Starships in the sequel

[ElOhTeeBee]

I'd stick with Mark designations over ship size for clarity's sake. Though possibly they could be identified as both - Mk1 Assault Frigate, Mk2 Assault Destroyer, and so on.

[keith.lamothe]

I'd stick with Mark designations over ship size for clarity's sake.

Yea, that seems a hard conclusion to avoid.

Though possibly they could be identified as both - Mk1 Assault Frigate, Mk2 Assault Destroyer, and so on.

That occurred to me, but it seems that would be even more confusing than not having the mark numbers at all. "Mk 3 Assault Cruiser? Does that mean there are Mk1 and Mk2 cruisers around here somewhere? Why can't I build them?"


I may be over-thinking this. The Fallen Spire ships in Classic were just Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, etc. Didn't seem to be a problem with them not being called by mark number.

[CaptainTaz]

I'd stick with Mark designations over ship size for clarity's sake.

Yea, that seems a hard conclusion to avoid.

Though possibly they could be identified as both - Mk1 Assault Frigate, Mk2 Assault Destroyer, and so on.

That occurred to me, but it seems that would be even more confusing than not having the mark numbers at all. "Mk 3 Assault Cruiser? Does that mean there are Mk1 and Mk2 cruisers around here somewhere? Why can't I build them?"


I may be over-thinking this. The Fallen Spire ships in Classic were just Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, etc. Didn't seem to be a problem with them not being called by mark number.

At worst you could always do the names in the hover-over, and then the mark number on the zoom-out icon (if thats still a thing anyway.)

Then you got both there.

Or, you could put in the ship description something like "A mark 3 version of X, [Insert description here]"

Having them be identified by name would feel a lot more menacing too. "Crud, that's a bomber battleship guarding that command station" Vs "Crud that's a mark 4 bomber starship."

I dunno, sounds cooler and differentiates the starships from regular ol' ships

[kasnavada]

I think those weapon choices are bad.

If the game is anything like the first one, the longer range weapon will be the best weapon 99% of the time, unless in the specific case of radar dampening coming back. So the whole of "let's build different range weapons" sounds pointless to me.

The reason is simple, time is on the player side - being careful beats raw damage per second, player is outnumbered and outgunned when at range, and player can't afford attrition, so range cheese / kiting bests all other strats, and that's done with highest range.


That also means snipers are bad and should be eradicated.


If you DO want different weapon, I would have designed them in this form: -XX% damage / gain ability in exchange or just switch damage and fire rate greatly (anti-starship / anti-fly...).


About names, you guys set the "simpler to understand" as a selling point for the game. Learning ship real names and size go against that goal. I'd therefore suggest mark numbers. Setting 5 default modular ships is already pushing a lot it as it is. A newbie won't be able to get what weapons works against what when he has not figured out what the ships do in the first place.

[keith.lamothe]

If the game is anything like the first one, the longer range weapon will be the best weapon 99% of the time, unless in the specific case of radar dampening coming back. So the whole of "let's build different range weapons" sounds pointless to me.

The reason is simple, time is on the player side - being careful beats raw damage per second, player is outnumbered and outgunned when at range, and player can't afford attrition, so range cheese / kiting bests all other strats, and that's done with highest range.

In classic I generally agree. In the sequel most of the "guard posts" will be replaced with guardians (that have guard ships like guard posts do) that will come after you if you try to siege the static defenses. There are also further measures under the heading of responsive-defense, like overwhelming attacks drawing the attention of the Special Forces or Strategic Reserve. Finally, something like "this is a siege, and none of the usual help can break it, so we'll just all retreat and become Threat".

The general idea being that several things were done in classic's design, like radar dampening and nerfing the stuffing out of anything that was good at long-range siege, because the AI's defense was largely static and not very responsive to the player's actions. This time there's the opportunity to fix the underlying problem.

A newbie won't be able to get what weapons works against what when he has not figured out what the ships do in the first place.

It'll be a lot simpler than umpteen different hull types vs umpteen-dozen different ship types

[Tridus]

Though possibly they could be identified as both - Mk1 Assault Frigate, Mk2 Assault Destroyer, and so on.

That occurred to me, but it seems that would be even more confusing than not having the mark numbers at all. "Mk 3 Assault Cruiser? Does that mean there are Mk1 and Mk2 cruisers around here somewhere? Why can't I build them?"

