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AI War II: Design Document Updates Round 3: Ship Bays and AI Reinforcements
tadrinth:
On ship bays: So it's basically a modern-day carrier, but you can see exactly what's inside of it. Except also a guard post. The current carrier design is quite good, and ship bays would solve the biggest problems with it (always the same hull type, can't see what's inside).
On reinforcements: in Classic, each planet picks three fleet ship types and strongly prefers them when reinforcing, to give planets more personality. If you occasionally cause all shipyards to attack at once, then each shipyard could instead get its own ship preference. Or maybe a planet picks three and its shipyards each pick one favorite from within the three, or something. I think there's opportunity to create some interesting little tactical puzzles here, even more so than Classic.
--- Quote from: Captain Jack on September 07, 2016, 05:17:47 pm ---it's that reinforcement currency you were talking about, Chris
--- End quote ---
In classic, the strategic reserve is a separate pool from the reinforcement budget, and is hoarded rather than spent immediately. It's in the AI War Units/Mechanics doc toward the bottom: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E78-KtgIKyAExd9VpIKe2aXEKFO14A8b9zRLwRENkRk/edit#heading=h.v7gcycxl3z4c
The tricky thing about converting it over to ship bays is that the SR can be immediately deployed to anywhere the humans attack (though not all of it). You'd really want the SR to come in via a warp-gate. But, you could STORE the SR in a special ship bay on the AI homeworld, and give it the ability to deploy ships at other important planets via a warp gate. Or you could just not have an SR and have extra reinforcement allocations to the core worlds/homeworlds if their ship bays are low.
Pumpkin:
Thanks a lot for your detailed answers, Chris.
I'm not fan of each guard post being a shipyard. I would rather like a centralized version releasing a stream of FRD ships while hostile presence is at its planet. But I really love the rest.
Anyway, if cloaked ships don't trigger the shipyards, they would gain a very interesting sneak role.
--- Quote from: tadrinth on September 07, 2016, 05:58:30 pm ---On reinforcements: in Classic, each planet picks three fleet ship types and strongly prefers them when reinforcing, to give planets more personality. If you occasionally cause all shipyards to attack at once, then each shipyard could instead get its own ship preference. Or maybe a planet picks three and its shipyards each pick one favorite from within the three, or something. I think there's opportunity to create some interesting little tactical puzzles here, even more so than Classic.
--- End quote ---
Instead of preferences, I would like to see hard rule. The game would be much more readable if, instead of a shipyard having many bays and some more furnished than others, it would be limited to three bays. Or maybe not limited, because new AI designs would change that, but it would never (instead of rarely) pick a ship it has no preference for. And guard post shipyard, even if I don't like that idea, would be limited to one bay, maybe.
I love this idea, Tadrinth! Interesting tactical puzzles are really what I crave in this game.
About the Strategic Reserve, I would like it be less "used everywhere" (everything connected to everything makes the game blurry). I think it would be interesting to just "remove" the Strategic Reserve and make it the Home's MkV shipyard which depends on reinforcement budget instead of a special, separated budget. However that's not an idea I would strongly support. I think the current implementation of the SR is fine, even if a bit artificial and not clearly explained. (I was going to flesh this out but I'll do that in a separated thread.)
Draco18s:
--- Quote from: Pumpkin on September 08, 2016, 01:16:13 am ---I'm not fan of each guard post being a shipyard. I would rather like a centralized version releasing a stream of FRD ships while hostile presence is at its planet. But I really love the rest.
--- End quote ---
It's no different than having every guard post get 1/Xth of the system's reinforcements.
However, it could be an interesting strategical landscape if there were certain types of guard posts that could not be ship yards. E.g. Super Forts. Something generally terrifying enough on its own for the AI to be like "you don't need 6 fighters, gtfo."
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