Nominations for target of the Nerfbat of Damocles (I)

[Kahuna]

What's wrong with marauders?  I feel like I treat them like the devourer most of the time; keep out of the way and let them help with the enemy.

Too much health and damage  Oh.. and that range and radar dampening! I think they're too powerful.

[Varone]

Human:

Spirecraft scouts
Spire Matyr - Just wow, i think we should give it some guns and have the explosion as a minor ability, or an EMP/Paralysis explosion.
Botnet
Blade spawners

AI:
Spire Rams - just so many of them and they can demolish starships as soon as they go through the wormhole.

General:
Gravity - i think the affects of it are too much. Lowering speed to even 8 is just too slow.

[chemical_art]

For gravity:

Make it a % reduction instead of a flat reduction?

[Faulty Logic]

Written as:
Unit: suggested method of nerfing (if I have one in mind).

Botnets: zombie self-attrition, firing rate for golem.

Shield Bearers (human fleetship). Ideally just give them a regen time and make them immune to repair. This would preserve their role as survivablility-increasers but remove the invincibility factor you get when you add engineers.

Non-armored golems. All of them. Reduce health and damage.

Spirecraft jumpships. Give them a hop count instead of a time count, make them require high-level asteroids, or simply remove them.

Riot Control Starships. Keep the ships the same, but lower the cap while preserving k cost.

Spire Blade Spawners. Remove ff immunity.

Rebel Human Colonies. Have the cloak have a 5 min timer once captured, and lower the shipcap (maybe make it dynamic depending on the number of held colonies) or nerf the ships themselves.

Energy collecters: make energy a complete non-issue in their current incarnation (for almost all games).

Martyrs: We have warheads for that. High-level asteroids or remove.

Gravity guardians: Make transports immune.

Logistics command stations mkI. I rarely ever use econ or military, and I never see any reason to upgrade to mkII or III.

Gravity turrets. Limit the number of ships they can affect at once, or lower their cap.

Eyebots. These do not declare war on my empire, but directly on my sanity. They are coming. They are here. They are all around. Invisible. Waiting. They are coming. : remove one of their immunities (missile or sniper).

[PokerChen]

On the gravity side of things...
Gravity: 50% increase in speed across marks.
Gravity Drill: 100% increase in speed (at least, more than the turret so it doesn't have to eliminate turret use). It gets painfully slow across the entire system.

Golems:
Botnet - their HP has been nerfed enough. If it is possible to bring HP back up a little to trade for a DPS decrease, do so.

 The 20M damage is by design, right? KOs all fleetships in one hit, regardless of ship cap so it's insanely powerful against low-cap shiptypes in range.

 Perhaps it's better to have the botnet more shots at vastly smaller damage, like 330,000x80 per 4 seconds (target: a bit more than average fleet-ship mark-II health). This ensures that the Botnet no longer overpowers mk-III/IV ships, but retains most of its former might against lower-mark planets. It's hard to implement a good scaling on this ship unless we went down to 80,000x240......
I mean, I can park one over a mark-IV planet AI command and score free elite guards forever.
 
 Alternatively, please implement the reclaimed-ships-follow-Botnet Golem rule or maximum reclaimed-ship-cap-per-AIP rule, similiar to how the Hybrids have their escort ships.

Logistics-I. 2x+160 can be a little much in combo with halving enemy speed, although my inclination is to bring up the other command stations a little as well as decrease this slightly. If mk-I can decrease enemy speed by 33% instead...

Spirecraft:
This one need a general re-evaluation rather than a piece-meal approach. They are all niche-use ships, which seems to be the design decision. In practice, I build mostly Siege Towers+a few of Ion Blasters and Implosion Artilleries because I prefer not to overly cheese things.

[_K_]

I would also add artillery golems. I mean, seriously, attacking systems, epsecially the ones with AI eyes becomes so easy with these. I'd suggest a significant damage nerf (so that they dont kill other golems in like 20 seconds) and lower fire rate.
Another solution would be to make the human arty golems have like 20-30 seconds to "deploy" like the fortresses and other things.

For logistics stations i'd suggest removig the slow effect from the MKI, so the MKI only speeds up your ships, MKII also slows, and MKIII also prevents teleporting.
Also, it would be cool for MKIII to have some other cool feature. Like "Wormhole inhibition: all non-immune enemy ships entering the system through the wormholes get stunned for 3 seconds"

The spire scouts probably need a 20-25% self-attrition per wormhole traveled, and immunity to repairs.
This way you can set them as pickets as deep as 3-4 systems away from your territories, but cant scout any further at all.

