Poll follow-up: the future of manufactories. And M+C.

[chemical_art]

Irreplaceables should remain so. I could be okay with some kind of second chance (like: it drops remains once, or it has an hour of invincibility off human planets that doesn't recharge), but not anything further.

A lot of complaints here are because exos kill fabricators easily. But you have other ways to get firepower when exos are enabled. Essentially, it seems like people want the benefits from exo-sources without one of the major, established downsides: you will lose irreplaceables from time to time, unless you savescum mercilessly.

That's the issue though. One the hand you want irreplacables to remain so, then acknowledge you will lose them. That is not easy recipe for fun. At the very least, it causes apathy in which they are not viewed as viable.

I don't like irreplacables, but I like golems. Why? The units are irreplacable- but they are not vulnerable to exo-waves like constructors are: They can shoot back. They are tough. Most importantly, they can run to good situations.

The game has an established, awesome and very strong means to break stalemates: warheads. They can take (almost) any stalemate to a fast-paced, win-or-lose affair.

If you have somehow dug yourself so deep that warheads cannot work, then it should be a fairly clear case for even a beginner to resign and start over.

That is not true. If you have exo waves enabled, warheads suffer from obsolesce. A single Martyr trumps a cap of offensive ones. EMP's are great for stalling, but if the error that was made was strategic, and not tactical, it still won't save you long term.

I have never won a game where I was required to use warheads unless I was obtaining a permanent benefit that overcomes the AIP: More specifically, fallen spire. Even then, it is rare. Warheads buy time at the cost of long term viability.

Warheads suck for breaking stalemates. Not least because unless you are throwing 50 AIP at the AI they can't make a dent in HW, where the greatest potential for stalemates happen.

[Hearteater]

The only reason I ever have a Fact IV is because I need to kill a CSG-B anyway.  In no way to I micro Mark IV units, even after I've lost an AF.  They aren't pretty stuff animals to collect on my dresser.  They are for getting work done.  When I have Mark IVs, I use them (and the rest of my fleet) to knock out the toughest obstacles on the board.  This might be a Super Fortress in my way, an insane amount of threat fleet, a special forces pile, or even AI Homeworld brutal guard posts.  I know I might lose the ability to replace them, so I want to them to make a difference.

As an aside, you said that my position results in the loss being a trivial matter, but my proposal is worse than the current situation? 

I'm saying your argument leading up to that statement about not wanting losing them to be trivial, was actually you asking for them to be made trivial.  Your later proposal tries to remove the triviality you were asking for before by adding AI panic, but I was pointing out the problems with that.

I'm certainly with you on thinking the AI needs to get better at finishing off the play when they've got themselves in a losing situation.  On the other hand, I've read about people breaking themselves out of crazy stuff.  I'm currently feeling an AI on CS death is the best way to keep the pressure on when you start losing and avoid the AI backing off for hours and hours, reinforcing to a point you can't touch it.  But I'm also thinking at certain points a Super Wave should be triggered, effectively testing your defenses to make sure you aren't just barely hanging on with AIP slowly creeping up.

Hmm, that gives me an idea that might make both sides happy.  Going to brainstorm this.  I'll be back...

[chemical_art]

But I'm also thinking at certain points a Super Wave should be triggered, effectively testing your defenses to make sure you aren't just barely hanging on with AIP slowly creeping up.

CPA's?

If you want to make it different fine, but CPA's are still effective in wrecking anything sans fallen spire, and even then  they still will kill you unless you completely empty the galaxy first.

[Cyborg]

I voted for manufactories because I thought we were going to get some automation. I still think that's the case, Keith is just throwing ideas around about creating another resource and making it so valuable that you can lose the game if you don't have it.

Somebody else brought up the point that StarCraft gas works much the same way. It really doesn't. Gas functions more along the lines of, how much gas can you get in a period of time? This is because all resource patches in StarCraft 2 have gas and crystal. All ranked maps, anyways. This prevents the player from spamming the most advanced units, which typically cost high amounts of gas. And there isn't a lot of gas to be had. The game doesn't punish you for not having gas because by then you have already lost the resource node (including the crystal).

