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

[Cinth]

Changing the fort caps to much would kill my ultra crazy high AIP play.

Well, for me, high AIP games do the same, except I have to ensure. Have. To Ensure. That my high AIP games have to a chokepoint. Having them per planet helps alleviate the necessity of choke points.

Depends on what the caps are. 

And I'm pretty sure I'm one of the few players who would consider pushing 9.8 to MK III (or IV) tech through AIP

[keith.lamothe]

Chem: Would you be willing to absolutely destroy someones preferred method of play to get this kind of change in?

Considering I already did when I asked for static reserves to be static AIP, I feel boxed in 

If someone's preferred playstyle were destroyed by said rule, they can turn it off.  They're getting a situation that may simply be too easy if they don't compensate with other settings, but they're not stuck with the static reserves.

[orzelek]

I would like additional per planet fort idea. As I would like anything per planet that can help with distributed defense.

Proposed for idea for this is a bit.. strange for fort. It would need to be either very durable (to actually hold that enemies) or have some dps. Without dps it will be next thing to rebuild after it gets wrecked with enemies repairing their engines slowly.

[keith.lamothe]

Proposed for idea for this is a bit.. strange for fort.

It was just a response to the mention of a riot fort   Riots don't kill much.

[Cinth]

Maybe a good time to go with the Riot Fortress.  You know the one, the one everyone hangs out with. 

Ok, so:

Per-planet cap of 1.
K-cost maybe 2x the minifort.
M+C and E maybe 4x the minifort (so 2x cap-vs-cap)
Weapon like the riot's laser cannons (probably without the ED-floor) but with a lot of shots per salvo.  Not likely to kill much, in any event.
A lot of fairly long-range tractor beams.  Possibly even paralyzing tractors (a la the widow golem) but that could be a bit much.

Not going the modular route because there's no interface for placing templated types, iirc, and don't want these to need extra attention per unit given the per-planet nature.

Don't know how I missed this, lol.

It would need to be fairly beefy HP wise since your probably going to have it camping a wormhole, and it is going to have a bunch of POed AI ships dead in the water close by. 

[Radiant Phoenix]

As a Fallen Spire player who is trying out non-X map styles (I'm currently working on a cluster with two entrances, after having failed badly at getting three chokepoints in a 'simple' map), I don't find Mini-forts too amazing (and I have them, in every system) -- they just don't deal with anything at 800 AIP. Not even counterattack guard posts waves (which are one of the things that, in the past, chokepoints didn't protect against).

What I think I would find very useful would be a per-planet high-HP "tarpit" fortress that would slow the AI down enough for my fleet to arrive and defend.

Something like a riot-control fortress, yes, but it needs to stall about a thousand mark-3 fleet ships and a starship and a carrier for a few minutes.

I think it wants a lightning weapon that does a bunch of engine damage, and about sixty million HP, and radar dampening equal to its weapon range, and some paralysis to help it out. The paralysis should be for slightly less than its reload time so it doesn't completely stunlock the attackers.

[Cinth]

If it has RD like the Mini, then it should have 23k range and RD to 15k.

[Radiant Phoenix]

If it has RD like the Mini, then it should have 23k range and RD to 15k.

Yeah, maybe.

But if it's a major electric paralyzer with significant engine damage, 8k might be too far to expect the enemy to be able to drive.

[Diazo]

Heh. Don't worry, I'm around, this thread is just moving fast.

I'm not actually sure I have a suggestion on this yet, expect to note that we have kind of drifted from forts back to the "how required should chokepoints be?" conversation.

Also, I want to note that if you have exo-waves on, chokepoints are mandatory.

To actually change this situation is going to require coming up with a superweapon counter that is different and can be dangerous to both single-ingress and multi-ingress player empires.

At that point you are redoing a significant chunk of the game.

The thing is, forts are designed for chokepoints and chokepoints are the optimal defensive strategy (arguably required for end-game exo waves) and the fort is really the only thing in our toolkit that is really designed for chokepoints so I don't want to mess with them.

What would I like to see for multi-ingress defense? A better way of dealing with threat. Because I know I can't fort every system I have a response fleet for dealing with waves. I need to bring my main (offensive) fleet back to go threat hunting though.

