Minor Faction Intensity

[Bognor]

The minor faction intensities in the 5-8 range are presumably useful in multi-homeworld games.  Eg if you're happy with the influence a certain minor faction has at intensity 4 in a single homeworld game, and you want it to have a similar relative influence in a three homeworld game, you could increase the intensity to 7 or whatever to match your larger fleet.  (Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe minor factions without exos scale with multiple homeworlds.)

[keith.lamothe]

Incidentally, is anyone else missing posts with the "Show unread posts since last visit"?  This is like the 3rd time today I've been posting something and looking back see a post in the middle of a thread that I missed.  Almost like it is scrolling just past the most recent post sometimes.  Never had that problem before.

I use "Show unread posts since last visit" as my primary means of checking the forum, and it's working pretty well for me.  There've been a few times lately where my browser window has seemed anchored to the next post down from the earliest-unread post or something like that.

Another thing that can happen with show-unread (since forever) is that you can go to the show-unread screen, not actually go through all of them, then come back maybe 12 hours later and none of the previous ones are showing up anymore (despite your not having read them).

Anyway, the forums have been kinda weird lately with "Insert Quote" not really working during post-writing, and the "new post while you were writing" just showing a blank area, etc.  My only two guesses as to why for all of this is 1) Rackspace apparently switched to using cloudflare or something like that for a number of things and 2) I added the evil-laugh smiley so Faulty would have an accurate expression.

It'd be kind of funny if it were the latter thing causing all the weirdness.

[Diazo]

Okay, it looks like this is dead in the water.

The assumption that started this thread, that the intensity multipliers for exo-waves were so high that no one ever enabled them on intensity 8+ looks to be wrong.

Enough people have come forward saying they do play (or can think of valid setups) with minor factions that high.

That also makes the second part of making the difficulty steps a non-starter as without sliding the current difficulty 8 to 10, there is no room to add the additional steps to make those increments smaller.

D.

[Hearteater]

Might want to check back over what they actually said.  Only Cinth actually gave any number at all.  Also important to note, this was before the 10/10 changes.

Anyways, having slept on it, why not break FS difficulty off from AI difficulty?  Just make the Exo multiplier scaled strictly from FS difficulty.  This gives the best options available to all players, at any difficulty.  With the current system you need to come to this forum and look up the formula to calculate the FS difficulty setting for your AI difficulty.

For example, say you played on 7/7 FS 4 and found Fallen Spire too easy.  You want it about 2 times as hard.  You've also really want to see what the regular AI can do, so you pick 9/9.  What do you set FS on?  FS 3.  That's right, you want FS to be harder, so you set it to a lower number.  Without coming to the forum you have no way of figuring this out.  Imagine you this poor guy set FS to 6 on 9/9 trying to get Exos to be twice as big (because 7/7 FS 4 vs 7/7 FS 6 is x2 size).  Oops, x5!

[Diazo]

Might want to check back over what they actually said.  Only Cinth actually gave any number at all.  Also important to note, this was before the 10/10 changes.

True, but this forum is such a small sample size. Enough people have commented they could see why you would enable FS 10 that there are going to be a lot of players out there who do so who are not forum posters who do in fact set FS at 10. (I have to assume that anyway when pushing for changes.)

Anyways, having slept on it, why not break FS difficulty off from AI difficulty?  Just make the Exo multiplier scaled strictly from FS difficulty.  This gives the best options available to all players, at any difficulty.  With the current system you need to come to this forum and look up the formula to calculate the FS difficulty setting for your AI difficulty.

Except I see AI difficulty as overall difficulty. I have always assumed that all minor factions that spawn military ships scale with difficulty. (Keith, can you confirm?)

I simply see (or saw) the multipliers getting so high as the difficulty and intensity increased that no-one ever enabled them that high.

For example, say you played on 7/7 FS 4 and found Fallen Spire too easy.  You want it about 2 times as hard.  You've also really want to see what the regular AI can do, so you pick 9/9.  What do you set FS on?  FS 3.  That's right, you want FS to be harder, so you set it to a lower number.  Without coming to the forum you have no way of figuring this out.  Imagine you this poor guy set FS to 6 on 9/9 trying to get Exos to be twice as big (because 7/7 FS 4 vs 7/7 FS 6 is x2 size).  Oops, x5!

[/quote]

I disagree in principle and see this mechanic as desirable. Minor factions should scale with AI (overall) difficulty. My point when starting this thread was that the high end multipliers are out of whack.

Intensity 10 is supposed to be death on wheels, intensity 9 is supposed to be extremely hard but doable with a lot of cheese, and so on down to intensity 4 which is the 'design' balance as carried over from before the intensities were implemented.

Now, opinions on what the modifiers for 'doable with cheese' are supposed to be varies and that's where the discussion is currently at.

D.

[Hearteater]

Intensity 10 is supposed to be death on wheels, intensity 9 is supposed to be extremely hard but doable with a lot of cheese, and so on down to intensity 4 which is the 'design' balance as carried over from before the intensities were implemented.

Then you don't want minor factions to scale with AI difficulty.  If you see FS 10 as "death on wheels" then load up a 1/1 FS 10 and you will get x0.9 sized Exos.  That's the same as 6/6 FS 4.  So less challenging than even a basic game.  In fact, it is impossible with the current system to get a "death on wheels" experience on 1/1, just as it is impossible to have an insignificant impact from a minor faction at 10/10, because 10/10 FS 1 still gives x1.25 Exos which is harder than 7/7 FS 4.

So minor factions separate from AI difficulty is literally better for everyone, plus more intuitive.  The multipliers will probably need to change somewhat, but the system is superior.

