What is the eye mechanic?

[superking]

I was thinking about the AI eyes- in my current game, if a planet has an eye I just snipe it first... but I have faced eyes on planets where victory would be virtually impossible with a maximum 2:1 advantage of lower mark player ships too (multiple fortresses under FF & ion cannons, starships, MK IV ships...) so I dont like the idea of it being invincible, there must be other mechanics to make eye sniping less desirable without removing the ability to destroy it.

how freeing the planets defenders when under attack in the same manner as comstation sniping? if the AI units counterattack out of the system, the eye will reproduce a force equal to the player army instantly- thats a fairly punishing. making the eye tougher (4 million hp evaporates almost instantly nowdays) would make this more dangerous

[zebramatt]

Here's an idea: conditional logic such that if the Command Centre is still present when the Eye is destroyed, it instantly releases a large number of high mark ships.

Everything else the same.

Is that a goer?

[snelg]

I'm a little worried that having the ai eyes permanent would mean if you want to be able to move through this planet you need to destroy the command station. Either that or send groups of a couple of ships at a time to avoid it triggering and spawn massive blobs every time you needed to go by that planet. And if it's on over 1/3 of the planets, that would quickly become irritating.

I think it would be interesting if the eyes would notice there's lots of human player ships here, so maybe there wouldn't be that many on defense. Then send an attack of some form somewhere else. Rather than dropping them in the current system where they have to go through the players blob to actually pose a threat. Maybe the ships attacking could be picked among ones that are not too bad against stationary defenses, making the players want to keep at least some ships on the defense.

[HitmanN]

What about this.

The Eye:
* is much tougher, but not invincible
* counters player with slightly tougher ratio, maybe 3:2 or 1:1
* only has a limited range it can 'see'. Basically, a circle around it. Long range though, enough to cover something like 1/4 of a planet's commonly used space.

This would mean the placement of the Eye has a meaning, and affects the choices of how to deal with it. The wormhole you attack from could be outside its range, in which case you can bring in a blob, but you'll still likely want to snipe the Eye with long range weaponry before entering its range of 'sight'. If the entrance wormhole is slightly in the Eye's range, you can bring in your fleet in small blobs at a time, and move them outside the range, then coordinate the next move from there. Or, if the Eye is right close to the entrance wormhole, you might have a chance to easily ninja it first, if you have sufficient enough attack power, then bring in the rest of the fleet.

Creates at least three different situations, and is slightly different each time, yet essentially functions the same, just not planet-wide.

[TheMachineIsSentient]

I'm sure that Lance will chime in here, but from what I've seen of the eye...just my thoughts:

• You must use starships to avoid exceeding the ratio. Bringing lots of triangle ships, even when their mark level is one or two below the planet level, the eye goes nuts. This probably needs to be looked at, as now what you see is players going full starships because they're being punished for triangle.
• The eye is a good defense against stopping the blob, but I don't think it's going to stop players from making blobs. This has just forced us to think about how to allow our blobs to exist, in this case eye-diving.
• Eye-diving is fun and expensive, often decimating a fleet and leaving yourself open. This may be a better way to punish players for blobbing, if that's what you want to do. I won't rage about it, as even that is stoppable from a player's perspective. The only boolean way to stop blobbing is to place caps on the planet for the amount of ships you can bring, and that wouldn't be very fun.
• Violating the rules of the eye is really easy in multiplayer. Maybe too easy. I would rather see the eye use things like warheads or even bringing their own blobs to the party ( make this scoutable and not from a warp). That way you can see that the AI is flying its own army in your direction to punish you, and maybe you should think about retreating. This delayed punishment might be a better mechanic than a stream of ships coming from the eye, as the idea or potential for losses on the planet side of the game would be much more fearsome than knowing all you have to do is deal with the stream, which is somewhat too easy for certain ships like autobombs and certain starships.

[zebramatt]

Carrying on from that, and expanding on my previous suggestion, how about: conditional logic such that if the Command Centre is still present when the Eye is destroyed, it instantly releases a large number of high mark ships in the form of a counter-attack wave?

[Ozymandiaz]

Those particularly have a lot of them.  Otherwise it's normally supposed to be around 30% of the map covered.

Having to bum-rush the Eyes was not really the goal of the original design, but I hedged and left that in there.  So let me ask you guys a question, now that you've seen the Eyes in practice.  How much rage would I stir up by making the Eyes invincible (or practically so, along the lines of the wormhole guard posts rather than the dyson sphere), but with them dying immediately when the command station is dead.

The idea of these was to make people play without blobs on those planets, not to have a tedious chore to do before they pull out the blob as usual.  I REALLY hate blobs, which is why they are so prevalent; this was also intended to encourage better mobile defenses, and more of a guerrilla feel to the game.

Thoughts?

I am not fond of the idea of making in invincible. For a few reasons: No gate raiding and that sometimes I need a bigger number of units then the AI got if I only have access to low level units and the AI has high level.

