raid starship balance discussion

[TheMachineIsSentient]

How's everyone doing against raid starships lately? I've noticed, even on 98 progress, I have Mark three raid starships easily walking in, hitting my command center a couple times, and then leaving before I have any time to mobilize a defense. And by defense, I mean siege starships, because regular triangle ships only give them a light tickle, and normal turrets can't touch them unless they are flak turrets  because they are immune to most all defenses.

edit: I forgot to    after "flak turrets"

[Wingflier]

I personally agree that Raid Starships, in the hands of the AI, are a problem.

They are very quick, powerful, and hard to kill (at least before they take out something important).

At best, you lose an energy generator or 2, maybe an Orbital Command Station, before you kill them.  At worst, you lose something irreplaceable, like a Core Fabricator.

[Vinraith]

I used to have this problem under 3.1x occasionally. Under later 3.1x builds and the 4.x versions, they swoop in, become completely preoccupied shooting at a force field they'll never be able to get down, and die quickly thereafter. Consequently I haven't lost a structure to one in the past 4 or 5 games I've played.

[TheMachineIsSentient]

I have also seen them inexplicably go after a force field as well, however, when they are using mark three against Mark one force fields, it is effective. :-) I was hoping to hear people's defensive solutions.

[Winter Born]

Fabs just got a huge buff which should help against all FF penetrating ships.

[Vinraith]

I have also seen them inexplicably go after a force field as well, however, when they are using mark three against Mark one force fields, it is effective. :-) I was hoping to hear people's defensive solutions.

Interesting. Can I ask what difficulty you're playing on? I can't help with defensive solutions simply because I haven't seen the problem in ages (and when I WAS seeing the problem I didn't know how to deal with it , I'm just interested because I'd thought this kind of thing wasn't happening anymore.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Heavy beam cannons have enough damage to penetrate their armor, and get a bonus against Ultra-Light.

[orzelek]

Smallish issue now is that player Ultra-Light counter is a missile turret (8x bonus). This basically means that it can't counter raid starships and few other ultra-light ships that are missile immune.

It's hard to tell if this is by design or something to be changed. This mostly touches raid starships and leech starships - both are ultra-light and missile immune.

[TheMachineIsSentient]

Smallish issue now is that player Ultra-Light counter is a missile turret (8x bonus). This basically means that it can't counter raid starships and few other ultra-light ships that are missile immune.

It's hard to tell if this is by design or something to be changed. This mostly touches raid starships and leech starships - both are ultra-light and missile immune.

Correct, both of these ships wander around without any fear through a defensive planet. Leech only does a few hundred damage and is as equally effective as a flak turret. Watching them battle each other is like watching a tickle fight.

I guess the solution is heavy beam cannons? I didn't want to *have* to research these, but I guess so. I play on difficulty seven and eight.

[orzelek]

There is one more missile immune starship that will give you much more headache: core star ship that comes to chew you when you talk with spire. It has same issue as with raider starships - Neutron hull counter is MLRS which is missile but can't shoot at it. Having many of these attack means that you need to whittle them down - and usually use double forcefiled with repairing to protect your home command station.

[Diazo]

I think the bigger problem is the 30 k armor, maybe give it incremental armor so that they aren't quite so hard to kill?

like 10k, 20k, 30k?

You do want them to be hard to kill, but at the moment it's a little ridiculous.

D.

[HitmanN]

The Raid SS's are a bit weird these days. Sometimes (but rarely) they do mad quick strikes and take out a Command Station, then run. Other times, which is more common, they pick weird targets.

There was this one planet in particular in a game I'm just playing. I had a mk1 econ station, mk2 FF, mk2 and mk3 reactors, and some miscellaneous turrets in the location. The Raid SS came in. Shot at the FF a few times. Then shot at a Laser Turret once, Then started shooting at the mk3 reactor, kept shooting and destroyed it, fired on the FF again, the laser turret, then the mk2 reactor, destroyed it, and ran away to shoot some random turret on the other edge of the planet. Then my backup fleet arrived and eliminated it.

Weird.

When there's a lot of them though, I tend to rely on a combo of Heavy Beams and Grav Turrets, so that I can keep starships mostly on offense. Gravs give the Heavy Beam plenty of time to shoot down a few Raids and Leeches.

I play mostly on Diff 7, but I'm thinking about moving to 8 soon.

[Vinraith]

This may no longer be all that relevant, considering how much the balance has changed, but I figure it's worth cross linking anyway:

http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,6532.0.html

[TechSY730]

From that past discussion, it looks like people were always complaining about how well raid starships can, well, raid. I guess they were designed to be overly annoying. In fact, many of the complaints look similar (In particular, how well they can "muscle" past turrets)
Now whether they have gotten more or less annoying and/or unbalanced since then is something that is up to debate.

[Lancefighter]

the question of course, is: at what point can a player raiding toy be useful, while the same toy in ai hands is not powerful?