Somewhat silly question for old timers..

[Lancefighter]

How often do you find yourself coming back to Aiwar, and deciding the entire game needs to be rebalanced somehow?
I feel like I have done it at least three times now..

I noticed when I came back a lot of threads questioning old content - I myself recently started a starship rebalance discussion, where someone else started a triangle discussion. I've definitely seen others too. There is apparently great talk about reworking the entire armor system about too.. Its definitely been a few times me or others have shown up and discussed how weak or strong they felt certain ships are (I think I complained a lot about spire minirams for a while.. I saw them in a game a few days ago and ran for the hills >_> ).

And at keith/chris - How much of what we say do you actually agree with? Do you/other primary playtesters notice these issues we bring up, or mostly just tend to acknowledge that we have them? Not really meant to be a accusatory question or something silly (i dont even know where I'm going with this), but how much of the game do you feel is shaped by the few vocal of us that repeatedly show up and say something needs to be changed? How often do you think we are just rofltastically wrong, and make token adjustments to make us be quiet?

edit; Content for new people too now!
How do you see us old people returning? When you see some of us show up and almost demand a complete rework of mechanics that have been in the game since you started playing, what really goes through your mind?

[Draco18s]

I've been the root cause of several re-balances myself, both directly and indirectly.

I take the blame for Transport-out-of-supply-warp-attrition, as I once posted that I used them to travel 7 hops, claim a system, repair, and then 7 hops-out again, repeat, then four more hops to the AI homeworld.

I take credit for the parasite buffs post massive nerf, as I anticipated the utter uselessness of them, to the point of filing a bug report before the patch even went live.

I may also be partly responsible for said nerf (I once posted that I no longer built armies, I reclaimed them).

I'm likely also responsible in part to the reduction in Force Field Shield Bearers cap numbers, as I would use them to shield my fleet, trounce up to a guard post, WTF murder it, and everything around it, and then have engineers sitting under my shield bearers, repair the (moderator removed word that was understandable but outside the profanity policy) out of my fleet, thus never needing a refleet.  I can still do that today, but the engineers die much faster now than before, due to plasma siege starships, and the annoying frequency of the AI to pick melee units.

I will likely be causing a nerf to raid starships, at least in terms of toughness, if the fact that a cap of Mk 1+2+3 can waltz up to the core worlds 14 hops away, murder the command station, and then waltz back out again (oh, and killing four other systems, a raid engine, and two data centers in the process).  Or perhaps deepstriking will become more deadly.  Just a prediction.

Despite all of this, the game still doesn't sit right with me.

[Wingflier]

I think things are getting better...slowly.

There are still some major and glaring balance issues.  The problem is that new players don't even notice.  For at least the first few months you play it, you're so overwhelmed with all the different options and game content that you really have no frame of reference to understand game balance.

However, I think that playing for a few years starts to make the problems really show.

As an example, how often are difficulties 1-6 even used?  The fact that we're constantly having to buff difficulty 10 every few patches is indicative of a major flaw in game design.  If 1 strategy continues to work on all difficulties, and never has to be changed or altered in any major way, the game isn't forcing the player to adapt or be dynamic enough to always have a unique challenge.

Right now I'd say the 3 major balance problems are:

1. The huge usefulness disparity between the bonus ship types.  Without a doubt some bonus ships are ridiculously useful, while others nobody really uses.  The buff/nerf polls are nice for this, but in the end the most useful ships seem to follow a certain pattern, not really excel because of their particular stats.

2. The schizophrenic way the AI reinforces planets.  When they're just throwing a little bit of everything at you every battle, there's not much strategy involved.  As much as everybody likes to blob, it's a major design flaw of the game.  The AI needs to specialize a certain ship type per planet, and (in my opinion) have extremely powerful Guardians that makes each planet a unique challenge, not a blob vs. blob combat.  I've never heard of a successful strategy game that balances itself around blobbing.  People who say Starcraft 2 Protoss don't really understand Starcraft 2.  Force Fields, Blink micro, Guardian Shield, Zealot Charge, Templar Feedback, and Psionic Storm, as well as many other combat mechanics mean that the player is often moving his force into different groups, or using each type of unit in a specific way.  People who want to continue blob + right clicking in AI War still have the lower difficulties to play on.

