Author Topic: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)  (Read 9709 times)

Offline Kjara

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #60 on: February 08, 2010, 09:14:41 pm »
But bubble sort is sooo inefficient.  I suggest from now on we radix sort them!

Offline x4000

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #61 on: February 08, 2010, 09:25:14 pm »
But bubble sort is sooo inefficient.  I suggest from now on we radix sort them!

:)
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Offline Kordy

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #62 on: February 08, 2010, 10:16:22 pm »
Yes, X, I know it's a beta release (Might need to remind Goekhan later, though :P). However, I do have a reason for my response. It's a trained reflex from World of Warcraft. Playing a class, any class, as a hardcore player from start to the second expansion was a painful ordeal, because it took Blizzard three years to realize that players also wanted some say on the balance, and after playing for three and a half years, it became a second nature to react with this magnitude against heavy nerfs. I also agree that a 5% decrease doesn't just cut it either.

What I've learned from WoW is that a group of codes and pixels isn't that important unless I'm earning money from it (I do, but I'm not a game developer and I definitely don't earn money from AI wars), but when something that can affect my fun in a game that I care about is made, I react. Apparently, a lot of other people do, too :)

And Keith, I'm indeed spoiled by the response time from you guys, but maybe this time the speed was a bit too high instead :P It's just that the overall tone was a bit too set-in-stone here with 'old crusties' and 'spoiled newcomers' clashing a bit, and of course, without enough warning. You might want to sprinkle some more numbers in changes like these when you announce them in suggestions :)

All in all, I find the 'hardcaps' arbitrary in most conditions, and would rather see the fleet ships complement a fleet instead of some measly amount of ships, with soft-caps placed to preserve the balance, just like the stacking penalty (the penalty is there, but changes with ship amount).

If you guys are fine with the munition boosters as per pre-3.028, then it should be possible to shoehorn some more fleet utility to fleet starships while lowering the fleet line's boosting (not axing in half!). A percentage of attack bonus, speed boosting, shield boosting, a combination of all, or something new and fabulous, even - I'd be happy if I could use a cheap, weaker but useable alternative to munitions boosters without making any of the alternatives obsolete. Ship caps prevent that with the total multiplier way of boosting. Also, what will be the baseline amount? We can get 150+ ships from just the basic triangle. Adding a swarm type of ship (infiltrators, raiders maybe) to the mix along with a non-swarm ship (anti-bombers) with just mark 3 line necessiates the use of munitions boosters as I've said a few posts earlier due to ship costs. Boosting is a powerful boon - too powerful prepatch, still too powerful with the MB's but obsolete with fleet starships -  when attacking and defusing core/homeworlds, and sometimes you really do need to blot out the sun. After you defang and dismantle one homeworld, you will encounter more resistance in the other if you're solo, and if you're going at it with more than one people, the munitions boosting will be a huge bonus at x5 on mkIII/IV ships.

What I'm getting at it is that the munition boosting fleet starships isn't the problem - the amount of boosting percentage is. It can be altered and it's effects monitored much, much easier than an arbitrary amount of ships being boosted, imo.

Also, bulletproof fighters might be too powerful against ion cannon II's, just sayin'.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #63 on: February 09, 2010, 12:00:03 am »
Ok, here's the munitions boosting changes for 3.029, as they stand now (with prompt feedback I might have a chance to change it before the patch is pushed out, but either way it can be considered for 3.030):

- Simultaneous munitions boosting caps effectively removed, replaced with logic that basically only caps simultaneous boosting if the player has somehow crammed more ships into the boost radius than would be physically possible to hold as a stable formation (i.e. some ships WILL be colliding and moving out of the circle).  

This is done by taking the total area of the collision circles of each boosted ship and comparing it to the total area of the boosting circle, if the sum of the boosted collision circles is greater the ship cannot boost any additional ships that cycle.  Suffice it to say that I had a hard time in testing just getting that density of ships to happen, so you shouldn't run into it unless you're HEAVILY spam-attack-move-stacking.  In case you were wondering, no it isn't a CPU drain because the circular areas are precomputed when the game loads.

- Munitions Boosts no longer stack, the highest available to a given ship is used.

