Missle Frigate - Area Damage Immunity -> Serious Balance Problem

[RCIX]

Well, that, and the logistics station is usually more useful in defensive situations because of the large mobility bonus it grants for your fleet (while slowing the enemy ships down so the fleet has time to respond).

[Mánagarmr]

Aggressiveness and playstyles apart, there are some imbalances regarding Raid Starships, and particularly multiple-homeworld games.

[Diazo]

Well, that raises the question about what to balance for.

I play single homeworld games pretty much exclusively and with their low ship cap with only a single homeworld, I almost never unlock raid starships because they are only useful in a pretty narrow set of tactical options and they aren't really worth it to stick with your main fleet because they lose their speed advantage if you do.

That set of options is using them as a solo raid force against isolated targets, ie: a raid.

Raid starships were never intended to make up a battle line, hence the low ship cap.

Now, based on this thread, there seems to be agreement that raid starships are unbalanced when used in a large group but please keep in mind that any nerfs to the raid starship will also be felt by the people who play single planet starts.

This actually sounds like a perfect place for a cluster penalty, maybe 0.9 or so?
Give the raid starships a small boost so that 3 of them do about the same damage they do now, but that would prevent the massive raid starship only fleets being talked about in this thread.

It would also weaken the AI raid starships when they attack en-mass as has been mentioned. It would make a solo AI raid starship more dangerous though.

Either way, I don't see the need for a massive overhaul, just some tweaks. I'll try to make a point of unlocking them my next game to see what their current state is, it's been a few games since I used them.

D.

[keith.lamothe]

I'm of the opinion that Raid Starships do too well in that kind of "wolf pack" deep raid.  They should do well, but as Spymine's experience shows they do *too* well.  I think it has a lot to do with the AI not having sufficient weapons that actually hurt them.  Like many people, I think HBC's should hurt them, at least on a direct hit, but I need to ask Chris about that since he's the one who gave them aoe-immunity.

As for multiple-homeworld starts, they should be balanced almost exactly the same as a multiplayer game with that many human players (I say "almost" because the multiple-HW version is a loss if you lose any home command station, rather than all of them).  While playing an 8-player game with really well-coordinated players is likely to be easier than a single player game for a variety of reasons, it shouldn't be way easier.  Same deal with an 8-HW game.

In practice, however, this can be difficult.  For example, someone playing an 8-HW game who builds Riot MkIIs to cap (24, I believe, in total) all with tazers has an aoe-paralyze weapon of doom.  In that case the tazer should probably have a (reasonably high) max-targets-hit thing, but anyway.  Same deal with an 8-player multiplayer game in which everyone unlocks Riot IIs.  All that said, even such exploitable ships have a counter; the Riot IIs aren't terribly durable and can only paralyze a localized area.  Raid starships are a lot harder to counter right now, short of grav drills and whatnot (and even then it's a pain to actually kill them).

[Lancefighter]

the main issue with multi-planet starts is that /any/ ship becomes a useful battle line in itself. the flagship line specifically, because of its awesome health bonus.. sprinkle in some riot starships for flavor and long-ranged engine killing and forcefields... Add to that the new siege starships, and generally nothing gets close.


Then again, most of that is pretty possible single-planet wise, just takes longer to build

[keith.lamothe]

Oh, just saw the suggestion of a moderate cluster penalty for raid starships, that actually sounds like a great idea (at least, it does right now ).  It could be tuned so that one normal cap's worth of ships has little to no penalty, but things go rapidly downhill after that so that there's not a motivation to have these huge wolf packs (but you could have separate packs on different planets, but without that huge concentration of power).  This would require a small punch-through in the cluster mechanic to say "doesn't apply unless x ships on planet" etc, but it would avoid nerfing the raids for single-HW use, but make them less exploitable in multiple player/hw games.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, yea, 8 caps of spires, zeniths, riot I, II, III, siege I, II, III... I think that would be pretty brutal   Perhaps we could look at that kind of high-count-only (say, more than 2 full caps worth) cluster penalty for those types (and perhaps others) too.  Not making any swift moves right now since we're in the middle of the Unity port, but I'll be thinking about it.

[keith.lamothe]

Another thing to look at is whether the recent AI-population-reductions have left the numerical results in a state where they don't properly scale to human homeworld/player count.  From the sounds of some reports it may be a problem even in single player, though that's largely because Chris isn't done making things more dangerous.

[Lancefighter]

Hmm, yea, 8 caps of spires, zeniths, riot I, II, III, siege I, II, III... I think that would be pretty brutal   Perhaps we could look at that kind of high-count-only (say, more than 2 full caps worth) cluster penalty for those types (and perhaps others) too.  Not making any swift moves right now since we're in the middle of the Unity port, but I'll be thinking about it.

well, to be fair- its actually less than 8 human player's caps of it.. its around 12 spires/zeniths, and 30 siege.. Then again, MAKING that much is an adventure in itself.. requires quite a bit of +bonus, or a lot of time.