Agreed. The combination is more confusing than either term individually.

I may be over-thinking this. The Fallen Spire ships in Classic were just Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, etc. Didn't seem to be a problem with them not being called by mark number.

They were also very much another "thing" rather than part of your core fleet, which might make a difference. But yes, they worked just fine. You didn't need to be told that a Spire Dreadnaught was a mk V Spire Warship. It made that pretty clear by existing.

[Chthon]

Though possibly they could be identified as both - Mk1 Assault Frigate, Mk2 Assault Destroyer, and so on.

That occurred to me, but it seems that would be even more confusing than not having the mark numbers at all. "Mk 3 Assault Cruiser? Does that mean there are Mk1 and Mk2 cruisers around here somewhere? Why can't I build them?"

Agreed. The combination is more confusing than either term individually.

I may be over-thinking this. The Fallen Spire ships in Classic were just Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, etc. Didn't seem to be a problem with them not being called by mark number.

It existing is a very good cause for AI alarms.
They were also very much another "thing" rather than part of your core fleet, which might make a difference. But yes, they worked just fine. You didn't need to be told that a Spire Dreadnaught was a mk V Spire Warship. It made that pretty clear by existing.

Edit: I had my own text here. I don't know what happened to it.
I said, a spire dreadnought's very existence is a cause of great distress in the AI.

[MaxAstro]

I am strongly in favor of using the hull types for capital ships - it distinguishes them further from fighters and makes them feel more "capital ship-ish" to me.  Plus I really want to be able to dramatically declare "Battlecruiser operational" over Skype and annoy my co-players. 

I'm also in favor of them being distinguished with mark icons when zoomed out, though.  I think that is the best of both worlds, and plenty clear from the player's point of view.

Oh, and carriers are always my favorite ship type in space games, so... I'm in favor of that, as well.  A proper carrier, not the neinzul sorta-carrier, would make me super happy.  And of course give the opportunity for more annoying quotes.  "Carrier has arrived." 

[Squashyhex]

I would say stick with the marks. While it may be intuitive to us, it is just another thing for a new player to learn.

[kasnavada]

If the game is anything like the first one, the longer range weapon will be the best weapon 99% of the time, unless in the specific case of radar dampening coming back. So the whole of "let's build different range weapons" sounds pointless to me.

The reason is simple, time is on the player side - being careful beats raw damage per second, player is outnumbered and outgunned when at range, and player can't afford attrition, so range cheese / kiting bests all other strats, and that's done with highest range.

In classic I generally agree. In the sequel most of the "guard posts" will be replaced with guardians (that have guard ships like guard posts do) that will come after you if you try to siege the static defenses. There are also further measures under the heading of responsive-defense, like overwhelming attacks drawing the attention of the Special Forces or Strategic Reserve. Finally, something like "this is a siege, and none of the usual help can break it, so we'll just all retreat and become Threat".

The general idea being that several things were done in classic's design, like radar dampening and nerfing the stuffing out of anything that was good at long-range siege, because the AI's defense was largely static and not very responsive to the player's actions. This time there's the opportunity to fix the underlying problem.

I don't believe what you're stating will change anything. Some of those were already there in the first game and had little to no effect.
Even if the AI is more responsive, kiting & outranging will beat everything else because outnumbered + outgunned means the best strategy is to shoot without being shot. There is also a niche for fast high damage - hit & run - but as a whole, it's costly. Anything that has "modules" which enables them to not correspond to those archetypes might as well just not be there. In any case, going the DPS race by sacrificing ships to attack more will never be as useful as keeping DPS steady by not dying. Especially at higher difficulty level.

A newbie won't be able to get what weapons works against what when he has not figured out what the ships do in the first place.

It'll be a lot simpler than umpteen different hull types vs umpteen-dozen different ship types

Sorry, but that's a bad justification. It's not because it's simplified compared to a complex mess no one even dare to try understand that it's simple enough. Having 15 types of starships at start ? Complex. Usefulness ? Dubious - especially given the previous point I'm making, which states that most of the alternate ships will have very niche uses at best. Letting Newbies just making their life harder by trying stuff that does not work because it sounds cooler ? Bad idea. There's enough to understand already in the game.

