Taking a look at Guardians

[keith.lamothe]

I'd like to take a look at the stats of all the AI's guardians with a view to a few things:

1) Making the AI not always have every guardian type in every game, but rather having a certain (preferably small) "core set" that's always there and a number of "unlocked" guardian types at the start of the game, with additional unlocks coming as AIP goes up (and/or, potentially, hacking-antagonism).
- But in order for this to work, each optional guardian type needs to be at least roughly equivalent to the others in danger.  Or have a different "unlock category" so that it doesn't think Warp Gate Guardians are in any way comparable to Raider Guardians, etc.  It may be that "core" and "unlockable" are all we need in terms of those categories, we'll see.

2) Having some good balance targets and categorization system for some new guardian types to be added in the next expansion.

3) Improving the current numeric balance and bringing these a bit "up to date", for example:
- making the bonuses even for each guardian type (so no unit having x2 vs one type and x5 vs another or whatever)
- make sure the hull bonus types each has make sense
- making armor and armor-piercing more rare and more deliberate rather than "everything has it", as that seems the most likely near-term improvement to the armor situation.

So, the current stats (of mkI guardians, on epic combat style; high caps though that doesn't matter as guardians don't scale; may be some odd rounding/urounding of certain numbers compared to actual in-game):

ObjectType	Health	BaseDPS	BonusDPS	Hull Type	Armor	Movement Speed	Attack Range	Armor Piercing	Shot Power	Targets Hit Per Shot	Shots Per Salvo	Seconds Per Salvo	Highest Bonus	Bonuses Even?	Bonuses	Special Ability Range
AIGuardianArtillery	400000	13333	66666	Artillery	200	28	18000	320000	160000	1	1	12	5	FALSE	Heavy;Turret;UltraHeavy	0
AIGuardianBeam	1119921	74250	74250	Medium	300	28	10000	500	33000	9	1	4	1	TRUE		0
AIGuardianCarrier	8000000	1860	5580	Medium	300	50	6000	0	600	1	31	10	3	FALSE	Heavy	0
AIGuardianEMP	1119921	1860	5580	Medium	300	70	6000	0	600	1	31	10	3	FALSE	Heavy	0
AIGuardianFlak	1119921	13750	68750	Medium	100	28	4000	0	5500	5	5	10	5	FALSE	CloseCombat;Refractive;Composite	0
AIGuardianGravity	800000	6667	20000	Artillery	300	24	10000	0	40000	1	1	6	3	FALSE	Heavy;Neutron;UltraHeavy	7000
AIGuardianLaser	879882	13600	68000	Medium	300	34	8000	300	3400	1	8	2	5	TRUE	Light;Refractive;Polycrystal	0
AIGuardianLightning	1119921	66667	66667	Medium	600	22	4000	999999	6000	200	1	18	1	TRUE		0
AIGuardianRaider	400000	13750	68750	UltraLight	375	92	9000	0	11000	1	5	4	5	TRUE	CommandGrade;UltraHeavy;Structural	0
AIGuardianSelfDestruction	20000	20000000	60000000	UltraLight	0	92	-1000	999999	100000	200	1	0	3	FALSE	Artillery;Swarmer;Turret	0
AIGuardianSniper	400000	15833	63333	UltraLight	150	22	999999000	999999	19000	1	5	6	4	FALSE	Medium;Polycrystal	0
AIGuardianSpecialForcesRally	800000	1000	1000	Medium	0	32	6000	0	10000	1	1	10	1	TRUE		0
AIGuardianSpider	400000	10000	40000	UltraLight	150	22	999999000	0	3000	1	20	6	4	FALSE	Medium;Polycrystal	0
AIGuardianSpireImplosion	800000	0.25%	0.25%	Medium	0	40	8000	999999	1	1	1	1	1	TRUE		0
AIGuardianStarshipDisassembler	2400000	2000	6000	Medium	0	38	6000	8000	4000	1	1	2	3	FALSE	Heavy;UltraHeavy	0
AIGuardianTachyon	800000	2000	2000	Medium	150	0	6000	0	4000	1	5	10	1	TRUE		6500
AIGuardianTractor	1119921	17500	52500	Medium	450	22	6000	0	35000	1	5	10	3	FALSE	Turret	1700
AIGuardianVampire	800000	5333	16000	Medium	50	58	10000	0	4000	1	4	3	3	FALSE	Medium;Neutron;Polycrystal	0
AIGuardianWarpGate	16000000	8000	8000	UltraHeavy	0	22	6000	0	4000	1	4	2	1	TRUE		0
AIGuardianZombie	266666	60000	60000	Medium	300	32	10000	0	60000	1	2	2	1	TRUE		0

Thoughts?

