Reactions to Ancient Shadows and Suggestions

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, it tries to remain threatening throughout the scenario   The large starbases can be hard to take down, but as long as you protect your side's attack forces long enough for them to get a couple shots in against it each "wave" (mainly thinking of the larger coherent spawns from the ally large starbase) you'll wear them down.  If your ships are not even getting to the large starbase then there are some things you can do to swing the open-space battles more in your allies' favor.  In particular, pay attention to the fact that each side has:

1 "bomber" ship type good against starbases
1 "bomber-killer" ship type good against the bomber type
1 "command" ship type good gainst the bomber-killer and, by sheer weight of base dps, not bad at killing anything else either

and then the starbases, which are particularly good at shredding the command ships and champions, but also can wipe up the two smaller types by sheer dps.

Also, for your own part, needler modules (and the human champ main gun) are good against the bomber types, mlrs modules are good against the bomber-killer types, and laser modules are good against the command types.  Missile modules are pretty good against starbases, but generally if you're smaller than a cruiser you don't want to do your own starbase-attack-runs, and even then expect to take heavy damage.

So basically to take down a starbase you want to protect your ally's bombers, which means killing the enemy's bomber-killers and when facing fire you can't stop that way (like starbase defensive fire), cover them with projected shields and your own shields.  If you expect to need more ooph here, mount some mlrs to clear out the enemy bomber-killers (and possibly lasers to deal with enemy command ships)

And when defending an ally starbase you want to kill the enemy bombers asap.

For overall open-space combat, I find that killing the enemy command ships (i.e. use lasers) is more important.  But most of the significant combat is usually around a starbase on one side or another.

And of course there are other modules you'll pick up along the way that have other uses, some outside and some inside the nebulae.  But the basic set available from the start lets you handle the early/mid scenarios pretty well.

[Faulty Logic]

early/mid scenarios

Scenarios have a restricted order?

What is it?

[keith.lamothe]

early/mid scenarios

Scenarios have a restricted order?

What is it?

Of the 9 scenarios, 3 can only happen after all the others.  There are a few other story-based dependencies before that, and the mourners one can't happen as the first one.  That's about it.

By early/mid I meant "other than those last 3", mainly.

[LordSloth]

Report: Fallen Spire campaign is definitely more interesting now. Six player co-op game, 7.6/7.6 Support/Assassin AIs, Easy Broken Golems, 7/7 Hybrid Hives, 7/7 Hybrid Hives, a few other less relevant things on an 80-star X-map.

Lost a command station (but the subspace reciever survived with 8% health and no shield coverage with hostiles in system on the first shard. Lost the Refugee ship on the second and then the fleets to an ill-considered nuke. We then lost the 60%+ completed doomsday nuke and another home command station to yet another nuke mk1.

"Teamwork" aside, it was considerably easier to underestimate the forces needed to protect the shard than in previous fallen spire games. This is good, but it does lean a bit more towards taking out all warpgates adjacent to the travelled path than I expected. It put some pressure back in the pursuit, but not the tedium.

I'd vote for replacing the four times multiplier with a three times one, on a first impression.  The objectivity of this opinion is a bit skewed by the bountiful teamwork we received.

[keith.lamothe]

I think the presence of those nukes may indicate one of the problems   Glad it was more interesting

[Histidine]

(7/7 game, FS 4/10, one homeworld + champion)

Yep. Definitely more interesting. And this is just half their remaining force!

I concur with LordSloth; even 2x previous size would make it considerably harder to defend the shard than before (you may be facing half the total number of ships, but they're coming at you in groups twice as big, bad enough even without Lanchester's Square Law)

Oh, and thanks for the nebula advice, Keith. I always knew laser was best base module, but now I know why 
(killing cruiser groups before they reach critical mass is really helpful)

[LordSloth]

So this isn't specifically Ancient Shadows, but: I think Scout Starship health is too low nowadays. 100,000 300,000 900,000 health.  Admittedly, it is more than a decloaker. On the one hand, Scout hull means that nobody gets a multiplier. Their raw health is lower than that of a fighter. If guard posts get a rebalance pass after the tweak we've had to guardians, scout starships could probably have their health adjusted.

[dotjd]

I tried a 10/10 game with Heroic and Fortress King.

24 minutes in, the AI force-fed me 5 spire destroyer champions with plasma lance/siege cannon modules.  I had a full cap of basic turrets mk. 1/2, which I had specifically built to gank the champions the AI sends with waves.  The turrets didn't exactly help when a single plasma siege cannon would one-shot several turrets at a time, heh.  And their overlapping shields sealed the deal.

These weren't from a wave either; as far as I can tell, they just decided to show up with 0 warning. Speaking of zeroes, that's also how many chances I had.

