Thinking about blobbing

[Kemeno]

Wingflier's solution is good insofar as it encourages you to think about the positioning of your units but I don't see how it deals with the problem of putting my entire fleet cap on planet X all at once; maybe you can clarify that?

First, I'll say that I agree with most of what's been said here; right now I find that most of the interesting work in AI War (and the reason why I play) comes from high level decisions: Do I take planet X? Do I research ship type Y? Etc.

I think that there's a lot of nice theory behind the guardposts and battlefields within battlefields but blobbing takes less time, less thought, and roughly the same amount of resources (or not sufficiently more that I notice, at any rate). I also really, really dislike the Eye. It just makes conquering a subset of planets actively unfun instead of solving the problem of blobbing being good. I'd rather have a mechanic that rewards me for being clever about how I use my ship caps.

On a related note, the whole battlefield within a battlefield thing is a huge PITA right now because it's so opaque. I have absolutely no idea how many ships I can throw on a planet before the AI releases everything at its guard posts, or maybe releases everything, or whatever. I'm probably killing a bunch of AI ships so that number will probably keep changing anyways.

I think part of the answer is to add large incentives for players to attack AI planets with small groups of ships, and take the AI out piecemeal following the "battlegrounds within a battleground" theory. But do this through rewards to me for being clever while attacking a planet, instead of punishing me for blobbing on a few of them. For starters, let me form a "task force" of a fixed size which will *definitely not* cause AI units to release from guard posts, regardless of the enemy ship count on the planet. (Maybe this cap is expandable through research, or something.) Maybe also give these task forces a firepower/armor/etc boost (or maybe I should just attach fleet starships to them?), to further give me an incentive to use them instead of blobbing.

Also, I'd really like to see some mechanism for sorting my fleet out, so I can tell my fighters to go out front, frigates to hang out in the back, that sort of thing. Its kind of a pain to keep them in formation right now. (I like to use fighters to screen bombers and keep frigates in the back through group moving, but it's a pain if I try to change the group's direction.)

[Wingflier]

Wingflier's solution is good insofar as it encourages you to think about the positioning of your units but I don't see how it deals with the problem of putting my entire fleet cap on planet X all at once; maybe you can clarify that?

I don't see how that's a problem, either mechanically or lore-wise.  The AI's force is massive, it takes up the entire galaxy.  You start (usually) with just 1 or 2 planets; most of the time you're going to have to send your whole force to each planet in order to contend with your massively superior opponent.

However, once you get there, it's a little silly that you can just group them all into a ball and AFK until you've wiped everything out (this is a bit of an exaggeration, but this is more or less what happens regardless of difficulty in my experience).  I think that how well you do in each engagement should depend more on than just your fleet composition, but also how you use your fleet.

If Fighters become your primary damage dealers (except against heavily armored targets), then you have an incentive to use them and protect them.  If Frigates eat them alive once they get in range (even moreso than they do now), then you either have to have your Fighters kite the Frigates or have Bombers take the Frigates out first.  Either way, you're not blobbing anymore.  If you try to blob your Fighters in with your whole force, they'll all get slaughtered before they even get in range.

In addition, in my reiteration of the Triangle, Fighters will be significantly faster than even Bombers; so not only will you be wasting your Fighters' not inconsiderable damage, you'll be sacrificing their speed and tenacity as well.

Sure, this would require some considerable rebalance work, but I think it would also make the game a lot more dynamic and interesting.  Something that might be looked at is the schizophrenic way the AI spawns its units and Guardians.  What if, instead of spawning several random Guardians of whatever type with each wave, it spawned several of the same kind on each planet?  Now, instead of just sending a huge mish-mash of forces to combat your indiscriminate opponent, you've got to decide what best way to combat this threat using squad-level tactics.  A similar approach could be taken to how the AI spawns fleet ships as well.

On the contrary, we might see more interesting tactics from the AI as well if they possessed a more effective and specialized force to work with.

edit:  Alternatively, increase the power of Guardians significantly, and make them much rarer to be seeded into the game.  With the new Triangle hard-counters to one another, many of the tactics will revolve around how best to dance around your opponent's superior Triangle force.  A Guardian becomes more of a mini-boss that you really have to be careful around/think critically about.  This would provide a good reason why not to send your whole fleet in haphazardly, as provoking a whole planet of Guardians could spell disaster.

