your fleet to support it.
So as long as you can scrap it, I think it's a bit too easy to use them.

That's exactly how all the warheads work, I don't see us changing that

[zoutzakje]

though warheads cost AIP on use. doesn't this make the lightning warheads a bit useless?
ah well, hooray for easy wave kills I guess
On the other hand, there is a limit to the amount of martyrs you can build in a galaxy (especially since you usually don't capture all planets), while there is no limit on how often you can use a warhead. So I guess I see your point.

[keith.lamothe]

though warheads cost AIP on use. doesn't this make the lightning warheads a bit useless?
ah well, hooray for easy wave kills I guess
On the other hand, there is a limit to the amount of martyrs you can build in a galaxy (especially since you usually don't capture all planets), while there is no limit on how often you can use a warhead. So I guess I see your point.

Yea, in both cases it's using a non-recoverable resource (you can reduce AIP, but you can never reduce the AIP floor that increases with AIP), and we don't mind if adding a super-weapon faction (like Spirecraft, Golems, or Fallen-Spire) reduces the comparative usefulness of a core-game unit like the lightning warhead.  That's not to say we won't buff the warheads a bit more in the future (they've been up and down for a while), but the mere fact that martyrs are vastly superior to them isn't really a problem in itself.

[KDR_11k]

The Spirecrafts are just so damn specific and situational that it feels silly to buy most of them unless you have a very specific need.

the Spirecraft Scouts are so powerful they trivialize the scouting game for them

I dunno, the Mk4 Scout cuts it for me (BTW, is it intended that the resource costs of the thing are so low now? They were massively lowered when prices got linearized to the mark), Mk1-3 are good enough for finding the advanced factory and only then does looking for the AI homeworlds make any sense.

[keith.lamothe]

The Spirecrafts are just so damn specific and situational that it feels silly to buy most of them unless you have a very specific need.

Well, yea, they're going to be pretty specific: if they were mostly standard combatants for general purpose fighting it'd pretty quickly eclipse the need for a lot of the rest of your fleet and also not have a lot of variety within them.  Golems are very rare, and the Fallen Spire ships (which if you want lots of general purpose fighting power in a super-weapon are the way to go) have a much more complex challenge associated with getting them and going on to win the game.  So the spirecraft are generally utility for specific situations, though some of those are not as narrow as you might think.  Implosion Artillery, for instance, is good against pretty much _anything_ with a ton of HP.  How often are you facing AI stuff with tons of HP?  That varies from game to game, but generally the variance is from "often" to "all the bleeping time"

And some of it really is quite niche, but when you've got a mining golem or a human colony rebels against the AI on some faraway part of the map those Jumpships are pretty useful.

the Spirecraft Scouts are so powerful they trivialize the scouting game for them

I dunno, the Mk4 Scout cuts it for me (BTW, is it intended that the resource costs of the thing are so low now? They were massively lowered when prices got linearized to the mark), Mk1-3 are good enough for finding the advanced factory and only then does looking for the AI homeworlds make any sense.

The m+c+e costs of the scouts don't really need to be that high, the main thing for the standard and starship scouts is their knowledge cost.  If you spend the K to unlock mk4 of either of those then it's basically the "scout everything" button (over time) and that's ok.  Though I seem to recall knowledge costs going down recently and I don't know if the mk4s of those were included in that.  But yea, the balance of the scouting game is one of those where it's hard to get it right and keep it there; it often oscillates between "I can't get more than 2-3 hops out even with mkIIIs" and "I can scout the entire map with mkIIIs".