Spirecraft Attritioner usefulness-increase possibilities

[Nalgas]

Unlike the botnet golem, you get maybe one, two opportunities to use it per game. Unlike the golem, it is not reusable....Also, if you get a game where you have thousands of ships on one wormhole, you probably do on more then one...so unless you then take that new fleet you have and beeline it toward the homeworld it still won't solve your defensive situation...and since AIP will be fairly high before you even get access to Titanite I feel the advantage would quickly dissipate under the usual AI onslaught...

If you get a game where you have thousands of ships on one wormhole, you're probably playing every single multiplayer game I've ever played, where there are always hundreds or thousands of ships everywhere you look at all times, because that's just what happens when you play with four to six players.  Or with fewer, if you turn the difficulty up.  The situation I was describing wasn't using it defensively, though.  It was deliberately freeing up a large number of ships and funneling them into a chokepoint with the intention of farming them.

Why use them to solve a defensive situation that doesn't need solving?  Making a beeline for the homeworld was actually exactly what I had in mind, either using your new free ships to do it earlier and more easily than you could otherwise, or to take out the second homeworld immediately after the first one with an "instafleet" instead of having to transport/rebuild your fleet to prepare for another battle.  Getting a full cap of all four marks of all shiptypes the AI has unlocked instantly at no resource cost (other than building the Martritioner itself) is a HUGE amount of firepower to throw at pretty much anything.  If you're lucky enough to have access to two of the asteroids, that's quite possibly GG for each of the homeworlds.

[TechSY730]

Nope, "flavoring" the dot is fine for me. Armor damage over time would be the easiest to balance, but given the average lifetime of units in battle, the affects of armor damage would not be very visible. (In fact, this is a problem with armor damage/rotting in general, but that is a subject for a different, preferibly new thread)

How would you plan on balancing engine and/or armor damage?

[orzelek]

Small note slightly on topic:

Anything that makes you put attritioner close to target seeems.. wasteful.

These things are finite amount paper thin kind. Similar to implosion artys.
Current attritioner way of working is neat because you don't need to keep it on front line.

I agree that effect is puny. Especially on low caps where stuff has more hp. I'm trying to use attritioners now... but placing few of these on main defense planet seems to accomplish... nothing

[BobTheJanitor]

I think no matter what you do with the DoT, as long as it still angers all the ships on the planet you're going to end up in the same boat. No matter what it does, if it takes a few minutes to do it and the AI ships are coming to eat you while you're doing it, effectively it doesn't matter. You either have to warp out quickly, or kill those AI ships with your fleet. And if you're killing them with your fleet, then they're dead and the attrition effect has no importance. You've accomplished just what you would have done by sending in a fleet sans attritioner. Again we come back to the fact that it might well just be emitting an 'aggravation' pulse.

Solutions could be:

-Making it cloak while attritioning. That's pretty clearly overpowered without even needing further investigation.

-Making it extremely armored. That's interesting but you still end up with the same dynamic. If you make it so ridiculously armored that it can sit around and attrition down a planet while the entire population beats on it, it's way overpowered. If you don't, then once again you're bringing your fleet in to deal with the system, and we're back to square one where the attrition doesn't matter.

-Making the damage more focused. I.e., allowing it to execute one fat attrition pulse and then run for the hills. This semi-undermines the name of the unit, but not exactly the spirit of it. Is it possible to have it do percentage based damage? Like a pulse takes off X% from everything on the planet, after which it has to go recuperate for Y minutes before it can be used again? Something to consider anyway. Also still allows it to be used for aggravating everything on the planet if you so desire. This could probably be balanced with some number fiddling, although I'm not sure how you'd balance stacking a lot of them on one planet. If you made it X% of remaining HP though that might work. At least, until some smart guy puts ten of them on one world and has them all pulse at once. Maybe just flat damage numbers makes more sense. I'm just trying to think of a way that you couldn't use a huge force of these to cream every planet you come across.

-Giving it a repairable force field. Some sort of tiny bubble (not for use by other ships) that allows it to sit and attrition a planet for a while even under fire, but then forces you to run when it gets low. Probably hard to know exactly how strong to make it, but numbers fiddling is a problem for engineers, I'm an ideas guy.

-Making it really fast. Send it in and then play chase with the AI ships until you wear them all down. OK, that was a silly idea.

[keith.lamothe]

I think no matter what you do with the DoT, as long as it still angers all the ships on the planet you're going to end up in the same boat. No matter what it does, if it takes a few minutes to do it and the AI ships are coming to eat you while you're doing it, effectively it doesn't matter. You either have to warp out quickly, or kill those AI ships with your fleet. And if you're killing them with your fleet, then they're dead and the attrition effect has no importance.

But what if the effect of the attritioner amounts to a 10% increase in reload time for the AI ships (due to para-attrition) or hobbles the engines of a significant part of the enemy force so you can pull off a hit-and-run (or aggravate-run-pounce or whatever) more successfully?  Or if it makes it so that over the course of several attacks against one particularly nasty planet it's basically wiped all the armor off the permanent targets?

And then there are the defensive uses, of course, though we do want it to be worth bringing offensively too.

-Making it cloak while attritioning. That's pretty clearly overpowered without even needing further investigation.

Spirecraft Penetritioner!  Yea, that'd be kinda like giving the player an "go eat lunch to win" button in a limited sense.