[Faulty Logic]

AI defence fleets patrol around enemy systems, reacting to large forces.

http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=9137

Suppressor guardian gets more firepower the more human ships are in its system

http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=9134

Little Doctor guardian destroys your entire blob

http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=9132

AI systems get more, harder-to-free defenders, so moving the entire fleet in is problematic

http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=9079

[Cinth]

AI defence fleets patrol around enemy systems, reacting to large forces.

Isn't this what Special Forces are doing but to a lesser extent?

Suppressor guardian gets more firepower the more human ships are in its system

Sounds like a good candidate to add to the list of new Eyes? Booster Eye ...

Little Doctor guardian destroys your entire blob

Um... arbitrary response to force the players do XYZ?

AI systems get more, harder-to-free defenders, so moving the entire fleet in is problematic

Send in the Raids!! Kill the guard posts and kill the trickle of defenders on the other side.

And the AI does blob against players. Waves and Exos.

[Kahuna]

In other RTSes the cost of units is much higher. Maybe not in the immediately visible sense but if you're fighting an active opponent (another player or an AI that acts like a player) your main cost is how much time you take to build your force up and how vulnerable you are to raids since an active opponent will build up quickly too and wasting resources would make you fall behind in the arms race. In AI War that arms race obviously doesn't exist, the AI is almost completely passive in that regard. You don't have to operate on a tight schedule if you want to survive because the AI's actions are so slow that you have time to build whatever you want. That's the usual RTS campaign issue, against an enemy that does not grow (granted this AI grows to SOME degree but all planets have ship caps and the AIP growth happens primarily at the player's pace, not the game's) your best bet is to grow as much as you can and then use overwhelming force.

The only RTS campaign I remember that avoided this was Perimeter and that's because Perimeter had an active AI in the campaign that built its forces up at full speed so you had to act quickly to not get outpaced.

AI War is a slow paced strategy game. Also lot of the games in "Real-Time Strategy" genre are more like "Real-Time Tactics" games. AI War and Civilizations are RTS games. Starcraft and Supreme Commander are RTT games. RTSs are slower paced and larger scale. RTTs are fast and furious and have a "tight schedule"^^. Like macro and micro. Increasing the auto AIP and the difficulty level of the Hybrids (10/10 ) will make the schedule tighter. Also 4X games in general are a bit slow paced.

Arms race does exist in AI War too but again.. AI War is a slow paced strategy game. You have to be prepared for waves, exos, hybrids, minor factions and whatever you have enabled. Auto AIP too. Preparing for those includes capturing Advanced Research Stations and Golems. Capturing new planets and building defenses and ships.

To make AI War more fast(ish) and furious(ish) increase the difficulty level of the Hybrids, disabled Core Shield Generators, select a map with ~50 planets and 2 aggressive AIs and/or 2x waves. 4/10 or higher marauders, resistance fighters, miners, dyson, devourer, wardens, enclaves, Rocketry Corps 10/10 and all exos 4/10 or higher.

I never thought there was anything wrong with blobbing.. I didn't even think about it and had never heard about the term "blobbing". That's just how AI War works. Every game does thing differently. Also I think it makes sense to move my ships together.. not just because it works.. but because then the ships are able to support each other and focus the enemy down faster. There's blobbing in Starcraft too: Protoss death ball, zerg swarms, M&M&M etc or just a bunch of Stalkers or whatever. There's blobbing in lot of strategy games. Sure there's counters to blobbing in Starcraft (banelings, psi storm, siege tanks). That's one reason why Starcarft is faster paced. In AI War the AI doesn't have counter to blobbing. The player does: Lightning Warheads. Allow hybrids to take over the Neinzul Rocketry Corps and maybe even BUILD silos. When the player attacks they would send the missiles to destroy the blob.
EDIT: I forgot AI Eyes. Sentry, Ion and Parasite Eyes are anti blobs.

[Kahuna]

To put it into perspective, most professional Starcraft 2 players have an APM of 200 or higher.

That's because they
select, deselect, select, deselect, click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click, select, click click click click, deselect, select, deselect, select, deselect,  click click click click, select, deselect, select, deselect, select, deselect.
for no reason. They smack and spam the buttons without actually doing anything useful. So the useful APM is different from the actualy APM.

[keith.lamothe]

A few thoughts:

1) There's strategic blobbing: all your available mobile forces being involved in the same fleet action.

2) Then there's tactical blobbing: all your available mobile forces on one planet (regardless of what percent of your overall force that represents) being all in one location.