[topper]

So minor factions separate from AI difficulty is literally better for everyone, plus more intuitive.  The multipliers will probably need to change somewhat, but the system is superior.

por que no los dos?

1. Remove the dependence of the minor factions on the AI difficultly.
2. Get rid of the arbitrary 1 to 10 scale for minor factions and make it so the scaling factor can be changed directly from 0 to insanity at whatever increment you want, and the scaling factor of 1 is the balanced scenario. 

This way you know exactly what you are getting if you choose FS difficulty 0.25 or difficulty 20. 

[LordSloth]

So... you're proposing an 'intensity' factor, scaling from zero to (arbitarily picked by me) four, with the default at 1.0, where the player can directly type in intensity 1.25 if they so desire? and intensity 1.25 is precisely 25% more brutal.

[keith.lamothe]

Anyways, having slept on it, why not break FS difficulty off from AI difficulty?  Just make the Exo multiplier scaled strictly from FS difficulty.  This gives the best options available to all players, at any difficulty.  With the current system you need to come to this forum and look up the formula to calculate the FS difficulty setting for your AI difficulty.

Except I see AI difficulty as overall difficulty. I have always assumed that all minor factions that spawn military ships scale with difficulty. (Keith, can you confirm?)

I believe you're correct on that last point, Diazo, at least for stuff that spawns enemy-to-the-human units.  The Dyson could be an exception, however.

In any event, I think Hearteater may have a point here.  Sure, the AIDifficulty factor is common among those factions, but it was common because there was no variable intensity of the factions.  Now that there is, why vary it by two factors?

On the other hand, the current way is intentional even with the two-factor approach: If 4/10 FS always gave the same size exos as Diff 7 does now, then playing 4/10 FS on 10/10 would probably actually be an _easier_ game than playing 10/10 without any FS.  Because honestly the exos on 4/10 FS 7/7 just aren't that strong compared to the threats anyone who has any business challenging 10/10.  And once said person gets FS capital ships, they can turn around and hammer the normal fleet ship and such threats that actually scale with AIDiff.

Similarly, playing 4/10 FS on a 1/1 game would possibly be harder than a 7/7 game with no FS, at least if you weren't counting on it coming after you with (relatively) vicious exos.

So if the minor faction intensity scale really was supposed to be parallel to the AI difficulty levels, this would make sense.  But I'm not convinced that's the way to go.

[Hearteater]

For UI reasons, I'd probably say just stick to the 1-10 range and select a good variety of intensity factors.

As for 4/10 FS making 10/10 easier, I think that's true for several minor factions.  Some make the game easier, some harder.  But if 4/10 FS makes the game easier at 10/10, it also makes it easier at 7/7 for the same player.  Whether FS should make the game easier at 4/10 is a different question.

I'd like to repeat that I'd really like to see the 1-10 minor factions scale the whole thing, not just the AI response.  If Broken Golems 10 had spawned an extra 6 golems or something, I might actually play it.  I'm not sure how FS would scale aside from AI response, but if Golems and Spirecraft could, that would be great.  Incidentally, I'd also use settings 1-3 for when I kinda want it there, but in the background.  So the Exos would be light, but there also would be less golems/asteroids.

[keith.lamothe]

But if 4/10 FS makes the game easier at 10/10, it also makes it easier at 7/7 for the same player.

Not necessarily.  7/7 by itself could be easier because the player wouldn't need to handle the exos and doesn't need the extra toys to win.  They could deal with the exos and win with more firepower, or they could just win simpler (and probably easier) by skipping that extra complexity.  On 10/10 they could be unable to win without the extra toys, but on 10/10 with 4-FS be able to handle the exos until they had said toys, and then be able to win.

I'd like to repeat that I'd really like to see the 1-10 minor factions scale the whole thing, not just the AI response.

Sure, that would be good.  It was just more work, and at the time I'd sunk a lot of time into the variable intensity thing   For golems and spirecraft the solution would be fairly stratighforward (alter seeding frequency of broken golems or asteroids).  For botnet golem a bit less clear; someone (you, probably) suggested having it seed far away on lower intensity and closer on high intensity... and I guess that would work.  Be kinda funny to have 10-botnet just seed the thing on your HW

For FS... well, I guess it could modify your capital ship caps, and in theory modify your income from hab centers, but the cities themselves wouldn't really be feasible to scale up in terms of their module dps output and so forth.  But I guess scaling the caps would be better than nothing.

The other factions, iirc, don't have a problem with only scaling part of it with intensity.

[LordSloth]

Human Colony Rebellion: It would be great if the intensity made these show up more often. I've wanted to set up games where a rebellion happens every two hours or so, rather than waiting till around hour six or so.

Edit VV
I believe so. I won't be able to check for another five hours, however. I believe it just affects the secondary cloak timer, that is, after you've colonized it, but I'm not sure.

[keith.lamothe]

Human Colony Rebellion: It would be great if the intensity made these show up more often. I've wanted to set up games where a rebellion happens every two hours or so, rather than waiting till around hour six or so.

Does that one have variable intensity?

[Cinth]

Guys, I more or less gave a few examples of where I used VS on 10.  I also noted that you shouldn't use my games for a basis of balance or stuff of that nature (16 HW).  D asked for something with a little substance and I tried to fit that only.  Please don't read more into it.

Even though I have played FS on 10, any serious game I only player on 4.  So any adjustment of the scale wont hurt me anymore than anyone else here.

That said, I also play a few other minor factions at 10. 

Cutting this off here because it is a pain in the ... to post from my phone :/