So, what most needs attention for 6.0?

[keith.lamothe]

Basically I'm looking for nominations for a poll of "what most needs doing for 6.0?".  I don't just mean the Ancient Shadows stuff (though that is certainly included, as it's significant and recent and thus has had less time for refinement), basically anything that you think really needs taken care of before 6.0.

I've already got various things planned (full sweep through the tutorial to make it correct again, though I've already updated it for some of the bigger changes), but feel free to nominate something even if you know it's already planned.  I'm curious to see what's a priority for folks.

Thanks

Edit: in case it isn't clear, I am including bugs in this discussion.  Obviously all bugs should be fixed, but the question of what is most important to do first is more complicated than that.

[chemical_art]

I almost feel this needs a brainstorming session first, just to identify the bugs and various things that need attention, and then an easier consenses can be drawn to compare relative importance.

Like...I don't even know where to begin...not in the sense that everything is bad, but rather good...my thoughts just sift through my fingers...but I know others have some ideas so I want to hear them before I go "yep, that needs attention" or "not know, maybe later"

[keith.lamothe]

This can double as brainstorming   I'm figuring we'll do more than round of this, I just want to get started.

[TechSY730]

First off, there seems to be one last possible case where your units can get "teleported" somewhere in AI space randomly. I think it may have something to do with Neinzul scapegoats. In any case, if this triggers in just the wrong way, it could be a game ender by no fault of your own.

After that, I vote for the various unit management bugs, both for the humans and the AI.
Telling your units to do something (or not to do something), and they don't listen is a pretty disconcerting feeling.
Examples:
3825: Enemy ships stop moving and related issues (the first report of this dates back to Jan 20, 2011, during version 4.072!)
3351: AI unit movement jumpy and related issues (the first report of this dates back to Jan 28, 2011, during version 5.000)
(the above two have been around for a disturbingly long amount of time for something so severe when it triggers)
3844: Ships in FRD not always regathering at FRD point
9584: Auto-kiting units sometimes kite out of range
8819: Ships sometimes autotarget wormhole guard posts, though I think this can also hit other "should not auto target", armed structures, including ones that can increase AIP. If so, that would raise the severity of this issue

Some more, "special case" ones:
3178: Auto-gather knowledge gets stuck, including the related sub issue where this happens when a nebula is involved
Transports free units, even when nothing is in them, but not always (can't find mantis issue)
Giving an explicit attack order makes the unit move a tiny bit, even if the target is within firing range (can't find the mantis issue), which is annoying with fortresses, and REALLY hampers the usability of Z seige engines.


After this, the various UI bugs.

Actually, from a "polish" perspective, the UI bugs may be more important.

[Lancefighter]

I am not sure what to really say, as I didn't really encounter anything wrong with the game recently? Nothing major, at least.

I'm not actually sure how I stand on heroship module balance though, as some of them seem really good, and some of them terrible (and i still think there should be a way to repair/build in a nebula somehow). I just feel like a lot of the modules on the heroship are niche (flak cannon, doom accelerator, parasite guns?? really?).

Some of the heavy slots make me wonder too. Its pretty obvious that in a fleet, the heroship probably is best off being a very strong asset in firepower. But in a nebula, not having shields means every point of damage you take will basically ruin you.. (and stuff deals so much damage early on). So in fleet - bring big guns. Out of fleet - Many shields. Build for survivability so you can continue to deal as much damage, even given the downtime for recharging.

Anyway, thats my pretty random musings on balance, and I think thatsmy only actual major issue atm. Youve solved the whole starship bonus ships (mostly. There could be more, for now I'm satisfied. I expect 7.0 to have a full starship bonus ship compliment), I think I have a few minor complaints about the way alerts are handled (those were brought up in my post about no wave warnings/crossplanet waves, mostly.. apparently nobody actually likes playing that way. I wonder why.)

[Diazo]

Can we nominate game mechanics?

Having actually played a game with multiple ingress points, I'm getting more and more convinced the game has become, at least at higher difficulties, a single-chokepoint defense game. Multiple ingress points for the AI is simply impossible to handle due to the turret caps being empire wide.

Earlier thread I made on the subject here.

Having now played a game with multiple ingress points, I have 3 ingress points in my current game, I don't feel like I am getting any smaller waves for exposing 3 systems to AI attack instead of 1.

I have logging turned on, which line actually is the multiple ingress calculation so I can see the actual numbers?