[Hearteater]

This is a very exciting change.  Honestly, Guardians are probably my favorite opponent in AIW.  So anything to make them have a better and more interesting impact is a huge plus in my book.  Are you looking at just changing existing Guardians, or adding new Guardians?  Either way I'll try and stay on point and avoid mentioning previous related suggestions...much.

[keith.lamothe]

This is a very exciting change.  Honestly, Guardians are probably my favorite opponent in AIW.  So anything to make them have a better and more interesting impact is a huge plus in my book.  Are you looking at just changing existing Guardians, or adding new Guardians?  Either way I'll try and stay on point and avoid mentioning previous related suggestions...much.

Right now I'm just talking about adjusting what we have.  The new ones are an expansion topic, not for this thread

That said, bringing what we have to a better state is important for the new ones to have a good foundation, etc.

[Wingflier]

You already know my opinion on this, being a proponent of the "Super Guardian" idea on the mantis boards. http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=9450

Frankly I think Guardians are somewhat terrible at their jobs. Nothing has ever really prevented me from just killing them with a fleetball, most of the time I don't even notice they're there.

Some of the Guardians such as the Carrier Guardian or the Rally Post Guardian have the potential to be extremely cool, but after hundreds of hours of playing with them, I've never actually seen them perform their duties because they die so fast.

I think as a role, Guardians COULD be awesome, but in their current state they are an ignorable force multiplier at best.

[keith.lamothe]

They've definitely been non-ignorable at points in the past, but the novelty of "is that a flak guardian? wait, where did my fleet go?" wore off kinda fast

[TechSY730]

Personally, I actually think that guardians are in a good state right now, both balance and mechanics.

Yes, some of them could have their stats tweaked for better balance, but overall its pretty good.

Their spawning mechanic is also pretty good. They spawn somewhat rarely, but not as rarely as starships.

Granted, if guardians are truly supposed to be the rough equivilant of AI turrets, the. Their current spawn rate times their individual strength isn't quite high enough yet to really serve that purpose. But that is more of a numerical balance issue than a mechanics issue.

I also have no problem with them always having all types. After all, we have all types of turrets availible to us in each game (though some require knowledge).

My only complaint is the tachyon guardian, which I do think its special spawning mechanics are a bit flawed. (Mantis link to come later)

Now, I wouldn't mind some sort of "super-guardian" system on top of all this, but I think the core guardian mechanic is good as is.

[Lancefighter]

Were they not intended at some point to make combating guard posts more.. less similar?

As it stands, guardians are.. I dunno. they arent scary individually, except for a single one - The emp guardian. Theyre sometimes scary when I meet a group of them or something, and now and again raider guardians fly towards my homeworld or something..

The only notable one on that list, other than emp, is gravity guardians, which are annoying because gravity effects are still really strong.

You rarely actually see sniper/spider ones, with the minor exception of when an exo-wave brings 6 or 10 of them somewhere and its pretty painful..
I dunno.
I think turning them into starship/starship like entities would be good. Put 2-3 of them in a system, and have them do the starship-patrol thing. if I see a flak guardian and bring a fleet of light/ultralight, it SHOULD go away instantly. If the planet has an artillery guardian, it should do the really annoying auto-kite thing while peppering my fleet with far too much damage to be reasonable.
Some of this doesnt really fit, like emp guardians. I feel those could maybe go on core worlds or something and just pulse EMPs. as in, 'those are some mighty fine not-mk5 ships you have there, itd a pity if they all froze forever' Being on normal worlds doing that just seems meh.

However, I do not want to see these on the offensive. Ever. I think itd be ok for them to be part of special forces (through like fleet compacting or whatever primarily), as that is a strictly defensive force.

Anyway, thats my idea.

