[Nevermind!] Forcefields need to die, help me kill them.

[PokerChen]

So Chris, what's the chief difficulty in simply removing AoE force fields from the sequel?

If it's lore, invent a shield inverter that catastrophically-collapses a target shield bubble. If it's gameplay, health-pools can be rebalanced and other means of sustain can be devised. If it's graphics, change the wording to "damage-redirect" ala laser drones and mirrors. If it's CPU-based, use personal FFs, as a third health-bar.

Until you start packaging your squadrons into fleets and enable fleet-specific mechanics (certain cap-ships in fleet provides shielding to all units in fleet, removing the need to have range calculations), there's no neat compromise between personal and global.

= = =
I'm not in support of enforced invincibility - there's no particular reason to suspend anyone's disbelief that some targets simply cannot be killed, on the same order as "why doesn't the AI just send a Golem fleet to kill the player at the start of the game"? One should be inventing compelling reasons if they can.

Nor do I much like the global effects, but that's more personal taste as I view it as more of "mechanic for the sake of mechanic" rather than adding to gameplay value. Global multipliers are also more difficult to balance down the track.

[Pumpkin]

@pumpkin
I like the idea of protectors "defending" another unit, making them invicible until the protector's dead... but it sounds like you'd have to manually set / reset those links and therefore it would mean much micro-management, especially when rebuilding. Any idea on how to remove micro-management issues ?

Not requiring manual set/reset?

If there is a Human version of the Command Station Shield, the link is obvious. If it's an attachment thing, it would be built atop the unit and rebuilt by remains rebuilders. I see no more micro than with a FField.

[Tridus]

In terms of personal forcefields, what's the difference between an upgrade that adds a FF only to the unit and an upgrade that adds more health to the unit? The net result is effectively the same thing.

[PokerChen]

In terms of personal forcefields, what's the difference between an upgrade that adds a FF only to the unit and an upgrade that adds more health to the unit? The net result is effectively the same thing.

I usually think that personal FFs don't benefit from any armour or hull-type effects: All attacks do full damage (or do whatever the shield multiplier is).

[kasnavada]

In AI war yes, shield damage was on the shield "hull" type.

That said, nothing prevents the "personal shields" to be something else entirely, like a flat or percentage reduction to damage, or that it would regenerate, and absorb a portion of incoming damage. Or something else.

I'm in favor of regenerating + partial damage absorption myself, but regeneration means that each object must check if it regenerates all the time. Then again, the shield might only regenerate every 5 or 10 seconds instead of in real time. Hull, of course, would need to be repaired.

Mechanics would be:
100 "hull"
20 damage, 50% absorption => if 20 damage is taken then 10 go to hull, and 10 to shield.

=> That means that some units could have "shield piercing 50%" which would remove some shield protection, rather than the "immune to shield" mechanic we have now.

[Steelpoint]

Perhaps replace 'logistical' stations with 'defensive' stations that let the player construct several linked force fields.

This would reduce the overall presence of force fields in the game, but that the actual forcefield will still be available to the more defensive minded player.

In addition I like the proposed idea of the 'candy tech' shield for ships themselves, but that's more of a offensive thing unless it also applies to defensive structures.

[Draco18s]

If it's lore, invent a shield inverter that catastrophically-collapses a target shield bubble. If it's gameplay, health-pools can be rebalanced and other means of sustain can be devised. If it's graphics, change the wording to "damage-redirect" ala laser drones and mirrors. If it's CPU-based, use personal FFs, as a third health-bar.

It's gameplay, graphics, and CPU problem.  Mostly CPU and graphics.  Lore is the easy solution to why the tech doesn't "exist" any more, as you've noted.

(I've been reading the Uplift trilogy and there's several instances of human creativity coming up with an idea that the galactics didn't expect because it wasn't in the Great Library, thus it takes the more technologically advanced aliens by surprise, but the reason it wasn't in the Library was rather that it was but wasn't used any more due to a glaring defect that had been discovered a million years ago.  For example, a space ship ends up with a refined coating of carbon soot from a red giant--some machine race converted it--that made the ship impervious to all forms of lasers and other heat-based weapony, by shunting the energy into hyperspace.  The flaw in the coating was that with relative ease an attacker could broadcast a signal that would turn the coating into an "antenna," drawing energy out of hyperspace and broiling the crew.  Of course, the plot required them to survive, so they had another human trick up their sleeve and reconfigured their communications laser into a refrigeration laser* and dumped the heat back into space).

*Not actually a real thing, but it was another human invention used in the first book to allow humans to visit the sun.  As in, actually dive down into it.  Hence the title, Sundiver.

[keith.lamothe]

Chris asked me to post this reply of mine from our email conversation:

We can just try having no forcefields and see if they complain. But to address the specific points:


> * They have traditionally been a CPU hog, but the spatial partitioning AND the squads help solve that.  Still, though.

I don't think this will be a big problem.


> * Visually they can be a mess, because you have to be able to see the forcefield and if there are a lot of stacked forcefields you still have to be able to see the ships under them.

It looks kinda cool, honestly. The level of "haze" helps you see at a glance just how fortified a position or fleet is, and when it starts to thin out you can tell the real casualties are about to start.


> * Players are using these to do things like block wormholes, which is pretty annoying since that's a cheap way to get around using tractor beams.

