Reactions to Ancient Shadows and Suggestions

[KDR_11k]

Transloc does not work on "certain large ships". I think it doesn't work on starships either.

[Soyweiser]

iirc it works on leech starships. I had one warped away in a gravity drill system. Took forever for it to get killed.

[Soyweiser]

Ps the whole Epsilon Eridani mission takes for ever.

The half speed on your own ship is annoyin as hell, it means you can never reach any hotspot. (Combined with the fact that the ships in the nebula all have double the range the champion has). The Intimidators always spawn in groups of three, and those three are not really targetted all that well by the AI. So you constantly need to hunt those down. It is pretty easy, but it just takes for ever.

And when you have the enemy wittled down to only the starbase. It constantly spawns groups of 18 enemies at once. Who then easily mop up the starships spawned one at a time by the friendly bases. It turns it all in a uninteresting grind. You know you are going to win, but the AI makes it annoying. (kill the intimidators, kill the other ships, escort your ships to the enemy starbase. And before you can reach the starbase and your front ships, the new spawn is there. Repeat). Even more fun, the intimidators not only out range the default champion, they are also quicker. !fun.

Really annoying. Takes half an hour to clear almost.

[Fluffiest]

I think the Champion needs to scale upwards in power with # of homeworlds, as I rarely find that my Champion can do that much outside of nebulas once I really start to get anywhere in my games. My weak exo-waves that come in with only one or two HK just make them disappear so quickly that I don't even bother use them outside of nebula. I just sit them outside the next one and wait until I have time to kill (A shard is flying across the galaxy) then send it in to play to kill time.

On the other side of thing, it is an extremely great way to kill time well you are waiting for Fallen Spire stuff (fleets to be built, shards to fly in) happens.

Is the Champion even meant to be balanced with the Fallen Spire game? It seems like it wouldn't be. I suspect the only way to make a Champion that's useful in Fallen Spire without being hideously overpowered the rest of the time would be to add special Champion unlocks that are only available with certain numbers of Spire cities or city modules.

[LaughingThesaurus]

I think the Champion needs to scale upwards in power with # of homeworlds, as I rarely find that my Champion can do that much outside of nebulas once I really start to get anywhere in my games. My weak exo-waves that come in with only one or two HK just make them disappear so quickly that I don't even bother use them outside of nebula. I just sit them outside the next one and wait until I have time to kill (A shard is flying across the galaxy) then send it in to play to kill time.

On the other side of thing, it is an extremely great way to kill time well you are waiting for Fallen Spire stuff (fleets to be built, shards to fly in) happens.

Is the Champion even meant to be balanced with the Fallen Spire game? It seems like it wouldn't be. I suspect the only way to make a Champion that's useful in Fallen Spire without being hideously overpowered the rest of the time would be to add special Champion unlocks that are only available with certain numbers of Spire cities or city modules.

That's kind of a neat idea, that might be stupidly hard to implement.
Like, the Spire that you build up give you additional classes of ships as you go to give you a unique champion to contribute to the uber spire fleet.

[keith.lamothe]

I have had so much trouble getting into this champion stuff.

You're the one who asked for "Arcade Mode"   That's not the only inspiration behind it, but is one of them.

A question on the new Heroic AI type.

How does it value Champions for wave sizes?

It just adds the champion on top of the wave that's there.

Ps the whole Epsilon Eridani mission takes for ever.

Half an hour is within the target range, though I find it generally takes me more like 15 minutes, or less depending on how I do it. 

If your ally fleet gets wiped out, and it's a late enough scenario that the enemy is getting a lot of scaling bonuses, then the central starbases spawns could be pretty frequent, yea, but by then you would have a pretty big champion and have more flexibility to make stuff happen.  One key thing is to keep your ally's anti-starbase ships (the lowest-tier ones) alive by shielding them from enemy starbase fire and killing the enemy mid-tier ones.  Depending on how big you are and what modules you've specialized in, you can do enough damage to the enemy starbase that cover from nearby allies, your shield ability, and your shields will allow successful attack runs of your own.

If it's one of the early scenarios it can basically be steamrolled in 10-15 minutes by your allies if you use the shield ability judiciously and kill off those enemy mid-tiers before they gobble up the ally anti-starbase ships.