3. Armor and Hull Type mechanics.  I think overhauling both of these completely for the entire game would fix point 1 pretty well.  Personally I'd like to see armor become more of a factor and hull types become less of a factor.  It's a little silly that some ships basically do no damage to others simply because they have a different "hull type".  Armor could be a much bigger factor than it is now, giving many bonus ships (anti-armor, armor rotter, minipods, etc.) a more important role than they currently have.

Even with these 3 major problems, the game is definitely playable, but like Draco said, it doesn't feel right.  It's something new players won't even notice but as the thread indicates, veterans can sense it.

[Martyn van Buren]

About 2., has there ever been a time when it really didn't pay to blob?  I think I came in after 5.0.  Personally I find it hard to imagine a form of the game in which tactics are all that central a part of play.  I can definitely see there being more circumstances in which it pays to pick the right part of your fleet to commit to a world and hold back the ones that are going to get slaughtered or cause more trouble than they're worth, and there are definitely some circumstances where some tactical micro can go a long way, but I'm wondering if I missed something very different that was around in the earlier versions of the game.

[Ozymandiaz]

How often do you find yourself coming back to Aiwar, and deciding the entire game needs to be rebalanced somehow?
I feel like I have done it at least three times now..

I noticed when I came back a lot of threads questioning old content - I myself recently started a starship rebalance discussion, where someone else started a triangle discussion. I've definitely seen others too. There is apparently great talk about reworking the entire armor system about too.. Its definitely been a few times me or others have shown up and discussed how weak or strong they felt certain ships are (I think I complained a lot about spire minirams for a while.. I saw them in a game a few days ago and ran for the hills >_> ).

And at keith/chris - How much of what we say do you actually agree with? Do you/other primary playtesters notice these issues we bring up, or mostly just tend to acknowledge that we have them? Not really meant to be a accusatory question or something silly (i dont even know where I'm going with this), but how much of the game do you feel is shaped by the few vocal of us that repeatedly show up and say something needs to be changed? How often do you think we are just rofltastically wrong, and make token adjustments to make us be quiet?

edit; Content for new people too now!
How do you see us old people returning? When you see some of us show up and almost demand a complete rework of mechanics that have been in the game since you started playing, what really goes through your mind?

Not often I do it, I might try and give my input on some small things, but generally someone else beats me to "rebalanced everything"

[Mánagarmr]

I keep returning to it almost every other month. I'll start up a game and I'll run it for some 5-20 hours and sometimes I even finish them. I enjoy them immensly, but unless there is something that is TOTALLY off, I rarely bother with balance issues. I'm too much of a casual player to notice much.

[TechSY730]

I actually think the game is in a pretty good shape right now. There is certainly far more RIGHT with the balance than there is wrong right now.

However, there are some points I agree with:

About the continual buffs to difficulty 10. I think part of the problem is that most of the changes have been around giving the AI "MOAR" or giving the humans less (like the reduction in AIP reduction on higher difficulties). The problem is that doesn't really deal with the underlying issue, we are finding strategies that the AI doesn't know how to deal with. That can't really be fixed by giving the AI "MOAR" unless it is done to such huge extents that it makes the game less fun.
What needs to happen is to make the AI smarter with strategy, tactics, fleet management, etc. That will scale much, MUCH better in the long run.
Some progress has been made on this (like the change to make AIs sometimes choose to reinforce their homeworlds even if they aren't alerted, or the upcoming special forces changes), and while those are appreciated, these sorts of changes haven't been the focus.

Now while making the AI smarter scales better (and indeed, is more fun to play against), it does require substantially more work to implement, which is why I understand why "smarter AI" changes are coming at a slower pace. But I would like to point out that the work doing it is generally worth it.