[chemical_art]

Reminds me of my early ideas of a super guardian, where each planet would spawn them separately from regular waves and would not be around in the early phase of games to slow them down. Each guardian would be so strong that you would have to notice it in base game, yet they wouldn't be allowed to go on the attack.

[Histidine]

I think with the new buffed guardposts, guardians (aside from a few exotic ones like Starship Disassembler and Gravity) don't really have a role beyond "bigger, meaner ship for garrisons." Still, they're not actively harmful to the game or anything, so they can be left as is.

[LordSloth]

Before the changes to starships, I found guardians having an impact on my forces on difficulty 7. They were more of a threat to starships if I was being inattentive, but not so much a fleetship ball. It was generally manageable, but if I stopped paying attention, something would knock out my starships.

So current factors:

• Drastically decreased starship knowledge costs, larger starship balls, less vulnerability to guardians, more flexibility to counter, easy to cover an entire starship ball under cloaker starships.
• Guard posts have a significant presence on the battlefield, although they don't come to you.
• It isn't too difficult to draw guardians off to more favorable places to fight them, excepting EMP guardians. I can't decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm leaning towards it being more interesting with them retaliating as currently implemented.
• I really need to try out the new Mobile Space Docks. They should have a pretty significant effect on fleetship use, and they may make extended starship operation less viable. Assault transports still have the cloaking, but at least they're not capable of roaming non-stop behind the enemy frontlines.

Thoughts, sometimes contradictory. Some I like better than others, some even I think are pretty awful ideas.

• Nerf only MK1 Cloaker Starships. I shouldn't be able to hide six heavy bombers, six plasma siege starships, 2 zenith , 4 flagships, 2 spire starships while only using half my free cap. The sheer amount of firepower I'm able to stealth for free is a bit overpowered on a normal game.
• Buff them with a focus on anti-starship roles. Increase their dps while decreasing their number of shots fired per reload.
• Give guardians a tagteamer AI. You wouldn't be facing them on guardposts as much, and non-blob tactics would be severely hampered. Not so good.
• Buff most guardians with a focus on anti-fleetship role (going back to the original concept of a replacement for turrets), while combining with or without a redesigned armor system similar but different to what's been discussed (key part is that there would be three to five types of armor, primarily differentiating starships from fleetship). Increased number of shots per salvo that would be rather deadly to unarmored fleetships, but considerably less effective (let's arbitrarily say 40% less) against your standard combat starship. Laser guardians wouldn't be about countering starships unless they teamed up, but they'd give fleetships a real beating. Problem: yet another reason to use a starship ball, harsher to highcap fleetships?
• Nerf 'brawler'-type guardian DPS across the board. In exchange, give them ten thousand armor while in AI territory territory only, adjust health values after experimentation, theorycrafting. Goal: a considerably more durable guardian focused more on damage over time rather than an alpha strike you can take out in a few seconds.
  
• Break guardians into different 'classes' and rebalance them as appropriate to focus on dogged persistence, alpha strike, counter starship or fleetship roles.
• Leave 'em alone until starship and fleet ship tweaks settle down.

Personally, I'm leaning towards a nerf of the basic cloaker starship's supercloak boost, either in recloak or count. Playing against defensive AIs in 6.018, forty free cloaked ships completely unbalances the fleetship/starship valuation. Cutting that Cloaker Starship MK1 to 10x supercloak would keep things in line with the halved caps, but I'm leaning towards a mere 5x. It wouldn't tackle the entire balance issue, but it would tackle what I consider the critical weakness to any other proposed balance change - cloaked starships can clear the guard posts without ever dealing with more than one-three guardians at a time, and fighting that guardian threat in a neutered system with your fleet trivializes them.

That said, I haven't played with the latest starship changes yet. Plasma siege and heavy bomber starships may be a bit less ridiculously overpowered if they're taking down posts (even their counters) a little slower, and going down a bit faster. Previously with a small amount of micro (two or three standbys and an MRS) I could take down even a missile or laser guard post with marks one to three of heavy bomber starships and zero casualties. Throwing plasma siege on top of that was just gravy. I haven't mentioned this anywhere, but I was thinking somewhere around a 20% nerf to starship health. The DPS reduction of the Heavy Bombers should compensate nicely.

[keith.lamothe]

There's "utility" guardians (tachyon, emp, etc) that do their job through means other than damage.