-Making it extremely armored. That's interesting but you still end up with the same dynamic. If you make it so ridiculously armored that it can sit around and attrition down a planet while the entire population beats on it, it's way overpowered. If you don't, then once again you're bringing your fleet in to deal with the system, and we're back to square one where the attrition doesn't matter.

Pretty similar, but more of a limited thing than the cloaking; just elongates the time it has to do something, not make it infinite.  Still not thrilled over it taking a long time to do whatever, though.  Maybe it could play up the armored and aggravating idea and be a giant decoy drone too
 

-Making the damage more focused. I.e., allowing it to execute one fat attrition pulse and then run for the hills. This semi-undermines the name of the unit, but not exactly the spirit of it. Is it possible to have it do percentage based damage? Like a pulse takes off X% from everything on the planet, after which it has to go recuperate for Y minutes before it can be used again? Something to consider anyway. Also still allows it to be used for aggravating everything on the planet if you so desire. This could probably be balanced with some number fiddling, although I'm not sure how you'd balance stacking a lot of them on one planet. If you made it X% of remaining HP though that might work. At least, until some smart guy puts ten of them on one world and has them all pulse at once. Maybe just flat damage numbers makes more sense. I'm just trying to think of a way that you couldn't use a huge force of these to cream every planet you come across.

I don't think this approach would work very well on balancing due to how clever humans are at abusing such things, and it does definitely make it not attrition anymore (I don't mind renaming the unit, but I don't think it will ultimately be necessary).

-Giving it a repairable force field. Some sort of tiny bubble (not for use by other ships) that allows it to sit and attrition a planet for a while even under fire, but then forces you to run when it gets low. Probably hard to know exactly how strong to make it, but numbers fiddling is a problem for engineers, I'm an ideas guy.

Spirecraft AttritionBearer!  Hmm, this has some potential but it probably wouldn't work the way you'd think: if it has a forcefield, it _is_ a forcefield, unless the forcefield is a module (and modules are a no-no in spirecraft land; they're fine if the point of the thing is to be modular but too fiddly to have a single module on something).  That means that when the ff goes down the ship blows up, since there's only one Health for the unit.  Though I guess we could have it scale down in size faster so that the radius is equal to the unit's radius at <=50% health, but then the "ff" and the ship would have exactly the same hull type, armor, etc.

-Making it really fast. Send it in and then play chase with the AI ships until you wear them all down. OK, that was a silly idea.

Neinzul Youngling Attritioner!

[bongotron2000]

How about giving the attritioners large amounts of health and making it so that any damage that they take is dealt back out to all enemies in the system as attrition? They'd keep the per-second attrition that they already have as with this you'd want the AI to have a reason to come after them. This could be balanced by having some sort of multiplier (probably fractional, at least for the lower levels) for the damage related attrition that increases as you go up through the levels, otherwise it'd just be way overpowered.

[keith.lamothe]

How about giving the attritioners large amounts of health and making it so that any damage that they take is dealt back out to all enemies in the system as attrition? They'd keep the per-second attrition that they already have as with this you'd want the AI to have a reason to come after them. This could be balanced by having some sort of multiplier (probably fractional, at least for the lower levels) for the damage related attrition that increases as you go up through the levels, otherwise it'd just be way overpowered.

The Zenith Mirritritioner!  Though this one is actually pretty inventive.  My main concern is that it makes it a bit fiddly to get the most use out of because you have to bait the AI to attack that particular unit, etc.  But worth considering.

[bongotron2000]

The Zenith Mirritritioner!  Though this one is actually pretty inventive.  My main concern is that it makes it a bit fiddly to get the most use out of because you have to bait the AI to attack that particular unit, etc.  But worth considering.

They could have an ability like Decoy Drones where they take damage that would have been inflicted on nearby ships within a certain radius, and with the same vulnerabilities of the Decoy Drones, namely any ships that can fire through forcefields. Given that Spirecraft come from a finite resource, this ability could switch off once the attritioner's health drops below a certain percentage to prevent them from getting wiped-out too easily.

[Nice Save]

Make them interfere with enemy supply. That fits with the whole semi-passive planet-wide stand-off thing.

Edit: Also, Exo-waves might be impossible.

[Nalgas]

Make them interfere with enemy supply. That fits with the whole semi-passive planet-wide stand-off thing.

Edit: Also, Exo-waves might be impossible.

Beachheadtritioners?

[keith.lamothe]

Attritioners are already not eligible for exos.  I'd like to get them back in there (the other non-military spirecraft that make sense, too) but I'd have to give them guns for the logic to work right.

[Cyborg]

Give them the same guns as the siege starship. They still won't hit anything, but the logic would work right. 

[c4sc4]

I like the idea of them doing engine attrition damage. Maybe they could do something like 1% of a ship's total engine health every 3 seconds or something. That way after 2 min ships would be at 60% engine health. It might be overpowered for ships with large engine health but then again it may not be useful at all. Or maybe it does 1% engine damage every second but is limited by how low it can take it, like the riot starship.

[keith.lamothe]

Give them the same guns as the siege starship. They still won't hit anything, but the logic would work right. 

Hahaha.  Reminds me of the anecdote where some dev team working on a tactical squad combat game wound up giving all the cows unloaded pistols so they wouldn't attack "the other team", run away, or shoot.

[zebramatt]

Give them the same guns as the siege starship. They still won't hit anything, but the logic would work right. 

Brilliant!