EDIT: Not saying that "MOAR" sometimes isn't the answer. It can be, like with the general magnitude of reinforcements and CPAs. However, it is wrong to think that merely giving more to the AI (or less to the human) can overcome a strategic blindspot of the AI.


For the "homogenous" way the AI defends, I've made my suggestions on the corresponding mantis post.
I would not like to see all, or even most guard posts become "focused" on a ship type or archtype, but I would like to see some. The existing, but currently weak, "be more likely to reinforce with ships already at that guard post" seems like a good tool (among other that will need to be implemented) to help implement this.


For the Armor, Hull type thing. I would like to see Armor and Hull types be made more even in terms of how much they, on average, impact ship durability.
However, I am waiting until the planned rebalance before making any further judgement calls.

[LaughingThesaurus]

I'm basically there with Moonshine. I don't ever really notice, but it's because I haven't played on diff 7 much at all. I do agree with some points though, because I've already seen that stuff happen. In particular, with the whole schizophrenic reinforcements. I'd see an even composition of a small number of enemy ships and think, okay what should I send. Well, my fighters beat their bombers, my bombers beat the frigates, and my missile frigates will beat the fighters so... okay, I guess send the whole fleet. The most thinking I have to do in that regard ends up being "What fraction of my fleet do I send?" rather than a good honest decision.

As far as total reworks of all the mechanics... how do I feel? It depends on what's getting reworked. I would not, for instance, like to see base elements of the game completely ripped out and redone. I like how economy works, I like how research works, and so on. I don't want to relearn those parts of the game, and I don't want to tell my friends that they have to relearn the entire game either. On the subject of armor, hull types, reinforcements, and whatnot, I wouldn't mind so much. Basically, the smaller the system is, the easier it'd be for me to swallow. Hull type damage has a huge effect, but is so easy to learn that if it were overhauled or removed entirely, I probably wouldn't care. Armor isn't something I admittedly pay much attention to, either.

Difficulty-wise, I may have skipped diff 6, but there's a pretty huge spike from 5 to 7. And by spike, I mean more of a comparative wall. Difficulty 7 does not pull punches, loads planets down with loads of cool stuff, makes me feel actually backed into a corner... and anything below that is just a complete and total pushover. For what I see about diff 10, however, I really agree with Tech that the AI needs more smart and less MOAR.

[Diazo]

It's interesting to see this threat and how people play the game. I consider myself an old-timer as I started playing back before Zentih Remnant was released.

For me, I've never really left. I did stop for a while, but that was when I stopped gaming due to real life getting busy, not me getting tired and moving on to other games.

Having said that, I generally like where the game is. Does it have issues? Yes, but the game itself is solid.

I think one of the reasons  I play 10/10 so much it is always a challenge, and if it was not I could turn on some minor factions.

I don't even want to think about how pathetic my win/loss ratio is.

Which I think is the reason I keep coming back. Rounds of AI War last too long to play a "quick, easy" game, you get bored before the round is over. You have to have the difficulty high enough to make you think, not just react.

If I kept all the other settings intact and dropped the difficulty for an "easy" game, I'm pretty sure I would not finish as I would be bored with it by mid game.

About the continual buffs to difficulty 10. I think part of the problem is that most of the changes have been around giving the AI "MOAR" or giving the humans less (like the reduction in AIP reduction on higher difficulties). The problem is that doesn't really deal with the underlying issue, we are finding strategies that the AI doesn't know how to deal with. That can't really be fixed by giving the AI "MOAR" unless it is done to such huge extents that it makes the game less fun.
What needs to happen is to make the AI smarter with strategy, tactics, fleet management, etc. That will scale much, MUCH better in the long run.
Some progress has been made on this (like the change to make AIs sometimes choose to reinforce their homeworlds even if they aren't alerted, or the upcoming special forces changes), and while those are appreciated, these sorts of changes haven't been the focus.

Heh. I kind of find this amusing because I remember when 10/10 actually lived up to it's DOOM title. What we have today is certainly better from a balance perspective, even if it's a lot weaker then it used to be but I still kind of miss the original DOOM that would DOOM you to DOOM.

