Reactions to Ancient Shadows and Suggestions

[LordSloth]

Adding a response to the champion is a bit troublesome. They often play at their own place in a multiplayer game. Adding something in that would strike at the normal player's world would be a bit of a headache. Then again, we already have people triggering raid engines in co-op...

Rather than force the champions to come to the normal player's defense, I'd rather something that requires the normal player to come to the champion's aid.

A literal hunter-killer, if you will, except a special special forces version. Would need it's own balancing.

I'm not certain if it actually needs a change, however - I've been humiliated by hard spirecraft before having the opportunity to find out, lately. I'm expecting to take part in a champion focused co-op game this evening for this LP Lilli is doing over at SA.

[relmz32]

I've been pretty busy lately, but i was able to sit down and spin up a 5.088 game with 7-7 last night, and it was pretty sweet.
Things i liked:

• The new distribution of AI forces, with a primary type of ship on a planet is really really cool.
• I really really like the champ ability ideas, it makes using them super awesome.
• I really like all of the bonus ships from this expansion, they all see unique and useful.
• I like the way champ upgrades and rewards work so far.
• I had a good amount of planets with barracks pre built on them, which i am not used to, but I really like it.
• There are many more ion cannons seeded than i remember(2 worlds within 3 hops that have II, III, and IV ions!), but that adds to the cooler 'specialized' feel many of the planets have.
• Parasite Eyes are jerks. Especially when you do not notice them. But in a good way.
  ... Its hard to explain.

Didn't like:

• my FRD engies would not, for the life of themselves, repair my champ!  ...the jerks.
• Also, i dunno if this is how it should be, but normally i have an ARS within 3 jumps of my starting world on most any map i've played. On the one i rolled, ther isn't any ARS within 4 jumps.(To be fair, it is maze D and only about 12/81 worlds revealed)

Things I think could be improved:

• The first nebula i got is the gray spire, and that mission is a little crazy in all the right ways. The only problem with it was that i didn't know how much longer i needed to hold out. A timer would be nice.
• i think a cool champ ability would be the ability to spend a large amount of shadow charge (half of your total), in order to  bring all of your champ's systems back online and allowing you to quickly rebuild all of the destroyed modules. (A sort of shadow Scotty maneuver)
• Could you add some kind of indicator for the wormhole going to the nebula? The color of the wormhole is good, but it can still be a pain to find. I think, if you get a scout in an adjacent system, that should, at least, reveal the nebula in the galaxy map, without revealing the world itself.

[rabican]

Doing nebulaes is one of the very the very few things that gives you great benefits without increasing aip. This means that is hugely beneficial to just do every nebulae at start. Debending of map type this might be fast and easy(crosshatch, etc) or just tedious (snake). Deep strike threat really isn't threatening when you can beachead couple of modular forts

This is why there is so much disagreement on wheter or not champions are worth the 20% orwhateveritis. If you go to 1000 aip with just say destroyer hull its definately not worth it . If you are at 20aip with battleship hull you can just cruise through the rest of the game.

I know its too late to suggest anything about how you get to nebulaes or anything. But anyways , it would be nice if new nebuale would appear after some time or when you hit certain aip or fulfill some other condition. Having bunch of citadel ascendant ships jump in , throw you with some asteroids and space cows  and then flee through previously unknown nebulae wormhole would be great fun.

Ooohkay, about nebulae missions themselves. My favorites are Mr. Ravenous, dyson gatlings, colony ship massacare(this one does have some scaling issues) and the brawl (just because of the scale of it). These mostly feel different, and there is only so many times you can run onto starbase throw some shields before it becomes repetitive.

Some ideas for new nebulaes if there are still plans to add some in future:

AI shipyard: You stumble upon AI's shipyard building up a exo strikeforce . Destroy the builders or be exofied. No friendlies just you versus teh macfhine.

Final confrontation with citadel ascendant: Complete with mad scientist space lab of horrors.

Neinzull nesting grounds: I must imagine i'm bit unclear what neinzull are but i imagine they are closest to space monsters this game has. Ancient insane neinzull oldlings spewing out endlesss amount of twisted younglings.

[dotjd]

Could you add some kind of indicator for the wormhole going to the nebula? The color of the wormhole is good, but it can still be a pain to find. I think, if you get a scout in an adjacent system, that should, at least, reveal the nebula in the galaxy map, without revealing the world itself.

You can filter the galaxy map by Unexplored Wormholes: search for that item in the first of the two drop-downs at the bottom.  If you use default settings and have unexplored planets displayed (as opposed to only having explored planets visible and having to go through a womrhole to see where it leads), that'll show you where all the blue wormholes on the map are.

[relmz32]

Could you add some kind of indicator for the wormhole going to the nebula? The color of the wormhole is good, but it can still be a pain to find. I think, if you get a scout in an adjacent system, that should, at least, reveal the nebula in the galaxy map, without revealing the world itself.

You can filter the galaxy map by Unexplored Wormholes: search for that item in the first of the two drop-downs at the bottom.  If you use default settings and have unexplored planets displayed (as opposed to only having explored planets visible and having to go through a womrhole to see where it leads), that'll show you where all the blue wormholes on the map are.