Is the Champion even meant to be balanced with the Fallen Spire game?

Yea, it should work with pretty much any other setting, or at least not break it.  In FS's case I think I'll just take an earlier suggestion and make the champion have only a very minor impact on FS exo size.  I mean, a champion is a threat, but compared to even a 2-city fleet...

[Diazo]

A question on the new Heroic AI type.

How does it value Champions for wave sizes?

It just adds the champion on top of the wave that's there.

Ok, that's yet another ow to the Heroic AI type.

So that is, umm..... way to many owies at this point.

But that's what makes it fun. 

D.

[rabican]

Transloc does not work on "certain large ships". I think it doesn't work on starships either.

Works on some ,debends on mark  in some cases. I don't think anyone knows what it works and doesn't work against.

[Vihermaali]

I have played for a while now, I have a shadow destroyer and I have cleared 4 blue wormholes (nebulae?).

It feels to me that the shadow ships is like a 1-ship fleet.  I created a game with random medium/easier AI types, and as a result one of them is a "turtle", AI Eyes on every other planet! I send in my shadow destroyer and it takes out all guard posts that don't have a forcefield. After this I send in raider/scout starships and sit them under shadow ship forcefields while they take out posts that are cloaked and/or under forcefields. I no longer need to send my whole fleet to take out a planet, I can just use my shadow ship to do that. This is of course without any extra AI firepower like spire waves, AI golems, hybrids etc.

So in short, I feel like the shadow/blue wormhole side missions are fun as themselves, but they do only feel like "side missions". A shadow ship champion doesn't feel like a complete game changer like a "fallen spire" campaign does. Main dynamic change seems to be that I leave my fleet home while the shadow ship kills everything except forcefielded structures and fortresses. Shadow ship has also been acting as a fast response ship when sh*t happens (EMP guardian disables a system and several hundred ships pour in, for example).

But this was vs standard 7.0 "medium/easier" ai types with almost no extra options added, so I may have to ramp the difficulty up quite a lot

[keith.lamothe]

I send in my shadow destroyer and it takes out all guard posts that don't have a forcefield.

Have the AI's special forces not rudely interrupted this process?  They don't respond on all planets, but I imagine you would have hit one of the CSG planets by now.

[Cinth]

[Have the AI's special forces not rudely interrupted this process?  They don't respond on all planets, but I imagine you would have hit one of the CSG planets by now.

They do. It's fun kiting them around planets while I take down as much of the infrastructure as I can. Inevitably though, I end up finding the Grav Guardian at a bad time and it is quite literally GG for that little raid 

[keith.lamothe]

[Have the AI's special forces not rudely interrupted this process?  They don't respond on all planets, but I imagine you would have hit one of the CSG planets by now.

They do. It's fun kiting them around planets while I take down as much of the infrastructure as I can. Inevitably though, I end up finding the Grav Guardian at a bad time and it is quite literally GG for that little raid 

To illustrate:

Where you goin'?!

[Cinth]

[Have the AI's special forces not rudely interrupted this process?  They don't respond on all planets, but I imagine you would have hit one of the CSG planets by now.

They do. It's fun kiting them around planets while I take down as much of the infrastructure as I can. Inevitably though, I end up finding the Grav Guardian at a bad time and it is quite literally GG for that little raid 

To illustrate:

Where you goin'?!

That pretty much sums it up 

[TechSY730]

An example of when you can use micro/fleet tactics to improve your effectiveness.


More seriously, rewarding some level of micro/fleet tactics does not go against your design vision, right? It just that you don't want to make it so rewarding that players feel pressured to "hyper-micro" to get that huge reward, right?

[keith.lamothe]

More seriously, rewarding some level of micro/fleet tactics does not go against your design vision, right? It just that you don't want to make it so rewarding that players feel pressured to "hyper-micro" to get that huge reward, right?

In general micro having some positive payoff is fine, but that's a bit beside the point here: champions are specifically units that need micro to really shine, and that's part of their design.  That's why you get one of them (unless you quite deliberately add more).  We wouldn't want other units to be that micro-inclined.