1. The huge usefulness disparity between the bonus ship types.  Without a doubt some bonus ships are ridiculously useful, while others nobody really uses.  The buff/nerf polls are nice for this, but in the end the most useful ships seem to follow a certain pattern, not really excel because of their particular stats.

Well, don't pick your ship then. Just go hit start and go random. Yes, this is imposing a higher difficulty on yourself, but you have to do that for the game to remain fun. (Actually need to add that randomness to a Multi-HW start.)

Really, I think the game is in a really good place as long as you set the difficulty high enough it is a challenge.

If you are winning every game you start, you don't have the difficulty high enough. In my opinion, the amount 'fun' you get out of AI War is directly tied to how close the difficulty is set to your 100% effort level.

Which means losing a small, but non-negligible, amount of games.

One of the funnest evening I ever had with AI War was back when the DOOM waves still existed. I started 6 different games and never lasted past the first AI wave, but the challenge of knowing that I 'could' survive if I got it just right kept me going and meant I had a blast.

Erm, wow. I wandered all over the place. As for the rebalance question in the OP, beyond a couple more tweaks to the 10/10 level AI that would finish off the current rebalance, my only real thing is the attack multipliers vs. hull type has gotten so snarled up with so many units now in the game it needs a look. Back in the early days, there were not all these unique, high value structures that the bombers got the attack bonus against, the spread was much more even so you did not have the bombers being as critically important as they are today.

TL:DR Make sure the difficulty level is set high enough to challenge yourself and you'll never leave. At least I never did.

D.

[Wingflier]

I actually think the game is in a pretty good shape right now. There is certain far more RIGHT with the balance than there is wrong right now.

However, there are some points I agree with:

About the continual buffs to difficulty 10. I think part of the problem is that most of the changes have been around giving the AI "MOAR" or giving the humans less (like the reduction in AIP reduction on higher difficulties). The problem is that doesn't really deal with the underlying issue, we are finding strategies that the AI doesn't know how to deal with. That can't really be fixed by giving the AI "MOAR" unless it is done to such huge extents that it makes the game less fun.
What needs to happen is to make the AI smarter with strategy, tactics, fleet management, etc. That will scale much, MUCH better in the long run.
Some progress has been made on this (like the change to make AIs sometimes choose to reinforce their homeworlds even if they aren't alerted, or the upcoming special forces changes), and while those are appreciated, these sorts of changes haven't been the focus.

I often noticed that the AI does much better with a large number of 1 type of ship than with a small number of many types of ships.  This is why I think that if we made each planet focus on reinforcing with a certain type, we'd see a lot more interesting things from the AI other than:  "Well, better send everything".

The point of having each planet specialize, with rare but powerful Guardians spawning as well, is that it forces the player to send counters instead of sending his whole fleet.  Is this a planet full of Fighters?  I'll send my Frigates to kill the Fighters, then I can handle the Guardians once that's over with.  The idea is that if you upset an entire planet at once, the Guardians are going to be much more of a threat than they are now.  So it makes assaulting a planet a lot more interesting in terms of - how do I accomplish my goal without riling up the entire hornet's nest at once?  Where now, the best strategy usually IS to rile up the entire hornet's nest, which in my opinion is very counter-intuitive to everything AI War stands for and rather boring.

Also, I agree with you about the difficulties.  I think that if we balanced the game right, the difficulty would (and should) scale a lot better than it does now.  The fact that 1-7 is pretty easy, 7-8 is somewhat difficult, then 8-9.7 is extremely hard, then 10 is supposed to be impossible - but that you beat all the difficulties the same way, really makes no sense to me.  It's much better to have the highest difficulties be too hard (to constantly give the best players a challenge), than have the lowest difficulties too easy.  Regardless of what we do, difficulty 1 will still be a snoozefest, but in the current incarnation, difficulty 10 will probably continue to get buffed because of balance problems.

