Things to focus on when development resumes

[TechSY730]

Based on both my own experiance and feedback on the forums, I have decided to list a few big* the game issues regarding balance, flow, pacing, and "fun factor"
*big as in number of things it touches in the game, not necessarily severity, though nothing here is a quick fix

I would like to point out that although these issues are not minor, they are not big enough to really start crippling the fun of the game. 5.032 (the latest version as of this writing) is a very solid version, and the "good" of the current balance vastly outweights the bad.

Please do NOT discuss how to fix individual issues here. Post in its relevant topic or make a new topic for this.
Please do mention things that could be added.
Also, I have NOT attributed the the original person who posted the idea, nor have dug through to find the relevant topic for each of these. If these are worked on, the original author of the idea will need to be found and creditied. I am mostly just listing.

Not everything listed here (in either list) will nessecarily require any changes, but it seems that there is enough commentary by the community to at least look at every point.

Things that could feasibly be worked on before AI War becomes the focus again:

• Starship rebalance (notably, cap usefulness normalization and knowledge costs)
• Guard post rebalance (which includes core guard posts)
• Guardian rebalance
• Golem rebalance (mostly durability issues and multiplayer/multi-HW numeric scaling)
• Warhead rebalance
• Fleet ship rebalance (nearly done actually)
• Capturable rebalance (Z reserves, Z resources deposits, captive human settlements, et al)
• Harvester and econ station rebalance
• AI "stalking at wormhole" behavior review
• AI retreating behavior review
• New AI "homeworld is under attack" behaviors
• Ability to turn off hybrid hive "plot interactions"

Things that are pervasive or tricky enough that they will probably have to wait until AI War becomes the focus again:

• Armor system revision and rebalance
• Energy system revision and rebalance
• Make every fleet ship "feel" distinct
• Turret rebalance and possible system revision (due to the complexities of keeping turrets balanced for single chokepoint setups, multi-chokepoint setups, and beacheads all at the same time, this is here instead of the category above)
• Minor faction rebalance
• Spirecraft rebalance
• New hybrid hive "plot interactions" (too limited in scope to be here?)
• New "plot interactions" in general (too limited in scope to be here?)
• Add more variety in the fallen spire campaign segments (to reduce the feeling of "grind")
• Dealing with the HP and damage "inflation" (You could basically divide all damages, armor, and max HP by 100 and barely impact the game and rarely find anything low enough to start running into rounding error)
• Better rewards for "guerrilla warfare tactics" (which implies revising how AI alertness is triggered, and also better advertising that guerrilla warfare can work well)
• UI work (make it more intuitive, incorporate improvements found during UI work on AVWW, and most importantly, FIX UI BUGS!)
• Re-evaluate overall flow and pacing (broad enough subject that I can't break it down much further, but of particular interest is the mid game, its too easy to play in such a way such that the mid game becomes grindy, and ways to play such that it doesn't aren't advertised well enough)

[Eternaly_Lost]

I would throw Golem Rebalance into the list. Golems from what I had read about first thought about them, were very limited superweapons. Yet far too often I find myself with a golem that goes in after the whole fleet has cleared up a system, so they don't get instant killed when they come though the wormhole rather then sending one, even if it dies, to clear the system without the fleet.

[PokerChen]

Which golems did you try? Super-weapons are relatively fragile, but I find them a bit overpowered except for the Armor Golem (which you can practically send to clear a plane on its own, expensive though).

I would suggest minor-faction interactions to go into the grand design of the next iteration.

[Eternaly_Lost]

Which golems did you try? Super-weapons are relatively fragile, but I find them a bit overpowered except for the Armor Golem (which you can practically send to clear a plane on its own, expensive though).

I would suggest minor-faction interactions to go into the grand design of the next iteration.

Armored, Botnet, Hive. I tried all three of them together because they felt like a good idea, but all three just died without killing much of anything, Hive died before it had the chance to unload along with the botnet. Armor did not even last long enough to turn around and get back to the system it came from. Botnet tends to die from just random Exo-waves unless it is carefully kept under 4 mk3 human FF at all times. They don't feel that much like superweapons without taking an insane amount of micro and second them in second. I would much rather that Golems got a lot more powerful at a lot more cost. They don't feel like what I expected of a Golem, save for the botnet's unique mechanic, I don't use them that much, and most of the ones I see is when the AI sends in several dozen of them in each Exo Wave.

I would much rather have them be powerful enough that the AI sends 1 as an Exo wave, not that the average Exo Wave has 12 to 24 of them.

[_K_]

Are you playing games with like 6 homeworlds, or just against 10/10 AIs with capturing 20 systems?
Because i sure dont remember golems being weak, or seeing them in groups of over 3 in exo-waves.
In fact, in my most recent game it took me like 3 whole minutes of my entire fleet focus fire to kill an armor golem. And IIRC the AI versions of golems are actually weaker than the ones used by players.

[Eternaly_Lost]

Are you playing games with like 6 homeworlds, or just against 10/10 AIs with capturing 20 systems?
Because i sure dont remember golems being weak, or seeing them in groups of over 3 in exo-waves.
In fact, in my most recent game it took me like 3 whole minutes of my entire fleet focus fire to kill an armor golem. And IIRC the AI versions of golems are actually weaker than the ones used by players.

Normally I play 4 homeworld Fallen Spire 9/9 with Spire and Golem Hard on. But that does not change the fact that they die a lot easier then even my starships do.

