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

[Mánagarmr]

How about giving the decloaker a once-per-30s/1 min counter-spy shot in addition to its other abilities?  Btw, can the counter-spy fire on cloaking units while they're decloaked by tachyons?

Now that's an idea. It's also fairly "easy" to balance by simply changing the RoF. That could be a sensible alternative.

[orzelek]

Tachyon Drone: Give them a much larger tachyon range (largest in the game basically) but prevent them from traveling through warp points.  They become ideal for sweeping your own systems, and replacing the need for Tachyon Emitters when you only have a few planets.  Sweeping your own planets is one of the biggest complaints for new players about stealth, and these are a K-free method of doing the job fairly easily.

Decloaker: Make this a full-on Starship that hunts cloaked ships.  Give it toughness and a reasonable punch.  A good hull multiplier vs Refractive armor makes them good against nearly every cloaked unit.  Their tachyon radius would be smaller than a Tachyon Drone, but larger than a Scout Starship.

Bonus: Tachyon Drones and Decloakers on FRD automatically patrol their system if an enemy is stealthed.  Use a pre-set pattern (spiral or some-such) that they just follow.

This one sounds like best idea to redo both of them into useful units and make zig-zag searches on your own planets much easier.

[keith.lamothe]

Gonna go ahead and call this one, with the following winners:

Zenith Reserve (the ones that give ships)
Decloaker
Captive Human Settlement
Spire Armor Rotter

I was going to stick to 3, but the 4th will be pretty simple to just make it a more capable combat ship in general and treat the rotting as a minor bonus (not quite as minor as the chameleon's cloaking, but you get the idea).

Interesting on the Captive Human Settlement... maybe y'all didn't get the memo that it's basically a penalty structure   Or maybe we didn't get the memo (and horsehead) that y'all don't like penalty structures that are capturables...

[PokerChen]

Interesting on the Captive Human Settlement... maybe y'all didn't get the memo that it's basically a penalty structure   Or maybe we didn't get the memo (and horsehead) that y'all don't like penalty structures that are capturables...

Don't make it an overall "buff" then. Perhaps give the player an ability to evac these settlements by giving them a speed equivalent to a Spire shard and periodically release threat....

EDIT: If I was an actual commander, I would seriously consider getting all these extra humans back into a cryopod on the home planet, or something out of the bloody line of fire.

[TechSY730]

Interesting on the Captive Human Settlement... maybe y'all didn't get the memo that it's basically a penalty structure   Or maybe we didn't get the memo (and horsehead) that y'all don't like penalty structures that are capturables...

I knew that when I nominated it. In fact, I mentioned that it should remain a penalty structure. However, I think the magnitude of the cons could be toned down quite a bit, but still make them a net negative. As they are right now, they are less of a penalty structure and more of a joke.

[rabican]

Yes it is i a penalty structure but ... Let me put it this way , losing all the advanced factories and fabricators in the map is lesser blow than losing one of these. That is kinda humongous malus for a structure that easy AI's put on 60% of their planets

[Martyn van Buren]

Hey by the way, how do armor rotters work?  As in, how much do they reduce armor by currently?  That doesn't seem to be on the Wiki.

[TechSY730]

Hey by the way, how do armor rotters work?  As in, how much do they reduce armor by currently?  That doesn't seem to be on the Wiki.

Straight up linear.

In more detail, being hit by a armor rotting attack adds to a "armor rotted" count (which is capped at base armor), which decays over time.
When some of your armor is rotted, your effective armor is reduced by that much.
When taking in armor-pericing as well, effective_armor = base_armor - armor_peircing - armor_rotted (with a min 0, of course)

[Martyn van Buren]

Any idea how much armor rotted they add per hit?  I'm wondering if they might serve their role better if this number was just increased by a lot or made into a percentage; is the problem that armor doesn't do enough in the game or that when they run into the few things that have significant armor they still don't do much?  Alternatively, perhaps if their effect worked as a field, like an anti-armor booster, or if they had an AOE that just turned off armor for a few ships for ~15 seconds?

[TechSY730]

Any idea how much armor rotted they add per hit?  I'm wondering if they might serve their role better if this number was just increased by a lot or made into a percentage; is the problem that armor doesn't do enough in the game or that when they run into the few things that have significant armor they still don't do much?  Alternatively, perhaps if their effect worked as a field, like an anti-armor booster, or if they had an AOE that just turned off armor for a few ships for ~15 seconds?

I think the amount of armor rotted per hit is defined per unit, sort of like how engine damage is. Check the unit stats, it should tell you how much.

Well, there is that armor rebalance/rejiggering discussion going on in the other thread, and hopefully things like armor rotting will become more useful.
In the mean time, I think giving Spire armor rotters a decent amount of cap damage to go with their armor effect should help them out. A boost to how much armor they rot might be in order too, but I would have to double check their stats to make an informed opinion.

[Wingflier]

Interesting on the Captive Human Settlement... maybe y'all didn't get the memo that it's basically a penalty structure   Or maybe we didn't get the memo (and horsehead) that y'all don't like penalty structures that are capturables...

Don't make it an overall "buff" then. Perhaps give the player an ability to evac these settlements by giving them a speed equivalent to a Spire shard and periodically release threat....

EDIT: If I was an actual commander, I would seriously consider getting all these extra humans back into a cryopod on the home planet, or something out of the bloody line of fire.

If I was a commander I'd genocide them before taking a 100 AI Point penalty.  No point in trying to save a single colony if doing so is going to cost you the entire human race.

[PokerChen]

Interesting on the Captive Human Settlement... maybe y'all didn't get the memo that it's basically a penalty structure   Or maybe we didn't get the memo (and horsehead) that y'all don't like penalty structures that are capturables...

Don't make it an overall "buff" then. Perhaps give the player an ability to evac these settlements by giving them a speed equivalent to a Spire shard and periodically release threat....

EDIT: If I was an actual commander, I would seriously consider getting all these extra humans back into a cryopod on the home planet, or something out of the bloody line of fire.

If I was a commander I'd genocide them before taking a 100 AI Point penalty.  No point in trying to save a single colony if doing so is going to cost you the entire human race.

I reckon it's very likely that the surviving population is genetically bottlenecked, so having a larger gene pool is important. On the other hand, the AIP increase probably comes from the fact that each human in that colony already has a chip implanted in the base of their spine...

[Wanderer]

Interesting on the Captive Human Settlement... maybe y'all didn't get the memo that it's basically a penalty structure   Or maybe we didn't get the memo (and horsehead) that y'all don't like penalty structures that are capturables...

Nah, THAT's not the problem.  The problem is losing one of those is the equivalent of kiling an AI Home Command Center.  Drop it down to 20/25 +AIP and consider it 'buffed'.   

[Varone]

With the captive colony perhaps you could spend an awful lot of m+c to turn it into a human colony ship not unlike the spire colony ship. We can then choose where to rebuild the colony. Obviously the AI penalty transfers to the colony ship and the ship is quite weak so it's in your interest to redeploy the colony instead of keeping the ship.

Perhaps when redeployed it still has the AI penalty but gives some other bonus for all the trouble you went to.

[Martyn van Buren]

I dunno, I'd favor dropping the penalty a bit but I don't see any need for repositioning --- the point of it is if you can't defend it, you don't take the planet, right?