I guess Heroic is supposed to do stuff with their champions the same way crafty spire sometimes sends spirecraft around?  That's cool, although I have to note that it's arbitrarily deciding to send things with orders of magnitude more firepower than the waves I was getting. =p

[keith.lamothe]

I tried a 10/10 game with Heroic and Fortress King.

gg

24 minutes in, the AI force-fed me 5 spire destroyer champions with plasma lance/siege cannon modules.

Open wide!

These weren't from a wave either; as far as I can tell, they just decided to show up with 0 warning.

Yea, heroic gets the wave ones, and periodically spawns "threat" champions on its homeworld.  5 in 24 minutes (earlier, counting travel time) is a bit more than I expected, but given that it was 10/10 it sounds possible.

[TechSY730]

I concur with LordSloth; even 2x previous size would make it considerably harder to defend the shard than before (you may be facing half the total number of ships, but they're coming at you in groups twice as big, bad enough even without Lanchester's Square Law)

Yes, PLEASE read over Lanchester's laws. They reveal SO many important details when balancing, especially how unit count, unit strength, and time of engagement interact with each other balance wise. Not just in this case, but for the whole game.

In particular, the various quantities do NOT scale linearly. (in this case, quartering duration but average quadruapiling enemy counts does not imply the same overall "difficulty")


EDIT: I wonder if it could also give some insights into why the AI getting just a moderate more above cap of low ship cap types feels (and may be objectively) much more threatening than the AI getting significantly more above cap of high ship cap types.
EDIT2: Though a glance over reading seems to imply that high cap ships should be STRONGER than their cap * individual strength would imply, even though in game experience seems to imply the opposite.

[keith.lamothe]

I'm aware that 2x the ships is not 2x the difficulty, and that a*X ships in 1/a time is not the same difficulty as X in 1, and that MkII ships having 2x the health and 2x dps is not merely 2x as dangerous as a MkI ship (both due to the squaring phenomenon and two stats being increased).  In general things scale up more than linearly because the game should get more intense as you go along.

For the shard-chase stuff I don't mind adjusting numbers but part of the reason I didn't tone it down (much, it is actually slightly lower due to the intervals being an integer of seconds and me erring on the side of higher interval when no whole number was available during the division) is that the two bits of feedback that most stood out to me about the chases were: too long, and too easy.

As usual, we tend to take something of a binary search approach to balance

[LordSloth]

Given an ideal most fun center, I think the current pursuit is closer to it than the previous setup.

As an alternate idea, perhaps the first shard would be at 1x. The second shard at 2x, the third at 3x, and following ones at 4x. I'd be a lot more likely to engage in the shard pursuit. That said, I've got a singleplayer game going on where I'll be exploring how the Fallen Spire campaign balance actually plays out (with save-restore experimentation to see how I can prepare/handle things). I haven't retrieved the first shard by the five hour mark (in part due to nervousness) but more realistically, due to preparing for the hybrid hives, cross planet attack, and spirecraft exo-galactic strikeforces that hit around hour four. I've done a decent job of securing my starting cluster, but I could have done much better. I haven't properly adjusted to the Neinzul Youngling AI yet, though I've got a few working tricks up my sleeve. Thankfully, the other AI is only a counterspy, and I'm getting use out of my scout starships.

In other words, I haven't gotten to the really juicy and satisfying revenge for all the headaches that the spire frigates will give me. But I'm doing much much better at getting there (albeit with some save-requiring slipups) than I did in my games where I paired the hybrid hives with Gravity Drills and Special Forces Commander.

Infiltrators absolutely humiliate hybrids and super hybrids by the way. I recommend avoiding them as your starting ship on 7 to 7.6 against hybrid hives. They're simply too cheap and effective and eliminate a good portion of the danger, although hardly all of it. I'd put mk1 and 2 against 10 hives any day, throw in mk3 and I'd laugh at 20+. Cheap enough to suicide against even more.

Edit P.S. That new beta release looks fantastic. I should have feedback on its Fallen Spire effects later tonight or tomorrow.

[dotjd]

I started up a sandbox game because I wanted to see how far the nebula questlines go.  Some more impressions.

-I can't decide what unlocks to get.  I ended up getting a bunch of level 2 unlocks (because only 1 point, natch) and after the 9th mission I finally got HBCs modules and sighed.  They seem to be balanced like knowledge costs; you can get a small number of things all the way through but nowhere near everything.  That's great, except I also really get the impression you're supposed to swap champions often and mix and match modules for each nebula encounter.  And then the character of the missions changes near the end, from mobile ship suppression to base killing.

