Starships in general have too little hp. A siege starship has 10x the health of a single missile frigate, or less then 10% of its hp as a cap limit.
Wait, or is that side bar showing squad strength, because if it is individually based then it claims fighters have a 2.4 mil hp cap? With them doing 880 dps? The numbers are not adding up. Very confusing.
Regardless, starships are all paper tigers with seemingly good hp but die from a sneeze.
There were still some bugs in the numeric display, sorry. I've fixed those up for the next version, but here are the real stats (in the version you have) for the triangle and the starship types:
| internal_name | cap_health | visual_thing_health | defense_type |
| Fighter_Mark1 | 120000 | 300 | Evasion |
| Bomber_Mark1 | 102000 | 425 | Armor |
| MissileCorvette_Mark1 | 50000 | 416.67 | Structure |
| AssaultStarship_Mark1 | 120000 | 120000 | Armor |
| SiegeStarship_Mark1 | 25000 | 25000 | Structure |
| SniperStarship_Mark1 | 50000 | 50000 | Structure |
| StealthStarship_Mark1 | 100000 | 100000 | Evasion |
| CarrierStarship_Mark1 | 100000 | 100000 | Structure |
So, yes, the Siege Starship is made of paper. The numbers may be overly harsh, but the idea is that it's the trebuchet/catapult/etc that can mercilessly hammer anything in its (long) range, but if enemy troops ever get in striking range of your trebuchet you can expect to have a pile of wood splinters pretty soon.
Put another way: in practice, is the Assault Starship also made of paper?
If you want to try "things die slower" go to GameData/Configuration/ExternalConstants/KDL_VanillaConstants.xml and change the value of
balance_seconds_per_efficient_fight="7.5"
to, say, 15.
All DPS numbers are based on that, and the current value means "1 cap of X can kill 1 cap of Y in 7.5 seconds if X's weapon is good against Y's defense, and X and Y both have the 'Normal' durability class".
Research feels more constrained. Needing to capture two worlds to get a MK II ship feels grindy. I know that MK I ships upgrade to II's but at first glance it feels a bit tough.
Planets have different levels of science, so it depends on the planet. Some give enough for a MkII and some extra to spare.
If you want to try it with more generous planets you can go to that same file and change:
balance_planet_resource_multipliers="2,1.5,1,1"
to, say, "2.5,2,1.5,1"
That would make the best-science planets (including your starting planet) give 2500 science, the second-tier ones give 2000, the third-tier ones 1,500, and the worst-science planets 1,000.
This would also increase metal/fuel/power/hacking gathering, so potentially I'll need to split that out, but it's still useful for testing.
There is no need to consider an economy build that you might from AIW 1.
If you hit metal-starvation in the middle of battle your effectiveness drops radically due to the inability to effiicently replace fleet-ship losses. So having a solid econ allows you to win fights you would otherwise lose.
Or are you finding that your income is staying positive in the middle of a big fight?
Things such as economic might, static defenses, time to recover, absolute offense (regardless of price), flexible forces (expendable forces that could be replaced relatively freely), and others, were factors influenced by tech and ship types and a player could never hope to do all at once so required to make choices. I have not yet hit mid game so cannot tell if such a thing for certain but from first impressions I feel like AIW 2 will have a more streamlined path in terms of this direction.
There's still a big difference between putting lots of science into turrets vs starships vs fleet ships.
I also want to switch from having the resource-converter buildings to just having a line of techs each for Metal, Fuel, and Power output, but that's not being done right away.
Combine the strong economy, the rapid and convenient building, and the general over all 2-3x enemy strength on enemy worlds I face no repercussions to sledgehammer attrition warfare. There is no need to have a neinzul style unit, you can do tactics like that with triangle ships with no tech investment.
Yes, they are much more like Neinzul, except without the fiddly self-attrition. And it takes more econ to sustain full output of them.
In general the idea is that they're the expendable units, and thus very different from starships.
The reprecussion you would normally face from attrition warfare is that your attack takes too long to succeed and the Warden Fleet shows up to shut you down. But the Wardens were nerfed heavily and repeatedly in the past month or so (especially for the early game, because they were stonewalling the player), so you may just not have run into them much.
On the subject of build time, you can try slowing down that initial prototype flagship's build queue by changing (in GameEntity/KDL_Ships_Starships.xml) :
<metal_flow purpose="BuildingShipsInternally" balance_planets_worth_of_metal_throughput="5" />
to 1 or 2
The current thing means "the prototype flagship can completely consume 5 average planets' worth of metal output".
Such a thing was possible in AIW 1 but required a large tech investment and was a mid to late game tech that was pretty specialized. In AIW 1 having it from the start is steering the game pretty hard in a certain tactical direction. Not sure if it is the best course of action.
I guess the basic question is: what would you prefer? There seem to be a few basic options for times when you attack against significant resistance:
1) You take losses, slowing down the rate at which you're destroying the enemy, until either you win or just run out of units (or retreat).
2) You take losses, but you're frequently switching your view to an adjacent planet to round up reinforcements built there and send them in.
3) You take losses, but you've got construction facilities on an adjacent planet replacing your losses and sending them to the target planet (via Rally; AIW2 currently has rally-to-control-group but not rally-to-planet).
4) You take losses, but you've got construction facilities on the target planet replacing your losses.
Is there a menu to find key bindings?
Not in-game yet, but PlayerData/inputmappings.dat (or something like that) has them all.
Got it on cutting the AI turrets on Mk1/Mk2 planets.
