Poll: Worst Unit Of The (time interval) Award (V)

[chemical_art]

My choices, in the order I chose them:

Enclave ship: Right now it costs a ton of K, with no increase in buildspeed to match the increased time for construction. How to be improved? Decreased K, increased build rate, increased health (REALLY needed, they are so squishy).

Armored warheads: For the AP cost, their dps and range are absolute terrible. Need increased damage even if you give it super tiny range so it can be a pinpoint missile that is hard to stop.

EMP warheads: They sound awesome, but in practical terms you can't do that much in the time they buy. Part of the problem is that if you are on offense and they are spread out there isn't enough time to zip over and cream them, and if they are huddled at wormhole you can send lightnings. End result: There is never a time where I could use them.

Z-bombers: I don't understand their niche. Before they were changed there were a few of them and they had ok hp but had huge bombs. Now there are a few more but they do meh damage. I wish they had huge bursts of damage, but at a better rate of fire then bombards to compensate for their shorter range.

So like bombard amounts of damage, with maybe 50% increased rate of fire to compensate for little range and not too good durability.

[Cyborg]

Great poll. I think we should get missiles that don't cost AIP, even if it's a missile that hasn't been thought of yet. Definitely not suggesting that current missiles have their penalty removed.

[TechSY730]

I am considering changing by decoy drone vote to something else, but I need a question answered first.

Do the experimentalist and support crops AIs do the proper scaling for ship cap when determining how many decoy drones to send in a wave?

If no, then that may be why they seem crazy good in AI hands, because they are getting too many of them. If this is the case, my vote for decoy drones will stay provided the AI starts considering their low cap properly.
If yes, then that shows that they do just fine per cap, and they probably don't need much buffing, and I will change my vote (probably to manufactories, due to their sluggish responce times and their low conversion rate, though I think their conversion efficiency is fine)

[keith.lamothe]

Yes, any ship type added to a wave (regardless of whether it's there due to support corps or whatever) is adjusted by cap.

[Huaojozu]

Decoy Drones are definitely more useful for the AI than for human players. I remember a wave of 400 or so frigates. Not to worry, I said to myself, lets just send my Botnet in there and make a few hundred new friends. So I get him in range and he fires his 50 shots. No changes in color of the frigate blob... before I could figure out that a few Decoy Drones ate up that salvo, my Botnet was dead :/

[TechSY730]

Yes, any ship type added to a wave (regardless of whether it's there due to support corps or whatever) is adjusted by cap.

Decoy Drones are definitely more useful for the AI than for human players. I remember a wave of 400 or so frigates. Not to worry, I said to myself, lets just send my Botnet in there and make a few hundred new friends. So I get him in range and he fires his 50 shots. No changes in color of the frigate blob... before I could figure out that a few Decoy Drones ate up that salvo, my Botnet was dead :/

Hmm, if they can be very useful past cap (even if the AI must scale it according to cap) but not so useful at cap, that may signal the need for a mechanics change in how they work.
But in any case, now that I know the AI is scaling them properly, I will withdraw my vote for decoy drones.

[chemical_art]

The problems with decoys are that they are very arbitrary. They have so little hp, but you can only target them one at a time. So a blob of 100 ships takes the same amount of time to kill 30 decoys as 1000 will. In the player hands, on 1 homeworld, it is not so bad since there are so few. But if you get into 4 hw games it in theory can allow some interesting tactics and wormhole clearing. The flip side is that with AI when they use them ai waves come with a guaranteed protection timer that cannot be shortened.

[TechSY730]

Just wondering, does the decoy drone interfere with "overfill refunding" of reload times and the new "find new target" behaviour of missile ammo?

If so, that would certainly make extra firepower (past a certain point) useless at speeding up encounters against decoy drones.

[chemical_art]

The craft get a refund, but there still is "bullet time" between shot and hitting the target. It's been reduced somewhat with faster projectiles, but it still exists and can cause problems when the AI sends 30 decoys.