For the record, I have captured 6 systems on a single HW start, so I have 31,000 knowledge available.  I have unlocked all my Mk II fleet ships for 10K knowledge, the other 21K knowledge has gone into defensive structures (turrets, forcefields, Mk II military command, etc.) so it is not like I'm skimping on my defenses.

With 3 systems exposed to hostile waves and the turrets roughly evenly divided I am still having to bring essentially my entire fleet in to defend to guarantee my command station stays alive.

Now, this is more a feeling them anything until I learn where the numbers for this are in the wave attack log and can pull them but this would be my biggest 'thing' with the game right now.

D.

[Lancefighter]

Actually, thats a pretty interesting point - What about some sort of mechanic that makes waves hit multiple systems? For instance instead of "wave of 3k blahs blowing up at blahland", you get "wave of 3k blahs heading to.. you", which subsequently hits every single planet.

This maybe should only happen for a limited number of chokepoints, with increased amount of units for smaller number of chokepoints.

For instance, 100% of a wave could hit planet (given 5+surface area), or 30% of wave could hit 4 planets, 50% of wave hit 3 planets, 70% of waves hit 2 planets, with like 150% of wave hitting single planet choke.

If that makes sense. And it probably doesnt make sense, or isnt even a good idea. But it sounds like an idea that would benefit players with like 4 chokepoints, make no difference for those with 5+, and hurt people who have 2/1.

[TechSY730]

Actually, thats a pretty interesting point - What about some sort of mechanic that makes waves hit multiple systems? For instance instead of "wave of 3k blahs blowing up at blahland", you get "wave of 3k blahs heading to.. you", which subsequently hits every single planet.

This maybe should only happen for a limited number of chokepoints, with increased amount of units for smaller number of chokepoints.

For instance, 100% of a wave could hit planet (given 5+surface area), or 30% of wave could hit 4 planets, 50% of wave hit 3 planets, 70% of waves hit 2 planets, with like 150% of wave hitting single planet choke.

If that makes sense. And it probably doesnt make sense, or isnt even a good idea. But it sounds like an idea that would benefit players with like 4 chokepoints, make no difference for those with 5+, and hurt people who have 2/1.

That's actually a pretty interesting idea. Have the AI sometimes split up waves into multiple smaller waves to possibly different targets.

Make the scaling non-linear (total strength of the wave goes down with more in points, to a minimum wave strength of course to prevent things like 10+ planet in-point cheese) like you proposed, and you get a much more natural feeling, far less probabilistic, "large wave for single in-point penalty" than the variation of time between wave mechanic we have now. Not saying the other mechanic should go, but reducing the factor that plays and in return introducing this that may feel much more natural.

[Diazo]

I think I follow you, but you just described a CPA really.

What I'd love to see, but is way to complex to get implemented in the short term (I think?) is split turret caps.

There is a global turret cap of 75% of the current caps and a system turret cap of 25% the current caps.

That means you can't build more turrets then you currently can in a single system, but it increases your overall turret cap so you actually have more turrets to cover more ingress points.

So at 1 system it is 100% the turrets of current, 2 systems 125% of current, 3 systems 150% of current and so on.

Exact numbers would need tweaking and if this could work at all with something like the fallen spire would have to be determined but it would help with the problem of multiple ingress points tying your fleet down so they can never go far.

One thing I feel I should make clear for this though is that a single-ingress defense should be easier then a multiple ingress defense, just not the massively easier defence it currently is.

D.

[TechSY730]

I think I follow you, but you just described a CPA really.

What I'd love to see, but is way to complex to get implemented in the short term (I think?) is split turret caps.

There is a global turret cap of 75% of the current caps and a system turret cap of 25% the current caps.

That means you can't build more turrets then you currently can in a single system, but it increases your overall turret cap so you actually have more turrets to cover more ingress points.

So at 1 system it is 100% the turrets of current, 2 systems 125% of current, 3 systems 150% of current and so on.

Exact numbers would need tweaking and if this could work at all with something like the fallen spire would have to be determined but it would help with the problem of multiple ingress points tying your fleet down so they can never go far.

One thing I feel I should make clear for this though is that a single-ingress defense should be easier then a multiple ingress defense, just not the massively easier defence it currently is.

D.

You mean something like 2222: Turret cap modification?

EDIT: Wait, not much like that. That is just slapping a per planet cap to turrets and increasing the global turret cap accordingly. Yours is a sort of a dynamic cap type thing.