-The balance... I'm not really sure how to say what I mean, but it feels like you're intended to have to cheese things and/or used advanced micro to clear the later ones.  I still have no clue how I'm supposed to clear the colony ship one if it spawns near the end.  60 exploding colony ships every 10-20 seconds?  Not a single ship had a chance.  I ended up doing it after 2 hours of savescumming by loading a zenith champ up with 2 bomber bays (for distractions), 2 missiles (for dps), and then running through and killing the bases as fast as I could.  Won with 1% health left after too much pain.  Your ship is way too slow to even try engaging the regular enemy ships in that fight, let alone the colony ships.

-I hate how the large enemy bases decide to spawn more things once you clear the small bases out.  It's like, you think you made progress, but NOPE.  Especially hate how large starbases end up spawning 6+ advanced command cruisers at a time, because they take forever and a day to kill and poison the well by murdering bombers so efficiently that your allies are useless for the rest of the fight, and you basically have to clear the large starbase by yourself.  With very long & tedious needle pricks.

-Yeah uh, I ended up recharging shadow, running up to a large starbase, spamming the shield, and running away after 20s to begin the long recharge (and exit the nebula to repair shield modules).  If there's a better way to do it, I didn't find it.

-The shadow regen thing isn't very good.  You can't use it in a firefight, and while it's nice that you can heal a starbase, it doesn't actually help you achieve victory.

-Shield modules being able to die, but not other modules, feels wrong (although I can see why it turned out this way).

-Speaking of which, is something broken with the Neinzul champion's radar damping?  Some tooltip might be lying to me, but I'm not sure which one.  Missiles get something like 6k more range than the radar damping (16k vs 10k iirc), meaning you should be able to sit outside a starbase's radius and ping it to death.  But that, uh, doesn't work; the starbases are ignoring it or something, and firing at me from max missile range.  The tooltip doesn't mention that as one of their immunities though...

-Does vampirism only apply if the main gun deals the final blow to an enemy?

I kept trying after eventually getting 9 clears and my battleship.  10 looped back to the beginning of the rotation and gave me grey spire.  ~45 gatlings spawned at the start.  gg.

Overall: I much prefer the variety here to the fallen spire stuff.  There are many more ways to play it, and many more missions that aren't boring.  With some time this is going to turn out really well, I think.

re: new fallen spire: the shard moves too fast.  My fleetball can't keep up.

zen siege engine: could use longer range.  I can't see a way to use them without suiciding them, aside from an elaborate whipping boy setup.

possibly broken (have not tried): shield bearer + med frigate

[Histidine]

contingencyplan's golem thread reminded me of one of the things that bothers me a bit about champions: the 20% ship count increase the AI gets doesn't scale with champion strength at all. So, here's some random idea spitballing for fixing that:

• Remove 20% AI ship bonus per champion
• As someone suggested previously: Small AIP increase as champion levels or completes nebula scenarios
• And/or: Give champions their own exos, which scale up with champion strength FS-style (perhaps as a minor faction setting, so intensity can be controlled)
• (Maybe as an AI plot?) The AI gets some champions seeded around its territory (perhaps near nebula entrances and/or high-level planets), which go up in strength to match the player champion(s). They behave in a special-forces like manner: when you attack a planet the AI cares about and there's an AI champion close by, it should immediately fly over and CHALLENGE YOUR CHAMPION TO A DUEL. (note: AI should not actually attempt to duel player champion(s))

They seem to be balanced like knowledge costs; you can get a small number of things all the way through but nowhere near everything.  That's great, except I also really get the impression you're supposed to swap champions often and mix and match modules for each nebula encounter.  And then the character of the missions changes near the end, from mobile ship suppression to base killing.

There's also the problem that while spending knowledge to unlock units increases the size of your force, spending unlock points to upgrade modules that you're not presently using doesn't increase your strength in any direct way at all. I'm not really seeing a reason to do anything other than max out shields + 2 or 3 weapon modules that between them can handle pretty much anything your champion faces (with me it's usually laser/paralyzer + bomber drone.

[keith.lamothe]

the 20% ship count increase the AI gets doesn't scale with champion strength at all

It generally scales up over time, though, as the AI's base amount goes up.  If you outstrip that with your champion's growth, good for you.  From what I've seen the reverse is often true: people get to mid/late game and don't feel that what their champion gives them balances off the 20% bonus the AI gets.  I don't think they're necessarily considering all the advantages it gives them, but I wouldn't want to make it harsher with scaling up the counter-bonus.

Adding AIP-on-growth would just discourage people from using them as many players run the other direction as fast as humanly possible from anything that adds AIP.  Learned that with an old implementation of golems.

Adding response exos... maybe, but we do that with all the other superweapons so I wanted something different.

For the duels... very complex to be adding now   And I don't know how many iterations that would take to get right, if ever.