Golems - countdown to extinction

[Goekhan]

your forgetting the hive golem, and the cursed golem and the artillery golem.. and well, i dunno what to do with the armored golem

the hive is relatively safe - it only needs to be on the planet long enough to drop its load of bees; after that, it can retreat and be safe.. ish.

Other than that, cant really comment on the others.

Best golem is Black Widow I'd say. Anything damaging itself is pretty stupid. And Black Widow just saves the day, it's shields, tractor beams, engine damage... On cross planet attack, I was able to save my planet thanks to Black Widow (and +teleporting battle stations). Grab 100, then run. It's always fun

[triggerman602]

i think the whole self damaging plus AI progress for repairs is pretty dumb which is the only golems i will ever even consider to restore would be the hive and black widow golems.

[Ozymandiaz]

i think the whole self damaging plus AI progress for repairs is pretty dumb which is the only golems i will ever even consider to restore would be the hive and black widow golems.

I could see myself using the cursed Golem actually. And in fact I got a planet with one on in my current single player game. I plan on saving it a bit and unleashing it later .

[RCIX]

i think the whole self damaging plus AI progress for repairs is pretty dumb which is the only golems i will ever even consider to restore would be the hive and black widow golems.

I could see myself using the cursed Golem actually. And in fact I got a planet with one on in my current single player game. I plan on saving it a bit and unleashing it later .

Don't. It's not worth the effort, trust me. I had one in my game and it requires constant micro so slowly destroy units (like 50 in a couple of minutes)

[Velox]

     Hive Golems are great defensive weapons, although they fail pretty sadly on offense since the wasps can't attack turrets.

[Doddler]

The idea of voluntarially driving up the AI progress to build a golem kind of goes against the entire point of the game I think.  The game is designed to reward cutting as many corners and being as smart about lowering AI Progress as possible.  Being put in a situation where you can drive the AI progress up by a huge amount for a big risk is an interesting idea but, at least for me, I don't even give it any thought because the mindset you're supposed to be in makes you do the evaluation "can I avoid doing this in order to keep the AI progress lower", and almost always I come to the conclusion that it's better not to touch it.  If repairing the golem were vital or important I would consider different but when you play the AI progress balancing game, unless the golem somehow were to allow me to instantly win the game, I wouldn't really give it much thought and avoid capturing them if possible.

But there's other ways you could make the golems a convincing risk without involving AI Progress.  I thought of it for a bit and here's my ideas.

1) The AI perseives the golem as an immense threat, and will make every attempt to stop it.  In this regard, the golem functions like a reverse raid engine.  A golem under player control will cause the AI to launch waves against a system the golem is in every couple minutes from a random adjascent system (lets say the highest level one).  If the golem isn't adjascent to a system with a warp gate, nothing happens, so it's possible to get a break here by retreating the golem or by destroying warp gates before capturing the golem.  However, if the golem moves into a system with an adjascent warp gate, the AI will again begin doing waves.

2) The destruction of a golem gives the AI a huge boost in confidence, or whatever passes for artificial confidence (perhaps the belief that they now have the tactical advantage now that you are stripped of your weapon).  The AI immediately begins preparing for an interplanetary assault against you.  Additionally, ships in the system where the golem was defeated, if the system is an AI system, become released from their post and are free to attack.

[Kjara]

The other big minus to golems imo is the fact that they are counterproductive when on an enemy planet.  Bring a golem and the ai starts getting more units to counter you.  If it was a close battle beforehand on a tough planet(and why else would you bring a golem?), its very possible that the triple reinforcements at least partially cancel out the golem.

I'd love to see it be more of a:

As is its now, a pain to defend while repairing(aka increased raids, perhaps increased raids galaxy wide while you hold golem remains).

No increased reinforcement on enemy planets for the repaired golem or remains.

Either no increased raids once its repaired, how the heck does the enemy even know what planet of yours its on, its mobile or minor increased galaxy wide increased raids again, but smaller than when you were repairing it, say 1.2-1.5x?.

No ai progress cost for loss, keep the ai progress cost for repairs.  I just killed the player's big superweapon, I'm suddenly more worried about the player?  Logically a small ai malus would make sense here even, clearly the player really isn't as much of a threat as the ai thought he was.

Edit: Oh lastly I'd like the repair cost to be more expensive mineral/crystal wise, and the golem itself to be cheaper energy wise.  Perhaps do the math so you end up paying about the same cost when you figure on an average lifespan of the golem, but the ability to spread the cost out a bit more (and not have to have so many extra powerplants for the golem).  This would cause you to have to be vulnerable for longer(and have to put up with the increased raids), but the golem itself will be more useful when it finally gets up and running.

[orzelek]

kjara your ideas are really nice.

With one small modification maybe - keep AI progress cost for initial repair but remove it from later repairs on working golem.

[Kjara]

With no repair ai cost I worry too much about being able to support and maintain a golem indefinitely without any real loss(as people at one point were just running around with starships and repairing them between raids).  I could get behind lower ai progress cost for repair than for the initial repairs, but I think that there needs to be some minor progress cost for repairing, to keep it from being such that raiding with my golem then repairing it always being the optimal strategy.

The only way I can see to get around that would be to increase the metal/crystal repair costs to a really high level, which might work?  I'm somewhat divided on this point.

[Nightchill]

I might consider using a golem if there was only an initial AI progress increase on capture and the no increase after that