Brainstorming about offense vs defense, and refleeting speeds.

[x4000]

This whole business of "OMG I need my fleet somewhere else" makes me decidedly uncomfortable.  There was some element of that in AIWC, but generally things moved slowly enough that it wasn't a big deal, and part of the meta was moving things around to create choke points to avoid that happening.

So far in this game, I don't get the sense that these two games are remotely on the same page in that regard.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm just saying it needs some brainstorming.  This might actually be a more root cause of the problem than the speed of rebuilding (though that doesn't help).

Some thoughts:

Offensive Fleets
I'm assuming that I'm going to have one, maybe two offensive fleets.  Mainly these are going to be attacking enemy worlds, or in some cases holding a forward position.  The latter is the main reason to split your large fleet; one part stays behind on a forward position while the rest goes even further and attacks.

While I'm doing all this, I'm busy.  I'm planning, I'm positioning, I'm getting into scuffles with these guys against various foes.  The only reason I really expect to have to bring them home is if a CPA is announced, or if there's an absolutely massive breach in my well-laid plans at home. 

I shouldn't even be considering bringing these guys home, otherwise.  It's a pain to have to do that, and it's a pain to then re-set-up.  Reminds me of a big complicated board game that you have to pack up after every game night.  The setup and teardown winds up taking half the playtime.

Even if there was a fast-travel mechanic to get these offensive fleets back home to defend, and then back to the front-lines, it's still a major interruption.  It's like taking my board game off the table and playing another game with the pieces for a bit, then trying to get everything set back up for the original game again.  Blaaah.

I need to either not want to bring these home, or not be able to.  In AIWC it was a bit of both: the time to refleet, and the metal cost to do so, was too high to just scrap everything; and the travel time to fly there was way too slow, too.  That feeling of being out in the blue yonder was always really fun, and basically we start running into Small World Problems very fast if we lose that.  I'm really not a fan of the fast travel mechanic idea.

Defensive... Stuff
Basically I get attacked every so often.  Enough to make it interesting and provide some risk, and to mix it up so I'm not just always on raids and doing nothing else.  But not so frequently that it's like swatting gnats in my eyes while trying to do something else.  And definitely not so significant that it's like being pecked in the knee by a goose every 5 minutes.

I should be having to repel some sort of large animal from my front or back door (or both, if I'm careless) every so often, and the size of the animal would vary.  But I can't just sit around guarding my doors all day.  I have automated turrets for a reason, and they'll let me know if there's trouble.

Soooo... that brings me to "if there's trouble."

If there's trouble on my lawn, I'm going to run down there and brandish stuff to deal with it.  I need to be able to move around, although the stationary turrets and mines are certainly nice.  But I don't want my boardgame upstairs in the house to get shuffled around to deal with it!  If I'm attacking bears with minifigures, then... they need to come from some other box.  My metaphors are getting strange.

A scheduled bear attack should provide a few interesting things for me:
1. Time to prepare my house, which is fun in a Home Alone sense.
2. Time to get my offensive buddies ready to hunker down for a bit while my attention is at home.
3. Reason to start shelling out cash for Bear-Away and rifles and bear-killing contractors.

One and two off that list are pretty much already handled in terms of them being POSSIBLE.  But the problem is that instead of doing #2, I'm taking all the guys from that and dragging them back to be my #3.

Let's Start Throwing Ideas At The Wall And See If Anything Sticks
1. What if, as soon as a wave is announced, all the wormholes got jammed?  Or took WAY longer to travel through?  There are many problems with this, and I'm not going to fully explore the idea here (nor any of these ideas), but there are some interesting possibilities in it.

2. What if my offensive fleets went into "power down repair mode" on my own planets?  So they were utterly useless as defense, so there's no point in bringing them home?  That would need to be paired with another mechanic, of course.

3. What if I had some sort of separate-cap power-using version of my main fuel-using fleet, and these went dormant when not on a world where there's power for them?  Basically they function like mobile turrets that can fly through wormholes.

