BETA AI War 2 v0.868 Released! "Fleet EXP Level-Ups and Starting Battlestations"

[BadgerBadger]

Yeah, You/Arcen are in a rough place these days, no question. I think everyone here wants you to succeed! It's

I think the thing with refleeting is that if it's too easy to refleet the player wins attrition wars, and that's Bad. So if it's time consuming it gives the AI a chance to counterattack if you've lost your fleet (and for the AI to reinforce). If you are trying to refleet and the AI is attacking you and potentially taking out your weaker planets, that's exciting.

But if you're in a spot where you are well-defended and the AI can't do anything to you while you watch netflix and rebuild, well, that's boring. But it also means that you are playing the game "well" (or you're a turtle); your defenses are stronger than the current AIP's worth of AI counterattack ability.

So I'm not entirely sure what to do about that.

[ptarth]

(Go Team Metal removal).

If the problem is refleeting time, then one solution would be to faux speed up time (training montage!). That sounds ridiculous, but it is possible. Just increase the rate of resource income, build speed, and AI fleet growth (and aggression).

In a system where Metal is used for Ship Caps (i.e., the metal less economy), it's easy because there is no resource income, you just speed up build speed (and also get attacked by 30 minutes of accelerated AI ship growth). It becomes a 'faster' game, where after every attack you make against a planet, the AI will counter attack more vigorously. You can conceptualize this as momentum changes or taking turns (ala the Chess analogy). (Caveat: This will have repercussions on fleet experience.)

In the current Metal Economy, it's harder. An example of this already are those structures that give you 100K metal (or whatever) for destroying them for 1 AIP. That's a terrible trade for me. And having an acceleration that costs AIP is likewise not appealing. If I can spend game time for AIPless recovery, then I'll do it (because I'm a terrible person). So then you are stuck increasing build speed and AI fleet growth (which are easy) and metal income rate increases. That last one... is hard, because that means you now have an off/on state to control fake game speed.

But maybe I'm overthinking it? Maybe there should be a "rebuild mode" button that applies an acceleration parameter on those three rates. Then after an attack, you enter rebuild mode, deal with the incoming attacks, and then you are ready to go again. It's really similar to how hacking works.

[AnnoyingOrange]

Having read all of that I begin to wonder...
What if tesla effects had their damage scale up as there were more targets.

The total tesla damage already scales up as targets increase up to the target cap, and it does so in a linear fashion (twice the targets = twice the damage).
With your proposal, the per-target scaling would go on top of this linear scaling and effectively make teslas into hyper-specialized anti swarm units.
It's certainly a way to differentiate the effect from other AoEs.

But this has been such a winding road and nobody is ever fully happy, so it can really have me questioning if I even know what I'm doing and should be in this career.

You're doing better than, as long as you get the game out of early access honestly (which you want to do) you should be fine.
Early access is a sales dampener because there's hundreds of devs who abused it, and you're still getting multiple positive reviews per month even with updates only on the beta branch.

If you really desperately need ideas for backup plans, consider this one: smaller games.
Look at Refunct and Swarmlake: tiny games by a lone indie dev, very cheap (to make and to buy), short, simple ideas and mechanics, no complicated assets, but the excellent implementation resulted in overwhelmingly positive reviews and sales in the hundreds of thousand of units.

[BadgerBadger]

"rebuild mode" is basically "hitting + to speed the game up"

[ptarth]

"rebuild mode" is basically "hitting + to speed the game up"

Yes. Quite literally. (Although a bit more controlled.)

[Draco18s]

Having read all of that I begin to wonder...
What if tesla effects had their damage scale up as there were more targets.

The total tesla damage already scales up as targets increase up to the target cap, and it does so in a linear fashion (twice the targets = twice the damage).

Not really. With the "targets less than max, deal more damage so that total DPS remains constant." Which is the same as firing N bullets at N targets, but if there's less than N, targets take 2 (or 3) bullets each, up to some maximum number. I.e. identical to multishot shotguns.

With your proposal, the per-target scaling would go on top of this linear scaling and effectively make teslas into hyper-specialized anti swarm units.
It's certainly a way to differentiate the effect from other AoEs.

