New Carriers EDIT:, salvage and stuff (rant)

[Kahuna]

So it's no longer possible to pop carriers. Will they ALWAYS unload when they enter one of my planets? Because if they don't they will ignore Force Fields, destroy my Command Station(s) and not give a shit.

[TechSY730]

So it's no longer possible to pop carriers. Will they ALWAYS unload when they enter one of my planets? Because if they don't they will ignore Force Fields, destroy my Command Station(s) and not give a shit.

I thought carriers were only FF immune for the purpose of movement, not firing.

Also, they will still pop and unload based on previous criteria like before (number of ships falling below a certain amount, etc)

[Kahuna]

Ok. That's kind of stupid. Will have to spam Armored Warheads then.. which cost 3 AIP.. which is a bit stupid. What is also kind of stupid.. is that I was able to build Super Fortress to 50% in about an hour. Thank you salvage. So I guess spamming the Armored Warheads (which cost 1 million metal each) wont be a problem.

Hell.. just give the player unlimited resources in the next patch. It already feels like I have more resources than the AI. That would make sense. I mean we're out outgunned and massively outnumbered after all.

EDIT: On the other hand.. thanks to the buffs to the AI.. it would be half impossible to win without this salvage thing. The AI has so damn many Starships. In other words. This game has become a mess. It's just player and AI throwing ships at each other and no one gives a shit because both have unlimited resources. Hell I'm playing at 10/10 difficulty and vs AI 1: Raid Engine/One-Way Doormaster / AI 2: Crafty Spire/Alarmist and it's pretty funny. Sometimes I keep an Assault Transport on AI 1's planet so it keep triggering the Raid Salvage Engine so I can build the Superfortress as fast as possible. If I started building the Superfortress earlier I might have been able to finish it before the first CPA (at ~2 hours).

Also. This salvage mechanic makes capturing additional planets absolutely useless. The best option is to stick with 1 planet (Homeworld) and only pop planets for knowledge and to prevent deep striking. If I wasn't building the Superfortress I'd be sitting at 2 million Metal all the time. I CAN NOT spend the resources "fast enough" without building the Superfortress. Not even when I'm building Starships with 39 Mark I Engineers.

EDIT: It also seems like recently AI War has been balanced around playing with Super Weapons. Don't get too carried away when someone wins a 10/10 game. Faulty always plays with Champions, Fallen Spire, Golems and Spirecraft. No wonder the game seems so easy. This salvage mechanic has now made the game even easier. I have no Super weapons.. I have 1 planet.. and I've only used the first 13000 Knowledge.. and I might be able to win the game.

Did I already mention the AI sends too many Starships?

EDIT: 2 things I hate the most in this world: 1: water splashing on my ass when I take a dump and 2: people who play with super weapons and/or more than 1 homeworlds and then complain that the game is too easy.

[Lancefighter]

Especially plasma siege starships....

[TechSY730]

It does feel like that maybe salvage could use a nerfing on both sides (though less so for the AI).

Or maybe make the amount of salvage a unit drops be a sub-linear relationship with its base cost (like, the more expensive a unit is, the less salvage each additional cost of metal the unit will produce). That should make salvage still notable in the normal case (fleet ships, and a few starships), without severely destabilizing intended balance when superweapons or exos or high mark starships come into play.

Because yea, salvage does sort of get out of control when the "big stuff" comes rolling in.


Note, this would apply to both sides, so just as you start getting less salvage from the expensive stuff, so does the AI.


EDIT: Also, I do think the "cost to the AI" for starships overall is too low. They do seem to be a bit starship happy, especially in comparison to how many guardians we tend to see.

[Faulty Logic]

Faulty always plays with Champions, Fallen Spire, Golems and Spirecraft.

No, I don't. Examples linked.

But I agree that the 10/10 superweapon balance needs work more than the baseline. Maybe the presence of superweapons could bleed into other things like waves, a la the ancient champions? Another round of making the exos bigger might be warranted, too.
Only once you actually get them, maybe?

It does feel like that maybe salvage could use a nerfing on both sides (though less so for the AI).
Or maybe make the amount of salvage a unit drops be a sub-linear relationship with its base cost (like, the more expensive a unit is, the less salvage each additional cost of metal the unit will produce).

Agreed, though metal wasn't exactly restrictive for as far back as I can remember. I think you proposed an elegant solution.

This salvage mechanic makes capturing additional planets absolutely useless.

Again, metal and energy were never the main reason to take planets. K and capturables were.

[keith.lamothe]

Nothing like a good Super Cat Rant to start a Saturday morning


On carriers:

- I've been waiting on feedback from the last round of changes on these, but what I've wanted to do is remove their ability to move through FFs, and rework their "internal ships contribute to firepower" thing such that the contribution is much closer to the actual dps of the internal ships (rater than counting a minipod and a railcluster the same).  This would result in them being more directly powerful, but without the ability to bypass one of your main defensive tools


On salvage:

- Yes, it's kind of stupid-op right now.  For the humans, anyway.  For the AI it actually seems like it needs more buffing, but perhaps I'm misreading that.  Anyway, I like Tech's idea of having the salvage value of a unit scale sub-linearly with its metal.  That should help prevent superweapons from skewing salvage amounts so horribly.
-- Any suggestions on the math?  1:1 for the first 1000 metal, 2.5:1 for the next 9,000, 5:1 for the next 90,000, 7.5:1 for the next 900,000, and like 10:1 for anything after that?  Or is that not a steep enough decline?