I understand you do not want blobs as such though, but kind of forcing it on a select few planets do not strike me as the most optimal solution.

I would rather suggest of tweaking the Eyes behaviour and the mechanincs surounding it. Making it stronger might be an idea, but I think it should be killable witohut taking out the CMD station.

How about it gains some more ehp and stuff like sniper immunity, and maybe some ok close range weapons?

[keith.lamothe]

I think that making them invincible would be asymptotic in an unhelpful way.  Making them tougher could be good, though.

My off-the-cuff suggestion to head-off a grindy feeling is to have different varieties of Eyes:

1) The one we've got now ("Sentinel").
2) An invincible/dies-with-station one ("Observer").
3) One that only maintains a 3:1 ratio but roams from AI planet to AI planet, so you could potentially have more than one eye on a planet ("Patroller").
4) One with a turbo-fire railgun-like ion cannon that only fires when the ratio is worse than 2:1 ("Cyclops").
5) One that's cloaked ("ManBehindTheCurtain").
6) One that, if the ratio is worse than 3:1, either acts like a planetary cloaker or automatically spawns one ("Hider").
6) One that spawns counter-attack-waves (or just normal eye-spawns from other places, so they go after the player elsewhere) ("Retaliator").
7) One that's mobile (but can't traverse wormholes) with a bunch of health and some module slots for heavy guns that are auto-built based on how bad the ratio is, so coming in with 10:1 is going to get something golem-esque in your face or something like that ("Enforcer").
8 ) One that doesn't spawn ships but if the ratio is past 2:1 provides a proportional munitions boost (and/or armor boost and/or speed boost) to all AI ships on the planet ("Equalizer").

These could have varying frequency, perhaps even based on the AI Type, AI Difficulty, etc.

It would also be good if the ratio was computed in a way that recognizes the difference between, say, a Zenith Starship and a Laser Gatling MkI.  And, for that matter, the difference between an Artillery Guardian MkIV and an (AI) Fighter MkI.  Not that it has to be completely linear or very accurate, but some kind of difference would be good.  My suggestion would be to have a new int field on UnitType that would be initialized in the ctor to some value based on EffectiveShipCap, IsStarship, stuff like that (it'd be zero for non-combatants, presumably).  Then, when adding/removing a ship to/from a rollup, add/subtract its value from a new int on that rollup for enemy/allied.  And the eyes could then refer to those rollup ints to compute the ratio.  And then you could have another eye type called "Indiscriminate" (or "Equal Opportunity" ) that just checks the counts like it does now

Anyway, there's no need to do _all_ of that, but it seemed worth mentioning

[keith.lamothe]

For kicks, you could even start treating these as the "avatars" or command ships of the AI subcommanders you sometimes hint about

[HitmanN]

For kicks, you could even start treating these as the "avatars" or command ships of the AI subcommanders you sometimes hint about

Cool idea. Maybe if the Eye was instead a mobile subcommander ship. Its behaviour could vary by type. Some subcommander act like the current Eye, summoning backup, others might go on offensive, others keep their distance from the player force (to keep up a bonus of some sort perhaps?). Err, basically, most of the stuff Keith listed. ;p

Could also be called an "Overseer" or something. Or "Protocol". You could have a "Defensive Protocol", "Offensive Protocol", "Evasive Protocol", "Pre-emptive Protocol", etc. Sounds more AI-ish.

[zebramatt]

Yes, do all that!

[Winter Born]

+1 for Keiths multiple eye types


for computing the 2:1 ratio how about raw attack power (as a factor)?
Normal ship caps

Spire Starship 19600 x 6 = 117600
Mk1 fighter 600 x 1 = 600
Mk1 Bomber 1200
Siege Mk1 192000 


Could lead to some interesting twists for siege heavy fleets

[keith.lamothe]

Raw attack power is pretty misleading   But it would need to be something pretty transparent, so that players aren't having to guess too much whether their fleet will trigger the eye.

[HitmanN]

for computing the 2:1 ratio how about raw attack power (as a factor)?

It would be near impossible to manually compare the difference between the AI and player forces on a planet, unless both total values are displayed somewhere for easy reference. Otherwise it's a gamble whether you're bringing in too much force or not.

BUT! On a somewhat unrelated note, I do like the idea that such values would exist. The number of ships on a planet has never been a very good indicator of the military strength. There's a difference between 500 ships that are infiltrators and 500 ships that are electric bombers, for instance. Being able to compare total ship or damage values without too much manual work would be quite interesting, and wouldn't still remove the need or usefulness of tactics. That's just me though.

[zebramatt]

Raw attack power is pretty misleading   But it would need to be something pretty transparent, so that players aren't having to guess too much whether their fleet will trigger the eye.

Then make it simple but arbitrary: any starship counts for ten fleet ships, for example.