Early scouting is now much harder and more involved - manually steering scouts around tachyon beam emitters was key to extending their penetration range in a few cases as being visible whilst attempting to pass through a wormhole is very damaging.
Hmm, I really want to get away from the manual legwork here, but at the same time only have scouts be able to penetrate so far. I could come up with some sort of "fuel system" for scouts, where each wormhole they pass through reduces their fuel by 1, thus weakening them by that much. And then make it so that scout 1 has 3 fuel cells (or whatever), scout 2 has 4, scout 3 has 5, and scout 4 continues to work the way it does not. That would be very consistent and predictable, and if I then made them all immune to tachyon beams like the Mark IV scout, that would allow for very predictable, very hands-off scouting... of course, that could also be more boring, and it would vary less by map. Hmm.
Astro-trains are now a more interesting threat as crossing paths with them can often spell doom for the scouts involved, again manually making sure to avoid them is important, especially when complex ship types are enabled and they are instantly set upon by teleporting ships. Giving all scouts cloaking has made early scouting more balanced in simple vs complex game types.
That's good to hear that it is now more balanced for you. And yes, that's one of the main functions of the Astro Trains, but of course in the past that only affected the Mark III scouts. Much more interesting earlier on in now, I think. Of course, if I went with a fuel-cell approach as above, that would remove that whole function from Astro Trains except as regards non-scout cloaked ships.
My tech I scouts were consistently able to travel 2-3 hops away from my starting system. Grouping them together was also much less effective in increasing their penetration range - situations lethal to a single scout usually destroyed all of them. This is because there is no limit on how many tachyon beams ships can emit so all the scouts become vulnerable at once.
Well, that's good. And that makes sense that the grouping is now more pointless. Grouping huge numbers would still be good for getting past ion cannons, etc, but still, as you point out all the scouts would be revealed at once, which is bad news for them.
I think that a single ship/turret should only be able to emit a tachyon beam once every second or so, perhaps larger ships could emit more at once or have a lower recharge time - Groups of scouts would be more likely to succeed this way.
I see the tachyon beams as being more of a "field effect" rather than a beam that is really shot, despite the fact that this is how it is represented visually. The counter-shooters (counter-missiles, counter-snipers, counter-missiles) all work this same way, where they can block infinite incoming shots in their limited range. This is the most effective thing when dealing with incoming enemy waves, and I don't want to sacrifice that for the sake of scouts. I'd rather come up with something else for the scouts...
Overall, the effect is that you now need to pay more attention to what your scouts are doing - previously I often used to just point them at somewhere far away and see how far they got. I prefer this new system.
That's pretty much what I would do, too. I prefer having it be more hands-off just because I tend to be more focused on other stuff. Maybe "fuel cell scouts" should be an additional line of ships, more expensive in knowledge, etc, than the basic scouts, that work the way I described above. That way people who just want to spend the knowledge for the fuel cell scouts could do that, whereas the people who are okay with paying more attention could use the regular scouts. Or maybe there is some other sort of hybrid approach that would solve both problems in one... that would be ideal. I'll have to keep thinking about that, but if you (or anyone else reading this!) have any ideas, those are always welcome!
Deep raiding is now vastly more costly - this is great. Additionally, establishing beach heads is now much more interesting. Should the AI be reinforcing the wormhole I'm at even while I'm in the system? It kept building tractor beam turrets at my beach head - obviously not very effective. Maybe the AI should only reinforce on the actual wormhole if there isn't any actual combat going on in the system.
Awesome, glad that's a hit! The AI is indeed supposed to keep building even when you have a beachhead there, except after you've killed their command station. That's the trigger for that to stop. If I make them stop building there too soon, it could unbalance the deep raids again. I should have it check for the presence of hostile ships near each wormhole, though, and have it build more intelligent stuff than tractor beams there. Tractor beams are useful in general at wormholes, but not if you're already sitting on top of it, which it currently isn't checking to see. Thanks for telling me about that, I'll be sure to give that another look soon.
On a side note, it is still possible to place turrets after the mobile builder has been destroyed as long as you don't leave build mode.
Ha, I had never noticed that. Great catch! Added to my fix list...