[NichG]

I think there's a hierarchy of roles, where the absence of certain roles in a fleet (or the absence of those roles being useful) will mask other roles from being able to be useful.

For example, playing AIC of late, as a given situation gets more difficult I have to get more clever, but often it's sufficient to: build fleet up to maximum caps, roll into target system, set FRD and let them clean the place up. In that case, the ship statistics that contribute to just being able to do that on more heavily-fortified systems are the ones that contribute to my 'core loop'. However, there isn't much gameplay in that.

The real gameplay happens when I start encountering systems with ion cannons, mass drivers, or other finnicky things that I want to prioritize. In that case, being able to do a rapid raid to just take out one structure versus being able to hold my own stably against a fleet begins to become an important role distinction. In those situations, maximum lifetime damage output isn't necessarily what I'm aiming at - a gambit using a cloaker and some raid starships might let me crack a system that my other 1600 ships can't deal with. For better or worse, champions usually dominate this role for me in AIC as cheaply expendable fast ships which can take out a few key structures without provoking reprisal (or 10 minutes of waiting for refleeting to finish). I'd call it OP-but-fun though. Mass drivers mean that I can't always use the champion as an assassin, so they can further diversify the meaningful roles I have to think about in those cases.

I guess my point is, roles seem to only become important when stuff begins to break down or become ineffective. Unless the player is actively trying a gambit, those distinctions are likely to be overshadowed by 'increase the fleet's lifetime damage output'. So the question seems more, how to make the player need to try gambits, and then figure out how the differences between ships can give the player fodder to scheme with.

On the other side of things, the place where differentiation between units is meaningful is when the AI is using them. Encountering a stream of slow-down ships or swallowers or the like feels different from a gameplay perspective, and can encourage that feeling of 'okay, I need to be making gambits now, not just rolling through with my fleet ball'. So to some extent, I think even if the player can't necessarily understand the full diversity of units, there's room for that diversity to be there as a way to make the AI more interesting to play against. That is, not every ship has to be designed with 'its use should be obvious and immediately optimal to the player' in mind, but those AI-centric ships might benefit from having a different naming convention or something to make it clear that they're more specialized/gimmicky things.

[keith.lamothe]

I don't believe what you're stating will change anything. Some of those were already there in the first game and had little to no effect.

Some were present, yes, but not all.

1) If you attack with underwhelming force, the nearest guardians just converge on you and chase you out. Depending on your goal you might use long or short range, but in general you would avoid this situation except for special tactics (feint, etc).

2) If you attack with roughly equal force, all the guardians gang up and come after you. They might lose, but you'd have a use for either short or long range because you're going to be forced to fight unless you leave the planet entirely.

3) If you attack with overwhelming force, all the guardians group up around the command station and rely on shields and whatnot to wait you out until the SF or SR or whatever arrive to restore this to a #1 or #2 situation. You could use long-range to siege with minimal losses, but if the short-range plasma cannon does 5x as much damage as the long-range plasma torpedo (for example), you're going to have a strong motive to use the short range cannon in order to break the defenders before their relief arrives. If you don't, you'd either have to pull back when the relief arrives, or engage the relief and suffer more attritional losses than an earlier close-range assault would have cost.

4) If you attack with a force so overwhelming that none of the relief forces could get there in time, or couldn't make a difference even if they were all there now, then all the guardians (and their guard ships) retreat into AI territory to join a threatfleet or something else like that which preserves their value. That just leaves some static defenses around the command station (and maybe one other strong static point around a data center or whatever), which you could whittle down with long-range and minimal losses. But if you had that much force you can probably quickly kill what remains regardless of your weaponry.

In situation #4 you might prioritize killing the defenders before they can leave, and you might choose to do that with long-range to minimize your losses. But, again, if the short or medium range weapons are sufficiently more powerful than the long-range weapons, it might make the difference between killing 25% of the defenders before their escape, and killing 75% of them. You'd have to work out positioning, shield placement, etc, so you could catch the defenders, but either way you'd also need the heavier weapons to get the job done.

To summarize: there are situations like assault and pursuit where the long-range weapons would not achieve the objective due to running out of time.

Even if the AI is more responsive, kiting & outranging will beat everything else because outnumbered + outgunned means the best strategy is to shoot without being shot.

