Okay -- for now, no changes to this, I'm going to focus elsewhere. I think that the current Eye mechanic isn't too distressing to anyone (the worst complaint has been "I dislike seeing it so often with turtle AI Types,"), and overall people seem to have really liked it. The discussion of buffing the Eyes seems to have really stressed a lot of folks out, though, and that's something that was not my intent and it's also not my intent to get hugely hung up on the eyes or the de-blobbing at the moment (it's not a major part of my goal for the next expansion, nor it is a bugfix, etc).
To be clear about a few points:
1. It's not my goal to remove all large fleet battles from the game. I really don't like it when folks take something to the logical extreme and assume that's where I'm heading -- please don't do that! As I'd noted before, we're talking about a max of 30% of the planets except with the really defensive AIs here.
2. The whole point of this is to encourage MORE variety, rather than less. Would this mean that planets with a certain type of Eye would have to be taken down in some specific manner? YES! That's true of most of the big weapons the AI uses, and is sort of the point: more variety, more need to think outside the box, more strategies to try. Is fighting the AI with a smaller fleet harder and different? Quite often, yes -- hence the added interest of the Eyes. Is fighting the AI with a huge fleet also interesting? Of course -- hence why Eyes are never going to be dominant or everywhere.
3. The reason why the Eyes are fixed in position is because I want the players to be able to size up the planet and then formulate a strategy for taking it down. If the Eyes roam around, that takes out the strategic thinking and just puts in a seemingly-random chance of bad consequences for the players.
4. Having the Eyes only affect a localized area of the planet also is interesting in some respects, I certainly see the motivation for that, but it's computationally intense for the CPU and also something that I think would be complex to the point of detriment. But taking that sort of idea, where there is some sort of ship-that-spawns-other-ships when the players are in firing range of it, does strike me as a cool thing to do at some point down the line.
In short: calm down, please, and let's table this for now. Just discussing this really stirred up a hornet's nest, so I'm not about to try implementing anything along these lines when we're on such a tight schedule for the next expansion. There are much cooler things in store that I think will see more universal appeal.