Why is that a problem? They work on things tractors don't work on, and tractors work on some things ffs don't work on. Tractors can prevent entry or exit, where ffs can only prevent entry.

It never really hard-stops the AI from getting somewhere, it just puts up a "you have to have this many guns to get on this ride" barrier.

Trust me, when the AI gets serious, even the biggest human ff piles melt like butter


> * Players HAVE to use stacks of these to protect their home stations... but even then, their home stations can go down in a jiffy.

Buffing the station would be relatively simple, but in general whatever protective measures are available will be deployed to protect your "King". Because, again, once things hit a certain scale it doesn't really matter how many HPs any one target has, the only way to protect it is to prevent the enemy from being able to bring his full force to bear on it.


> * Trying to fit a bunch of ships under a forcefield is an exercise in frustration.  Please, fit this stack of circles inside this larger circle.

Generally this isn't a big deal; you just build your pile and pile on your ships and turrets. I don't generally do more than a visual check to make sure everything's at least reasonably within the area. The areas are pretty big nowadays.


> * The AI isn't very good at it, either, and we can't expend too much CPU on it because that would bog things down.

The AI doesn't have to be very good at it, its ffs are big enough to cover anything reasonably "at" that post/station. And the mobile shields don't cover the whole exo/whatever but they cover enough.


> * There becomes an arms race between AI ships that need to be able to chew through forcefield abuse on the part of players (let's put ALL my forcefields right here!), and between forcefield effectiveness.

Generally the player will concentrate as much of their ff cap on their main chokepoint as they can, but they also generally have to divert at least one ff for each command station they don't want to die immediately, and generally at least a few to assist the home generator at the home station. They can get quite a bit of ff-cap between normal and hardened fields, though I don't think they generally max that out. It's a K tradeoff.


> * In general, trying to fit ships into a certain area is problematic, as noted above.
> * But increase the area, and you just increase the number of ships players try to cram in there.

As noted, I don't think this is generally a big deal.


> * At the same time, players stacking forcefields with one another is a huge issue, too.

Graphically, or?


> * I don't like arms races, because either people on the extreme ends are "getting away with stuff" and complaining about that, or people in the middle are finding it too hard to use things or out of balance.

Not using forcefields does limit how far you can get, yes, but so does not using your pawns in chess. They function kind of similarly: finite; of distinctly limited offensive use; and if you don't have them you get chewed to bits.


Anyway, like I said, you can just omit them and see how it goes. I just think their positives outweigh their negatives by a large margin, and they form a lot of the texture of AIW's tactical planning.

Feel free to correct my assertions about how players play and what they do/don't have problems with

[x4000]

At this point, I'm going to basically say </thread>, though.

Ultimately:
1. There are some issues with them.
2. But people really love them despite that.
3. A better solution is not readily at hand.
4. The game would be poorer, for a lot of people, without them.

QED, they stay for now and can be revisited in some other manner in the future.  This thread shows both how much room there is for innovation in this area, as well as how much work and prototyping there would be to actually get to something that works at least as well as the current setup.  Trying to do that while also implementing the game as a whole... not good for time or budget.

[Tridus]

One thing the current FFs do have going for them is personality. They're quirky oddball things that you can do stuff with in AI War that you just can't do in other games.  So, probably a smart call. Let the community stew on it for a while and come back to it later if there's still problems.

[x4000]

Yep.  And they can always be kept in the future but kind of marginalized by something better if there's still division about it.

[Wingflier]

This kind of makes me sad. I agreed that the game would be a lot better without forcefields, if not for all the technical reasons, than to eliminate all the ways that the computer can just cheese you with units that fire through them.

Unfortunately though, a game based around space platforms would work a lot better with this idea because the base itself would be unified and much more defensible with the use of defensive boosting mechanics than the original scattered layout AIWC has. It's two ideas I'm sad to see go.

[Tridus]

This kind of makes me sad. I agreed that the game would be a lot better without forcefields, if not for all the technical reasons, than to eliminate all the ways that the computer can just cheese you with units that fire through them.

Unfortunately though, a game based around space platforms would work a lot better with this idea because the base itself would be unified and much more defensible with the use of defensive boosting mechanics than the original scattered layout AIWC has. It's two ideas I'm sad to see go.

I expect platforms will come back in 2.0 if 1.0 is successful. That'd be the time to revisit FFs, based on the new mechanics.

[Wingflier]

My thing is, if AI War 2 is just AI War Classic with better graphics, then why not just play the original?

Part of the point of modding is the ability of individuals to revert any changes that a small, hardcore group of people don't like to see go. You already know that somebody is going to make an AI War Classic mod as soon as the tools come out, undoing any small changes the developer has made and trying to get the look and feel as close to the original as possible, so why not let people do that? Let's make a better game than the first.

[Tridus]

Probably because there's a question of budget if it's going to take the next six months to figure out a better FF model than the one that exists now.

AIW Classic works. The things that don't work, we know a lot about. Departing wildly from that is inherently risky, because we have no idea if the departures will work as well as what they're replacing, and just how much effort it takes to get there. This isn't a case where the house needs to be burned down and started over.

I expect we'll see more new ideas stick around, but in this case, replacing a working and relatively popular FF mechanic with god only knows what isn't exactly better. It's different for the sake of different, until we get something that actually *is* better (as compared to say ship bays & AI reinforcement changes, which are clearly superior in numerous ways).