That assumes that the defenders are either stationary or too slow to catch you in a reasonable period of time. In classic the guard posts anchored down most of the normal defenders, and player speed was buffed so much relative to AI speed that you could often kite indefinitely. In the sequel most of the normal defenders will be fully mobile, and the AI defenders will be able to catch you unless you're only using fast units (which excludes the stuff with long-range siege capability).

Sorry, but that's a bad justification. It's not because it's simplified compared to a complex mess no one even dare to try understand that it's simple enough.

Relative simplicity isn't the point, correct. So I'll restate: each weapon will be good against one of four target types. How hard is it to know which one you need more of, and to know which of your tools provide it?

Does it make any difference if some of those tools are variants (modular) instead of entirely different ship types?


I should add that my goal here isn't to deflect your criticism. Deflection is easy, but does nothing to improve the game. I just think you're wrong.

[Draco18s]

I think I'm largely on Keith's side here.  There are counters to long range low DPS, and Keith's pretty much named them:
 - Higher Speed: engage in a short range fight
 - Force a retreat: higher speed, long ranged units retreat until either they're pushed into a short range fight or are pushed out of system
 - Running Away: retreat, build up numbers, and counter attack

[kasnavada]

@Keith & Draco...
Well I have the complete other opinion, but we'll see. Given as predominant long range units are in every game that relies on beating up overwhelming odds, or they are so nerfed into oblivion that they're useless.

Thing is there is large odds that 3 & 4 won't ever happen at higher difficulty level - and as I stated, there is a niche for suicidal strike force. That's about it.

That assumes that the defenders are either stationary or too slow to catch you in a reasonable period of time. In classic the guard posts anchored down most of the normal defenders, and player speed was buffed so much relative to AI speed that you could often kite indefinitely. In the sequel most of the normal defenders will be fully mobile, and the AI defenders will be able to catch you unless you're only using fast units (which excludes the stuff with long-range siege capability).

Yes, that does, because it will be the case again after a few rounds of balancing. Unless you nerf the AI into having smaller forces than the player - making the trailer and game definition lie.

If the AI has overwhelming forces and superior logistics, there is nothing the player can do. So, I don't believe that the AI units will be fast enough to catch the player, like ever. If the strike response can catch-up to any attack, the game is going to get VERY boring very soon, as the only possible means of attack will be suicidal strikes, followed by rather long refleetings.

So, we'll see, I guess.

So I'll restate: each weapon will be good against one of four target types. How hard is it to know which one you need more of, and to know which of your tools provide it?
Does it make any difference if some of those tools are variants (modular) instead of entirely different ship types?

I think my point isn't understood, actually. I do get yours - it's not hard to know by itself. But my point ain't that. My point is that even very easy stuff to understand points make a complex mess, if there is a lot of them. What is necessary to know to start a game ? What's needed in the first 5 minutes of AI War ? A lot of easy to medium complex things to know.

Make a list and see.
- how to scout.
- how to use the 3 basic ships.
- how to use the 5 starship types and their 3 variants each => requires your to understand the armor types.
- how to manage energy ?
- how to manage fuel ?
- how to set-up defenses ?
- how to unlock technologies.
- how to set-up your factories properly.
- how to evaluate your attack forces to attack properly.
- (...).

Now, there's a lot that can / should be introduced gradually. Just like in starcraft, you don't have access to everything at start.

Should the homeworld come pre-protected ?
Is having 15 choices of starship really necessary at the game start ?
Should the starting energy / fuel be abough until 4 planets at least are under control ?

These are the questions that should be asked IMO. That's the point I'm trying to make. That's the point I'm worrying about when I see more starting complexity when it's claimed that special care is done to make the game less underwhelming at start.

[Cyborg]

Should the homeworld come pre-protected ?
Is having 15 choices of starship really necessary at the game start ?
Should the starting energy / fuel be abough until 4 planets at least are under control ?

These are the questions that should be asked IMO. That's the point I'm trying to make. That's the point I'm worrying about when I see more starting complexity when it's claimed that special care is done to make the game less underwhelming at start.

Are you changing the point of disagreement now? I think Keith's reply was actually really good.

When it comes to complexity, it's okay to have meaningful decisions, and the variety in ships is part of that. I don't think Keith is adding ships or damage types just for the heck of it. I don't see any evidence of that here, and I'm not finding what he explained to be hard to understand. It took all of a few seconds to read.