I believe at some point, I stopped playing Aiwar, a while back. If I remember, this was actually really close to the release of the spire expansion. Since then, it seems that quite a bit has changed.
Today, I spent about 5 hours in a game with Chemical Art, where I was plodding around as a normal player, and he as a champion.
The map was a pretty simple seeming clusters map, against two difficulty 8 ai, random moderate. Rolled a starship commander and a vicious raider, and random plot things. Not sure as to all the random plots, but weve encountered the dyson, the devourer golem, both human marauders and human resistance fighters (albeit briefly).
Since I absolutely hate myself, I turn on silly things like crossplanet waves and no wave warnings, but thats normal for me.
I also opted to let random choose my starting ship, and rolled a beautiful shield bearer.
Not going to deep into aar-stuff, the game went reasonably well, with a few .. A little bit back and forth, where I seemed incredibly unprepared for 2k cruisers...
Back to the point: I have a few points of discussion I would like to open a discussion on.
Foremost - Starships actually feel really weak right now. There is a single line of useful starships - The zenith starships (marked "alien starship" on the map search, fix plz?). They perform really well as dps powerhouses. They also survive reasonably well, with minor exceptions (I'm LOOKING AT YOU CRUISERS). Problem is - They are the only useful starship it seems.
Fleet starships have always been about munitions boosting, which is perfectly fine. They were designed to spearhead a fleet, and provide bonuses for doing so. However, there are still a lot of things wrong with them. They deal absolutely pathetic damage.. I mean, Its not pathetic pathetic, but its not particularly good. They used to be decent at destroying things, mainly cruisers, but now they just seem to lack damage to do anything useful. Problem with lacking damage, is that they dont make up for it in raw health either - If I'm not mistaken, zenith starships are their betters in virtually every category outside of fleet boosting. Finally - Fleet starships are STILL heavy. Youknow what has bonuses towards heavy? Bombers. Dont get me wrong - bombers are a perfectly fine counter to starships. The problem is just one thing - They have the same heavy bonus as they do ultra-heavy. It just doesnt fit. Ultraheavy things on average have an order of magnitude more raw hp than heavy things.. Yet they still get the same bonus.
(btw, minor bug with fleet starships - They dont fall into the same planetary overview group like they are supposed to)
Slightly unrelated, but did I mention cruisers? Did they get a substantial buff recently? I feel like they are actually really strong right now.
Back to starships - I actually dont really think bomber or dreadnaughts are particularly flawed. I think they still fill the role they are supposed to fill really well, and as an alternative to bombers, they seem to be good. I saw the enclave buffs, and those seem really nice. Unfortunately I havent given them the attention they deserve yet.
On the other hand, I have great issue with spire starships. At one point, the great and powerful Spire Starship, (
May we never forget..) was actually a long range shell spewer, dealing massive amounts of damage to many targets on the battlefield. It also provided munitions boosting, but that is another story, and frankly I think splitting the roles is ok.
The problem at the moment is that it doesnt deal damage. The spire beam mechanic.. is.. well, Flawed. It is ok as long as two things are true - Both parties are stationary AND the receiving party has lots of health. In some cases (forcefields) the first is not as important, but it is still very relevant. The problem here is that this is space - It is very unlikely that both parties will be stationary. I dont feel like the spire beam weapon deals its damage consistently enough.
There was at one point an implementation of the spire beam that I really liked - Way back in beta, when it was first introduced. It felt really nice, and actually dealt damage to a wide area of ships. For some reason, since then I've been unable to reproduce this particularly well..
So the spire starship, which was once the flag of your fleet, the almost literal point of the spear.. Is now pretty much useless, as far as dealing damage to fleets goes. I mean, its decent if, as i said earlier, both of you are stationary and the target has lots of hp.. But lets be realistic here - That plainly doesnt happen as often as it needs to for the spire beam weapon to be relevant. Also, can they even hit cruisers? I feel like cruisers might be a tad strong almost purely because the starship that did well against them previously, the spire starship, is now useless.
Then finally, we have absolutely HUGE knowledge costs for mk3 starships. These seem incredibly unjustified, honestly. I could justify 5 and 7 thousand for zenith and spire starships previously, but that was because they were incredibly strong in their own right. They brought a lot to the table. At the moment, I cant honestly see why anyone would even UNLOCK spire starships.. let alone pay the exorbidant amount of resources it takes to build them. Looking at bomber starships - its what, 6k knowledge for mk3 bomber starships.. Plus 300k metal PER SHIP. I feel like that scaling is a little bit high..
you get similar numbers when you look at all of the starships - i can maybe justify zenith starships because of how strong they are.. MAYBE. The rest? Definitely not. Almost all of them follow this trend of being incredibly expensive.. prohibitively so.
--
So; We have established what I believe to be a problem - I feel like fleet starships are not up to par, and I feel spire starships dont fill their role. But what exactly do we change?
I am not really sure with regard to the Fleet starship. I mentioned earlier that they feel really light - they cant really stand up in battle particularly well, partially because I feel heavy is a very bad hull type. I think if we looked at the bonuses against heavy, itd go a long way. Additionally, I feel like I want to differentiation them from the munitions booster fleet unit. I was thinking that they might also provide an armor buff to ships around them? That feels like something that might go a really long way with a lot of ships, but not quite as far with others. I think synergisticly with other starships itd be amazing, but certain fleet ships wouldnt benefit at all. Is it currently possible to give a flat armor buff maybe? For instance it could give a bonus 100 armor, then provide armor boosting 2x?
This isnt to say that they should armor boost instead of munitions boost - I think they maybe could do both - to a point. A pure munitions booster or armor booster would be best, but these give you both, which seems like a worthy idea to consider at least.
On spire starships though - I feel again its mainly a byproduct of their weapon feeling very lackluster. The zenith beam, for example, is amazing. Like. Seriously seems to work really well. What does the zenith beam do differently? It uses single pulse of damage. I *think* the hbc does the same thing (deal damage very quickly in a line), with the caveat that the hbc never deals more than x damage, where the zenith beam frigate deals damage to all units in a line.
I believe the hbc mechanic is far more streamlined, and more importantly, consistent - Why did you opt to make a new mechanic that doesnt seem to work as well? I think it honestly needs to be looked at before spire starships become relevant at all.
I think if we made the fleet starships more useful as flagships, and the spire starships more useful at dealing damage properly, we could make the entire group of starships a lot stronger as a whole.
Also, when did 8/8 waves ramp up so quickly? Nearly died to an invasion of 4 thousand mk2 units..