In my current game I'm looking to have 10 adjacent AI systems so when I go threat hunting, I'm starting to get annoyed by the 4th or 5th system and by the 9th or 10th system a grind is the only way to describe it.

Off the top of my head, something like a warhead that reduces the systems firepower to zero for the purposes of the AI deciding to attack so threat comes through to me? Would cost AIP like all warheads. That would give me a way of killing that 400 threat on a planet with 1500 units without freeing any the 1100 units that are currently not threat onto threat.

So yes, as my games progress it is more often then not threat that kills me. Not waves or a CPA, just the threat hanging around builds up until I can't stop it because I have so many ingress points.

Not sure how much that helps the discussion, but chokepoint is going to be optimal (or required for exo-waves) and we can't change that without breaking the game. (If changes go in to make chokepoint not the optimal strategy, it could still be fun but it would not be AI war any more.)

D.

[Cinth]

If it has RD like the Mini, then it should have 23k range and RD to 15k.

Yeah, maybe.

But if it's a major electric paralyzer with significant engine damage, 8k might be too far to expect the enemy to be able to drive.

More like the RCS Laser weapon with a huge volley.

D: Welcome D! I figured you might have some game experiences to share that would relate to the general topic (chokepointing vs broader defensive lines/multiple border planets).

Have you tried to use something like a beachhead in a defensive configuration?  Don't know how useful something like that would be (don't know your economic situation), but if you had some turrets to spare, you could have a small setup to handle threat (at the cost of alerting the neighbors).  Might be useful enough for out of the way systems you would rather ignore (and don't have significant connections). That's practically what I use, though I use it in a chokepoint configuration.

[Toranth]

The thing is, forts are designed for chokepoints and chokepoints are the optimal defensive strategy (arguably required for end-game exo waves) and the fort is really the only thing in our toolkit that is really designed for chokepoints so I don't want to mess with them.

What would I like to see for multi-ingress defense? A better way of dealing with threat. Because I know I can't fort every system I have a response fleet for dealing with waves. I need to bring my main (offensive) fleet back to go threat hunting though.

Random idea:  Make Fortresses able to make Wormhole jumps - but only if in Supply.  If they were unable jump out of supply, you'd still be able to move them around your systems, and even advance them a bit for use in clearing out threat, but they wouldn't be able to actually be 'offensive' units.

Off the top of my head, something like a warhead that reduces the systems firepower to zero for the purposes of the AI deciding to attack so threat comes through to me? Would cost AIP like all warheads. That would give me a way of killing that 400 threat on a planet with 1500 units without freeing any the 1100 units that are currently not threat onto threat.

I'd love more support-type turrets and buildings out there.  A "Deception turret" that does what you suggest, or "Fake turrets" that add lots of FP to the AI's calculations, but don't actually do much.  "Fake Buildings" like faked command centers or FacIVs, so the AI can be confused and split its forces within a system, wasting time and firepower to deal with decoys.
Warheads would be acceptable, I suppose.  I'd prefer something more reliable, since the AI's decisions are so random.  It'd be a shame to use such a warhead, gain AIP, then watch the AI threatfleet go wander off somewhere else.

per-planet caps on Fortresses

Remember, a single system with 10 Fortresses is much more powerful than 5 systems with 2 Fortresses each.

[Diazo]

I do sometimes setup a beachhead to handle stuff like that, but it's rare.

I'm more typically faced with something like this:



My HW is the green circle on the right, I'm going to capture the 3 worlds in the green on the left, giving me a 4 planet empire by about the 3 hour to 3hour 30 minutes mark.

I am then going to stay a 4 planet empire for the next 3 hours of gametime while I hammer scouts out and reveal the majority of the map.

The next planets I take will be somewhere in the middle with an Adv Fac in them, but scouting that far out is going to take a while.

That leaves the 8 pink circled planets on alert for ages and its 8 planets for threat to sit on. I can't beachead that many planets, not if I want to spend K to unlock most of my Mk II and a Mk III fleet ship.

So ya, the bottom line is that once I get a few planets captured and so have the energy base to build everything I have access to, I fear threat the most up until I'm looking at attacking the AI HWs.

