Poll follow-up: the future of gravity.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, so "Gravity units/structures (all of them)" just won the AI-side nerf poll AND came in second in the player-side nerf poll.  And this is certainly not the first feedback I've seen to the effect that "grav effects are really, REALLY OP".  The game's kind of adapted around the incredible utility of grav stuff, so I'm hesitant to just pull that rug out from under the game and have everything go sideways, but I think we may be able to avoid that.  In any event, I think the game will ultimately be more interesting when grav effects are less dominating.

Anyway, here's what I'm thinking:

a) Change the grav mechanic from "cap affected unit speed to X" to "reduce affected unit max speed by X%", with each grav unit having a "grav magnitude", with each magnitude having an X as follows:

Grav Magnitude	Percent Reduction From Gravity	Base Victim Speed	Effective Victim Speed	Victim Seconds To Travel 10000	How Much Time You Have To Kill Victim, Compared To Normal	Delta Compared To Next-Lower Grav Magnitude
0	0	100	100	100.00	1.00	0.00
1	33.3	100	66.7	149.93	1.50	0.50
2	50	100	50	200.00	2.00	0.50
3	60	100	40	250.00	2.50	0.50
4	66.7	100	33.3	300.30	3.00	0.50
5	71.45	100	28.55	350.26	3.50	0.50
6	75	100	25	400.00	4.00	0.50
7	77.77	100	22.23	449.84	4.50	0.50
8	80	100	20	500.00	5.00	0.50
9	81.83	100	18.17	550.36	5.50	0.50
10	83.33	100	16.67	599.88	6.00	0.50
11	84.62	100	15.38	650.20	6.50	0.50
12	85.71	100	14.29	699.79	7.00	0.50
13	86.66	100	13.34	749.63	7.50	0.50
14	87.5	100	12.5	800.00	8.00	0.50

(many of the above numbers are rounded, obviously)

b) Change the current values of X to something that works with that, so:
-- The following unit(s) had a cap-speed-at-17, and now would be magnitude-2 (so +100% time-to-kill-stuff) :
--- MkI Spire Gravity Drain
-- The following unit(s) had a cap-speed-at-14, and now would be magnitude-3 (so +150% time-to-kill-stuff) :
--- MkII Spire Gravity Drain
-- The following unit(s) had a cap-speed-at-11, and now would be magnitude-4 (so +200% time-to-kill-stuff) :
--- MkIII Spire Gravity Drain
--- MkI Gravity Guardian
-- The following unit(s) had a cap-speed-at-10, and now would be magnitude-5 (so +250% time-to-kill-stuff) :
--- MkII Gravity Guardian
-- The following unit(s) had a cap-speed-at-9, and now would be magnitude-6 (so +300% time-to-kill-stuff) :
--- MkIII Gravity Guardian
-- The following unit(s) had a cap-speed-at-8, and now would be magnitude-7 (so +350% time-to-kill-stuff) :
--- Player Home Forcefield
--- Riot Control Grav Generator
--- MkIV Spire Gravity Drain
--- Grav-Reactor Core Guard Post
--- Grav-Reactor Gravity Drone
--- MkI Grav Turret
--- MkIV Gravity Guardian
-- The following unit(s) had a cap-speed-at-7, and now would be magnitude-8 (so +400% time-to-kill-stuff) :
--- MkV Gravity Guardian
-- The following unit(s) had a cap-speed-at-5, and now would be magnitude-10 (so +500% time-to-kill-stuff) :
--- MkII Grav Turret
--- MkV Spire Gravity Drain
-- The following unit(s) had a cap-speed-at-2, and now would be magnitude-14 (so +700% time-to-kill-stuff) :
--- MkIII Grav Turret

Note: for the technically curious, it is likely this will cause some kind of performance hit due to needing to multiply (involving the Int64 in the FInt class; we can't use floats in the sim and they would be slower anyway) rather than just cap, but it's unlikely to be significant in this case.  If it does become significant, there are some lookup approaches we can use to pare it down.


Thoughts?

[Hearteater]

Looks good.  Are you planning on some kind of stacking of Gravity Magnitude, or just best applied?

[keith.lamothe]

Looks good.  Are you planning on some kind of stacking of Gravity Magnitude, or just best applied?

Just best, no stacking.  Stacking would just be for redundancy against unit loss.

[Diazo]

I have yet to crunch the numbers, however any sort of percentage reduction is really going to weaken gravity.

Take one of the biggest threats, the raid starship. I will unlock gravity to slow these down so my turrets actually have time to get salvos in before it reaches my command station.

A raid starship has a speed of 296, a Grav I slows it to 8. That is reducing the Raid to 3% of it's original speed.

