Neinzul viral cluster craziness

[LintMan]

When I picked the Viral Enthusiast AI type, I expected to fight a lot of swarmers, but I didn't realize the insane weapon each cluster has mounted on it:

16K or 32K energy wave damage at range 83000 (!), firing every 2 seconds.

Holy cow, I'm playin on a grid map, and there's a number of planets with 10-12 of these things on them.  They're like mega-ultra snipers.  The fragile slowpoke seige starships don't stand a chance against these.

Then, on top of that, for some reason ships don't auto-target the viral clusters so you have to manually target each one.  One time, resistance fighters showed up and completely ignored the cluster right in front of them, killing all its surround turrets and moving on, as it continued pounding me across the map with its gun and spamming swarmers over them.

[keith.lamothe]

Yes, they're pretty tough.  I'm working on various changes right now, one is to reduce their range from 83000 to 25000 so that they don't get such an overwhelming overlap effect.

The non-auto-target behavior is intentional, as hitting them causes them to launch the swarmers, and it would be rather frustrating as a player to not be able to get your ships to not trigger clusters on the other side of the planet.  As for the resistance fighters not shooting them, I guess it's kind of a tossup, but another case of wanting to not put the player in the position of having to deal with the swarm triggered by something outside their control (and potentially the swarm could get pretty big from feeding off the resistance ships, I forget how those interact).

[LintMan]

Yes, they're pretty tough.  I'm working on various changes right now, one is to reduce their range from 83000 to 25000 so that they don't get such an overwhelming overlap effect.

That would help.  Still, why so much range and power for something so ubiquitous, for an "Easier" AI?

The non-auto-target behavior is intentional, as hitting them causes them to launch the swarmers, and it would be rather frustrating as a player to not be able to get your ships to not trigger clusters on the other side of the planet.  As for the resistance fighters not shooting them, I guess it's kind of a tossup, but another case of wanting to not put the player in the position of having to deal with the swarm triggered by something outside their control (and potentially the swarm could get pretty big from feeding off the resistance ships, I forget how those interact).

As I see it, most of the player ships don't have nearly the range to shoot clusters on the other side of the map.  And it they're in the 20-30K range of seige ships and z-bombers, I'd rather just have them destroy the cluster ASAP rather than pound me with that big gun.   As it is, I've had a large fleet of ships that moved on top of one of these clusters and covered it up (possibly due to a miss-click by me), so they sat there getting shot up by it while I was managing some ships elsewhere on the planet.

Personally, if it's able to shoot me with a powerful long-range gun (which even at 25K is long range), and isn't going to cost me AI Progress, then I'd prefer it to be auto-targetted.  Maybe a control node for this?

[Dragon]

Holy cow, I'm playin on a grid map, and there's a number of planets with 10-12 of these things on them.  They're like mega-ultra snipers.  The fragile slowpoke seige starships don't stand a chance against these.

Just a slightly off topic comment, but would it be unbalanced to increase the range of the siege starships a bit?  They are currently so fragile, that range is the only thing that keeps them alive, and there are quite a few things in the base games that can out range them, and kill them before they have a chance to fire.  For example:
Fortresses: Siege are supposed to be good at killing them, but a fort will kill a siege before the siege can fire on it.
Bombards: While siege can't shoot at these, if the AI has them, they will fire on the siege before the siege gets within range of it's target.  It's so slow, even a few could kill one before it gets within range.
Also now I'm hearing about things in CoN that have huge range.... 

*shrug*

[keith.lamothe]

Yes, they're pretty tough.  I'm working on various changes right now, one is to reduce their range from 83000 to 25000 so that they don't get such an overwhelming overlap effect.

That would help.  Still, why so much range and power for something so ubiquitous, for an "Easier" AI?

