Prerelease 3.168 (Huge shifts to golems, sniper turs, acid sprayers, engineers)

[RCIX]

7. RCIX, I also had thought about making golems dangerous to friendly ships, but that's just fraught with a lot of issues, I decided.  But that was something I spent a lot of time thinking about yesterday, trying to find a model that would work, etc.  In this case, I think simply removing the supply restriction handles the current issue well enough, anyhow.

Oh, i was just supplying a thematic reason for why Golems wouldn't work in the presence of allied ships

[Buttons840]

I'm worried about potential sniper turret overkill, I can see the fallowing situation happening as it seems to happen with many other ships already:

One enemy enters -> snipers fire to overkill because why not? there is only one unit after all -> dozens of enemy ships enter and cuddly hug  the planet while snipers are reloading because they just waited all their shots on one auto-cannon.

For most units this isn't a big deal, because they have a quick reload, but a sniper volley will be a terrible thing to waist with their horrendous reload times.

[rubikscube]

that's what you get for extremely high attack power, swarm ships never have these problems/

[Volatar]

I'm worried about potential sniper turret overkill, I can see the fallowing situation happening as it seems to happen with many other ships already:

One enemy enters -> snipers fire to overkill because why not? there is only one unit after all -> dozens of enemy ships enter and cuddly hug  the planet while snipers are reloading because they just waited all their shots on one auto-cannon.

For most units this isn't a big deal, because they have a quick reload, but a sniper volley will be a terrible thing to waist with their horrendous reload times.

Idea to fix that: if a sniper detects an enemy, any enemy, it then decides it will shoot. After deciding that, it then waits a time, say 4 seconds, then runs its target search. Only then  does it shoot.

You could say they have a delay before attacking so they can line up their shot I guess It takes a lot of math to hit a ship from kilometers away.

This would also discourage micromanagement of sniper turrets.

[Signata]

I have mixed feelings. The changes made to turrets effectively nullify them in most short-duration skirmishes at wormholes. Primary wormhole defence will no longer benefit from them. The main reason for this is that it takes so long for sniper fire to even get in range (in most cases) targets will already be eliminated by short-range turrets and closer ships. After firing off a salvo of wasted shots, they are then out of the battle for an entire minute. Using the old model, this was less of a deal because a waste salvo was quickly followed up on six seconds later. Chances are good they would be contributing to the battle eventually.

On the other side of the coin, they are still effective in extended engagements, especially when and if enemy units have broken out of the defence zone and start going after resource targets. Snipers suddenly become a lot more important and their identical damage delivery per minute rating is at that point, no greater or lesser advantage whether front-loaded or distributed over the minute. You could make the argument in fact that front-loading is better because the odds of taking a ship or two out before it can sustain damage to a resource target is greater. While the old snipers were whittling away over the 60 seconds, the ship could be firing at a metal or crystal target the entire time. Now, if the snipers were going to be decisive at all, they would be decisive before the enemy target could deliver <=60 seconds worth of damage.

So I guess the main question is: how important were snipers to primary wormhole defence in the first place? I know I never relied on them. I don't think a reduction of effectiveness on their part will hurt wave defence much, but meanwhile the odds of them having a greater suppression effect in an extended, wide area, battle go up---and in a way, that's really what they've always been best for anyway. Taking out targets that nobody else can get at in a reasonable amount of time.

[Buttons840]

They overkill they're targets now.  If I have a dozen sniper turrets I can kill a dozen bombers, or a dozen auto-cannons in the same amount of time.

I see no reason to have such a long reload time, keep it under 20 seconds.  Give them a 3x damage, 3x rearm time - but 10x is a little much IMO.

[rubikscube]

what if we can make sniper turrets know that their target is gonna die for sure, then they pick another target.

[Trezamere]

I'd be lieing if I said I ever used Sniper Turrets, the cost just didn't outweigh the "benefit" (Spider Turrets on the other hand were amazing, we'll see if they still are).  At best to do any sizable amount of damage over anything else and affect a battle in a meaningful way you'd have to build a ton of them - which can cost a significant amount and prevent you from using them anywhere else, and even then they still aren't THAT effective.

I've always thought they needed to be slow firing high damage turrets, by virtue of their name.  This change seems to be in the right direction, and they can actually be useful for their main purpose (at least mine), killing those ships that manage to sneak past your defenses (planes/teleport stations) and start attacking your economy/base, whereas before they would kill everything long before the snipers were able to kill them.

Possible changes to help them out with the issues of being slow at reloading is to drastically increase the speed of the actual bullets, so they won't fire and then the ship gets destroyed before the bullets even get there, wasting them for another minute.  Maybe also halve their reload time or so and also halve or quarter their ship cap, or give them a sentinal frigate limitation where more then X number of them on a planet are ineffective.