The point of explaining all that is that creating a resource node that you have to get to produce ships seems extremely severe in a game that's about massive amounts of ships. One of the selling points of AI War are the large, amazing battles. I wouldn't play it without it. So you have to ask yourselves, does the AI removing a resource node make the game more or less fun? In my opinion, a situation that prevents the player from creating fleets to go to war is not made of fun.

You would have to rebalance the really large boss units like the avenger in addition to HK, advanced hybrid hives, the fallen spire scenarios, and more. One of the satisfying parts of this game is fending off a huge wave… imagine how deflating that would be to survive a wave and lose some critical resource so you can't make ships anymore. I see lots of save-scumming in your players' future, which defeats the whole purpose anyways.

Let's keep talking.

[chemical_art]

I see lots of save-scumming in your players' future, which defeats the whole purpose anyways.

This is true, making capturables irreplaceable have one of two things (dramatically simplified):

1) They accelerate things that were already possible.
2) They are necessary to do the impossible, meaning when lost things are impossible again.


1) Makes a "why bother" situation if it incurs permanent costs to things that could indeed be impossible. Earning AIP to accelerate things already exist via warheads.
2) Leads to savescumming.

[Hearteater]

Ok, so this is to address the issue of the player is losing, but the AI just won't do them the courtesy of finishing them off.  So the AI gets something which I'll call a Super Wave just because.  It should be based on AIP and tech level, stronger than a normal wave, but probably due to having a higher percentage of Starships rather than just more fleet ships.  Think a regular max wave with +1 Starship per 10-20 AIP, maybe a few extra things for flavor.  Ideally, if your in good shape, you can stop this wave.  It might hurt, but it shouldn't hurt as much as an Exo, especially since it is launched just like a normal wave (maybe use Counter Attack GP deep strike logic?).  I picked Starships because they are tough to kill when your defenses are down, but their DPS isn't as high as an equal "point value" of Bombers.

So what triggers this Super Wave?  If everything goes well, you'll never meet one.  It only triggers when you are doing bad.  You gain points towards triggering one when you lose Command Stations, important destructables, Fortress or other big items (non-suicidal Spirecraft, Golems, etc.), Starships to a lesser degree, or large amounts of fleet ships in a short time (measured as a % of your unlocked max fleet ship cap).  But whenever you accomplish objectives, you reduce some or all of these points.  Capture a system and they go to zero.  But even destroying a Guard Post might take off a point or two.  Basically, as long as you are advancing against the AI, this number goes down.  When the AI is advancing against you, it goes up.

Unlike AIP this isn't a permanent hit.  Losing a player CS pushes you closer to a Super Wave, but it doesn't permanently make the game harder like say +20 AIP would.  Also, although a Super Wave might be tough, it isn't impossible to stop at all (Exos are much tougher) so setting the threshold a little low to catch people who get set on their back foot a little too long really helps keep the pace up without automatically ending the game.

TL;DR: It's short-term AIP really, used to trigger a "is the player out of the game yet?" wave.

[keith.lamothe]

I voted for manufactories because I thought we were going to get some automation. I still think that's the case

Yep, the automation came out in 6.013 this morning

Keith is just throwing ideas around

Also accurate.  Not necessarily very good ideas, I think. 

M+C as two separate resources is a weak mechanic, and I think the game would be better if we just make them one resource and add something else in that's a stronger mechanic.  Not irreplaceables?  Fine with me.  And in any event, there are more pressing things than combining m+c.

[Faulty Logic]

I acknowledge that I will lose fabricators given exos. In a normal game, they can be held.

But again, you have other ways besides capturables to increase your firepower if you have exos on.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Somebody else brought up the point that StarCraft gas works much the same way. It really doesn't. Gas functions more along the lines of, how much gas can you get in a period of time? This is because all resource patches in StarCraft 2 have gas and crystal. All ranked maps, anyways. This prevents the player from spamming the most advanced units, which typically cost high amounts of gas. And there isn't a lot of gas to be had. The game doesn't punish you for not having gas because by then you have already lost the resource node (including the crystal).

