Essentially, Demolition has one weakness and two strengths, while siege has two weaknesses and one strength. Siege kind of seems like Demolition's little brother no-one likes.
The numbers would have to be shored up, but basically my intent was to make demolition superficially good against capital ships so that they have a bit of a role outside of just bombing structures.
But bombing structures is IMPORTANT, so letting demolition just have those alone (and not the capital ship bonus as well) would make more sense. It would just declutter things in general, too.
More abstract things like "long-range" are harder to factor in, as are extent of multipliers (all that could be figured out later).
Agreed. I had planned on that being the differentiating factor, but it just isn't something that can be easily grasped at a high level, which makes it pretty much a Bad Idea.
While this sort of goes against the Leviathan isolation idea, having Siege be good against Leviathans gives it a unique role (although its possible that that is done is a less "damage multiplier" type way but instead longer range+kiting or something makes them strong).
I'm so tempted to give them a role against leviathans in general, but I think that would make the leviathans less scary and potentially put too much weight on certain types of army composition when leviathans are around. I want your general fleet mix to not be too dependent on a big baddie showing up, but instead based around the generalized battlefield.
Where do the neinzul if any form of them come back (especially stuff like NCC/Enclave carrier, neinzul railgun) fall on this current triangle? All into Specialist? That would be difficult to work with if you ever plan to turn neinzul into a full fledge player race if tactical superiority will always win.
I supposed you could always give neinzul enough capital ships to make up for that.
They also won't be part of what you can just unlock as part of the main human faction. They MAY be their own faction that you can play after all, but either way you'd be able to get their stuff as a reward for interacting with them as a minor faction in certain ways. So basically it becomes some of those "lower frequency but over-powered" ships that you can get through gameplay, and lose access to through gameplay, rather than a core staple like they used to be (possibility of playable Neinzul aside).
What about units that has some indirect bonus against specific Leviathan classes? Otherwise we might be tempted to field ONLY tactical superiority (against demolition) and Leviathan for everything else! All while pretending capital ship and siege don't exist as a build-able option.
Aheh. To be clear, you won't really be having much in the way of leviathan class yourself. If you do, it's something you found or bartered for (think golems).
Also, you'd never be tempted to field just any one unit, because of ship caps.
Example: units that are immune to reclamation damage against botnet golem? armor rotter against armored golem? etc... While one on one they will lose badly but with enough of them you lose less.
Those sorts of things are basically specialists inside whatever their larger role is. So you might find that the armor rotter is very very good about some specific leviathan class ships... but mainly in terms of opening that up for the rest of the forces of yours to actually do damage. That would likely be a specialist, but theoretically special abilities from any of the triangle areas could be used to skew things in special ways.
Basically that's looking at the design higher up, where we see "okay this one ship has a special ability that would be useful in this specific circumstance," which is a key part of AI War and not going anywhere. That's a layer up, though, and is basically when someone goes "above and beyond their general role." It's basically your accountant makes an awesome pizza, which is really irrelevant most of the time, but during pizza day at the office suddenly he's a hero. But normally you think of him as the accountant, not the pizza-maker-guy.
That analogy was odd, but hopefully it makes sense.
Errrr... I'm going to be the bitching guy, again. Sorry if I hurt feelings here.
You're not hurting my feelings by stating a contrary point of view, and a lot of people (including you) change my mind all the time. Multiple times today, in fact. That doesn't mean it's going to happen every time, though.
Starships / capital ship / whatever the name being their own category makes no sense to me. It's not because it's bigger that it's role have to be to kill small stuff... and that's it. And, that category will be feeling very, very empty after a short while. There is not going to be a billion ways to kill fighters.
We're talking about the most base level here, not getting into larger powers and so forth. Usually capital ships are going to be some sort of force multiplier themselves, or have something else special about them. Them not feeling epic is really not something I'm worried about.
Thinking about space movies, in particular Star Wars in this particular case, there's a lot of precedent for the bigger centerpiece ships having a more central role in general combat. This will open up a lot of interesting things for us to do above and beyond their base abilities (refer to the accountant pizza guy above to see what I mean by that).
It's probably going to sound dumb, but the concept of the triangle is good, just... this category should be called "Anti-air" or something. It's sooooo limiting to have them as starships only.
It's really not limiting at all. It makes perfect sense, since the starships would actually wreck a whole lot of things outside the core triangle. I just realized that's not really reflected on the chart (fixed that in this post now). But these things are expensive centerpieces, and have a much bigger role than just anti-air. The tactical superiority role really is very superior, in that it takes some expensive hunks of junk from you or the enemy to counter them without taking heavy losses.
Last, specialists.
Arrows there are also annoying me from a conceptual point of view. Specialist may or not have a counter depending on what they are, but tying their strengths & weakness to a category... does not feel right to me. Actually, I think that in practice, the designs there will ignore the arrows in practice. My opinions is therefore: let's remove them.
I had been mulling the same thing, and you're right. Those are too oddball to get any special bonuses or penalties. Graph in this post is updated to show that.