Thanks! I actually discovered that last night!
But i very much appreciate the help!

[Mermel]

I pretty much like the concept of Ancient shadows, but there are still some major issues I have with it.
Balance mostly, but that should eventually be doable.
It feels to me like a lot of the scenarios require a certain loadout to be beatable in any reasonable manner or beatable at all. The colony ship one in particular.
I havn't found any other way but carrier type modules (Bomber, fighter...) to be of any major use here.
I found that scenario with a cruiser hull, not sure how many I did before though.
The ships came at 2 to 4 second intervalls with 16 spawing with each wave. It's absolutely impossible to do that with a lot of cheese or luck.
Another thing in general is, that once you die in one of the further out nebulas, the scenario is pretty much done. The champion becomes such a large factor in time when the scenarios scale up, his absence is almost an instaloss.

So, the fact that certain weapon loadouts higly favor certain scenarios and the loss of the champion is almost certain defeat and the need for cheese, in the current balance, lurks at every corner made me thinking of ways to solve this without major finetuning every single scenario. It's okay some are harder, some are not. So:

1.
Allied main starbases get the ability to repair the champion and rebuild it's modules at a reasonable rate.
No more need to cheese and see what's in there, reload and fly in with an appropriate champion setup. No need to place engineers outside, no need for a lot of rather annoying stuff.
More tactical depth, as you have a place to retreat to and maybe even change your loadout mid scenario to adapt to a changed battlefield.

2.
Speedboost ability.
Available from the start, just like the shield.
Double movement speed for a short time (Couple of seconds)
This may even only be usable within Nebulas, as the champion already is pretty fast outside.
Brings more action, brings more satisfaction, gives more choices than shieldspam and wait til the energy is up again in the scenarios. Basically a secong ability you want to do all the time, but can't.

So, for me these two pretty much nail it.
The champion on the outside is fine as he is for me and inside the nebulas, those two changes above should completly do the trick

[keith.lamothe]

On certain scenarios requiring certain loadouts, I have heard that from multiple players, but the thing is that generally the different players present different loadouts as "the only one that works".  You can see how the feedback partly cancels itself out there

But yea, having allied large starbases repair/assist-module-build (or at least assist-module-build, we'll see) the champion has been on my list for a few days.

As for a speedboost ability, that does make sense, yea, I'll think about it.

[Hearteater]

Part of the multiple divergent "only-one-way" feedback could come about is if the scenarios are tuned too difficult and people are finding that to win with a given load-out leaves little margin of error.

[Mermel]

Another might be, that not everyone has every module at any given time.

A cheat like way to have every module available at max level would be pretty neat for balancing.
There actually are optimal loadouts for a lot of scenarios.
Pure laser loadout for the the dyson with bombers makes it challenging, but not hard for exampel.
This is as it should be. An optimal loadout makes a scenario challenging in a way that if you think about the situation and act accordingly, there is not much that could go wrong, giving a marging for error.
In said exampel it is theoretically possible to beat the scenario without taking a single hit to a starbase or the champion itself.
You place your fully loaded champion relatively close to the bases, so that new dysons have a long way to fly, while your support ships are available in an instant. Optimal blocking range is within firing range of the smaller base, but far enough to keep the dysons from hitting the base.
When using the shield to allow your bombers to build up and making no errors, a perfect streak like the one mentioned is possible.

The best balance is, when every scenario is beatable with every loadout, giving suboptimal loadouts less and less marging for error.

So.... are there cheats for that already?

[Cinth]

You can do this already sans the bomber drones

That is pretty much my strat for Dyson when I get it early on. Spam shields on the bases while the allied ships do the work. If I have Bomber drones then I get aggressive and take the fight to the Dysons.

[Mermel]

Yepp, that's what I meant.... this one is pretty neatly balanced.

Optimal modules against the dysons make this one managable to the point where failure only comes when you overdo it and push the dysons back too much and insist on a battle far from the center.

Suboptimal and you have to be defensive and need a hint of luck if you wish to keep both bases alive

[keith.lamothe]

The cheat for unlocking all modules (also gives a lot of xp) is "facilitate communications".  The cheat for just getting a lot of xp is "terminate hostilities".  There's also a "gain xp" cheat for gaining a relatively small amount of xp.

[Mermel]

Merci beaucoup, monsieur lamothe

Edit:
After a first test run I can confirm to 100%, that the colony ship scenario needs to be tweaked in some way.
I tried it with a Spire Battleship, equipped with mostly photon lances and needler modules, all at highest mark. The enemy bases went down fast, but actually the scenario was completly over before I could even reach the 4th one.
The main base as well as my Spire Battleship were killed simultaniously after less than two minutes.

A Zenith Battleship on the other hand, loaded with bombers and interceptors, as well as needler and flak modules, does the trick. There is still a loss of friendly bases, but the large number of spawned bombers and interceptors distracted enough of the colony ships to make the scenario beatable.

First thoughts on it:
Less colony ships, more firepower per colony ship, a little less speed on them.
I think it would enable a player to actually do something about them, mostly they were in and exploded before my guns could even react to them.

[chemical_art]

How do the repair beams in nebulae work?

[Mermel]

There aren't any, I made a suggestion to add them.