More Units

[BadgerBadger]

One of the things I feel is missing in AIW2 right now is a sense of "commanding a large fleet". In AIWC you could typically build 40 or 80 fleetships per mark level. That was generally enough to make it feel like you had a significant armada to wield.

In AIW2 you get 10 squads per mark level, which feels like 10 ships total if you play at full zoom. Each squad has multiple ships in it, but the ships are so small as to be barely visible. It feels like there are just a lot fewer ships in the game. I propose a simple tweak: lets halve the number of ships in a squad. What do people think of that?.

[keith.lamothe]

One of the things I feel is missing in AIW2 right now is a sense of "commanding a large fleet". In AIWC you could typically build 40 or 80 fleetships per mark level. That was generally enough to make it feel like you had a significant armada to wield.

But if you had 40*3*3=360 squads of MkI+II+III triangle ships, plus a hundred or so squads of bonus ships, would you be able to make any sense of it in AIW2?

I propose a simple tweak: lets halve the number of ships in a squad. What do people think of that?.

You're welcome to try it, just go to Balance_Granularity.xml/KDL_VanillaGranularities.xml and change:

Code: [Select]

<granularity name="Swarmer" ship_cap="800" dps_multiplier="1.2" />
<granularity name="MildSwarmer" ship_cap="400" dps_multiplier="1.1" />
<granularity name="Normal" ship_cap="200" dps_multiplier="1.0" />
<granularity name="MildLowCap" ship_cap="100" dps_multiplier="0.9" />
<granularity name="LowCap" ship_cap="50" dps_multiplier="0.8" />
<granularity name="VeryLowCap" ship_cap="25" dps_multiplier="0.75" />
<granularity name="ShieldGeneratorCap" ship_cap="5" dps_multiplier="1" />

to:

Code: [Select]

<granularity name="Swarmer" ship_cap="1600" dps_multiplier="1.2" />
<granularity name="MildSwarmer" ship_cap="800" dps_multiplier="1.1" />
<granularity name="Normal" ship_cap="400" dps_multiplier="1.0" />
<granularity name="MildLowCap" ship_cap="200" dps_multiplier="0.9" />
<granularity name="LowCap" ship_cap="100" dps_multiplier="0.8" />
<granularity name="VeryLowCap" ship_cap="50" dps_multiplier="0.75" />
<granularity name="ShieldGeneratorCap" ship_cap="10" dps_multiplier="1" />

and that will double the number of squads of fleet ships and a bunch of other stuff.

The main downsides are:

1) It's visually harder to tell what's going on, because the screen is much more cluttered.

2) Doubling the number of squads reduces simulation performance to roughly 25% of what it was before, since the simulation mostly deals in terms of squads (ships are mostly a vis-layer fiction) and the main cpu-limiting algorithms are O(n^2). There's more optimization we can do (and will do) but making our task 4 times harder is not a good way to start I'd rather be able to have the sorts of advanced moddable logic we already have (and more) than simply increase the icon density.

[TheVampire100]

I rather have it this way, even if it feels like you direct "less" units. It's easier to navigate these units instead of 200 individual ones.
However, I think a cap of 20 squads (but with less ships per squad) wouldn't hurt the game.

[keith.lamothe]

However, I think a cap of 20 squads (but with less ships per squad) wouldn't hurt the game.

It would still hurt performance, because performance is mainly limited by squad count rather than ship count.

That said, it's a fairly easy change to mod and try out (increasing the squad count; reducing ships per squad has to be done per-type since they define a formation to fit the number of ships).

If double-squads works well on a large number of machines it could be included as a settings option or something like that, similar to the cap-scale setting in AIWC.

[BadgerBadger]

In the interest of furthering the discussion, I created a game with the squad changes you suggested and a ton of bonus ships enabled. Here's a saved game so we can get a taste of things. So far I'm inclined to agree with Keith, it feels a bit overwhelming.