Reactions to Ancient Shadows and Suggestions

[Draco18s]

Can there be an option to cuddle our champions?

Can we coddle them too?

[Philo]

When I heard about the Champions I was thinking something along the lines of Dota. Are you gonna have special regenerating skills etc. (or something that a player that would be playing just a champion wouldn't be bored) for the champions or is this basically just a heavy starship that builds it's weapons by experience?

Admittedly I've played this expansion just for an hour now.

[keith.lamothe]

I would like to do directly-triggered abilities like in the MOBAs, but it'd be a fair chunk of new code and I wanted to get a better feel for how much time the stuff actually listed in the expansion bullet points was going to take me before deciding to bite into that

My guess for actual playstyle in multiplayer is that the champion-only players would also be given team-control of a normal player's units so they could bring in and directly control some fleet support on some actions.  Not in the nebula stuff, but there there's more need for direct involvement with the one unit.

[Philo]

I would like to do directly-triggered abilities like in the MOBAs, but it'd be a fair chunk of new code and I wanted to get a better feel for how much time the stuff actually listed in the expansion bullet points was going to take me before deciding to bite into that

Well, here's hoping. Directly triggered abilities would be the best. And a skill tree maybe later on
I guess items are already in the to do list also?

But a top priority for me would be new sounds for the Champions weapons, and maybe new sound effects for other ship in the other universe. A lot of the feel has to do with sounds so the Champion has got to have them. Also, just being able to name the Champion would improve a lot. But I think this is already on the do list.

Also, I haven't found a way to repair the champion in the other universe, I guess there isn't any possibility. Some kind of quick repair station should be near the wormhole or being able to launch repair drones from the Champion. This considering that having the Champion destroyed is punished in some way.

[keith.lamothe]

Also, just being able to name the Champion would improve a lot. But I think this is already on the do list.

You can already do this: it uses the name of the player that controls it, and you can control your player name by the profile window, or the name of other player slots through the Manage Players window in-game

Also, I haven't found a way to repair the champion in the other universe, I guess there isn't any possibility. Some kind of quick repair station should be near the wormhole or being able to launch repair drones from the Champion. This considering that having the Champion destroyed is punished in some way.

The lack of repair out there is a balance consideration; if you have some degree of control over the normal-space entrance you can just park engineers on the other side of the wormhole and go back there.  If you're operating outside the area where you can do that, you can regenerate health by getting out of the line of fire before your shield generators are overloaded and wait for them to recharge.  I may make the recharge a little faster, but it's there.

If your shields totally fail, then there's no way to repair hull damage in the nebula, which is intentional.

[Faulty Logic]

Having played through most of an AS game now, here are my personal suggestions:

First, Ancient Shadows is awesome. The Champion(s) suck up your excess attention like mercs do your excess resources.

A new quest, and a big reward for completing all of them:
Resistance is under attack: The deep space corps of the AI has finally gotten to the resistance bases. Save them and gain the ability to call in resistance strikes (1 per 2 hours, AI homeworlds exempt).

If all quests end in victory: you get to build the Shadow Hub. It connects all the backwaters to each other, and gives all of your ships the shadow drive.

Could you give the Frigate some usefulness after you unlock the destroyer? Like cloaking?

For directly triggered abilities, a shortcut I would really like, and which sounds easy to implement (like most things, until you try) would be a missile silo module, which generates AIP-free mini-warheads of its mark, with a high recharge time. These would have about 1/3-1/4 the effectiveness of normal warheads.

Refinement/feedback welcome.
Outright rejection less welcome but acceptable.

[keith.lamothe]

A new quest, and a big reward for completing all of them:
Resistance is under attack: The deep space corps of the AI has finally gotten to the resistance bases. Save them and gain the ability to call in resistance strikes (1 per 2 hours, AI homeworlds exempt).

Something like that might happen, yea.  And actually that wouldn't be a bad example of a direct-use ability for the champion.

If all quests end in victory: you get to build the Shadow Hub. It connects all the backwaters to each other, and gives all of your ships the shadow drive.

