Prerelease 3.180 (Completely New Endgame)

[superking]

top notch

[lanstro]

Cool changes

[Kjara]

Random thoughts, most of these could be modified by the AI type or guard posts:

-homeworld adjacent planets are assaulted every X minutes when Human controlled.  waves are core ships and unreclaimable.  number of ships = X - (number of guard posts)x10, minimum of Y.  Therefore the waves get more intense as you kill guard posts.

-while homeworld adjacent planet is human controlled you get (number of guard posts)xY (or Z if only one homeworld is left) AIP every X minutes

-all ships and structures take ongoing damage while on a human controlled Homeworld adjacent planet.  It can be mitigated by repair, but would end up being expensive and difficult to maintain.

-AI starts building a nuke when homeworld adjacent planet is human controlled.  

-when a homeworld adjacent planet is human controlled backdoor wormhole opens up and starts sending ships every X minutes.

-when a homeworld adjacent planet is human controlled AI homeworld builds a gravity drill >_<

-when a homeworld adjacent planet is captured it causes a cross planet attack (maybe AI level +1)

I think most of these would be less punishing than the current model

All of these continue to encourage never taking a homeworld adjacent planet though.

[Vinraith]

Looking ahead at the 3.181 notes on the wiki I've got to say, those are some seriously dramatic balance changes. Can I ask what prompted them?

[keith.lamothe]

Looking ahead at the 3.181 notes on the wiki I've got to say, those are some seriously dramatic balance changes. Can I ask what prompted them?

Which ones, particularly?

The starship/warhead build speed just makes them a bit less painful to use, doesn't really impact unit balance very much.

The AI max-units-on-planet-per-guard-post dropping thing is largely just to reduce grindy-ness both for the player and the CPU itself.  There's plenty lately that more than balances out the actual challenge reduction there (mostly from the reduction in reinforcements).

The starfleet commander nerf was long needed, people have periodically reported simply ludicrous numbers of spire starships on every planet, etc.

The golem changes are somewhat significant, but mostly just to reduce the amount of pain involved in using them.  It's tricky to use something that gives the enemy so many units

The grenade launcher change is one of mine, again prompted by bug/pain reports more than anything else.  The idea is that their effectiveness in the common case shouldn't be any lower (indeed, probably higher), but it no longer has an asymptotic behavior on wormhole-exit scenarios and that sort of thing.

The neinzul youngling health change is basically not a change at all, just a workaround-type bugfix for the somewhat low precision available to the negative regen mechanic.

The silo emp-rate is a change to make the silos you've captured and moved on from a little less painful, again prompted by pain-report.

Or is it one of the other ones?

[Kjara]

I like the idea of golems possibly being worth using in the next version

[Spikey00]

I haven't gone to see the new guard post stuff for the endgame, but are these on multiple planets, or only on the AI home cores?

If they're on multiple planets (or if it's necessary) then perhaps include them in the objectives list?

[Vinraith]

Thanks for the reply Keith, I was talking about the reinforcements and cap change, specifically. My ship caps stay the same, the AI has far fewer ships, that seems (on the surface) like a major balance shift in my favor. My build rates stay the same, the AI's reinforcements are reduced, again that's clearly a benefit to me. Similarly, the reduction in cap on the AI homeworld and core worlds drastically reduces the chance of an unmanageable "backwash" of AI units, which is one of the greater risks of losing in the late game. I Know you guys are as fond of a challenging experience as I am so I'm sure I'm missing something, I just don't get it.

I also don't understand why everyone's afraid of using golems under the current rules, they're incredibly powerful on defense, and there's really never any need to use them on offense until you've removed the AI's ability to reinforce on a planet anyway. As a result of that second thing, though, I don't think the change matters all that much. Outside of using them to raid, I can't imagine it coming up.

[Burnstreet]

One thing that is annoying about the hybrid hives is that they seem to have a priority to target engies. Especially in the beginning this means that id you don't micromanage them you may end up without any engies, leaving you unable to properly react. same, just more expensive is valid for remains rebuilders.

Something else that doe not make sense for me is, that they seem to gather at one of the border planets and to get there, they try to go through my territory, even passing through my home planet to get there, only shooting what is in their path. I can provide a savegame if needed.

Vinraith, one situation where it does matter is when you try to attack a core world with a golem.

[Kjara]

Thanks for the reply Keith, I was talking about the reinforcements and cap change, specifically. My ship caps stay the same, the AI has far fewer ships, that seems (on the surface) like a major balance shift in my favor. My build rates stay the same, the AI's reinforcements are reduced, again that's clearly a benefit to me. Similarly, the reduction in cap on the AI homeworld and core worlds drastically reduces the chance of an unmanageable "backwash" of AI units, which is one of the greater risks of losing in the late game. I Know you guys are as fond of a challenging experience as I am so I'm sure I'm missing something, I just don't get it.

