My initial though is to drastically reduce the "Attacker" hybrids health in return for faster speed and a raiding mentality.
Yea, for 3.176 I've already:
- Reduced their speed from 50 to 30. Gives you a bit more time to do damage, also generally slows down.
- Hull strength from 2mil to 1.5mil. Makes it easier to cut down on repeat offenders (they aren't intended to have ultra-survivability individually, just reasonably so).
- Cut their attack power against forcefields to 20% of what it was. They can still chew through ff's but it's more of a lunch than a quick snack and you have a chance to scare them away in time. Note that later-tier attacker types will have more siege-oriented modules available to them, but the basic attacker class doesn't need to slice through ff like butter.
- In response to your suggestion just now, made the base attacker type only able to get a MkI forcefield (same as a neophyte) instead of MkII, so 0.5mil hp instead of 1.0mil. That may be a bit too low now, we'll see. Also, if the new-to-3.176 "Advanced Hybrids" plot is enabled then the attacker type can get MkII forcefields like before.
- Slightly increased how long it takes a Hybrid to spawn from nothing, and how long it takes them to mature from one stage to the next. Generally slows down the pacing of the hammer-blows
Anyway, all this together may wind up being too much nerf, but I don't think so (indeed, may still be too hard, with the defender types shutting down offensives and such). We'll see how it goes.
edit: Or some sort of cluster penalty for the attacker type hybrids, or something based on AI progress so the attacker type is more dangerous the later in the game it is? But that's connecting it back to the core AI's again.
The attackers get stronger as they mature and get better modules and drones, so a number of the steps taken thus far are intended to reduce the brute-force-power of the base attacker class. If I try a cluster penalty they'll kill me
(it also wouldn't really work as most of the firepower is in the modules which would only cluster with other modules of the exact same type and mark level)
In a real game, I would be expanding before they could choke me off
Yea, that's the idea, just gotta get the attackers to the point where the player CAN reasonably do some expansion and get adequate defenses up, rather than one or the other.
Thanks very much for the testing, the feedback helps a lot
