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.
Completely unrelated, but this reminded me of an anecdote (which may be apocryphal for all I know) about an RPG developer who wanted to make the wildlife in their world more active and more fitting in the RPG conventions, so they allowed them to randomly attack other wildlife and also let them level up as they got more kills. The end result was a rabbit that would one-shot any player that came into its range.
Back on topic,
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.
Even if you do something like this, you've still not solved the original problem. If they take two minutes to get rid of 60% engine health, the result is that after 30 seconds the attritioner has already died because everything on the planet came to kill it. (Or you brought in your fleet along with it, and they have killed everything that just came after your attritioner, so engine damage becomes moot.)
It all comes back to that, no matter whether they do engine damage, or attrition damage, or reclamation damage, or just tickle the AI and call it bad names, as long as they do something to every ship on the planet, then every ship on the planet is going to close in for the kill.
I don't know, maybe the attrition damage should be beefed up so you can at least take a substantial chunk out of the baddies before you're forced to run. I mean, let me pull some numbers... OK back. A Mk V Attritioner, top of the line, does 1,500 attrition damage per second. A lowly Mk II Bomber has 308,000 HP. So that's 205 seconds before you can take that bomber down to 0. Roughly 3 1/2 minutes. Almost pointless. In a real game scenario, you'd be quite lucky to get even 30 seconds of attrition damage before you have to pull out of the planet or deal with that bomber in some other way like by blowing it up with your fleet. In that time, you've done 45,000 damage. Hardly enough to matter. A single shot from a Mk I fighter on a Bomber II after hull bonuses does 21,600 damage and it can do that every 4 seconds (assuming I got the armor calc right. It comes out after the hull multiplier?)
And yes, I know it's doing this to every unit across the whole world, so that damage number seems a lot more impressive when you're hitting a world with 500 ships on it and doing 750,000 damage per second. But again, that still means you have 500 ships to deal with (which after the first pulse are ALL angry at you), so it pretty well balances out in the AI's favor I feel. This is probably all obvious and the whole reason this subject came up in the first place, but I still like to nerd out and get real numbers into the discussion when I can.