I also don't understand why everyone's afraid of using golems under the current rules, they're incredibly powerful on defense, and there's really never any need to use them on offense until you've removed the AI's ability to reinforce on a planet anyway. As a result of that second thing, though, I don't think the change matters all that much. Outside of using them to raid, I can't imagine it coming up.

My views on using them for defense is that I don't that much spare energy for a purely defensive unit, esp one that increases the waves I get hit by(since I generally don't have a safe back area for it to hang out in to not have the wave multipliers).  For offense, if you only use them to cleanup, again I can't see myself with the spare power.  If in some situations it could travel with my fleet in the late-mid to late game to provide additional firepower without being counter productive? Then I could see myself using it at times at least.

[Vinraith]

@kjara

To each their own, I guess. I have enough generators that I can flip a few on when I need the golem, then turn them back off when I deactivate it. On offense it would never be worth the repair costs to let it get shot up on a neutering run, gate raid, or command station run, and it's not like I ever fight the bulk of enemy forces in their own territory. Transports self-repair for free, 'nuf said. On defense, though, I've had a botnet golem save me from a loss twice now when fleet ship reserves were low.

[RCIX]

Haven't tried the latest golem changes (can't really, since they're not out yet ) but something you might find interesting regarding balance is what Supreme Commander 2 did with their experimentals (which you compared the golems to).

SC2 uses experimentals as support units, so it's uncommon that you can use them as your sole fighting force, but they become significantly more useful when combined with a fleet (because the fleet guards them from surprise attacks and the like, and has a sort of insulating effect against an attacking army). They only carry as much power as 5-10 normal units, but they exert that power over a much greater range compared to army units. I think this would be an interesting role to put golems in: maybe drop their power by 5x, their energy consumption by 2 or 3x, and up the range a ton, and remove some of the more exotic penalties. Then have each golem give a small boost to ships around it (health for armored, make engines invulnerable for black widow, range for artillery, etc.)

I think it could be cool. How about it?

[Kjara]

Finally found a homeworld, a few comments, avoid if you don't want any spoilers on the new things:









Core Z Fortress claims to emit fire at a "short range", but has 53k range (besides, this thing is a bit insane at 160k dps, 100 shots and 53k range?, it far overshadows all of the other types).  I'm hoping the 53k range is a typo of some sort, since I have a pretty much insane killing field where I think at least 2 mabee 3 of these have overlapping coverage.

Missile post claims to fire "long-range" missiles, but has 17k range (note this is only a bug if the above isn't, so probably ignore this one)

I had a N melee guard post spawn with the expansion off(well perhaps spawn, my scouts died on entry so I can't see it, but it showed up on the summary when I'm tabbed on the galaxy map and there's an unposted harvester).

Why not make at least one or two not immune to blade attacks(the missile one mabee?) and perhaps one not immune to snipers so these ship types are a bit less useless in the end game?

Core electric post seems to have shell as an ammo type, probably needs to be changed to major electric.  Its flavor text says to attack with something immune to electric, is there anything immune to major electric damage?

Core leech claims to paralyze in flavor text, but doesn't have either reclaimer(which leech would make me expect), or "attack paralyzes" in ability descriptions.

What ship type are all of these (aka what sort of stuff gets bonuses against them, just bombers or also stuff like armor ships and other things good against turrets)?

[quickstix]

The starfleet commander nerf was long needed, people have periodically reported simply ludicrous numbers of spire starships on every planet, etc.

I've seen pictures. It wasn't pretty.

The grenade launcher change is one of mine, again prompted by bug/pain reports more than anything else.  The idea is that their effectiveness in the common case shouldn't be any lower (indeed, probably higher), but it no longer has an asymptotic behavior on wormhole-exit scenarios and that sort of thing.

I found a core GL fabricator once. Good times. 

Haven't tried the latest golem changes (can't really, since they're not out yet ) but something you might find interesting regarding balance is what Supreme Commander 2 did with their experimentals (which you compared the golems to).

You know, this sounds interesting. It all depends on whether a golem should play as a centrepiece unit (which I quite like) or simply a super powerful ship you send in to bulldoze the enemy. This idea reminds me of when I watched the SupCom2 bomb bouncer video for the first time. It was much like a tank units could rally around and hit units that got too close with a blast every now and then. The power comes from both the sheer boost it gives to the rest of the attacking units near it and the offensive capabilities of the unit itself. It would be an interesting experiment. (No pun intended)

[RCIX]

It's funny, because the Bomb Bouncer is probably actually OP, due to it's ability to hold off indefinite amounts of artillery as well as destroy arbitrary amounts of air and land units, especially in quantity. /offtopic