The point of explaining all that is that creating a resource node that you have to get to produce ships seems extremely severe in a game that's about massive amounts of ships. One of the selling points of AI War are the large, amazing battles. I wouldn't play it without it. So you have to ask yourselves, does the AI removing a resource node make the game more or less fun? In my opinion, a situation that prevents the player from creating fleets to go to war is not made of fun.

The idea was that stronger units require crystal, and weaker ones wouldn't-- exactly like starcraft. Also like Starcraft, gas is pretty darn limited. YOu can flat-out run out of gas on the map, you can be denied from expanding, you can lose a base which costs you your gas income until you replace quite a few relatively expensive things. In fact, if you lose a base late enough in the game, you're out of gas entirely because your main and natural are already mined out of it. You need to secure another source or get that back, which costs time and money and leaves you behind.
AI War is different in that you as the player set the pace in a lot of ways. Losing time or basic building money is not really all that costly unless you lose a really extreme amount of it. Losing an irreplaceable structure requires taking an AIP or knowledge hit which will result in you being further behind, which is exactly what happens if you lose your gas income in starcraft from your more recent expansions. Minerals? Those are so much more common than gas that I'm not really making any comparisons. Minerals and metal are, rightfully, not at all alike. To get any metal income back after having lost it, you would need metal. To make ships, to take an AIP hit, to get more metal. That's just bad RTS design.

It was my understanding that you wouldn't need crystal for anything but higher tech stuff though. As in, you'd probably be getting mark I ships, expendable ships, and stuff like that, all for just metal. Crystal would be used for higher mark good ships which effectively is what the more strictly limited Starcraft resource also does. Crystal gets you the fancier stuff. I do like the idea of a fancier secondary resource like that because it can actually make getting your fleet together more than just a time sink. If there's a better idea to make that more interesting then I'd love to keep exploring the topic... by reading others' posts. I don't feel as if I do a good job at contributing good ideas.

[chemical_art]

Any comparison to SC2 is flawed.

In SC2, there is a set amount of resources on the map, and through map control does one side get the economic advantage. So having finite resources is a intentional gameplay mechanic.

This doesn't apply to AI Wars. At all. If you don't have access to more high tech units because your crystal ran out, game over. Period. You simply can't smash the AI HW without them.

Something tells me when the crystal dries up, and the AI is still lobbing those high tech units at you, that it won't be very fun.

[LaughingThesaurus]

I more like the idea of something extra to manage. I never really said I wanted crystal to be strictly finite in a case like this. If that were the case, well, it would suck for one crowd and be awesome for another or whatever. That kind of idea is too divisive and doesn't work with expendable things. If the AI invents a way to steal or destroy your research permanently, we'll talk the ability to use a strictly finite resource for the purposes of something that can be lost.

Also, I was totally thinking with the SC1 mindset more than anything else. In that game, you still get 1 gas from depleted geysers per harvest. It's a significantly lower rate and it's inefficient but you never really run out. IIRC, Keith mentioned something like your homeplanet or home command always giving you some sort of crystal supply. So, in that case you can spend time to get crystal. However, that goes back to the problem I have with building up stuff anyway. All it really does is take time. However, if you somehow lost crystal production or really wanted more, then that could well force you to actually go take more planets than you otherwise would-- well, not force, but encourage. You take that AIP hit, you get more income, you can possibly topple the AI homeworld. Or, if you ever get into a situation where you're totally screwed, you can always blow away the ships with electric warheads or otherwise and hope you can win before the extra AIP gobbles you up. I don't really like warheads myself, but if you lost tech or lost critical resources or made bad decisions at a high level, you take that hit to get back into the game. That's my understanding, at least.