The wormhole graph is set in stone at mapgen, sorry   Just getting the offroad wormholes to act differently than normal ones was an enormous change.

Could you give the Frigate some usefulness after you unlock the destroyer? Like cloaking?

I've been thinking about it but in general I don't think it's a bad (just non-ideal) thing that you always use the heaviest hull available to you from the race you want to use at that time.  Perhaps some speed differences, etc would make it less obvious though.

For directly triggered abilities, a shortcut I would really like, and which sounds easy to implement (like most things, until you try) would be a missile silo module, which generates AIP-free mini-warheads of its mark, with a high recharge time. These would have about 1/3-1/4 the effectiveness of normal warheads.

Yea, something like that could work

[Oralordos]

Question. Does the extra nebula areas mess up the planet number calculations for the purposes of achievement gain?

[keith.lamothe]

Question. Does the extra nebula areas mess up the planet number calculations for the purposes of achievement gain?

Nope

[Faulty Logic]

Yeah, was pretty sure the hub wouldn't work (you would have to implement a third type of wormhole between the backwaters, and a third drive triggered by an event boolean...programming nightmare).

I would like to see something for completing all the quests...something that would have a significant strategic impact.

Idea: warp interdictor: invulnerable, wormhole size forcefield. Now that would be a good reward. Note they couldn't protect anything. Argh, could give perfect home defense. Scrap.

Idea mkII: warp disruptor: interplanetary structures of the AI now work only on their planet.

Idea mkIII: Destroy the CSG network.

Idea mkIV: Give the Champion a superdrive: it can now teleport, and can ignore BHGs.

Idea mkV: AIP reduction (Occam has spoken)

[@B0FH]

Unfortunately I don;t have time to trawl the 5 pages (shame on me!), so apologies if this horse has been flogged whilst it's ceased to be....

I love the gameplay alternatives that the Champions bring, from the maingame to the nebulae, however I really cannot emphasise how much I hate the fact there is bugger-all penalty for losing it - seen at the top of page 5 talking about it's relatively slow speed so delaying getting back into the fight, but really that's not much of a downer on running around trigger-happy like an old-school DM-a-holic.

I'd suggest (ballpark) something along the lines of a toughness buff (health rather than armour/immunities), but make it once it's dead, it's dead.

[keith.lamothe]

I'd suggest (ballpark) something along the lines of a toughness buff (health rather than armour/immunities), but make it once it's dead, it's dead.

Permadeath on these would be unspeakably brutal (stuck with a 20% increase to basically all forms of AI aggression), and would largely defeat the purpose of making sure the player had something to work with even while waiting on everything else was dead/rebuilding, unless it had so much health as to be effectively invincible

[@B0FH]

ok that makes sense - but how about a timed delay until respawn? Honet i'm not trying to murder us all

[TechSY730]

I was thinking about ways to make respawning cost, but keep normal operations how they are now.
My idea is to make the champion respawn as a "broken" form of whatever it was before death.
It would be much like normal broken golems, you would have to repair it to full health (possibly costing resources) before it would come online and be operational.

Not sure what should be done if the broken form is destroyed. Spawn again? Should the broken form be invincible? How would it remeber which module loadout it had?


EDIT: also, would it be reasonable for the higher level modules to cost resources, but keep the "base" modules free?

[LaughingThesaurus]

As far as a death penalty goes, I'm more for something like a 20-30 second warp-in stun before it can move or shoot. Guess it could be higher, but not too much higher. There just needs to be something that makes me not go "I'm on 20% health with no shields, two planets away from home. I should just scrap my ship to save time."
There also is something I'm wondering... Is the champion supposed to be able to gain even a recognizable amount of exp outside of the nebula combat areas? I mean, messing around on Diff 1 just blowing up some command stations and guard posts, I barely get anything out of that. I can gain upwards of 8 levels in the completion of one nebula. Seems a bit skewed to me, but I wouldn't know how to fix it.