4. What if defensive refleeting was slow, and offensive refleeting remained fast?  I need there to be danger to my home, which means losses need to Stay Lost for a while, but at the same time when it's offense I want to Get On With It.

[BadgerBadger]

In AIWC, when I took my fleet out and fought battles, I was constantly increasing my home defense; whenever I lost a unit in battle it would get rebuilt at home. So I always had some reserve of ships. In AIW2 though, all my losses are rebuilt to stay part of the offensive fleet, and those fleets will rebuild Everything. So my planets are always going to be weaker, since they don't have the (say) 10 bombers, 1 starship and 30 fighters that I lost in combat.

In fact, I also have a related issue if I have two offensive fleets of the same strength with 1 flagship each. Lets say fleet 1 loses half its strength. Fleet 2 will see "Oh, I can build some units now", so it will start building. The end result is that fleet 1 will now be much weaker, since it will only rebuild half of the units it has lost, and fleet 2 will be stronger.

One workaround for this would be to give a Control Group fine grained control over what it's allowed to build?

[x4000]

Current working design:

1. Fuel and power continued to work as they do now.

2. MAYBE: All power-using units have a per-planet cap (I keep pushing for this, mainly for simplicity).

3. The idea of galaxy-wide caps stays for starships, but goes away for fleetships.

4. Individual fleetship constructors instead have have caps, and the fleetships from them have a permanent link to them.

5. Fleetship constructors can't be destroyed, they can only be pushed to 1hp, which would then make them LOOK derelict and stop responding to commands.

6. Starships continue to work exactly the same as they do now.

7. If a fleet ship was built by a power-using constructor -- aka a space dock -- then it can't leave the planet it was built on.

8. Individual constructors have build-speed multipliers, and cap multipliers.  Some flagships are better than others at building speed, and some have higher caps, etc.  Space docks build very slowly.  The caps on the prototype flagship and ark are pretty low, but they build reasonably fast.

9. Build policies would go away, since that would just be "what I clicked at a given constructor."
--If we wanted to control the SPEED of metal expenditure in various queues and direct construction, then, sure, a policy.  But the build policies that populate queues need to go away because of confusion anyhow, based on some recent reports I've seen.

10. The idea of control groups that you can assign on your own would go away.  Instead you'd have:
- Control group 1 is your Ark, and any ships created by it.
- Control groups 2-8 are for flagships, and any ships created by them.  You can't ever have more than 8 flagships, let's say.
- Other stuff just wouldn't be in control groups.
- And these would just be called fleets and we'd be done with the idea of them being control groups in the other-RTS sense.

Original post:
-------------------

I feel like when we start getting into build policies, my eyes start to glaze over, honestly.

Here's... a thought.  What if:

1. Fuel and power continued to work as they do now.

2. All power-using units have a per-planet cap (I keep pushing for this, mainly for simplicity).

3. The idea of galaxy-wide caps goes away.

4. Individual constructors instead have have caps, and the ships from them have a permanent link to them.

5. Constructors can't be destroyed, they can only be pushed to 1hp, which would then make them LOOK derelict and stop responding to commands.

6. Players can't build starship constructors anymore; they have to find them, and they're super rare.  Each player starts with one on their home planet, and there's maybe 1 per player elsewhere in the galaxy.

7. MAYBE: if a ship was built by a power-using constructor, then it can't leave the planet it was built on?

8. Power-using constructors build ships a lot more slowly?

Something along these lines?

[x4000]

Further thoughts:

9. Build policies would go away, since that would just be "what I clicked at a given constructor."
--If we wanted to control the SPEED of metal expenditure in various queues and direct construction, then, sure, a policy.  But the build policies that populate queues need to go away because of confusion anyhow, based on some recent reports I've seen.