Hence the suggestion

[motai]

so a couple thoughts on the metal/refleeting problem.

1. the metal income is anemic without any tech boosters to metal production making the early game very painful since you have to do evrything at once without  a net.
2. the inability to pause construction prevents you from prioritizing tasks tho it does reduce micro.
3. the current metal costs on getting new things and the cost of defenses is disproportianate to fleet costs drastically which is sort of ok if i had a way to prioritise refleeting over everything.
3.5 the aip into metal nodes need to be multiplied by 10 in the new economic model to be remotely worthwhile. and likely increased in occurance alot
4. salvage as a mechanic is far too inefficient to be effective.

i would like to throw some ideas besaides just nuking metal tho i understand that solution too.
1. prioritize refleeting over everything metal build related. its cost is lower period and it is too vital to maintain active play.
2. consider changing the queuing model back to pay in advance to enhance refeeting/construction speed and encourage stockpiling before offensive play and considering strategy.
3. i find turret deployment important but tedious. consider defense waypointing for turret builds and having the station automatically start turreting the waypoints rather than turret spam/metal shortage as is currently. (1 waypoint all construction. 2 waypoints they alternate etc) each turret type having a different waypoint.) this potentially outdates turret remains to save data space
4. with waypoints from aiwc gone and integrated into fleet which is fine i still have a major problem of fleets becoming seperated because of speed differences(especially the transport leader taking off at mach 9 away from its siege taskforce(fleet interface in progress i know but just being ablse to tell the whole fleet to regroup at mothership would be nice so i dont have to keep switiching to the map select it then hope they get the message and they often dont

[Toranth]

(Go Team Metal removal).

If the problem is refleeting time, then one solution would be to faux speed up time (training montage!). That sounds ridiculous, but it is possible. Just increase the rate of resource income, build speed, and AI fleet growth (and aggression).

In a system where Metal is used for Ship Caps (i.e., the metal less economy), it's easy because there is no resource income, you just speed up build speed (and also get attacked by 30 minutes of accelerated AI ship growth). It becomes a 'faster' game, where after every attack you make against a planet, the AI will counter attack more vigorously. You can conceptualize this as momentum changes or taking turns (ala the Chess analogy). (Caveat: This will have repercussions on fleet experience.)

In the current Metal Economy, it's harder. An example of this already are those structures that give you 100K metal (or whatever) for destroying them for 1 AIP. That's a terrible trade for me. And having an acceleration that costs AIP is likewise not appealing. If I can spend game time for AIPless recovery, then I'll do it (because I'm a terrible person). So then you are stuck increasing build speed and AI fleet growth (which are easy) and metal income rate increases. That last one... is hard, because that means you now have an off/on state to control fake game speed.

I like having Metal, because I like resource management (up to a certain level).  But if Metal was 'removed' from being the constraint on Fleet building/rebuilding, I still feel like there should be something that the player is involved in, either in keeping track of, or spending, or whatever.

One quick simple idea would be to make Metal a slow-acquisition resource, that is used to provide a temporary bonus.  For example, when rebuilding, a Fleet might have a button that says something like "Spend 5 Metal to double rebuild rate!"  As much as I hate F2P mobile games, that is a resource mechanic that both works and is widely accepted (even popular).  It's similar to having the ability to speed up time (the other play-rate control mechanism) without actually doing so.

[Kesseleth]

And I also really wanted to say thanks for this.  I was feeling super down last night and this morning after reading some of the threads in here, even though I felt like I had ideas immediately for how to tackle a lot of the things that people were complaining about.  But it was just disheartening that in a lot of quarters it felt like there was lack of confidence that I'd actually listen to folks and respond with appropriate mechanical changes.  That was super hard, and so your note was really a pick me up.

Hey, and sorry I've been absent for the last week, I was unable to type with both hands for a week and so didn't respond sooner. I know I'm a bit late, but I think I have an idea as to precisely why people felt that way. I don't know if that's something you would be interested in (and bear in mind there's basically no way to explain it that doesn't come across as a little harsh) but if you are interested in the reasons some of us acted in the way we did, I believe I have an answer (I would DM it, it's not a public forum sort of discussion, I am aware).