Same goes for the teleporting transports. Just give them a self-attrition like for the regular transports. Just at 10-15% rate, so their reach remains significant.

[Hearteater]

I'm not sure I feel all the Golems need so much of a nerf (except Botnet...he's insane) as I'd like the Exo waves to really be a bit more meaningful to counteract them.  If Exos got noticeable tougher each time you activated a Golem, and kept that bonus even if you lost the golem, that might help.  But even base Exo strength might need to go up.  And/or, maybe Golems - Hard should merge in some of the Golems - Medium energy cost.

[TechSY730]

Although base exo-strength could use a buff, I feel the issue is more that "centralization" chances need to be tweaked some. Generally, tweak the chances such that the AI will centralize its exo-wave more should go up some.

Also, I suggested elsewhere, that an exo-waves can take a cue from the recent wave computation changes and alter the "centralization" chance should be tied to how many in-points it can copute. Now of course, computing the number of in-points for a exo-wave is a bit trickier, as they can spawn from any warp gate, not just from ones adjacent to a player world. However, this would help them deal with chokepoint style setups better, as more centralized exo-waves tend to do better at hurting well defended choke points, while spreading out is often better technique if there are many ways to get to your "juicy home command station" (or whatever they will try to go for)

I do like the idea of adding some relation between the strength and/or recharge time to their respective activating minor faction usage.

However, as this is a "buff" request for a mechanic, this should probably go into the other nomination thread.

[Wanderer]

From recent 10/10 wins, apparently Riot Starship Speed.

[keith.lamothe]

On the golems exo thing: creative nerfing by buffing the opposition is totally fair game for the results from the nerf poll   Honestly I prefer making the game harder to making the player's tools weaker.  The main reason I'd actually make something weaker is if it's just totally dwarfing other player tools and making the game harder would probably just exacerbate the issue of "why use A through E when Z is so much better?".

But when a given tool has a specific opposing force, like the golems, we can do a lot with that.  Even there, balancing the exos against the current usefulness of the Botnet would be excessive, as it would just make the Botnet the only one that could really work   So bringing the Botnet down a few notches and cranking up the golems exos might work all around (though some of the other golems might need a buff).

[Bognor]

I agree that Botnet Golems are hilariously overpowered... But they're also very fun!  Would anyone else favour taking them out of Golems Easy/Medium/Hard, and instead making them a separate selectable faction?  Choosing the faction would put a broken Botnet somewhere in the galaxy, and the number between 0 and 10 could affect the strength of the defending AI world.  The default 4 might be somewhat stronger than a regular Mark IV planet.  Note that Dyson, Devourer, Mining, and Trade Golems are all already selectable separately from Golems Easy/Medium/Hard.

[Varone]

Couldn't we buff the AI golems in the Exo waves?

They just seem a bit too weak some of them. Especially if you have an artillery golem yourself, it's so trivial to just snipe the AI golem.

[_K_]

Especially if you have an artillery golem yourself, it's so trivial to just snipe the AI golem.

Try fighting an AI exowave golems without using arty golems or spire rams.
Armored and Black widow are a huge pain to kill without any special weapons. Its just those special units are so good against them.

Spire rams, however, die in the process so its probably fine. Arty golem is simply a complete counter to any mega-unit.

[chemical_art]

It's hard to say if golems aside from the botnet should be nerfed. People say that exos don't counter them if it slams on their chokepoint.

But not all exowaves hit the chokepoint. And not all exowaves are alone. Plenty hit with a wave, or with a cpa. And if that exowave ever does peirce your outer shell, good luck with the hordes that will rampage through.

If anything, I don't think the strength of the exowave needs to change. Just how they are calculated. Similar to the wave mechanic of waves taking longer if there are chokepoints.

And remember, if you buff exo waves, you'll see more Hunter Killers sooner. I guess maybe you do want that [Evil Laugh]

[keith.lamothe]

I think exos could stand some calculation scrutiny in terms of how much they're "paying" for different ships.  I think the HKs are priced right, and I think the fleet ships are priced right, but some of the middleground ones (starships, guardians, etc) may be overpriced.  Thus causing actual exo threat to not scale up properly with exo budget.