10. Potentially, the idea of control groups that you can assign on your own would go away.  Instead you'd have:
- Control group 1 is your Ark, and any ships created by it.
- Control groups 2-8 are for flagships, and any ships created by them.  You can't ever have more than 8 flagships, let's say.
- Other stuff just wouldn't be in control groups.
- And these would just be called fleets and we'd be done with the idea of them being control groups in the other-RTS sense.

[Magnus]

I like the idea a lot and it was my main option to solve the problem of "agh I need to run back".

A couple further thoughts:

• A sort of galaxy-wide cap is still available by playing around with metal expenditures. Having 10.000 ships with 5 different constructors is all fine and dandy but can you afford the rebuilding costs if all 5 of them enter combat at the same time?
• I would limit them but not go so far as to "max 2 per player in a game". For one, if you only start with one, you're still on "omg need to run back" mode until you find the second. So I'd at the very least start with the Ark and one Flagship, to be able to use one for offense and one for defense
• What about different caps and different rebuilding speeds? Maybe your starting Flagship can only build a small fleet and you need to find a bigger one somewhere in the galaxy to be able to support an attacking fleet big enough to take Mark III+ worlds. That would instantly be an extremely high priority target. And of course, the really good ones can only be found in Mark IV heavily defended worlds...
• Another possibility is that all of them start weak, but you can find rare tech increases which make them better
• And maybe the 2-3 more you can find around the galaxy have either significant combat abilities themselves (constructor golems?), they give significant buffs to all their units, or both

[x4000]

I like the idea a lot and it was my main option to solve the problem of "agh I need to run back".

Any particular parts you don't like other than your comments below?

A sort of galaxy-wide cap is still available by playing around with metal expenditures. Having 10.000 ships with 5 different constructors is all fine and dandy but can you afford the rebuilding costs if all 5 of them enter combat at the same time?

Yeah, I was thinking about that, too -- metal becomes kind of the "implicit population cap over time," which is somewhat what it was in AIWC, too.

I would limit them but not go so far as to "max 2 per player in a game". For one, if you only start with one, you're still on "omg need to run back" mode until you find the second. So I'd at the very least start with the Ark and one Flagship, to be able to use one for offense and one for defense

You know... starships are just... different.  They don't need these mechanics.  They should keep working like they do now.  Build constructors wherever, global caps, all that jazz.  These aren't the problem.  It's all fleet ships.

What about different caps and different rebuilding speeds? Maybe your starting Flagship can only build a small fleet and you need to find a bigger one somewhere in the galaxy to be able to support an attacking fleet big enough to take Mark III+ worlds. That would instantly be an extremely high priority target. And of course, the really good ones can only be found in Mark IV heavily defended worlds...

I certainly like the idea, although I'd build that into flagship types.  Basically something like "Ark is meh," "prototype flagship is meh+1", "sniper flagship is good," "carrier flagship is OMG awesome," etc.  That way, by type, we know what we're looking at.

Another possibility is that all of them start weak, but you can find rare tech increases which make them better

That would be difficult in the current game mechanics setup.

And maybe the 2-3 more you can find around the galaxy have either significant combat abilities themselves (constructor golems?), they give significant buffs to all their units, or both

I'm getting a bit confused on exactly which thing you're talking about here.  The flagships do already have that, but may need to be accentuated even more.  For the starship constructors, basically just keeping those working as they do now would do the trick.

For space docks, those would just be "meh+2" and limited to their local planet.  But you can get one per planet on every planet you own, and augment smartly with turrets for your real defenses.  You need some chasey-downy units, but you also want to still rely on turrets for the true firepower.

[x4000]

I'm updating this above, now, too.  But for completeness:

Current working design:

1. Fuel and power continued to work as they do now.

2. MAYBE: All power-using units have a per-planet cap (I keep pushing for this, mainly for simplicity).

3. The idea of galaxy-wide caps stays for starships, but goes away for fleetships.

4. Individual fleetship constructors instead have have caps, and the fleetships from them have a permanent link to them.

5. Fleetship constructors can't be destroyed, they can only be pushed to 1hp, which would then make them LOOK derelict and stop responding to commands.