I still support the idea of something different to what crystal is right now, regardless. There could be crystal asteroids on enemy planets. You take the planet, you get more access to the neutral structures that those are. They function a lot like the spirecraft asteroids, except that a mining vessel can build an outpost on them that soaks in the income until it dies. Works like a harvester. If it dies, the asteroid becomes smaller or is just gone entirely. Smaller asteroids get smaller outposts which gets lower income. What this allows most importantly of all would be crystal raids. Set up a beachhead for some extra cash. If you lose all the safe asteroids, you have to get more risky. It's a little bit like if you waste knowledge or just plain can't get enough, you take the risk of knowledge hacking.
So, instead of strictly limiting nodes, or permanantly lost crystal manufactorum sorts of things, you just take little hits to your economy if some sweeping force wipes out your crystal mining colony. Even then, you weigh the risks and benefits and only build what you need. The asteroids that you leave neutral don't take any damage at all from said sweeping force.

[Lancefighter]

Despite the tons of discussion on just how much we do or dont want crystal to become limited somehow (as in, destroyable by ai or something, which I am totally on the opinion that a half hour is plenty of time to secure a lost planet, and after which I'm perfectly fine with losing it)...

 I still have one question - What is the intent of the new crystal resource?  On the assumption that 'metal' becomes the primary shipbuilding resource, what becomes of crystal? I believe it was thrown around a bit that it just becomes required (in greater quanities) as mark approaches V, which sounds ok.

Do we plan on just making crystal .. just plain not metal? THat sounds silly, but I mean do we intend for crystal to be just a replacement for metal as mark goes up? I think some discussion went into making it required for starships, but in what amount? Someone mentioned that resources are infinite due to time.. Do we want this to be the case for crystal?

I had some silly ideas that crystal would basically be lots of metal, in effect just making a lategame player have more metal available in his stash (and acquire it faster due to 1crystal -> 1000metal one way conversion, or something)

Then I thought back to energy - What if we had a second mechanic for that? For instance, a crystal harvester gives you, lets say, 10k crystal max (per), and uh 10 crystal/second. You could spend some of that to .. I dunno, build something. Lets say you build a starship. The starship costs an upfront amount of crystal, but what if it also cost a maintenance cost? For instance, your fancy starship also costs 5 crystal/s to run. In theory this would mean you could build more starships than you could support, keeping them powered down .. No, that doesnt make sense (due to upfront costs). I dunno. Someone might make sense of this paragraph.

[keith.lamothe]

Something tells me when the crystal dries up, and the AI is still lobbing those high tech units at you, that it won't be very fun.

I'm basically done fighting for the idea, but FWIW the crystal would never fully dry up due to the inherent income I mentioned putting on the home command station.  And crystal mines would not have a limited amount, they'd just be limited by being destroyed.  The caches would be finite, though.

Anyway, I'm fine just leaving this rework-crystal idea behind, but another wrinkle just occurred to me that might be more palatable to y'all:
a) Working from idea 2 in my original post.
b) Make crystal mines invincible.
c) While a crystal mine is on a planet with an AI command station, nothing happens.
d) While a crystal mine is on a planet with a human command station, the human gets its crystal income
e) While a crystal mine is on a planet with no command station (i.e. the human destroyed the AI one, and either didn't build one there or it got destroyed by the AI), the AI gets a boost to its wave/cpa/etc sizes.  Additive with other mines.
f) Potentially, make that boost slowly grow over time, with it going away once the mine is "recaptured" by the human player.
g) Make crystal mines maybe only on 1/6th of the planets so you're not tripping over them.

Thoughts?

[Histidine]

e) While a crystal mine is on a planet with no command station (i.e. the human destroyed the AI one, and either didn't build one there or it got destroyed by the AI), the AI gets a boost to its wave/cpa/etc sizes.  Additive with other mines.

Seems quite contrived. (Also super annoying if there happens to be a crystal mine on a planet you want to kill but not capture)

My proposed alternative: make the crystal bonus ramp up over time to a maximum as long as the humans hold the planet, but reset if the command station dies.

But otherwise: yea, no problems with it.

[Oralordos]

I think I like keiths latest idea. I would upvote it on mantis.