The new grav turret will drop it's speed by 80%, so the raid will now have a speed of 60. That is still 30% faster then a Missile Frigate's normal speed.

Now, this is supposed to be a nerf to gravity I am aware, but this is not an equal nerf.  It is going to have little to no effect on the slower units while having significantly reduced effect on the faster units.

I took a large part of the frustration with gravity (when in AI hands) to be the time it took to get anywhere for no purpose as the presence of gravity in AI hands would cause you to take longer, and so lose a few more units, but not really affect the outcome.

This change actually is not going to really increase the speed of your fleet at all. Raiding type units yes, those are getting a significant boost, but your fleet in general is not.

I suppose this is an opinion thing, should gravity be a flat effect (as current) or a relative effect (as proposed by Keith.)

D.

[keith.lamothe]

I have yet to crunch the numbers, however any sort of percentage reduction is really going to weaken gravity.

Yes, I agree.  And the nerfhammer is being used in such force because that's what I understand folks to be asking for.  If I'm wrong about that, I'm happy to adjust accordingly.

Perhaps the above numbers should be shifted down some towards more-powerful.  Though as you say that just further nails the base-slow units.  Perhaps just having a gravity-never-slows-you-below-X floor (maybe 1/2 the base missile frigate speed) on the whole mechanic, as someone suggested iirc, would help that.

I took a large part of the frustration with gravity (when in AI hands) to be the time it took to get anywhere for no purpose as the presence of gravity in AI hands would cause you to take longer, and so lose a few more units, but not really affect the outcome.

There is that, but I understood the greater concern to be that grav units gave the player way too much utility on the defense.  In tower-defense terms, something that "puts a max-of-X-speed cap on every single enemy within Y range" would be hilariously OP for any kind of significant X and Y.  It's not quite that bad here, but it's close.

Another thing I'm thinking of doing in connection with this is removing the immune-to-gravity stuff, which would at least somewhat mitigate the problem with the raging exos.

And a further adjustment would be to re-inspect the K (and m+c and e, perhaps) costs of grav turrets, since they would no longer be such game-changers.

I suppose this is an opinion thing, should gravity be a flat effect (as current) or a relative effect (as proposed by Keith.)

Perhaps.  Anyway, I'm looking for opinions and alternate suggestions, that's the reason for the thread

[TechSY730]

I actually think that the mechanic is fine, but just ranges and magnitudes need to be adjusted. Also, the grav turret line (caps especially)

However, I will admit a change in mechanic may help keep the balance in the long run as balance around it changes.

Thinking about the fast units thing Dazio pointed out, how about this modification to the naive "percentage slowdown" idea:
Slowdown is max(r*b - s, m)
Where r is the slowdown ratio, b is the base speed, s is an absolute speed to additionally slow down by, and m is the minimum speed to slow to (the unit cannot slow units down further than m)
(r would vary for each grav unit, m may be per unit or global but I am leaning towards per unit, and s I am totally undecided where it would come from)
Now, this is three numbers, so to ease balancing, we can make the numbers relative to each other. I think making s a function of b, r, and/or m is good idea, but how I am not sure yet.
Or we could make certain values GLOBAL rather than per unit (I think s is a good candidate) but that would require careful balance testing and updating and speed balance shifts.

[TechSY730]

Oh
how about
new speed = max(log(b, base r), m)
This would have the desired effect of slowing down fast stuff more, but still allow fast stuff to be faster in gravity, while keeping only 2 variables to balance. (r would vary for each grav unit, indicating how strongly it slows down, m might be per grav unit or global, though I am leaning towards per unit)


You can use any other strictly increasing, sub-linear function for the "main" function (like b^(1/r), aka the rth root of b)

[Hearteater]

Percent reduction keeps everything relatively the same.  Raids are always exactly the same relative speed to missile frigates (when both are affected by gravity).  I think the question comes down to:

1) is the proposed effect strong enough to combat Raid Starships?
2) is it too strong on slower units like Missile Frigates?

From what I can tell, Missile Frigates will be faster under all cases (I didn't run every one, but Mag 14 and Mag 6 are better than the current capping).  I think that's a good thing.  Raids might still be too fast.  So the question is, should that be fixed by Gravity or something else?

I'm a bit partial to an alternate Gravity Turret that projects a Gravity Wall around it.  In other words, it works like a Gravity Ripper, dropping anything to speed 0 when they hit its radius.  Unlike a Gravity Ripper (which is too weak a bonus ship anyway), that effect could slow fade from 100% speed reduction to 0% over time, like armor rotting does (maybe over 5 seconds).  This would give you a speed bump and time to focus the Raid Starship.  Actually, I'd probably say recovery should be X max speed recovered/second instead of %-of-max-speed so Missile Frigates would get back up to speed faster than a Raid Starship.

