Viral shredders number limiting mechanic broke?

[keith.lamothe]

As for the martyrs, what can be done?  Increase the asteroid cost?  Lower the damage?  Lower the area of impact?  Make it some kind of not-infinite-number-of-targets aoe?

Make them not two per asteroid would do a good amount.

Yea, that seems like a sound initial change.  I'm guessing it will take more than that, though.

Also make it so that ships immune to area damage are immune to the Martyr blast, it seems a little off that missile frigates can shove off lightning warheads but get wiped by martyrs.

I really don't want to do that, that's basically the martyr's unique ability that sets it apart from being a No-AIP lightning warhead.  It's the counter to (well, everything right now, but...) swarms of aoe-immune craft.  There are other ways of handling those swarms (obviously, as Spirecraft are just a minor faction), but that's an important part of the character of the unit.

I might be willing to go for some variant on the aoe mechanic used on electric shuttles: basically set some maximum on the total amount of damage that a martyr of a given mark can do in the blast, such that sending them against truly enormous swarms will dilute their damage to some degree.

And, of course, just an overall damage nerf is certainly possible.

[Commiesalami]

I really don't want to do that, that's basically the martyr's unique ability that sets it apart from being a No-AIP lightning warhead.  It's the counter to (well, everything right now, but...) swarms of aoe-immune craft.  There are other ways of handling those swarms (obviously, as Spirecraft are just a minor faction), but that's an important part of the character of the unit.

I might be willing to go for some variant on the aoe mechanic used on electric shuttles: basically set some maximum on the total amount of damage that a martyr of a given mark can do in the blast, such that sending them against truly enormous swarms will dilute their damage to some degree.

And, of course, just an overall damage nerf is certainly possible.
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Right now is seems to outclass the Lightning warhead in every way save for cost and availability.  I think the lightning warhead should have some actual use over the martyr in middle-to-late game when a player is sitting on a dozen asteroids 50K metal & crystal isn't so much of a huge investment.  Considering the Martyr is so large reducing the blast radius would be tricky to get right.  Damage could be reduced; as a Mk1 martyr is strong enough to wipe out Mk5 Triangle ships which i think is a little much.

The electric shuttle mechanic could be added in a way where there is many (~1,000) smaller hits (~100,000 damage) divided around that  could stack up high enough to lay on the hurt onto guardians and spire fleet ships (Somewhere were the martyr is severely lacking).  This way the martyr would not be overpowered against waves right when they pass through a friendly wormhole.  This would be doing the same theoretical damage (100 targets tractored, 1,000,000 damage).

[BobTheJanitor]

Don't nerf Martyrs too much. I'm afraid due to their unique mechanics, there's only a thin line for them between overpowered and useless. If you stop getting multiples per asteroid and they lose their ability to blow up a big blob of enemies (which is pretty much all they do) then there will be little reason to build them any more, except perhaps as a tractor platform that can't be repaired... which is kind of pointless. Actually, if you do make them less per asteroid and/or make them less likely to kill everything in range when they explode, perhaps you could make them repairable to balance that out. Then you could use them as a utility ship for quick fishing expeditions through wormholes or whatever and still have them later for their big one-shot moment of glory. Since they only ever get one 'attack', after which they obviously can't be repaired ever again, that might not be too bad.

[Mayjori]

I think i may have spoken to soon on the viral shredders, they are still useful, but are dying enough to keep their numbers down as i get further into this game (Vanilla AI 9), more so than i saw them die in my AI 7 or 8 game (dont remember which last time i used em)

[zebramatt]

What about if Martyrs self-attrition? So that within, say, three minutes they blow up? Then you can't stockpile them from asteroids and have to instead build them on the fly and send them where needed. They might not make it, if your asteroids aren't close enough - so there's a strategic planning element on which 'roids to use first?

Of course, for that to be at all workable you'd need to have a visual/audio notification the moment they were built; and probably a universally visible countdown of their remaining time until detonation.

Admittedly that might just be adding a fiddly control aspect to try to solve a balance problem, but it at least means they can remain as powerful as they are now balance-wise.

[keith.lamothe]

What about if Martyrs self-attrition? So that within, say, three minutes they blow up? Then you can't stockpile them from asteroids and have to instead build them on the fly and send them where needed. They might not make it, if your asteroids aren't close enough - so there's a strategic planning element on which 'roids to use first?

Of course, for that to be at all workable you'd need to have a visual/audio notification the moment they were built; and probably a universally visible countdown of their remaining time until detonation.

Admittedly that might just be adding a fiddly control aspect to try to solve a balance problem, but it at least means they can remain as powerful as they are now balance-wise.