3) Neither form of blobbing is the end of the world if it's a really common thing.  It's one of those things we try to poke holes in game-design wise because it seems like it's an area where the player could be challenged to think a lot more.  But, like the whole "battlefields within battlefields" idea, we understand that a ton of the other design decisions made (ship speeds, ship ranges, very few things that can block movement, etc) may simply limit what can really be done about it.  Blobbing being so good probably does make the game less fun than it could be, but the kinds of changes necessary to fundamentally change the situation may cause more loss of fun than gain.  AI Eyes are an example of something that does counter-blob but really annoys a lot of players (largely due to how common they are and how low-variety they were, we're still working on that).

3) Strategic blobbing is probably always optimal when you can pull it off.  But structuring things so that you can pull it off is often (in a challenging scenario) a highly non-trivial problem that does involve significant thought and falls prey to a variety of non-predictable factors.  And there are the Eyes which highly incentivize not just doing it blindly everywhere.

4) Tactical blobbing is definitely not optimal in nearly any non-trivial engagement. 
- I know this because of several past community members going into great detail about microing the positions of their fighters, bombers, and frigates (and other stuff, but the triangle being the most obvious) to minimize the chance of their ships taking fire from the nemesis type.  The difference that could make in a battle's outcome was pretty stark.
- There's also various AoE-damage considerations.
- And tons of tactics where sneaking forces up under cloaker starship cover or pulling parts of forces back to keep them out of enemy fire (bombards, enclaves) or having a decoy force to pull enemy attention (transports, riots)
- And, of course, fortresses, though that's already been pointed out as the counter to tactical blobbing.  Honestly the whole "can't even hurt bombers" thing doesn't really sit well with me but I don't want to mess with it out of mere personal dislike
- Grav Drains / Grav Guardians are one situation I can think of where you'd want to only send in your grav-immune or "I don't care if this dies" ships to assassinate them, and a situation where if your fleet is in multiple pieces it will be less likely to all get caught in the quicksand.
- And I could go on with various reasons for moving your ships-on-planet around in multiple distinct groups.

5) That said, tactical blobbing is also very often effective enough that there's no need to do lots of micro.  Not optimal, but good enough.  Also, the principle of concentrating all your force at the current critical point of the battle is a massive point in favor of tactical blobbing: getting fancy with micro can give you various advantages but unless you're pretty good at it you'll probably lose out in net terms due to unfocused (or, worse, unused) DPS.

6) For now, changes for the purpose of reducing the optimality of blobbing are not really in the offing.  I keep thinking about it, and I can think of a few things that might work if seeded on at-most-one planet in each entire galaxy (e.g. a four-unit set spread out across a planet where each gets 2x as strong with each other piece that is dead, making you choose between splitting your forces into four or suffer the firepower of the last one at 8x power), but in general this is an area to tread carefully.  Blobbing is often a-fun, but it's not anti-fun.

[Hearteater]

I'm also of the feeling that this is a non-problem.  If you are playing on with game settings that challenge you, mindlessly blobbing against everything can lose you the game.  Note that Fighters are excellent damage soaks.  Almost nothing beats them in that role.  Even if they never get a shot off, they are worth bringing along for that reason.

That being said, I really like this suggestion:

To refine the idea I tried to express above into a less nonsensical form, what if the AI just had more fighters on its worlds?

It has already been brought up that reinforcements seem a touch light, especially with how a CPA can deplete a galaxy so much.  What if current reinforcements got beefed up with an extra ration of Fighters?

[Wingflier]

4) Tactical blobbing is definitely not optimal in nearly any non-trivial engagement.
- I know this because of several past community members going into great detail about microing the positions of their fighters, bombers, and frigates (and other stuff, but the triangle being the most obvious) to minimize the chance of their ships taking fire from the nemesis type.  The difference that could make in a battle's outcome was pretty stark.
- There's also various AoE-damage considerations.

Personally I think most players would disagree with this.  The cost:effectiveness ratio of not tactical blobbing rarely makes it worth it.  In other words, for all the time you spend microing each of your fleet ships in most engagements for whatever minor bonus, you could instead be spending that time to move your reinforcements from your Space Docks to the battle or doing something else.  You're going to hit max resources either way; there's no real incentive to try that hard, because the difference it makes is marginal.  That's just my opinion though.

I wish we had the ability to modify the game, and I would make a mod to show everybody personally how much more fun the game would be if the way your used your individual units actually mattered, and could often make the difference between victory and defeat.

As has been said before, simply buffing the damage output of Fighters significantly would be a huge step towards eliminating tactical blobbing, because you would actually want to use them as more than meat shields or sub-par counters to the currently overpowered Bombers.  So if we really want to reduce the effectiveness of blobbing, it's up to the community to vote for Fighters in the next "Worst Unit" poll.