6. Starships continue to work exactly the same as they do now.

7. If a fleet ship was built by a power-using constructor -- aka a space dock -- then it can't leave the planet it was built on.

8. Individual constructors have build-speed multipliers, and cap multipliers.  Some flagships are better than others at building speed, and some have higher caps, etc.  Space docks build very slowly.  The caps on the prototype flagship and ark are pretty low, but they build reasonably fast.

9. Build policies would go away, since that would just be "what I clicked at a given constructor."
--If we wanted to control the SPEED of metal expenditure in various queues and direct construction, then, sure, a policy.  But the build policies that populate queues need to go away because of confusion anyhow, based on some recent reports I've seen.

10. The idea of control groups that you can assign on your own would go away.  Instead you'd have:
- Control group 1 is your Ark, and any ships created by it.
- Control groups 2-8 are for flagships, and any ships created by them.  You can't ever have more than 8 flagships, let's say.
- Other stuff just wouldn't be in control groups.
- And these would just be called fleets and we'd be done with the idea of them being control groups in the other-RTS sense.

[chemical_art]

The concept of having fleetships permanently tied to motherships of a sorts is radical. Really radical. It is fun to think about, but I feel I must splash water on the idea: There frankly isn't enough time to develop such a radical concept well. Such an idea will need to retool so much of the game in terms of design and then balancing and with current deadlines I just don't see it feasible. This is before going into such a change will be well received which is not certain. At the core though this doesn't really fix the issue, players will call back all their fleets on defense if the local defenses are overwhelmed. Arbitrary rules such as "defense" or "offense" fleets isn't going to sit well with players. 

Static defenses as they currently stand are inadequate to deal with even early game aggression. The pecking goose every 5 minutes wouldn't be an issue of the automated defenses could take care of them. If that issue is solved then the player wouldn't have a need to recall the fleet. In late game, when waves would come 30+ minutes apart, it is ok to then need to recall the fleet for there was enough of a gap to do other things potentially, but right now this stage of needing the fleet is much too early. Static defenses don't deal with with small amounts of raiders nor do they stop full waves, so they really aren't good at anything if not confined to a chokepoint.

The defensive toolkit is really gimped compared to what it once was. Things such as mini forts and military command centers were designed to deal with small raiders, and military command centers provided anchors for more set battles. Weapon ranges were such that turrets could fire multiple salvos at the enemy and shields meant that time could be bought. Now gravity has a greater influence due to planet instead of galaxy caps, but its power has not been tested and really it is an outlier to the other defenses. Enemy waves hit harder, sooner. Combine this with planets in general needing larger fleets to make dents on the attack and the player is skewed to needing a larger fleet for both offensive and defensive needs.

[x4000]

Cool.  I like seeing an idea fleshed out a bit when it's getting traction, but I'll admit that aspects of this were making me uncomfortable, too.  Eric has been a big proponent of Stellaris-style fleets for a month or more now, and I keep shooting him down on it.  This was I guess my attempt at something of a compromise, because I see why he likes the idea (and why it works for Stellaris).

Anyhow... yeah.  There's a question of "would this still be AI War" if we did that, to be sure.

I guess there are a few problems that I see, at the moment, at a basic level, then:

1. Right now all your mobile forces tend to be away from home.

2. If we make it easy for them to get back home, distance stops feeling like it matters.

3. That whole "rebuild elsewhere, send back to the front" feeling from AIWC was a Really Big Thing.  That has disappeared, and may be the cause of many woes we currently are facing in terms of feel.

4. The fact that the static defenses are underpowered certainly doesn't help.  Personally I feel it is less a matter of what type of defenses you have, though, and what numbers you have, though.  At a really basic level.  The other things you mention shouldn't be required for basic goose-dealing.  Those were really meant more for the bears.

