Zenith Remnant Impressions, raiders + trader wierdness

[maritime]

I started a new game with lots of the new options on to see what was up.

I was playing 7.6 AI vs teleporter turtle and raider.

Game Report..

The trader was in my small 2 system frontier a lot, he would come and go every 30 mins or so. After a few hours I noticed that the AI progress was at 1... I moused over it and saw that there was 80 negative AI points, I assume from the AI buying things from the trader. This grew to around 240 negative AI points (I had 32 positive AI...) by about hour 5. I finally decided I didn't want the AI buying more stuff and waited until the trader moved into my system (2 adjacent with only one exit) and then moved a forcefield over the wormhole. He would just move next to my forcefield and sit there, unable to leave the system. Seems cheap, trader should probably be able to move through them or else he will never help the AI as he is always on my system. Anyway...

I was playing teleporter turtle and the system adjacent to my starting one had a lvl 4 fortress... GRR. It took me about 7 hours to get that down (thank god for acceleration!) The system next to this (I was playing on tree so things were pretty linear) had 2 warp gates, 3 ion cannons, 2 of those super anti starship cannons... I sent in 5 dreadnoughts and 3 raid ships with about 500 regular ships, they got cut down in seconds.  I assume that this is where the AI had been buying lots of stuff from the trader. All of this wonderfulness was under a core forcefield with 18 million HP or something. Great. Good news was that the AI progress was still at 1, and teleporter turtle wasnt launching any attacks.

Lucky for me the neutral raiders sent 200 of those frigates after the AI world. His ion cannons (even mk2) couldnt make a dent in them, but something the AI had disabled all of their engines. The problem was they enter from WAY WAY WAY of the map, and were super spread out, and unable to move. While his ions were busy shooting at the frigates (and killing one every 2 minutes or so...) I snuck in a bunch of ships as cover for my 3 raid starships and barely managed to kill their command center for the region before all the ion cannons ripped me a new one. Then I built 4 force fields, 20 engineers, warped them all into the system with a bunch of cannon fodder ships, and a colony ship. I built my command center inside the 4 force fields, and with the 20 engineers on it (who were getting killed by god knows what that can go through force fields) I BARELY finished it... BUT when I did finish it I got the 3 ion cannons and 2 anti starship cannons. SHWEEET.

Now, heres what sucks, the 200 raiders were still in the system, but the ions (or something..) had disabled all of their engines, and they were all WAY WAY WAY off the map and WAY WAY WAY spread out. I scrolled for 30 seconds or so and couldnt even find them. the minimap had dots all around the perimeter but who knows how far out they were. I had my 5 raiders and 3 raid ships on auto defend mode, so they went out looking for them and SLOWLY killed all of the stupid raiders. All this time my ion cannons were shooting constantly and doing NOTHING to the raiders. It took about 1 hour to get rid of them all.

I finally did (yay!) and then moved onto the next planet, which was also owned by mr teleporter turtle and had tons and tons of ion cannons and other defenses. I did the same trick, killed command center, then built my own to reclaim the ion cannons. Unfortunately, this world also had about 150 raiders with no engines way off in the distance. I think what happens is the Raiders spawn way off the map, teleporter turtle has some teleporting ship that kills engines so they instant move to the raiders way off the map, kill their engines, and then let them sit there. This is a BIG PAIN IN THE ASS to clean up. At least let my ion cannons kill them in a couple shots ;-)

Then raiders attacked one of my defenseless worlds, or at least I think they did... it says there are 75 there, but I cant find them anywhere and they havent attacked in 20 minutes or so. I think they are just moving REALLY REALLY slowly. Or got lost.

I am giving up on this play, the raiders are no fun at all to mop up. They did create an opening for me to take out one AI planet, but the way they spawn / attack is not great. I think they should come through a wormhole just like the AI, but maybe they can come through ANY wormhole, even one that you have fully secured behind your main lines. Or they make their own new temporary wormhole, that you cannot enter? Maybe a message "raiders warping in in XX minutes!!" and you can go to whatever system and see the wormhole forming somewhere. Also I think their frigates are way too hard to kill. They are raiders, they should have tons and tons of little fighter ships, not 200 frigates with a couple hundred thousand HP each.

Overall impressions, new version is AWESOME! But... in a 8 hour game I took 4 planets, had AI progress of 40 (base) with about 240 negative AI progress to burn through before I started adding to it.

[eRe4s3r]

Speaking of the raiders, i can confirm that *something* does indeed kill their engines, and i mean, MASSIVELY all over. Though you can ignore them and simply not care

But i agree that the raiders need a fix, maybe they should come with a transport ship with inf eng health that parks at the border of the system and unloads the ships then.

Also, snipers and spider turrets seem to fire out of sector - their shot is slow, so that means that they are used up on these marauders for hours and don't switch targets when a real attack comes.

As for the progress thing, i can confirm that the ai buys like theres a wholesale and i have even seen 5 ion MK2 and 2 Mass drivers in a sector. But you can attack them easily enough (with flagships and their 4x damage boost)

but yea, something about the raiders needs to be done, theres a huge delay between announcement and anything happening which easily leads to the player forgetting about it

[x4000]

Glad you are enjoying it, overall!

I think that the bulk of the oddness you were seeing there was due to the Zenith Trade Ship.  Really, that was causing just a ton of strangeness for a couple of players -- the AI Progress gets sent way down because of all the useless stuff the AI buys, and then the useful stuff that the AI buys is in way too much supply also.  In the next version, I am changing it so that the AI Progress never gets reduced by the trade ship, but the AI will also only make purchases about 1% of the time compared to what it previously did.  This should make the Zenith Trade Ships a lot less extreme in their effect on the game.

Also, I think you are referring to marauders when you are talking about raiders?  The fact of them getting disabled and sitting useless way off in the middle of nowhere is a really good point.  I am going to make it so that both marauders and resistance fighters will have infinite engine health to prevent that from happening, because I think that is both overpowered and annoying in terms of how your sort of reported scenario affects players.

At any rate, I think these two changes should resolve all your issues when the next version comes out.  Thanks so much for the detailed report, that was some really great info there, very helpful!

[x4000]

Ah yes, eRe4s3r, you were the other player I was referring to providing good data about the Traders.  I was already thinking of changing them based just on your reports, but this seals the deal even more.  The change I posted about the marauders should also fix your issue withe them, so hopefully this will be better all around for you, as well.

[eRe4s3r]

Well its still a beta after all 

[maritime]

One more (unrelated) suggestion... now there are dozens of player special ship types... why cant we just pick our starting ship type instead of having them randomly assigned to planets? I have to re-seed forever until I get a good map with the ship type I want to play in a good position...

[eRe4s3r]

I am guessing its because in coop that would lead to everyone picking bombards or beam frigates 

[x4000]

Yeah -- for another two days!  That's why I hate adding such major features so close to release, I would have preferred a bit more time.  But, there's just a few such issues that seem to be there, and that was the most severe of them balance-wise.  It should work out well, but of course there will be more changes after this leaves beta, anyway; the nature of any such system with this much complexity, it will always be evolving at least slightly until it is dead.

[x4000]

One more (unrelated) suggestion... now there are dozens of player special ship types... why cant we just pick our starting ship type instead of having them randomly assigned to planets? I have to re-seed forever until I get a good map with the ship type I want to play in a good position...

That's part of why these are seeded with the planets -- to encourage branching out, rather than just having players always picking their favorite type and their favorite position.  Variety is good!