Viral swarmers are computer breaking-ly awesome (in moderation)

[Jesterman]

So I've been absolutely loving the new updates, yet i have run into an issue twice now with the viral swarmers.
While i do understand their point, i think they....do their job too well.

Example 1: i attacked a planet with a medium sized force, setting off the random encounter of marauders and resistance fighters at about the same time. I had to retreat as i was getting pounded (this was early game), yet even after i left, i noticed a huge spike in threat level. I shot back into the system and saw the viral swarmers feeding off the two factions, reaching an eventual 21,000+ before finally killing everything and dying.

This, while awesome, lagged my tripple core to near dropping the game.

The second time was in the same game, purely by mistake, and completely crashed the game. I attacked a second system with the viral swarmers with a massive force. I had also by this point aquired mark 1 and 2 parasites. Upon attacking, i noticed i was stealing some of the swarmers. Soon the swarmers, both mine and theirs began fighting eachother, reaching a population of 29,000+ combined and still rising. I tried to delete my swarmers to stop it, but this caused a game crash. I wonder if there is anything that can be done about this? Maybe a cap to how many swarmers can be on one planet?

I'm gona attach a save file near the height of the second incident. I hope it doesnt crash upon load.

[keith.lamothe]

Yes, they're broken, I know

Sorry about that, in testing they tended to die far faster than they replicated.  Trying to get a fix in for the next release.

[keith.lamothe]

(copied from another thread, this topic appears to have spawned new threads at a high rate in honor of the subject)

Ok, rebalancing changes in for 3.181.  Basically if you don't have enough firepower to contain an initial swarm it will jump up to 300 or so pretty quick, but massively slows down in growth after that, giving you a chance to haul in enough fast guns (fighters are generally good, and also much harder to eat) to kill them faster than they spawn.  The individuals now also only last 60 seconds instead of 240, so as long as you don't leave them a trail of breadcrumbs to keep it going you should be ok in the overall sense even if a given wormhole traversal goes horribly wrong.

[superking]

is that 300 is per world, not global, like zenith shredders? and 300 seems a little low for a unit that dies in one shot..

[keith.lamothe]

The zenith-shredder replication-build-point-cost-scaling is actually done per-planet too, I'm using exactly the same mechanic just with a value of 10 instead of 1 (I tried lower, and they would still explode in population).

The ship cap is just to tell it when to start applying the scaling.

So yea, per planet.

If this weren't for an "easy" AI type I'd bump it up to 500 or 1000 or whatever, but this seems good for now.  If it's too easy, I'm sure you'll let me know

And for what it's worth, even the 300 "cloud" can be too much for a group of 200 Core Missile Frigates to depopulate, though the viral swarmers aren't able to kill said frigates quickly either.  It creates something of a mosquito cloud effect that chips away at you unless you take the time to stomp them out, and if you really don't pay attention for a while they can grow to an unmanageable size.

[Vinraith]

Any chance there could be two viral swarmer AI types, an "easier" one withe a lower cap and a moderate or hard one with a higher cap?

[keith.lamothe]

That would certainly be doable, though the clusters and the swarmers produced by those clusters would have to be a totally different ship definitions.  Or I could parametrize the build point scaling logic to check the player's ai type, which would also be possible.

I think it would be good to get the existing ai type to a good balance and look at the other possibility (which could make more sense as some kind of AI Plot, though that doesn't make much sense if limited to a single ai type) as free dlc down the road, as we're currently very close to feature-complete (i.e. not balanced or bug-free, but all the stuff being in) for CoN at this point.

[Vinraith]

Of course, I wasn't trying to thing on your foot-horn new features into an already ridiculously-packed-for-its-price expansion, just thinking of potentially interesting things for down the road.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, I really like the swarm mechanic, and I really want to have a gloves-off version in the game at some point, perhaps as a minor faction that can overrun AI planets too

[Vinraith]

That'd be pretty great.