Well, for one, it's the only bonus the AI gets.  Two, 25000 isn't nearly as much as 83000.  Three, I've mentioned before that I'm going to cut them from every wormhole to 66% at Diff 10 and 33% at Diff 1 (scaling linearly inbetween).  Four, they don't have *that* much power; a Viral Cluster MkI hits for 8000, and a MkV hits for 40,000.  A MkI Fighter has 58,000 hp.  The main difficulty right now is that you get caught in the cross fire of multiple viral clusters since they're on all wormholes and have effectively-sniper range.

As I see it, most of the player ships don't have nearly the range to shoot clusters on the other side of the map.

But quite a few of them can hit them from well outside "antagonize" range (which is roughly 4000, iirc).

Maybe a control node for this?

Maybe later on, the situation is still very much in flux.

Just a slightly off topic comment, but would it be unbalanced to increase the range of the siege starships a bit?

Yes, there are several things that are calculated to have just a bit more range than a siege so as to not be trivially disposed of by them

They are currently so fragile, that range is the only thing that keeps them alive

Yes, that's all that keeps them alive if they are not protected by other units.  A failure to protect your artillery will result in ex-artillery

And most (actually, I think _all_) the huge-range stuff in CoN (more than a siege) is part of a minor faction, AI type, or AI plot.  So you have a fair degree of control over how much of that you encounter.

[LintMan]

Well, for one, it's the only bonus the AI gets.  Two, 25000 isn't nearly as much as 83000.  Three, I've mentioned before that I'm going to cut them from every wormhole to 66% at Diff 10 and 33% at Diff 1 (scaling linearly inbetween).  Four, they don't have *that* much power; a Viral Cluster MkI hits for 8000, and a MkV hits for 40,000.  A MkI Fighter has 58,000 hp.  The main difficulty right now is that you get caught in the cross fire of multiple viral clusters since they're on all wormholes and have effectively-sniper range.

I hadn't seen that before about not every wormhole getting one.   That will certainly help.  Thanks for answering my questions.

[superking]

I also would preffer them to be autotargetted, so far 100% of the time I have units with weapons in the same system I have wanted to kill them asap

[MaxAstro]

I can see not autotargetting being preferable in some cases, such as if you are pathing units from one system to another through enemy territory; not setting off swarmers in the way is definitely a good thing.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, apparently my brain had some misfiring neurons when I "balanced" the Cluster guns.  I basically didn't specify a recharge time, so it defaulted to 2-seconds.  Not a good thing when throwing around orbital-mass-driver class magnitudes, because the mass driver fires every 10 seconds.  Anyway, for 3.189:

* Neinzul Clusters and Privacy Clusters from firing 50k/100k/150k/200k/250k shots every 2 seconds to firing 25k/50k/75k/100k/125k shots every 5 seconds.  For reference, a mass driver fires a 900k shot every 10 seconds (but can't hit fleet ships, etc).

* Neinzul Bomber Clusters changed the same way as normal clusters except new damage is 30k/60k/90k/120k/150k.

* Neinzul Viral Clusters changed from 8k/16k/24k/32k/40k every 2 seconds to 4k/8k/12k/16k/20k every 5 seconds.
* Neinzul Viral Cluster range from 83000 to 25000.


The viral clusters are now pretty tame, it would take a MkV one 15 seconds to kill a MkI fighter.  But that's ok, they're supposed to be easy.  May tune them back up a bit when I get around to limiting the number of wormholes they spawn on.  Anyway, with their attack power and range much lower I think the auto-target question isn't as pressing.

[keith.lamothe]

Went ahead and did this for 3.189:

* The Neinzul Viral Enthusiast AI Type previously seeded viral clusters on every single womrhole at every one of its planets.  It still does that if it is a difficulty 10 AI, but only seeds a certain percent of wormholes on lower difficulties (Diff 1 = 55% of wormholes, 2 = 60%, 5 = 75%, etc).  Note that it will always round down, but seeds a minimum of 1 wormhole per planet.

[LintMan]

Thanks, Keith!  That'll definitely make them less of a pressing concern.