- Even aside from that, we may simply need to nerf the salvage efficiency of the various command stations.  But probably only after trying the first change.


On AI Starships:

- Too many?  Are you still winning?  SEND MOAR STARSHIPS! ... oh, not what you wanted, ok.  Anyway, I can maybe halve these, but it's not going to help the problem of the game feeling too easy.


On superweapons, and the balancing for:

- Yes, one of the biggest challenges in balancing this game is that "with superweapons" and "without superweapons" are really two different cases.  In the recent past it's seemed like "without superweapons" was reasonably well balanced, and "with superweapons" was significantly too easy.  Right now it's just all too easy, largely because of the new mechanics of Hacking and Salvage.  I won't leave it easy, don't worry   But I'm also trying to address some of the longstanding desires (as represented in that big-stuff-for-8.0-poll, and elsewhere), which necessitates unsettling balance like this temporarily.  Of course, I could have unsettled it in a way which err'd on the side of making the game too hard instead, but people tend to have less fun (and thus do less testing) when they think they're getting stomped all over the place by something that's just not been balanced yet.

- Anyway, point taken that balancing the game to be hard enough for superweapons should be careful to not always apply the same magnitude of extra pain to non-superweapons.

[Draco18s]

Note on salvage:

When I have a non-homeworld planet that's pulling 15% and I get a million metal dropped on that planet I barely notice.  As only 150,000 of it ever hits my coffers (and we're already talking about distribution nodes being meaningless at 600k).

Oh, and that's with no superweapons.  Notably that game I control some 34 planets (it's my What Memo? game) but even so.

Your proposed falloff values there would reduce that 150k income to a paltry ~21,000 (142,600 * 15% = 21,390).  Unless you're speaking a per-unit scale, which is harder to calculate the effects of.

Here's a thought:

1) Zombies don't produce salvage
2) If Raid Engines don't already spawn ships as zombies, make it do so
3) Less starships.  I've already complained about being hit with 3 plasma siege at once and had little to no way to defend against it (I am REQUIRED to throw my fleet at it as nothing else will survive).  Same goes for raid starships.

[Kahuna]

I'd say remove the salvage thing and buff Economical Command Stations and Resource Harvesters instead.

[Winge]

Here's a thought:

1) Zombies don't produce salvage
2) If Raid Engines don't already spawn ships as zombies, make it do so
3) Less starships.  I've already complained about being hit with 3 plasma siege at once and had little to no way to defend against it (I am REQUIRED to throw my fleet at it as nothing else will survive).  Same goes for raid starships.

I disagree with #2, but agree with #1 and #3.  Humans already get much less benefit out of Reclamation than the AI, I don't think more zombies is the right way to go.  Although I could see making reprisal waves zombies.

I think that the scaling mechanic that Keith mentioned is worth a try.  I don't want the game to go into Netflix territory, which is what I suspect would happen if salvage went away entirely (assuming no Champions).

[keith.lamothe]

Your proposed falloff values there would reduce that 150k income to a paltry ~21,000 (142,600 * 15% = 21,390).  Unless you're speaking a per-unit scale, which is harder to calculate the effects of.

I did mean per-unit.

[Kahuna]

"Netflix time"
I've heard this before. So what do you people do exactly? Do you just throw your ships at the AI over and over and over again until you win? You just go blobbing around and lose all your ships and then watch Netflix until you have a new fleet.. then do that over and over again? You should be punished for that. People wanted to remove blobbing but this salvage thing just made it more effective.

EDIT: If Economical Command Stations and Metal Harvesters were buffed people who have "Netflix time" could unlock more them so they would have unlimited or close to unlimited resources like everyone does now.

[Aklyon]

On the subject of Netflix time, I rarely have it for actually having thrown everything at the AI, its much more likely that I'll be trying to use (relatively) small raiding groups of a specific set of my ships (typically my starter bonus ship, riots, and if I'm playing with neinzul ships probably also MSDs, and the champ if I have one) and either forgetting its there or not wanting to use my main blob of fighter/bomber/missilefrigates/starships. Sometimes the enclaves join the group as well, sometimes they stay back as extra defense.

Basically, if I have 'netflix time' I'm being stubborn about my raiding party needing to get rebuilt before i stop being so turtle, not anything the game would be able to fix without me playing above 7/7.

[Kahuna]

either forgetting its there or not wanting to use my main blob of fighter/bomber/missilefrigates/starships

Well you should be punished for that IMO.

[Toranth]

either forgetting its there or not wanting to use my main blob of fighter/bomber/missilefrigates/starships

Well you should be punished for that IMO.

Punished by watching the AI reinforce all the systems you'd been cleaning?  Yes.
Punished by having the AI overrun your underdefended systems?  Yes.
Punished by being forced to twiddle your thumbs for an hour because you can't do anything?  No.