Question: balancing purpose of caps on high-energy defenses?

[contingencyplan]

From my understanding, the main purpose of energy is to limit the amount of "things" you can build at any given time. Additionally, it makes it easier for the AI to kill the player if the player lacks the energy buffer to maintain their defenses, hence the role of Matter Converters.

In the case of fleet ships, the caps provide a secondary limitation --- in the limit, to prevent the player from building a metric ton of ships for homeworld assaults. Furthermore, caps on auto-build-able ships prevent accidental energy exhaustion by telling the Dock when to stop.

However, I was looking at the modular fortress with its ship cap of 1 (and at fortresses in general) and got to wondering: given their high energy cost (ModForts at 100k, Forts at 90k, 120k, and 180k resp.) and the fact that they are must be manually placed rather than auto-built, what is the balancing purpose of having a galaxy-wide cap on their usage? By building them, I've already said that the system's defense is worth most of the free energy I gain from it (more than that in the case of FortIII), so why does the cap limit exist? What cheese is it preventing?

The main thing that I can see is the player putting a Fort on every border world, but at that point, shouldn't the energy costs --- in principle, I haven't crunched numbers --- cause a handicap on the amount of other things I can build, especially the ships I need to take the next planet / the AI Homeworlds?

[LaughingThesaurus]

I think it must be the idea that having a lot of forts is just ridiculously silly. It's probably also a factor in multi-homeworld games and effectively if the forts had an unlimited cap you would be able to basically trade matter converters for them.

Also why would you ever unlock higher mark forts, unless they're more energy efficient?
Regardless I'm still kind of intrigued by the idea of having lots of forts at the cost of energy as a "global ship cap"

[_K_]

What cheese is it preventing?

The most common (and efficient) strategy right now is chokepointint. And with enough planets behind the chokepoint, you will have enough energy to build way more than the current cap. So right now if you want more forts than the cap, you gotta unlock MKIIs.
Also, if you get MKII or MKIII fort and have no cap, you will have pretty much no reason to build lower marks at all. The highest mark forts are the most efficient per energy spent.
MKIII = triple strength of MKII, only double its energy cost.

[keith.lamothe]

The galaxy-wide caps are to maintain at least some relationship between "amount of K spent" and "total buildable power".

It would be ok to have a new high-energy-cost low-per-planet-cap defensive unit, though.  The "miniforts" are just that in... well, miniature.  Sure, some folks can afford to put miniforts everywhere and thus get a fairly ridiculous total power return for K cost, but most people won't have that much energy to spare, and even if someone does it's not like miniforts everywhere is anything like being able to concentrate them all on one planet.

[ZaneWolfe]

A possible idea, just because it randomly came to me after reading this. You could make the Forts a per planet cap, like the mini forts are now. This would increase the viability of multi-ingress point setups, by giving you access to even more defensive power, while keeping the soft cap via their ridiculous energy costs. Probably go with something like 3 for MKI, 2 for MKII, and 1 for MKIII. You could still stack up forts on a choke point, but you couldn't do something like 5+ MKIII forts on the same world even if your econ could afford the energy cost. (Cinth I am looking at you.) This does nerf chokepoints a bit, but not overly much, at least IMO. (Though I would imagine that someone like Cinth would feel this more than your average player)

[keith.lamothe]

I don't see the value in reducing the caps on the existing forts as outweighing the cost of "nerfing without cause" those players who rely on forts (there's more than just one of them, appearances aside).  If we wanted per-planet-cap forts, we could add per-planet-cap forts.  If we did then we might make them 1-per-planet and take 1 away from the normal fort cap of the same mark and possibly alter the K cost accordingly (it's possible they could stand to cost more K per unit, dunno).

[Cinth]

You know... If you mention my name 3 times in the same post, your CPU will start to melt

[RCIX]

Cinth Cinth Cinth *sssssss*

[chemical_art]

As a counter point, I think Forts are the worst abusers of chokepoint theory.

They are very expensive.

They are very energy intensive.

But if your empire is based on a single chokepoint, these negatives are counteracted by their massive damage.

[Cinth]

Cinth Cinth Cinth *sssssss*

Watch out for the purple smoke... once you see that, the magic is leaking out.

[TechSY730]

As a counter point, I think Forts are the worst abusers of chokepoint theory.

They are very expensive.

They are very energy intensive.

But if your empire is based on a single chokepoint, these negatives are counteracted by their massive damage.

And is that a problem?
It's a unit that works very well for certain types of defense models, and that's fine IMO.

I guess the problem is more that there is no equivalent "very effective" unlock that gives more return the more distributed you make your defenses.
The mini-forts do this somewhat, but aren't really strong enough to be the "distributed defense" equivalent in terms of how much better they get the more you "push" that defensive layout.

[keith.lamothe]

And is that a problem?
It's a unit that works very well for certain types of defense models, and that's fine IMO.

I guess the problem is more that there is no equivalent "very effective" unlock that gives more return the more distributed you make your defenses.
The mini-forts do this somewhat, but aren't really strong enough to be the "distributed defense" equivalent in terms of how much better they get the more you "push" that defensive layout.

Well, do you folks want a per-planet-cap all-up fort?  Would that actually help with distributed defense?  Or would it just cause additional fist-shaking at your depleted energy counter?

[Cinth]

Depends on what the caps look like

[chemical_art]

And is that a problem?
It's a unit that works very well for certain types of defense models, and that's fine IMO.

I guess the problem is more that there is no equivalent "very effective" unlock that gives more return the more distributed you make your defenses.
The mini-forts do this somewhat, but aren't really strong enough to be the "distributed defense" equivalent in terms of how much better they get the more you "push" that defensive layout.

Well, do you folks want a per-planet-cap all-up fort?  Would that actually help with distributed defense?  Or would it just cause additional fist-shaking at your depleted energy counter?

Well, when no one. No. One. Can dispute that the chokepoint theory trumps all defensive theories, I feel anything that nerfs this in return to benefit other defenses is inherently not bad.

I mean, if we had this logic, then we couldn't have changed strategic reserves to be static.

[TechSY730]

I'd like to see the existing forts remain the way they are. (in terms of core mechanics of how they work, cost changes and dps and health changes are fine)

If we need more defensive options that get more effective as defense gets more distributed (note, not defense in general, just that option(s)), I'd rather see a more "radical"/interesting type thing than a "distributed fort" or a larger version of the minifort.