- Boosts are now far more incremental in implementation, and here are the current numbers (please note that I said "current" numbers, these can change very quickly in response to player feedback) :

Light Starship
Boost-Amount 40%
Boost-Range 800

Flagship
Boost-Amount 60%
Boost-Range 1000

Zenith Starship
Boost-Amount 80%
Boost-Range 1200

Spire Starship
Boost-Amount 100%
Boost-Range 1400

Core Starship
Boost-Amount 120%
Boost-Range 1600

Munitions Booster I
Boost-Amount 60%
Boost-Range 1200

Munitions Booster II
Boost-Amount 80%
Boost-Range 1400

Munitions Booster III
Boost-Amount 100%
Boost-Range 1600

Munitions Booster IV
Boost-Amount 120%
Boost-Range 1800


Fire away :)
Keith

Edit: and thanks very much for all the feedback; WoW-nerf-like-reactions aside it was very helpful and this batch of changes for 3.029 would have suffered greatly had this discussion not happened.

Edit2: oh, I guess I should mention that I changed the speed of all munitions boosters from 12 to 24.  There was a lot of "I never use them because I don't want to slow the entire fleet down", so that should help make them less punishing.  Can always nerf it back down some.
« Last Edit: February 09, 2010, 12:11:49 am by keith.lamothe »
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Offline Kjara

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #64 on: February 09, 2010, 12:42:12 am »
My 2 cents before trying(and I will try :)).

The numbers seem a bit low if they are going to be unique(though I'm sure some of that is likely due to being used to the 4x boost available before).  As stated before I'm a bit against the whole unique aspect, but I'm not that against it (another route to take would be to mix it up some so that munitions boosters aren't unique, and are stacking in some way, but fleet starships are unique to make them different--not a fully fleshed out idea yet).


One question, how does the check for cramming work when you have more than one available booster?  If I "cram" a extra ships in a large fleet due to the fact that my fleet is in motion and is headed through a wormhole(and thus flattens down to a line), is it going to kick in even though I have all 3 flagships covering almost exactly the same area? Aka, if one fills its area, then the next one starts, that seems reasonable, though stuff on the edges might get lost depending on the order in which this is done. Don't see any easy solution though that doesn't run into computational problems.


I'd argue for moving munitions boosters back down to about 18-20 speed.  Not quite up to fighter/bomber speeds, but not requiring you to drag the entire group down to frigate speed.
« Last Edit: February 09, 2010, 12:44:20 am by kjara »

Offline MaxAstro

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #65 on: February 09, 2010, 02:17:55 am »
Those all sound just about perfect to me.  Perhaps a little upward momentum on the numbers based on if people think attack boosting should be more or less powerful but that's not my department.  I'd also be tempted to raise the attack boosts given by Munitions Boosters by a half-step (about 10% each) just to cement their lead over the starship line and give more diversity, but that is largely aesthetic.

Edit2: oh, I guess I should mention that I changed the speed of all munitions boosters from 12 to 24.  There was a lot of "I never use them because I don't want to slow the entire fleet down", so that should help make them less punishing.  Can always nerf it back down some.

Awesome.  I suffer from a lot of "I don't pair starships with anything but frigates because I don't want to slow the entire fleet down", so having a faster option gives munitions boosters a real edge.  :)

Offline Collic

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #66 on: February 09, 2010, 03:51:17 am »
Lots o' stuff

I like this approach much better than the previous one, and it seems like the most sensible way to do it. Not sure on numbers so I won't comment, except to say I instinctively wish the ranges scaled up a little faster/higher (like 2000 for a spire, for example). I won't know until I give it a try though.

My big fear was I'd lose boosting altogether in practical terms, since I really quite like it, but that's been addressed. Keep up the good work and I, like (most, some?) of us, only throw figures and crazy ideas at you to see what sticks. Theres a reason I'm not a game designer/programmer :)

We do all appreciate the hard work, it's just only the contentious changes ever really provoke vigorous discussion. If I'm honest I do enjoy those discussions anyway.