[keith.lamothe]

And at keith/chris - How much of what we say do you actually agree with?

Actively agree with?  Some.  Interested to hear?  Quite a bit of it.  At least consider as a data point?  Most of it.

Do you/other primary playtesters notice these issues we bring up, or mostly just tend to acknowledge that we have them?

I'm not sure what you mean; generally I have an inkling of an issue before someone mentions it, occasionally it's a "what? I had no idea".

how much of the game do you feel is shaped by the few vocal of us that repeatedly show up and say something needs to be changed?

Mere assertion and/or repetition doesn't make much headway, but a triangulation of a bunch of different players saying the same thing in a way that jives with my understanding of how the game actually works tends to produce results.  And yea, I'd say most changes that do happen are driven by the vocal portion of the community.  Basically half my role here is that of the DM   I'm not just working on a game, I'm working on a game that is the common interest of a community.  I assume the players that don't talk are relatively happy, and will pipe up if something steps on their toes too hard.

How often do you think we are just rofltastically wrong, and make token adjustments to make us be quiet?

I don't think I've ever made a change just to shut someone up.  I'll occasionally make a moderate balance change against my better judgment simply to demonstrate (via playtesting) why we shouldn't go that way, but more than once it's come back that it was actually a good change.

As for rofltastic wrong-ness... yea, that happens   Everyone has some lemon ideas in any pursuit, and this is no different.  It's further complicated by the fact that y'all have to operate more on perception than knowledge when thinking about the game.  Even I'm sometimes factually incorrect in what I think the game is doing, but I do have access to the actual data on what it's doing.  Anyway, if I think someone is totally off their rocker on something I just quietly move on, or maybe encourage a bit of community bat-it-around if I think there's something hopeful in there.

In general, when considering feedback for "is there something to act on in this?" I'm looking for:

1) Demonstration that the person is exercising rational thought.
- If they're just raging about something, there's probably not a lot for me to work with.  The lack of this point doesn't happen very often around here, thankfully.

2) Demonstration that the person understands what the game is actually doing now.
- If they're basing a request on a set of premises that simply isn't true, or changed substantially in a previous version, there's probably not a lot for me to work with.  This lack of this point happens with some regularity around here; it's a complex game, things change a lot, so sometimes people just make a mistake.

3) Demonstration that the person is not alone in their opinion.
- This is less important, I've done a lot of things just for one person (and generally found that many others are happy about it), but in a lot of areas (particularly balance, or major changes) I'm looking for consensus at least on the problem (and that there is a problem) if not on the solution.  If one person is just hopping up and down asserting thus-and-so and there's sharp disagreement from other folks I respect, then I'm not likely to move on it.  This has happened several times in the community's history, though sometimes the loner is actually right and is being opposed because they rubbed people the wrong way, and I have to try to get the discussion back on track (the example I have in mind is the first major "energy automation" debate).

Another thing, not so much a prerequisite as an adjustment: adjust for the known biases of the person in question.  If Lancefighter argues for buffing starships I say "of course, it's Lancefighter"   If a player who I know to be a seriously "glass half empty" sort of person gets really down on a particular mechanic or recent change, I take it with a grain of salt (though some of our "glass half empty" players I value quite highly, as I look to them to point out stuff that the more cheerful players don't want to get into).  If someone who's always super-positive about basically-anything-Arcen is super-positive about some mechanic or recent change, I'm quite grateful for the encouragement (and we need some degree of that, we're human after all), but I also take that with a grain of salt in terms of "is this actually good?".  On the flip side, when someone who's super-positive-about-all-things-Arcen sees a mechanic and says "sorry, that's a total deal breaker", we really pay attention to that.

Anyway, those adjustments are often unnecessary because there's enough people in the conversation that a consensus indicates personal biases aren't the operative factor, but sometimes it's pretty important.