[Diazo]

Kind of like that but by splitting it you don't multiply your effective turret cap by the number of planets you have.

I want a small effective increase in the turrets you can place to account for multiple ingress points, I don't want a second system doubling your effective turret cap.

D.

post-your-edit edit: Ya. Splitting the turret cap is also a decent bit of complexity being added to the game. On paper I think it's worth it but I want other opinions, including from Keith if it is even feasible.

[Vinco]

I'd like to see a way to band-select only one's own ships in a MP game.  Perhaps default to a l-alt modifier?

[keith.lamothe]

I am not sure what to really say, as I didn't really encounter anything wrong with the game recently? Nothing major, at least.

That's perfectly valid feedback, and it's helpful to have an idea of how close we are to "it's fine".  Certainly to my knowledge nothing is awful terrible broken, just some rough spots here and there.  Basically what I want to do here is polish the roughest spots, then look again, polish the roughest remaining spots, rinse, repeat.

I think the game even as it is today is a demonstrably superior version to 5.0, such that the only thing that really needs to be changed for an official is a tutorial update, but I'd like this to be as good as I can get it.

I'm not actually sure how I stand on heroship module balance though, as some of them seem really good, and some of them terrible

Most of them I've heard someone say that they really liked and got a lot of use out of.  But some are probably under par, and the hero in general might could stand a 10%-20% nerf (doing the same for all the stuff in the nebula; just thinking in relation to "realspace" ships)

(flak cannon, doom accelerator, parasite guns?? really?)

The DA is actually an excellent tool for facilitating communications with large stuff.  And there's enough players out there who can never get enough reclamation damage   The flak... yea, probably a bit underwhelming.

On the shields/heavy thing, most of the time I'm testing a nebula I find packing as many heavy guns as I can really helps.  They have so much more firepower (particularly against starbases) than the light mounts.

I have logging turned on, which line actually is the multiple ingress calculation so I can see the actual numbers?

In MainThreadWaveComputationLog.txt look for a line like "Next-wave-time-calc: because Diff >= 7 and entry_points = 10, entry-point-modified range of mulitiplier for modifier is -2:4, so: -420:840".

On the "forked waves" idea... yea, that would actually be pretty simple to do.  Each individual wave would be announced separately, but I could make them all total the same size as they would have been if concentrated.  My concerns about this actually being a good idea:

1) Will this actually help make multi-front more of a viable choice? (probably yes)
2) Will this feel sufficiently different from CPAs? (probably yes, in that they're synchronized, more frequent, and generally much smaller)
3) Does it make any kind of sense that the AI would intentionally divide its forces every single time? (not really)
-- Or it could randomly fork less or not at all, but then you have a situation where a random roll choosing not to fork could cause a difficulty spike.  You would have some time to readjust due to the announcement, but I'm thinking that wouldn't be a good thing.

The other idea of having split turret caps wouldn't really be workable (too complex, for me and for you).  We could have different special turret types that have per-planet caps, but we don't have time for much of that (if any), nor do I think it would necessarily be a great solution.

It does sound a lot like the "fire control" idea from a few months ago, or rather one form of it: have a 1-per-planet structure you can build that gives all turrets like a 500% attack boost, but doesn't work at all if there are more than, say, 64 turrets (adjusted for caps) on the planet.  Or 128, or whatever.

That I think would work, and it would just be an optional tool you could choose to use or not.  We wouldn't have a lot of time to polish it before 6.0, though, so I'd only want to do it now if this is a problem a lot of y'all are concerned about and this solution has similarly broad appeal.

[TechSY730]

I'd like to see a way to band-select only one's own ships in a MP game.  Perhaps default to a l-alt modifier?

Derp. How did I forget about that?
I nominate this as well.

EDIT: However, I would not try to make this a top priority for 6.0. I would vote it up in mantis in an instant if it went up there though.

[Diazo]

I have logging turned on, which line actually is the multiple ingress calculation so I can see the actual numbers?

In MainThreadWaveComputationLog.txt look for a line like "Next-wave-time-calc: because Diff >= 7 and entry_points = 10, entry-point-modified range of mulitiplier for modifier is -2:4, so: -420:840".

Alright, numbers incoming once I get the garbage out.

The other idea of having split turret caps wouldn't really be workable (too complex, for me and for you).  We could have different special turret types that have per-planet caps, but we don't have time for much of that (if any), nor do I think it would necessarily be a great solution.

Heh, about what I expected, oh well.

D.