Yea, that would be more on the side of "annoy the player" cost, which I'd like to avoid.  Though it may work out to be less bad than the other options.

[keith.lamothe]

You have some good mechanics to keep the game interesting and they are being basically negated by 1 ship... Martyr.

I appreciate the feedback but there's a bit of a conundrum here: many folks don't think the situation is _nearly_ that bad, so I'm having to interpolate "just how bad is it?" from a variety of opinions, and can't just take any one person's view as correct and proceed on that.  So I don't think anything like the level of nerfing you suggested is going to happen, at least at first.

[BobTheJanitor]

Yikes I hope nothing close to that is done. (Like not allowing them to use wormholes? What the what? I don't even...) I don't see them as a big game changer (but maybe I'm not abusing them properly). I'm more likely to use them as mobile tractors to catch runners in an emergency where my tractor/grav defenses fail and as occasional replacements for lightning warheads when a wormhole has a big pile of threat built up, which seems to be as intended. Again I point out that they only have one attack, and they can only ever do it once. If that gets too nerfed, they become a never-build unit. If people are using these attacks to deal with every wave they get, I don't know how they're using their asteroids for anything else. I much prefer to build a solid turret defense and rely on that to handle waves for me.

[keith.lamothe]

Personally I'm leaning towards significantly reducing the number of martyrs you can build from a given stockpile of asteroids.  I think their role is supposed to be "a get out of jail free card", but their cost should reflect their power.  And perhaps that power will need some toning down, since the cost (in asteroid terms) increases can't be very granular; we'll see.

[Toranth]

Personally I'm leaning towards significantly reducing the number of martyrs you can build from a given stockpile of asteroids.  I think their role is supposed to be "a get out of jail free card", but their cost should reflect their power.  And perhaps that power will need some toning down, since the cost (in asteroid terms) increases can't be very granular; we'll see.

Maybe reduce the ship cap?  16/12/8/4/2 down to something like 4/4/4/2/2, so you can't stick a Martyr on every wormhole "just in case". 
Personally, I'd really prefer not to see them weakened in damage output.  They're already limited in total number you can produce, where they can be produced, production opportunity cost, come with nasty side effects (exo-galatic waves), and they fill the damage gap where armored warheads used to sit.  Very useful for dealing with hordes of tough enemies, but too rare to use for every wave.

[Orelius]

But... oops suppose to be a Shredder mechanic topic.

Don't think of that as a problem here. 

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, when we're not in serious-development-gear on AIW the discussions are pretty meandering.

Who am I kidding, they're pretty meandering anyway


In general I want to know what's bugging people most about the game at the present moment, and this is how that tends to come out.

[keith.lamothe]

Flatline, on the subject of no-other-worthwhile-spirecraft, have you tried much with the implosion artillery?  They can be great against the mega-huge stuff in the later exos.

[Nalgas]

Thinking about it, maybe martys don't seem so overpowered on single player, due to smaller warp gate attacks. I don't suppose you get many waves of 3000+ ships on single player (And at times 2 very close together, seeing 7k ships incoming isn't unusual with 3 players)
Hmmmm...  

"Hmmmm..." indeed.  That's a good point.  I'm used to usually playing with 4-6 players.  Depending on what settings you're using, once you're past the early parts of the game thousands of ships at a time isn't just not unusual, it's...well, very usual.  A few hundred loose threat ships that might be considered a problem in single player are just background noise at that point.

The thing is, with Martyrs, the difficulty of those doesn't really scale up like it does without them.  Without them, 2000 ships compared to 200 ships is a big frickin' deal in terms of what you need to stop them.  If you have Martyrs handy, they're pretty much identical: park a mk1 Martyr in front of it, and the problem goes away.

They do a million damage to every ship in an enormous range, and you get roughly 40 hojillion of them on an 80-planet map.  When they're hitting hundreds or thousands of ships each, that's hundreds of millions or even billions of damage from each one.  A lot of that's overkill, but still...at that point, who even cares about the tractor beams or anything?  They make lots of ships very dead.

I don't use them as my only defense, but just using them for the particularly ugly situations and/or when I'm feeling lazy, I don't come close to running out, and they're good enough that I don't bother with much else other than things like the occasional implosion artillery when the situation calls for it.  "Throw Martyrs at it until it goes away" is a surprisingly effective and practical solution to many problems, and it often doesn't take more than one or two.

[Ranakastrasz]

How about giving them a damage cap, like electric shuttles have? The more untis they try to bust, the less effective they are? How about adding an additional Ion-component to the damage burst, dealing significantly higher damage (lower base damage tho) to units at or below their tier?