Waves? Easy to deal with as I know where they are going to hit. CPA? I pull my main fleet back to deal with that.

Random threat from my offensive actions and the survivors from waves that run away that survive to launch no warning attacks later on against any of my systems? Freaking dangerous.

And the best tool I've found for dealing with threat is Riot Is with tractors to pull them through in the tractor beams. But as the AI's unit count goes up Riot I's die before they can transit back and Riot IIs can't mount tractors.

At that point my offensive fleet turns around and I have to do a brute force clean out of all units in all adjacent systems to get the threat count back down.

I'd really like a better way to deal with threat (costing K or AIP as appropriate) because that is what loses me most of my games these days.

D.

[Cinth]

A small one might help you out on yarr to the south of your HW, but Savdis would be alerted.  Once you had a battle plan to work out those CSG planets, you would know where you would have permanently alerted planets (and have good candidates for beachheads.  You know what your doing there (better than I do )

@ Toranth: An exo made of 1 million FP is much stronger than a system with 10 fortresses

[Diazo]

Remember, a single system with 10 Fortresses is much more powerful than 5 systems with 2 Fortresses each.

But assuming the game has no exo-wave sources (like mine), 5 systems with 2 fortresses is a much better tactical decision then 10 fortresses in one system.

My example game above with 4 planets under my control? All 4 of those planets are staying exposed to the AI the entire game, lattice map simply has too many connections to make gate raiding worth the AIP.

Now we are coming back to different playstyles and the fact that while I'm not far enough out to call my playstyle an outlier, I am on that outer edge of the 'different playstyles' cloud.

D.

[contingencyplan]

Holy hell this thread is moving fast.

As a Fallen Spire player who is trying out non-X map styles (I'm currently working on a cluster with two entrances, after having failed badly at getting three chokepoints in a 'simple' map), I don't find Mini-forts too amazing (and I have them, in every system) -- they just don't deal with anything at 800 AIP. Not even counterattack guard posts waves (which are one of the things that, in the past, chokepoints didn't protect against).

That's one of the things that led to my question; I figured it'd become intertwined with the ongoing non-chokepoint strategies discussion, but I at least wanted to understand the point of having both limitations (power and cap) on a static defense.


For me, Mini-Forts are cute, and I've unlocked them in every game since they came out (which isn't that many games, really), but in terms of defense on their own, they don't really do much (though I need to see how they match up against hostile Enclaves). Granted, I play more "Sherman march to the sea" / "WWII European theater" in that I tend to have a mostly connected chain of planets to the AI HWs, as opposed to the "Island Hopping" / "WWII Pacific theater" approach that I know is popular. But I just don't see the "couple of AI fleetships" come into my border planets (i.e., bordered by the AI, but shouldn't get waves due to gate raiding) that the Mini-Fort addresses. If something comes into a border planet, it's either going to be the threatfleet, the Champion Nemeses (which the Mini-Fort is useless against), Exos or something similarly "non-trivial."

Is that others' experience as well, or an artifact of my playstyle, or me just not paying attention?


And to be clear, I'm not suggesting that Forts be changed --- I know that a lot of playstyles (e.g., Cinth's) depend on them. However, I do like the earlier suggestion of two separate research lines: one for common / galaxy-wide buildings, one for per-planet buildings. I remember Keith mentioning having per-planet turret lines during one of the Crystal alternative discussions; I don't see any reason why we couldn't just fold that idea back into here for regular resources, given that Crystal is looking like it'll be changed to Hacking (an idea I love).


If I had to say something specific that I wanted, it'd be this. Previously, nemeses spawned at the hour mark, meaning that I had an hour to try to build a buffer around my HW and put down enough defenses so that the nemeses (for 3 champs) would stay out. A complete chokepoint wasn't possible on that map (Simple layout), meaning that my defenses were stretched so that by the time the 3 Exos showed up at the 3 hour mark, it didn't matter where they came through at, they were going to reach my HW. Now, nemeses will spawn a little later, giving me time to set up my position better, but the core problem of having to stretch my defenses too thinly will remain. I'd like some way of dealing with this --- it doesn't necessarily have to be more firepower, but something.