The AI From Within - Part 4: The Special Forces

[x4000]

Courtesy of Keith!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcengames/ai-war-ii-0/posts/1797979

[BadgerBadger]

I think it would be cool if the Special Forces fleet was somehow distinguished from just a threat fleet or just "A bunch of ships on a planet". At the moment the only way I can tell is that the Special Forces have Riot Starships.

[x4000]

Generally speaking I think it's pretty key in the AI that you can't tell what ships are what, usually.  I could be wrong, but basically the AI using a variety of ships in different ways and you not being able to tell which direction is up is what leads to a lot of the best moments.

[BadgerBadger]

Fair enough! In which case, maybe you should make them even more subtle!

[x4000]

That's up to Keith -- but I think that based on Classic, by the end there it was not always easy to tell who was with who in terms of the AI sub-forces.  Made them a lot harder to predict because you wouldn't know what rules they were even operating under.  Will those guys chase me back to my planets, make a bum-rush past my incursion TO my planets, or hang out here and fight and then go on the offensive?  Etc.

[tadrinth]

I would prefer for the special forces to be labeled as such, because it makes it easier for new players to learn the game. Seems like something that should be enabled by default, at least, possibly with the option for people to mod it off if they prefer. 

Plus which, with the addition of variant special forces personalities, just knowing that a ship is special forces doesn't necessarily tell you what it's going to do. 

[Sestren]

In my experience you can tell where the special forces are hanging out, but it takes a lot of staring at the galactic map. In most of my games there are only three sources of moving ship blobs: Exowaves, which are clearly announced and easily distinguished; threat, which is explicitly labeled as such on the galactic map with the right filter; and the special forces. So to find the SF, just look for the moving blob of non-threat ships.

It might be different with more minor factions on (hybrid hives or dark spire perhaps which would add more non-threat movement) but in my experience since I can usually *roughly* tell where the special forces are currently holed up, it would just be a timesaver to have them identifiable via a map filter just like threat currently is. And like threat, there's no need to have individual ships ID'd, a map filter is plenty.

[tadrinth]

My thought was that if a new players sees a ship, and it's labeled as 'Belongs to Special Forces', then they can click on that (using the fancy nested tooltip feature) to bring up a tooltip that explains the basics of how the SF behaves.

Making the galactic map show the SF more clearly would be great also. 

[BadgerBadger]

I like the notion of having extra "Helpful" labels like that available for playing on lower difficulty levels. That way beginners will see it automatically, but experienced players won't see it.

[x4000]

Honestly it strikes me as being like "now your opponent is using his temporal lobe.  The temporal lobe is responsible for..."

If anything, I feel like it would make things more confusing for new players than not.  It also strongly tugs at the fabric that is the illusion of complex intelligence when you start showing off how all the tricks are done in realtime.  You're supposed to have your eye on the red ball, not the slight of hand we're doing with our other hand.

[Tridus]

Throwing a ton of terms and labels at new players doesn't tend to simplify things. They're going to have to read a bunch to figure out what makes the special forces special and what they should do about it.

Really simplifying it for newbies would be "below difficulty X, there is no special forces."

[Cyborg]

I think it's perfectly reasonable to have special forces be scoutable information.

[Butterland]

My two cents:

I hate to advocate this but I feel like Special Forces (SF) should be more invisible and less obvious to the player. 

Just to be clear I wish as a player I had a map filter for SF, and I know new players would appreciate it.  That being said:

I distinctly remember as a new player wondering the following: "WTF why is it so hard to neuter this world that has an Advanced Factory??".....and then having that moment where I leveled up.

It seems to me that part of that moment is what makes this game so special.

[Edit:  Don't forget that this game is marvelously asymmetrical.  I just started playing XCOM 2, and it is asymmetrical but not marvelously so.]

[x4000]

Well, I'm going to pass the buck on that to Keith, anyhow.  That area is his domain, so I get to avoid that fight happily.

I'm happy to provide my opinion on things like this, and now you know what my opinion is, but ultimately on this one it will be down to Keith and you guys and what comes of that.  Which you probably prefer, anyway.

[Draco18s]

And there's always the option of making it an option.