[_K_]

Normally I play 4 homeworld Fallen Spire 9/9 with Spire and Golem Hard on. But that does not change the fact that they die a lot easier then even my starships do.

Yeah, so actually they are ~4 times stronger than you feel when playing with your 4 homeworlds. Go ask the devs to multiply the number of available golems and asteroids by the number of homeworlds.

[Eternaly_Lost]

Normally I play 4 homeworld Fallen Spire 9/9 with Spire and Golem Hard on. But that does not change the fact that they die a lot easier then even my starships do.

Yeah, so actually they are ~4 times stronger than you feel when playing with your 4 homeworlds. Go ask the devs to multiply the number of available golems and asteroids by the number of homeworlds.

Well I was putting them up for rebalancing, and having the numbers of them be multiply by the number of homeworlds is rebalancing. So...

[TechSY730]

Please do NOT discuss how to fix individual issues here. Post in its relevant topic or make a new topic for this.

Guys, although I do have a few things to say on the current state of Golems (both good and bad), can we please move this to another thread? I don't want this thread becoming a hodgepodge discussions about various balance concerns.

[Diazo]

Well, I'm kind of surprised as the golem comments.

I play single planet HW and I captured a Cursed Golem. It was soloing anything less then a Mk III world I had left on alert for quite a while.

I ended up losing it to a combined  CPA/Spirecraft-Exo/Golem-Exo that hit at the same time.

That does not feel overpowered to me.

Have not managed to capture a different golem recently but the high mark AI worlds do have to be able to win in a fight against golems.

On the thread as a whole, to me this is boiling down to "rebalance everything". I'm assuming there is going to be a rebalance of the entire game during the run up to the next expansion pack that should take care of a lot of this.

I don't think there has been a whole-game rebalance pass since the multi-HW ability was introduced, just piecemeal rebalance of a single structure or unit.

And then the different unit caps and combat style settings could also use some rebalancing also.....

It boils down to the fact that I don't think the game has ever been really balanced for multi-HW starts. I see people talking about 15 Raid Starship Mk I fleets and always think to myself "it would be so much easier if I could do that" in my single HW games.

I think the way it would require to be done however is to affect the number of reinforcements planets get depending on how many HW you have in addition to the increased waves you already get.

TL;DR: It sounds like a game wide rebalance, with emphasis on multi-HW starts, is what is being asked for here.

D.

edit: I suppose the golem specific conversation could go to its own thread, but my point I was trying to make is I don't feel golems are underpowered and so I'm not sure they need a rebalance. This carries over to everything else aswell, with how complex the game is we need people to ask themselves "is this unbalanced or is my specific game setup making it more useful then normal?"

[TechSY730]

I just thought of something, make special forces more threatening by making them much smarter.
However, this seems limited enough in scope to not justify a place in the list above.

@Dazio
Yea, a game wide "double check" of balance hasn't happened since a little before 4.0 came out. Sure, almost everything has been edited since then, but mostly in isolation without a giant amount of effort to "mesh it in well" with the rest of the game. Once AI work starts again, several back-to-back versions consisting of almost nothing but balance adjustments for pretty much everything in the game may be in order. (Like 1st day, 1/3 of the game gets rebalanced, 2nd day, the next third, 3rd day, the last third of the units, and several days after that tweaking the new balance)
Of course, this also needs to be considered with the new content that will be added.
As mentioned, many of the things are near balanced already, like fleet ships. So aside from messing around with a few fleet ship types that seem redundant and making them more distinct, fleet ships may not need lots of changes in the balance pass.

EDIT: And about the multi-HW thing, yea, lots of things that logically should scale with multiple homeworld currently do not. That will need to be looked at.
And about the cap balance thing, 6211: Make most base ship caps a multiple of 8 to fix ultra-low ship cap rounding errors skewing balance

[TechSY730]

Duh, I just thought of a suggestion that has been around for a long time now.
*Add more variety in the fallen spire campaign segments (to reduce the feeling of "grind")

(Added to the first post)

[Martyn van Buren]

Quite surprised to see golems in here as underpowered; I recently cleared out a whole core world with one armor golem on 7.6/8 (admittedly low AIP).

[zoutzakje]

Are you playing games with like 6 homeworlds, or just against 10/10 AIs with capturing 20 systems?
Because i sure dont remember golems being weak, or seeing them in groups of over 3 in exo-waves.
In fact, in my most recent game it took me like 3 whole minutes of my entire fleet focus fire to kill an armor golem. And IIRC the AI versions of golems are actually weaker than the ones used by players.

Normally I play 4 homeworld Fallen Spire 9/9 with Spire and Golem Hard on. But that does not change the fact that they die a lot easier then even my starships do.

I believe we got to assume that 7/7 is the standard. In my opinion, everything should be balanced to that standard. Sorry your golems are dying fast, but that's to be expected in a 4 homeworld 9/9 game.
And your starships don't die as fast you say? That's probably because you send them in with fleet support, instead of all by themselves.
Making the golems even more durable than they are now would probably make it way to easy to clear out systems with them, which is boring in my opinion. I rather carefully think about my next moves, instead of just mindless rampaging through all planets.

[Shrugging Khan]

UI improvements is the big one for me.

More notifications and alerts (Lowest Ship HP in group < ?%, Enemy Type present in player-owned system), and maybe automatic response options (smart energy management, auto-retreat when HP < ?%, pause/unpause when enemy presence > N Firepower).

Less micro, in any case. Or at least a better view of things.