[TechSY730]

About the AI reinforcement thing, yea, AI seems a bit weak on defense (except for defensive specialist AI types, they are doing pretty decent currently). I made another thread on this. http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,11265.0.html

However, seeing the AI have bit more stratagy about which ship types to use for defense would be nifty. Right now, IIRC, it is mostly random, with a slight boost in chance to ship types already at a guard post (like if a guard post has lots more frigates than the other types at that post, the chance of it getting choosing a higher percentage of frigates goes up, though not by a huge amount)

It would be interesting if the AI could do some sort of stat tracking, like tracking which types have been giving that player the most trouble, and thus boosting the chance of choosing ships types on defense that have a favorable matchup. The chance adjustment should not be great (to keep humans from "training" the AI into stupid decisions easily), however, that could be a lot of work.

Maybe as a simpler form of this suggestion, give some ships a "UsefullnessInAIReinforcements" multiplier and/or chance of selection adjustment, and give things like fighters a >1 of that.

Actually, this would be pretty good for that other thread...

[TechSY730]

4) Tactical blobbing is definitely not optimal in nearly any non-trivial engagement.
- I know this because of several past community members going into great detail about microing the positions of their fighters, bombers, and frigates (and other stuff, but the triangle being the most obvious) to minimize the chance of their ships taking fire from the nemesis type.  The difference that could make in a battle's outcome was pretty stark.
- There's also various AoE-damage considerations.

Personally I think most players would disagree with this.  The cost:effectiveness ratio of not tactical blobbing rarely makes it worth it.  In other words, for all the time you spend microing each of your fleet ships in most engagements for whatever minor bonus, you could instead be spending that time to move your reinforcements from your Space Docks to the battle or doing something else.  You're going to hit max resources either way; there's no real incentive to try that hard, because the difference it makes is marginal.  That's just my opinion though.

Kieth concedes this in point 5.

5) That said, tactical blobbing is also very often effective enough that there's no need to do lots of micro.  Not optimal, but good enough.  Also, the principle of concentrating all your force at the current critical point of the battle is a massive point in favor of tactical blobbing: getting fancy with micro can give you various advantages but unless you're pretty good at it you'll probably lose out in net terms due to unfocused (or, worse, unused) DPS.

I'm with Keith though that this really isn't a problem. However, I would agree that somehow increasing the rewards of microing some would be a good thing for the game. Not sure how to go about it though.

I wish we had the ability to modify the game

Well, you could hex edit the game dll, but that would be really tricky.

As has been said before, simply buffing the damage output of Fighters significantly would be a huge step towards eliminating tactical blobbing, because you would actually want to use them as more than meat shields or sub-par counters to the currently overpowered Bombers.  So if we really want to reduce the effectiveness of blobbing, it's up to the community to vote for Fighters in the next "Worst Unit" poll.

Yea, while standard fighters are not terrible right now, what they can bring to the table right now often isn't enough to outweigh their downsides. I have posted some of my more detailed thoughts about this at http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=9138#c27386 (and a correction I made at http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=9138#c27387)

I agree wholeheartedly that fighters should have a faster move speed than bombers. It seems really dumb that they don't right now.

As almost all of the terrible units have been put into much better states now, we can now start to work on the under-performing but not terrible ships, like standard fighters and bomber starships. As such, I am planning on nominating standard fighters, and thus indirectly, all ship types that have stats derived from the standard fighters.

[Hearteater]

I would support a slight Fighter speed increase.  The AI sends its ships in a bit piecemeal.  There are a lot of them, but no real organization.  So their Fighters need to weather a hail of Missile Frigate from the player's blob.  A little more speed to close that distance a touch faster would be nice.  It would be more a buff to the AI I think, but that's ok.

[keith.lamothe]

Bombers used to be way slower than fighters but were buffed up to the same speed specifically so they were easier to use together.

[TechSY730]

Bombers used to be way slower than fighters but were buffed up to the same speed specifically so they were easier to use together.

I would be fine having fighters just a bit faster than bombers. Smallish speed differences aren't hard to handle in fleet management situations.

EDIT: That, and if we want units to be easy to use together, players would typically group move the ships they want to keep together.

[Hearteater]

Bomber/Fighters are speed 76, Missile Frigates 44.  I could see Bombers getting bumped down to 68 (about a 10% decrease), or Fighters up to 84.