[Signata]

I like the idea of dramatically speeding up the shell, it gives them a chance to actually contribute to far-away snarls and gives the faster-reload turrets and ships more effective targeting options. Another way of buffing them would be a cluster bonus---the opposite of the new fortress cluster efficiency loss. The more sniper turrets you have clustered together, the better their performance: distributed maths on the firing solution, could be the lore. With all of the computers working together, they can not only get a bead on the unit, but make sure the shell hits in the most critical spots on the unit: and carrying on the tradition of swaggering braggart snipers who declare they not only can hit a target from 3,000 metres, but give them a lobotomy instead.

[x4000]

You could make the Golem like a mobile AI Warp Gate, meaning the AI could use your own Golem to send waves against you.  So when your Golem is hiding at your homeworld, then the AI can launch waves directly against your homeworld, because the Golem is there.  I'm not sure how much work that would take, but it would discourage defensive use of the Golem while not artificially placing concrete restrictions on the unit.

I thought of that, and really liked the idea of that pretty well, but:

1. It would be difficult to describe that in flavor text.
2. It takes more time to code than I have at the moment.
3. It would prevent players from ever having peace while controlling a golem -- no withdrawing it from the front lines to repair and sit silently and harmlessly; AI ships would always potentially be warping en masse against it.

[x4000]

wait, so are you gonna make a reclaimation sniper or not?

Nope, no reclamation sniper, see my notes above.

so it's current attack is 10x (1800)but takes 60 seconds to reload? ( i doubt any ship should have a reload time over 30 seconds)

suddenly, you made sniper turrets not even as approachable than before the whole sniper buff.

The "damage per minute" for snipers is identical to before.  They just do more of it sooner, and cannot spread it between many ships as effectively.  But, given that their power was so low anyway, they weren't exactly spreading it around effectively before.

in case of higher power, make it reload 30 seconds and attack of 5000 and above. make snipers a real threat, on hostile planets it "focus fires" and destroys 20 or less fighters on a mk3 planet. and my snipers are only good against ships that pasted my wormhole defense which it never should.

That would make the way the AI uses sniper turrets absolutely unbearable, eh?  Your fleets would be shredded in minutes.

[x4000]

   *  There is now a sizable cluster penalty on fortresses, making them not very useful when clumped together too much on one planet.

Sizable? Yes. Extreme? YES.

My typical frontline defense has four fortresses.  To pull this off now, one of those marks has to have their attack power reduced to 20% (with two of them, that's the equivalent of a single fortress running at 40% capacity -- less than half) and I have to spend 12,000 knowledge where I used to only have to spend 4,000. So I spend 12,000 knowledge for less power than I used to get with 4,000.  There's something terribly wrong with this picture.

My goal is to nerf exactly that, and I know it's an extreme change.  You can still have three fortresses at full power, but they have to be a mark I, mark II, and mark III together (the reduction is per-mark-level, as with sentinel frigates, etc).  As for the other mark Is and IIs, you'll have them free for using on other planets.

I'm not terribly worried about this picture at all, you aren't meant to have so much concentrated firepower all at one place.  This is always the problem I face: the more ships I give people, the more they like to stick them all in one big blob that doesn't have much in the way of strategy associated with it.  My continual job is finding new and clever ways to stop that, heh.

In this specific case, you get a lot for spending a lower amount of knowledge for the mark I fortresses, but then you have the opportunity to get the mark II and III ones if you really want to specialize in fortresses.  As with many (but not all) specializations, you get somewhat diminishing returns for increasing costs.  In this case, the mark III fortress is absolutely a powerhouse, but you only get the one and it's pretty pricey.

Having a mark I, mark II, and mark III fortress would actually be more powerful than your old thing of having just four "no mark" fortresses in the past versions, I'm fairly sure (though I've not run the numbers).  You would spend a lot more knowledge on that, but I feel like that amount of knowledge is commensurate with the benefit you're getting out of it.

[x4000]

    * Sniper attack values have been increased 10x, and their reload speed has also been increased 10x. This makes them more of a "volley" type of unit, good at dealing a lot of damage right when ships enter their field of view, but then taking quite some time before they can do it again (about 60 seconds of reload in most cases).
          o The above applies to both snipers-the-unit and sniper turrets.
          o In the case of Spider Turrets, their values were only increased 5x since that made more sense for their engine-damage-focused abilities.

I will never update every again.

I presume you're joking, since you didn't give a reason and I can't understand why you'd have a huge negative reaction to this.  But, joking or not, that sort of comment really gets under my skin, I have to say.

[x4000]

Alright, I have been stewing overnight on the Golem changes, and I decided I think they are a good idea.

I really like the sniper modification. Should make them much funner to use.

Awesome, glad those are a hit, after deliberation.

[x4000]

7. RCIX, I also had thought about making golems dangerous to friendly ships, but that's just fraught with a lot of issues, I decided.  But that was something I spent a lot of time thinking about yesterday, trying to find a model that would work, etc.  In this case, I think simply removing the supply restriction handles the current issue well enough, anyhow.

Oh, i was just supplying a thematic reason for why Golems wouldn't work in the presence of allied ships

Sure, that's cool.