Then there's "combat guardians" (flak, beam, artillery, laser, etc) that are just combat ships.

The former are kind of all over the place numerically and that's probably fine for the most part.  It's difficult to assign a numeric value to what a tachyon or emp guardian do, but in general they do their job.

The latter need to be more tightly balanced, and for the most part are as of their more recent balance passes.  Each is balanced something like a 4-cap ship type, so in the starship range (more the old starship range than the new) but with an emphasis on firepower over durability: if looked at as "4 to a cap" (which is how they're priced internally, though obviously there's no hard cap) many have something like 5M*mk capHealth (10M*mk to 20M*mk is normal for fleet ships, 20M*mk to 35*mk is normal for starships) and 260k*mk bonus-dps (150k*mk is normal for a starship, 300k*mk is normal for a fleetship).

So in general they die fast if you can get to them, but they're going to cause pain until you do.

Anyway, I'm not hearing a lot of focused/actionable feedback here and that's fine, just wanted to give folks an opportunity to chime in

[TechSY730]

@LordSloth

They just went through a bit of a HP nerf. You want to bring them down further to get the "rest" of that 20% of their 6.023 HP values?


Anyways, having a one or two new guardians centered around taking on a small number of large targets would be nice. Maybe to prevent distracting them, maybe have them only be able to target large stuff.

It would be like the artillery guardian, but even more extreme damage, only able to hit large stuff, not long range, and not using missile ammo.

The with this new "anti-starship arachnid" guardian, combined with the existing artillery guardian, implosion artillery guardian, and to a lesser extent, the sniper and spider guardians, would give the AI a guardian "answer" to starships.


Keep in mind, guardians are supposed to be in a lower tier than starships. So given equal numbers of the same mark, it just makes sense that overall the starships would win out over the guardians.



Also, OMD buffs, anyone?

[Hearteater]

Each is balanced something like a 4-cap ship type, so in the starship range (more the old starship range than the new) but with an emphasis on firepower over durability: if looked at as "4 to a cap" (which is how they're priced internally, though obviously there's no hard cap) many have something like 5M*mk capHealth (10M*mk to 20M*mk is normal for fleet ships, 20M*mk to 35*mk is normal for starships) and 260k*mk bonus-dps (150k*mk is normal for a starship, 300k*mk is normal for a fleetship).

Anyway, I'm not hearing a lot of focused/actionable feedback here and that's fine, just wanted to give folks an opportunity to chime in

I'm working on them a little, I just had a bunch to do that stole a lot of time.  Counting them as a 4-cap with DPS over Health will focus my numbers a lot more.  I was actually balancing out more fragile than that (1/8th cap triangle ships) but I wasn't happy with those numbers.  I hope to post something in a few hours.

[keith.lamothe]

No rush, certainly.  I'm not making changes to these right now.

As far as the balance target of 4-cap with DPS over health, that's what they are now but not what they have to be.  On the other hand, if they had even fleet-ship durability (much less starship durability) I think that could cause a lot more player pain than is desirable, based on previous related feedback.  I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that you're often facing mkIII and mkIV guardians very early in the game.  As such, it seems likely they'll either be overly punishing in the early game or overshadowed in the lategame, as their late-game stats will only be 25% higher to 66% higher than what you're used to dealing with early on.

Maybe their initial population could be made lower, and the per-planet cap of "guardians from reinforcement" could go up with AIP.

[LordSloth]

@LordSloth

They just went through a bit of a HP nerf. You want to bring them down further to get the "rest" of that 20% of their 6.023 HP values?

Also, OMD buffs, anyone?

Nope. I'm not sure I was clear about this, but I only recently upgraded from 6.018, and I don't have experience with the revised versions yet. This was what I was thinking -before- the tweaks, but wasn't willing to commit to suggesting. In particular, the balance of bomber starships versus fighters seemed off, and heavy bomber starships needed past tense a hp nerf the most, I think. I'm mostly reflecting on player fighters versus mad bomber AIs, but the cheaper fighter IIIs in the work change that equation a bit. Partially clearing a MKIII/IV system early on was crazy dangerous compared to the early waves, even with multiple home FF. The slight decrease in HP and significant decrease in DPS should make fending them off before HW death a bit easier