[chemical_art]

Cool.  I like seeing an idea fleshed out a bit when it's getting traction, but I'll admit that aspects of this were making me uncomfortable, too.  Eric has been a big proponent of Stellaris-style fleets for a month or more now, and I keep shooting him down on it.  This was I guess my attempt at something of a compromise, because I see why he likes the idea (and why it works for Stellaris).

Anyhow... yeah.  There's a question of "would this still be AI War" if we did that, to be sure.

I guess there are a few problems that I see, at the moment, at a basic level, then:

1. Right now all your mobile forces tend to be away from home.

2. If we make it easy for them to get back home, distance stops feeling like it matters.

3. That whole "rebuild elsewhere, send back to the front" feeling from AIWC was a Really Big Thing.  That has disappeared, and may be the cause of many woes we currently are facing in terms of feel.

4. The fact that the static defenses are underpowered certainly doesn't help.  Personally I feel it is less a matter of what type of defenses you have, though, and what numbers you have, though.  At a really basic level.  The other things you mention shouldn't be required for basic goose-dealing.  Those were really meant more for the bears.

A part of the reason why the "scrap and rebuild elsewhere because it's faster" strategy works is because the economy on the whole feels stronger. If you can rebuild the fleet in two minutes and still have reserves do to that twice more then unless you can get your fleet there in two minutes it is a no brainer. If it took 5 minutes to build a fleet and left you with a balance of 0 metal (that in itself took 10 minutes to recover) then having your fleet take 5 minutes makes scrapping not as good of an option.

If we are to go the path of offense / defense units, have it done on the research level. Have each planet give 1k to mobile units, 500 to static units. This forces a pool of research on the player to be used for defense and provides a defense floor that balance can work around. Go even further if you want and you just like you can find blueprints for new fleetships you can find new blueprints for special turrets.

[x4000]

I have been advocating for split knowledge between offense and defense for a while now, but keep getting shot down on that.  How much do you actually like that idea?

[BadgerBadger]

Is there a need to actually have "Offense Knowledge" and "Defense knowledge" as seperate things? What about just having more cool things to spend the Knowledge on? How about a Carrier Turret that acts like a carrier starship in spawning drones on a planet when an attack comes? 

[x4000]

Keith doesn't think so, I don't think many other people are convinced, either.  So perhaps this is another instance of "control nodes" on my part.

But basically, my thought process is:

1. Attacking is more exciting than defending.

2. People will often mistakenly think that a sufficient defense is to have a great offense.  See also: zerg rush.  They are gravely mistaken in this game.

3. People are inherently creatures of habit, and will only experiment when bored or when the stakes seem low.

4. With the most-scarce and non-replenishable resource in the game, Science, people are going to be particularly conservative and only pick things they know about because the stakes feel very high.  They will pick things that help them in the part of the game they feel is most important, aka attacking.  Who can stomach unlocking turrets when they're getting smacked around on offense already?  And by definition, if you're not getting smacked around on offense at least some, you aren't doing it right.

5. With those things in mind, it's almost impossible to get people to unlock turrets, no matter how exciting they are made.  Something that is more versatile (can attack AND defend?  Cool!) will be more psychologically enticing than something that is 3x better at defending, since players will rightly worry that they might hit a brick wall on offense and not be ABLE to get more science in order to unlock more of... anything, really.

6. We can tutorialize all we want, but people are going to naturally do what they do.  I always unlock offensive stuff, and have only unlocked turrets so far in order to test them, and for no other reason.  I'm as prone to this psychological pitfall as the next person, and I don't think this is a habit unique to me.  We've observed similar habits over many games over the last 8 years.

7. The pressure of "do I spend science on offense or defense" is inherently a Not Fun decision (at least that's my assertion).  At best, an expert player is stressing about the exact balance.  At worst, a novice player is just going for what they assume is best and then paying dearly for it later.  A few rare turtles may wind up with tons of defensive structures and find themselves unable to take planets to get more science, etc.  The trap works both ways.