« Last Edit: February 09, 2010, 03:58:48 am by Collic »

Offline RCIX

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #67 on: February 09, 2010, 04:20:46 am »
And Keith, I'm indeed spoiled by the response time from you guys, but maybe this time the speed was a bit too high instead :P It's just that the overall tone was a bit too set-in-stone here with 'old crusties' and 'spoiled newcomers' clashing a bit, and of course, without enough warning. You might want to sprinkle some more numbers in changes like these when you announce them in suggestions :)
Hey! Who you callin an old crustie! ;)
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Offline vonduus

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #68 on: February 09, 2010, 06:06:15 am »

people may be thinking that these sorts of changes just stick for a long time or something.


And this is why we are whining: If we don't voice our protests, this is exactly what will happen: Changes will stick.


..the most important thing is that we'd like people's impressions of this in practice, not in theory.


Got me there! Mostly I learn about changes by reading this forum when I am at work, and sometimes I get so excited that I voice my opinions before I have actually tried them out. I apologize! I'll try to restrain myself (not sure if I can :-[).
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Offline HitmanN

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #69 on: February 09, 2010, 07:25:41 am »
Edit2: oh, I guess I should mention that I changed the speed of all munitions boosters from 12 to 24.  There was a lot of "I never use them because I don't want to slow the entire fleet down", so that should help make them less punishing.  Can always nerf it back down some.

How about doing the same as with bombers. Speed goes down with each mk level.
mk1: 24
mk2: 20
mk3: 16
mk4: 12

The "stronger" the unit, the slower as well. Plus that way you can use mk1-2 with fast ships and mk3-4 with slow ships.

Offline quickstix

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #70 on: February 09, 2010, 08:35:10 am »
Bomber speed already scales down with higher tech levels (something like 22-20-18-16, can't remember :P). Their speed is pretty much fine as well I think. Any faster and defences don't stand a chance, and slower and they get massacred.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #71 on: February 09, 2010, 08:41:25 am »

people may be thinking that these sorts of changes just stick for a long time or something.


And this is why we are whining: If we don't voice our protests, this is exactly what will happen: Changes will stick.
Not necessarily, I wasn't intending to leave those numbers the way they were anyway, but without y'all's feedback I wouldn't have changed nearly as much.  But feedback != whining, a calm and rational argument is actually considerably more effective with me :)  Y'all managed rational, but there were some marked failures in the "calm" department.  Anyway, I think we came up with a decent next iteration of changes, so it's all good :)
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Offline Excession

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #72 on: February 09, 2010, 09:10:17 am »
By making the MB's non-stacking,  you will never build more than 2-3  per fleet.

Maybe you need to keep an eye on whether their resource cost should be raised or their cap no. dropped esp as you have made them twice as fast...

Offline Goekhan

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #73 on: February 09, 2010, 11:20:00 am »
Haven't tried it but different values of boost looks better than a ship cap.

MB doesn't stack anymore. How about starships? I still vote for something like I suggested in my previous boost, stacking but not exceeding a cap unless a condition is met. Also, as said above, if they don't stack, you don't need to build more than 2-3 for your fleet unless there's an AI priority change that makes every ship goes for the MBs. If there was a munitions booster starship, this would be perfect for them.

How about starships, do they stack? If not, it's ok, but if they're, it'll be all the same, a big blob with all kinds of starships.

Starship boost ranges could be increased slightly, as you'll be having a handful of them compared to munitions boosters.

Lastly, I still vote for different boost values (done) but also with boost caps. Like I said before, in an example, light starships boost 2x, caps at 3x, flagships boost 3x, caps at 4x. So, any ships that are within range of a flagship cannot exceed 4x. If no flagships present there, cannot exceed 3x. My opinion anyway.
« Last Edit: February 09, 2010, 11:27:41 am by Goekhan »

Offline MaxAstro

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Re: Prerelease 3.028 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, munitions adjustments)
« Reply #74 on: February 09, 2010, 11:33:07 am »
Oh, this just occured to me.  While we are rebalancing the OPness of boosting in the player's favor, can we do the same for the AI?  I am speaking of the Interplanetary Munitions Booster and it's rather silly +200% attack boost.  Bad enough as that was before, it's now a bigger boost than the player can ever get (except by capturing said building, which would seem to go back to OP in the player's favor) and should possibly be toned down a bit.