[keith.lamothe]

I'm interested to know what a ton of missile frigates, mlrs turrets, and missile turrets do to waves with 30 decoys nowadays   Or are they immune to missiles?

[PokerChen]

I'm interested to know what a ton of missile frigates, mlrs turrets, and missile turrets do to waves with 30 decoys nowadays   Or are they immune to missiles?

Well, if you have a fleet-ball protected by a few decoys in the centre, which in turn is in range of a counter-missile turret, what will happen then?

[Cyborg]

I'm interested to know what a ton of missile frigates, mlrs turrets, and missile turrets do to waves with 30 decoys nowadays   Or are they immune to missiles?

Maybe we will get arena construction tools for the next expansion, and we can tell you!

[TechSY730]

Looks like Neinzul enclaves are going to win it by a good margin, and armored warheads have been in second for quite some time.

3rd, 4th, and 5th have been much more in flux. I can't really predict who will "win" those spots yet.

[Drjones013]

Why don't decoy drones create a reduced damage zone for x period upon destruction? Decoys could be used to breach wormholes and create overlapping (or even drifting, that'd be awesome) zones with damage reduction based on Mk.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, calling this one as it's run long enough.  Interesting 3-way (nearly 4-way) tie for fourth place

Here are the changes I've put in:

* Neinzul Enclave Starships, in honor of winning the fifth "Worst Unit" poll.
** Base Armor Rating from 1000 flat => 1000*mk.
** Base Health from 500K*mk => 3M*mk.
*** This gives an individual one 80% the health of an individual corresponding fleet-boosting starship; not using cap comparisons here since these are not military ships (i.e. ships with an attack), but for reference those fleet-boosting starships have 2x as much cap.
** Now have radar dampening of 8000/7500/7000/6500.
*** Between this, the armor, and the health it should be a lot more reasonable to keep these alive unless you get overwhelmed, in which case these should die (cloaking was experimented with, but was way too exploitable; that much cheese requires cloaker starships).
** Knowledge Costs from 0/3000/5000/10000 => 0/2000/2000/14000.
*** This is because the first two upgrades are purely for in-the-field construction (which is worth something) and the last is a game-changing ability to have mkIV production capacity without an advanced factory.
** The rate at which they construct ships used to be the same as a space dock, and is now 4*mk as fast as a space dock (so 16x for a mkIV).
*** This is because previously using these efficiently basically required engineer support (specifically, engineer mkIII support).  Engies still help, but it's not as critical.

* Armored Warheads, in honor of placing second in the fifth "Worst Unit" poll:
** Base Attack Power from 300k/1.5M/2.4M => 1M*mk.
** Explosion Size from 1500/1250/750 => 1500*mk.
** Now do 10k*mk armor damage, enough to strip all the armor off most units that aren't some kind of boss fight.
** In general you still aren't going to want to use these a lot, it's still a "rot your teeth" sort of unit where heavy use is rarely a good sign for how well your game is going.  But these should be more useful than they were, for sure.

* Lightning Warheads:
** Base Attack Power from 300k/1.5M/2.4M => 800k*mk.
*** Just keeping up with the armored warhead changes; only a significant change to the mkI, really.  So the armored ones pack about 25% more punch, for whatever that's worth.
** Explosion size changed to match the new armored warheads: 1500/1250/750 => 1500*mk.

* Metal/Crystal manufactory input and output scale multiplied by 10 (so consumes 200 of a resource to produce 140, instead of 20 for 14), in honor of placing 3rd in the fifth "Worst Unit" poll.

The lightning warhead one wasn't due to how it did in the poll, just keeping it basically an unarmored version of the armored warhead since that's the intended relationship between the two units.

That's all I've got time to do right now, but I will definitely look at the Riot III, Teleport Battlestation, and Tachyon Drone since they tied for 4th place.

Thanks for the feedback