8. The decision of "what type of offensive thing do I get?" is a very fun thing, and the cost of a wrong decision is only so high.  Similarly, the decision of "what's my next defensive thing to unlock" is interesting and fun, and could get people into "turret play" simply because they're not going to leave a resource sitting around that can only be used on defensive things.  No tutorials required, it gets people to use both types of resources.

9. We already have a shared resource, namely metal, to balance between the two things.  We already split fuel and power in order to make the pressure between offense and defense not so high, for many of the same reasons that I'm advocating here.  Although, arguably this situation is worse than the initial fuel/power one was.  The fuel/power thing was more to do with brownouts than anything else, IIRC, at least chiefly.

10. Lore-wise, there's nothing wrong with this.  Entomologists learn more about bugs.  Chemists learn more about chemistry.  Etc.  There's no reason these couldn't be something like "Defensive Tech Points" and "Fleet Tech Points" or something.  Ditch the term science in general, perhaps.  Whenever you get get what is currently x science, you would now instead get x fleet tech points, and x/2 defensive tech points.

11. This would also create yet another indicator in the interface that players need to be thinking about the offensive and the defensive game at the same time.  Since we'd be moving things over to the side, we could in theory bring back the Attack number, too, incidentally, and put it and Threat next to each other with the two tech points above each other.  We'd then save some other horizontal space not showing where you're being attacked but instead allowing you to mouseover this to see it.  Then it's just waves, CPAs, etc, in the little unimplemented-so-far boxes of Eric's that go to the right of the top-left bar.

[Magnus]

So let me clarify my position a bit.

I'm not advocating for a "split" between flagship constructors and static constructors. Just use constructors, period.
You can't build constructors on your planets. You need to find them (barring the two with which you start the game).
Whether they're "flagships" or "mobile space docks" only depends on their combat potential and movement capability. Maybe you start with two which are little more than mobile space docks, then you can find one which not only builds ships but can also kick ass in combat.

I agree that this mechanism should be limited to the small ships. For the big combat ships (which should NOT have constructor abilities) leave things as they are. One space dock per galaxy, all big ships come out of it. You want to relocate? Scrap it and rebuild elsewhere. It's going to take time, and in the meanwhile, don't let your big ships get killed because you can't replace them.

Why do I like the "per constructor" fleet cap? Because it gives me something else to work with for defense without the need for recalling the main fleet.
I agree that increasing turret / tractor capabilities also solves the problem. It creates another one, though: once I put in place the "perfect" defense, that part of the game is "solved". It doesn't contribute anymore, except for "build more turrets whenever your cap increases" and "move all your turrets to the new border planet whenever you expand your territory".
Of course you can find ways around this: different types of attacking ships require different types of defenses etc. How do you put this in practice, though? Especially: how do you put this in practice in a fun way? Because generally speaking the things you could do (e.g. build a scout network, check in advance what kind of wave is incoming and where and when, scrap everything and rebuild the appropriate type of turrets in the attacking fleet's path) have a high chance of turning into a micromanagement nightmare.

I don't understand the point about "attack" and "defense" either. If I have 3 fleets, whether they attack or defend depends on where I place them. Of course I can choose specific fleet compositions and try to specialize for either, but it's not like it's mandatory. I might use a fleet I've left behind to fend off an attacking wave, then immediately send it to blitz a nearby A.I. planet.

[BadgerBadger]

If you had two different types of science then at minimum we'd need to get Eric to rethink the resource bar. Can we come up with some sort of in-game mechanic that would penalize people for spec'ing too heavily into either defense or offense? Something that would motivate people to spend both?

First thought:  "Have a science cost multiplier based on spending science on Offense vs Defense."

If you spend more science on offense than defense,  the offensive tree gets more expensive and the defensive tree gets cheaper. If you spend more on Defense then Offense gets cheaper and defense gets more expensive. So lets say you spent your first 4K science on offense. Now you think "Oh, my starships are now more expensive. Lets spend some science in Defense to bring the cost of Offense down, then I can get my new shiny starship for cheaper"