Managed to complete a game over the weekend and start another (died, reloaded - almost died, reloaded - survived but painfully), I enjoyed the new hacking mechanics but it did raise a few questions:
1. Should superterminals spawn adjacent to homeworld(s), + (Evil) eyes close to homeworlds?
Picking 4 homeworlds on a snake map I ended up with the above situation, plus 3 nuclear eyes in the first 8 hops out... nuclear eyes are mean... but in a strange way much easier to handle when closer than when they're further away (except their trigger thresholds are obviously significantly lower when the planet lacks a large garrison)
2. Hacking responses change on reload... should they?
I notice the bug of the 30 second warp counterattack response, 18 hops from my frontline, 400 teleporting ships attacking my homeworld with 30 seconds warning... tried to reproduce it after my sudden death by loading the autosave... tachyon burst instead. Harmless results on reloading does encourage savescumming. (Thought: perhaps tachyon bursts should only occur when the enemy has significant presence of fleetships at the location, otherwise it's wasted)
3. Superterminal hack
I wanted to ride it to the floor for the fun of it and prepared well (all turrets, spire city). It feels like an optional boss fight, the AI home guard posts have a non-optional boss fight feel to them.
Now, the AI only spawned 4 types of ship, 3 triangle ships and spider bots... even with AI progress 800+ (I was expecting lots of nasty mkV reprocessors with (on ultra-low caps) 20-30 million health each, damage of what? 250k or 500k before you add the 8x multipliers so doing damage in millions, nasty buggers.
Instead... the hacking balance ticked away slowly, went negative and ticked quickly... no interesting events... felt safe... calm... -9500 hacking balance and 1200 of each ship type, no damaged turrets, effective AI progress of ~180.
One more tick since I'm certain I can handle it.
Avengers... no warning, just 4x Avengers... 1 hop from my homeworld (see above about superterminal spawning)
Turned out to be the most enjoyable boss fight I've had (never seen avengers before), they erradicated my defences and had to be whittled down using neinzul enclaves and rebuilding defences to distract them. Had they abandoned the world rather than staying in free roaming defender mode I would have been dead rather quickly.
Problem:
1. when they die, they nuke the place.
2. Spire reactors, hab and shipyards leave no rubble
3. City hub unable build buildings
4. Cannot search for new subspace signals when the city is underdeveloped
It's obviously an odd situation, but it felt really mean that after a boss fight, after winning it and losing only 1 out of a max of 4 worlds I was punnished so severely... having to scrap a spire hub (I tried to build a second city but it stopped the signal progress as the first city was unable to scan) Also, is it even possible to build the galactic capital after scrapping a city? (Are there only 5 city shard events?)
4. Small point... Exo waves contain some blocked ship types
I disabled ship eating ships in the lobby, it never disables dissasemblers in AI exo waves, there are never very many so it's not a major issue (It would have been if blade spawners were equally overlooked)
5. Low cap ships, on an ultra-low cap game are LETHAL in AI hands.
I think the issue is multipliers, low cap ships gain ~10x multipliers to damage and health (compared to general fleet ships), ultra-low caps another x4, then the AI can regularly produce 1-100x the normal ship cap of them.
I see 70 zenith medic frigates and 2 of each capital ship, the zenith V medics have more health than most of the capitals, heal each other and have the same cap as Capitals but not the same occurance rate.
Reprocessors are worse because they're more powerful, faster, cloaked, amazing attack multipliers.
Solutions: make the AI produce more high-cap ships by making them cheaper in reinforcement costs, exo wave budget costs etc. while simultaneously increasing the costs of each additional ship by (1/ship cap) per ship. (I would begin to fear the swarming tide of tiny mkV laser gatlings in that case, and a soft cap of say 10-20 reprocessors, although the mixed fleet composition would make countering much harder and the increase in total ships may slow the game considerably on my (old) machine)
Edit: I just remembered a question I wanted to ask:
Do you have to corrupt the same design twice (once for each AI), if you want to remove that ship from enemy hands? (If so, should you?) I tried to corrupt eye-bots in my first game and still found them well into the very late game being sneaky but couldn't work out if it was just a significant backlog of hidden ships waiting for me or fresh reinforcements.
Lastly: I'd like the nasty hacking responses to give significant warning with a countdown timer in the same manner as AI eyes. E.g.
"AI preparing to launch a counter wave in response to xhacking on y"
"AI is preparing a tachyon burst to reveal cloaked hacking ship on y"
"AI is preparing to summon (4) massive exogalactic reinforcements in response to hacking on y"
That's about it, just my thoughts after a couple of fun but mean 7.007 games.