===

On the continual buffs to 10/10, that's not due to a massive design flaw, or if it is it's a flaw that's been around for a very long time.  The current run of 10/10 changes started when I changed it so the initial waves would not be synchronized (both AI players sending waves at the same time), and reduced the minimum wave size.  Before that you couldn't really even tell how hard 10/10 was because it killed you on the first wave.  If you somehow survived that you could build up and potentially win.  The major glaring problem there was that 10/10 was practicing false advertising: the first 10-15 minutes of the game were nearly impossible (it took serious cheese to survive), the rest of it was considerably more tame.

Another thing that contributed is the overhaul to reinforcements: previously they were considerably fiercer, but largely because they would get low-cap ships for the same "cost" as high-cap ships.  This led to a lot of bandaids to prevent 100 blade spawners on a single planet, etc, but those were just bandaids.  So when the system was redone to make the AI actually "pay" for those things, reinforcements went through the floor.  It took a few months for people to notice, particularly that they were able to just roll over the AI's defense, and we've been bringing it back up.

So I could have left 10/10's "you must be a 10 foot tall dude in powered armor to get on this ride" initial-wave situation in place, and I could have left the AI's reinforcement bandaids in place, and we would be in a different place now without nearly so much need to address follow-up issues from those.  But I don't think it would be a better place

[relmz32]

People who say Starcraft 2 Protoss don't really understand Starcraft 2.  Force Fields, Blink micro, Guardian Shield, Zealot Charge, Templar Feedback, and Psionic Storm, as well as many other combat mechanics mean that the player is often moving his force into different groups, or using each type of unit in a specific way.

Sorry, WingFlier, but at the Top Tier of Foreign and Korean play, blob tactics are among the most powerful mid to late game tactics as well as the most used. Also, everything you listed (Force Fields, Blink micro, Guardian Shield, Zealot Charge, Templar Feedback, and Psionic Storm) is used as part of blob tactics and usually is better. Blob + micro still is a blob.

In many games from turn based strategy to rts, the tension between high dps and high survivability usually twists original design intent with emergent gameplay.

[KDR_11k]

Blob + micro is still way more than what we're talking about here, the blobbing in AI War takes the shape of select all, attack move.

Big question is of course what the alternative to blobbing is, hence my old "thinking about blobbing" thread: I have no idea what else AI War can realistically handle given its simple combat physics, lack of terrain and low-micro philosophy. Full force commitment may even be a valid thing if you think of AI War more as grand strategy where the strategic location of your fleet matters more than what the fleet does in combat.

Also the strong economy vs low unit caps means that forces are usually constrained by unit caps (unlike other RTSes where they are mostly constrained by economic output as you don't get enough money to easily hit the unit cap) and since unit caps are per type and mark your only option to increase the firepower of a group that already includes all the directly useful ships for a job (e.g. a bomber fleet for a forcefield) is to throw in unrelated units. The strong economy also means that even if throwing those extra ships in results in more losses you're still not losing much as they're trivial to replace.

The closest in terms of unit counts and economy are the * Annihilation games (and Supreme Commander, of course). Once you operate on a late game economy it does involve a lot of blobbing too (more so at low level play since high level matches are likely decided at the low tech/unit count stage).

As for giving the AI more, the 10/10 players seem to focus on keeping the AIP extremely low which leaves the AI with too few resources to do anything major. Maybe it's too easy to avoid escalation of the AIP.

[chemical_art]

As for giving the AI more, the 10/10 players seem to focus on keeping the AIP extremely low which leaves the AI with too few resources to do anything major. Maybe it's too easy to avoid escalation of the AIP.

Even with maximum cheese, I still could afford to take 4 planets after popping all the data centers. In a less cheese filled game, I could afford to take 2 and I would be fighting hard.

It's seems to be more a matter of you as a player making due with what you find rather then avoiding escalating aip, including avoiding anything that could remotely increase aip except those 2 planets you must take to leapfrog / get fabricators from.

[TechSY730]

I think that's where core shield gens enter the picture, which is sort of sidestepped by the fact that core field gens are optional. (Though I still feel that it should be 3 out of 5 rather than 4 out of 5 A networks you need to destroy, as rarely will you need 4 new ship types)