[keith.lamothe]

Right, and I think there should be a point and reward for managing the considerable feat of assembling a fleet like that, we just want to make sure it doesn't break the game; hopefully we can find a way that increases the interest of this stuff rather than feeling like a blunt-force-nerf-trauma

[Sunshine!]

I think there's a problem because the starship caps don't scale down with more players like the fleetship caps do.  Playing an 8 player game, the triangle ships go down to 100 ship cap (or 800 ship cap if you're playing 8 homeworld start), instead of the 198 that a single player start gets.  Perhaps single player ship caps for starships should be increased, so that there's an allowance for decreasing the ship cap given more players in the game, such that Raid Starships, for instance, may be limited to two Mk1 and one of each Mk2 and Mk3 if there's 8 players in the game.  That'll stick them with 32 raid starships total, but half of those will be relatively weak Mk1s, rather than allowing for 24 Mk3s and Mk2s.

[LintMan]

As for multiple-homeworld starts, they should be balanced almost exactly the same as a multiplayer game with that many human players (I say "almost" because the multiple-HW version is a loss if you lose any home command station, rather than all of them).  While playing an 8-player game with really well-coordinated players is likely to be easier than a single player game for a variety of reasons, it shouldn't be way easier.  Same deal with an 8-HW game.

Multi-homeworld starts are actually different than a mutiplayer game with an equal number of players.  One critical difference is that the player can only build a single set of reactors (at full efficiency) per planet, whereas multiplayers can each build a their own set of reactors on the same planets: so n players have n times more energy for a given cost than a player with an n-homeworld start does.  Same for initial starting resource amounts.   multiplayers also each have their own 600K cap, while a multi-home start player is limited to 600K total.

I'd love it to be eqivalent in the way you suggest, so a while back I pointed this stuff out: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,4971.msg34747.html#msg34747 

Chris responded that these differences were intentional as an added extra-challenging mode.  He twiddled a few things so you could start and control extra "players" simultaneously for a literal multiplayer game on one computer.  I found that too unmanageable, though, since you had to deal with multiple non-shared pools of resources, and couldn't jointly select or group up the ships between the "players".

[Fruden]

 Humm.... these solutions seem a bit overkill to me... for using raid ships extensively, i gotta say the 2 things that really used to scare my raid ship groups away were heavy beams and gravity turrets. A single gravity turret mk2 (and arrrggg at a mk3) is enough to make even a group of 54 raid ships extremely vulnerable, and occasional heavy beams were enough to significantly reduce the ability of raid ship groups to do their thing more than 1 world away from a player planet.

 If heavy beams would hurt raid ships again and the rules for the ai choosing gravity turrets were similar to the rules for choosing heavy beams (maybe having about a third as many as heavy beams to avoid making the game wayyyyyy too slow and boring), i'm pretty sure all would be good again.

 Anyway, just my opinion, and regarding the actual thread subject, i actually consider frigate immunity to heavy beams worst than raid ship immunity to them since every ai lobs them in such very high numbers while only the starship captain has large numbers of raid ships, i really wish frigates were only immune to lightning turrets.

ps: attached is a 3.1.7.2 picture of the 2 ai homeworlds vs a starship captain and golemite with 6 player homeworlds. I'm holding the first until i'm ready to take down the second and even with all the stuff there it's barely sufficient since the ai reinforces 1500-2500 ships including 15-30 starships every 3 minutes, and i have no idea how i could take the second homeworld in the newest beta without beams hurting raid ships since starships don't release when posts are destroyed and uggg, insane reinforcements with 6 human homeworlds, even if the devourer came and ate everything it would take ~15 minutes before it has over 100 starships again if i don't move quickly enough.

ps2: golemite is tricky at first but doesn't scale at all with progress and difficulty, while starship captain becomes incredibly powerful, so golemite should really be medium difficulty and starship captain should really be hard...

[Lancefighter]

what if frigates were made immune to some other main damage.. like sniper shots, or engine damage? would that be 'fair' enough? >.>

(random note: stages of grief: denial*, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Note how this thread will progress :p )
*not incredibly applicable really..

[Fruden]

 Meh, its just a bit of a headscratcher since the changes are probably meant to challenge players making huge choke points and using massive aoe damage, but there are implications beyond that. Heavy beams mk1 are single target powerhouses while the mk4 are multi target powerhouses, with the mk2 and mk3 somewhat in between, while the lightning turrets are exclusively multi target powerhouses.

 In any case, we're just offering opinions and suggestions based on what we've seen and how we play, of course we'll deal with what the devs decide.