On Gravity Turret caps, here is the mantis issue.  Below is my thoughts from that issue:

I think the caps are just too high. There are at most 120 systems in a game, and how many do you need Gravity Turrets on? Even the 58 Mark I turrets are enough for most games. Once you have Mark III, Mark I are obsolete and so are Mark II for all practical purposes.

Lowering Mark II and III caps is probably warranted. Heck, even Mark I might need a slight reduction. Maybe 48, 24, and 6.

[keith.lamothe]

@TechSY730: no log or exponentials here; I'm willing to tempt CPU doom with a mul instruction, but that's as far as I go

[Diazo]

On the gravity cap issue, that depends how you deploy them.

Because I usually have multiple hostile wormholes, I cover the AI's probable routes from the wormhole to my command station with gravity turrets to buy my long range units time to whittle the wave down.

I can easily get 10 gravity turrets in a system (or more if I go with redundant coverage).

D.

[keith.lamothe]

Raids might still be too fast.  So the question is, should that be fixed by Gravity or something else?

I think Raids being fast and difficult to stop via normal means (tractors, FFs, and with this gravs) is kind of their character.  So if they're too hard to stop after this I'd look at nerfing their health (for the AI version, at least), I think.  They're a lot more durable than makes sense to me, it's just worked out balance-wise.

I'm a bit partial to an alternate Gravity Turret that projects a Gravity Wall around it.  In other words, it works like a Gravity Ripper, dropping anything to speed 0 when they hit its radius.  Unlike a Gravity Ripper (which is too weak a bonus ship anyway), that effect could slow fade from 100% speed reduction to 0% over time, like armor rotting does (maybe over 5 seconds).  This would give you a speed bump and time to focus the Raid Starship.  Actually, I'd probably say recovery should be X max speed recovered/second instead of %-of-max-speed so Missile Frigates would get back up to speed faster than a Raid Starship.

Hmm, I suppose that could work.  But later

On Gravity Turret caps

Maybe they're too high, but I find I use dozens per important system by lining them up and putting redundant clusters on the points I really want to cover.  So I don't think they're massively too high.

[TechSY730]

Raids might still be too fast.  So the question is, should that be fixed by Gravity or something else?

I think Raids being fast and difficult to stop via normal means (tractors, FFs, and with this gravs) is kind of their character.  So if they're too hard to stop after this I'd look at nerfing their health (for the AI version, at least), I think.  They're a lot more durable than makes sense to me, it's just worked out balance-wise.

I think if you nerf the AI raid's heath, so should the humans, at least to keep the AI Raid SS HP = Human Raid SS HP / 2.
With the upcomming gravity nerf and (hopefully) a tweaking of the balance of the new guard posts (especially multipliers), this wouldn't really hurt human usage overall, or at least not any more so than AI usage, which is sort of the point.

[Diazo]

The thing is, Raids eat command stations.

I'm specifically thinking of my recent Fallen Spire game here, but a Mk IV raid only takes 5 shots to destroy my home command station, much less a Mk I command station in a captured system.

The early game exo-raid I faced (building the first city) spawned 6 to 8 Mk IV raids quite often when it picked its units.

Now, you are nerfing the effect gravity has on raids? I am seriously worried that I am going to have to entirely re-work how I do turret layouts because I need to intercept farther out to have the same amount of time now.

Again, this is a nerf so I'm going to be unhappy regardless of what happens, especially as my 'default' defensive setup is built around gravity turrets.

D.

[TechSY730]

The thing is, Raids eat command stations.

I'm specifically thinking of my recent Fallen Spire game here, but a Mk IV raid only takes 5 shots to destroy my home command station, much less a Mk I command station in a captured system.

The early game exo-raid I faced (building the first city) spawned 6 to 8 Mk IV raids quite often when it picked its units.

Now, you are nerfing the effect gravity has on raids? I am seriously worried that I am going to have to entirely re-work how I do turret layouts because I need to intercept farther out to have the same amount of time now.

Again, this is a nerf so I'm going to be unhappy regardless of what happens, especially as my 'default' defensive setup is built around gravity turrets.

D.

I do feel that the multiplier for command-grade of Raid Starships needs to go down some. Not a huge amount, but some. Of course, this would apply to both AI AND human raid SS.

[keith.lamothe]

The early game exo-raid I faced (building the first city) spawned 6 to 8 Mk IV raids quite often when it picked its units.

Ow! Haha.  How many sniper shots is it taking to kill one of those?  Iirc snipers hard-counter the raids but the mkI-vs-mkIV thing is probably not favorable.