A few notes from playing today (.513)

[BadgerBadger]

For once I could actually capture a Golem! Most of the times I can't capture them at all. I could only capture the first golem. I took another planet with a golem while I had 3K fuel and 5 million metal and I couldn't capture it. Are there some weird rules about capturing golems?

Gameplay notes: The AI will often leave their threat fleet right next to a wormhole adjacent to your planets. When you send a fleet through to attack it will immediately jump into the wormhole (so your fleet is now on their planet and their fleet is now attacking you planet). Then you have to chase their fleet through all of your planets since you can't build enough defenses anywhere to actually stop anything. This is quite frustrating.

One of the elements I enjoyed in AIWC was building elaborately fortified planets. One of the calling cards of AIWC was that it had significant Tower Defense elements and that feels pretty absent right now. The only way you can actually defend anything seems to be with a large fleet. Some of this might be because I'm using Basic Turretry.

Not having rally points for starship constructors is unpleasant.

The ability to select units is pretty broken right now, see Mantis 19227. I also had a lot of problems trying to send ships via the galaxy screen (ie select a ship in Planet,  tab to galaxy screen, ctl-click on destination planet). I could always move my main Ark fleet okay, but individual ships or smaller groups just didn't move most of the time.

Fortresses are currently selected by "Mobile Military". I don't think this is desirable.

The sidebar looks really weird when your fleetball has 3 Flagships, your Ark and a Golem. There are 5 lines in there with only one unit per line. Maybe Flagships should all be put on the same line?

I tried to hack a Design Template Server and it worked too well. I got a bunch of bonus ships unlocked instead of just one. Also, I just keep getting random additional ship types. Presumably having hacked one Design Template Server it's giving me all of the techs from Every server?

When you attack a planet, all of the mobile ships come and attack you immediately and the fixed defenses just sit there. The optimal way to fight (to me) seems to be to just park your ships right next to the wormhole, fight the mobile units and then attack the fixed defenses. That feels boring and non-interactive.

When you Quit to the main screen and reload a game, all your old settings persist across the Loads (game speed, for example). This seems undesirable.

[keith.lamothe]

I took another planet with a golem while I had 3K fuel and 5 million metal and I couldn't capture it. Are there some weird rules about capturing golems?

Was it the same type of golem? That shouldn't be a problem but the way caps are set up it might have been.

The AI will often leave their threat fleet right next to a wormhole adjacent to your planets. When you send a fleet through to attack it will immediately jump into the wormhole (so your fleet is now on their planet and their fleet is now attacking you planet). Then you have to chase their fleet through all of your planets since you can't build enough defenses anywhere to actually stop anything. This is quite frustrating.

One of the elements I enjoyed in AIWC was building elaborately fortified planets. One of the calling cards of AIWC was that it had significant Tower Defense elements and that feels pretty absent right now. The only way you can actually defend anything seems to be with a large fleet. Some of this might be because I'm using Basic Turretry.

Yea, there needs to be a way of achieving higher defensive density. I just don't want it to also mean:
a) You can apply that same density everywhere all the time.
or
b) You can only apply that density on one planet.

One idea that I've been considering is having all "connected" planets (unbroken chain of ones you control) share a power pool. Or perhaps each planet gets a boost for the number of other connected planets in the pool.

That second idea has good potential, I think, but it tends to greatly discourage playing in any way other than "all my planets are connected".

A third idea is being able, on the galaxy map, to point one of your planets "at" another one of your planets to forward its remaining power there. But that's probably getting too complicated.

In the end, maybe it's best to fall back on a quasi-AIWC design with having power be galaxy-wide and turret caps be planet-wide. That retains the change which makes Fuel an offense-only resource, though it gives up most of the other changes.

Not having rally points for starship constructors is unpleasant.

Yep, wanting to get there soon.

The ability to select units is pretty broken right now, see Mantis 19227.

Thanks for letting me know

I also had a lot of problems trying to send ships via the galaxy screen (ie select a ship in Planet,  tab to galaxy screen, ctl-click on destination planet). I could always move my main Ark fleet okay, but individual ships or smaller groups just didn't move most of the time.

Weird.

Fortresses are currently selected by "Mobile Military". I don't think this is desirable.

Aye.

The sidebar looks really weird when your fleetball has 3 Flagships, your Ark and a Golem. There are 5 lines in there with only one unit per line. Maybe Flagships should all be put on the same line?

Yea, at this point I think just not having any "unit gets its own line" types would be fine.

I tried to hack a Design Template Server and it worked too well. I got a bunch of bonus ships unlocked instead of just one. Also, I just keep getting random additional ship types. Presumably having hacked one Design Template Server it's giving me all of the techs from Every server?

Weird. It's not hacking them all, no concept for that, but it may be repeatedly triggering the hack effect.

When you attack a planet, all of the mobile ships come and attack you immediately and the fixed defenses just sit there. The optimal way to fight (to me) seems to be to just park your ships right next to the wormhole, fight the mobile units and then attack the fixed defenses. That feels boring and non-interactive.

Yea, there needs to be variations in the layout, and I need to fix the logic which is supposed to make only some of the enemy units come out if the attack is small enough.

When you Quit to the main screen and reload a game, all your old settings persist across the Loads (game speed, for example). This seems undesirable.

Hmm, yea.

Thanks for the feedback

Currently working on the Settings Menu, and a more flexible code-based way for defining the ui for things like that. The menu's basically done but that new framework needs more work before I let it escape.

[BadgerBadger]

Golems:

Aha! It turns out that the only Golem I can capture is a Botnet. I started a new game with a massively powerful ark and a bunch of extra seeded golems. When I captured any planets with a Golem nothing would happen (they didn't capture even if you sat on the planet for like 5 min with > 1M metal and 5K fuel) except the Botnet. I tried 3 or 4 other golems before I got to the botnet planet.

Maybe there's some problem with the unit cap?


Power:

Useful design points. Splitting out Fuel is a great start. The human player needs to be able to heavily fortify some subset of their planets. In AIWC a common tactic was "leapfrogging"; carve out a defensible empire, then jump forward 3 or 4 planets, capture and fortify, then jump forward another 3 or 4 planets, repeat till you got to Valuable Target (a golem? an ARC?). This strategy is currently unusable since you can't fortify a solo planet enough.
It's also frustrating when losing a few random planets suddenly causes a bunch of your defensive structures to stop working because you ran out of power.

A few random ideas.

What if the per-planet power amounts were just "A lot higher than they are now"? The high-end power planets can build a full cap of most turret types, weaker planets can build "enough defenses to hold back 1K ships or so, but no more".

What about having an Overcharge mechanic, where you can grant certain planets a ton of bonus power, but as soon as you lose that planet you have some sort of nasty (but temporary) side effect. This way you can heavily fortify when necessary. One possible implementation of this is to have semi-derelict structures scattered through the galaxy that you can capture and move to places you want to fortify. Or perhaps you can turn a Flagship into a stationary Defensive Platform that will now just produce lots of extra power (converting Flagship to/from Defensive Platform would take time/metal).

[TheVampire100]

In AIWC wie had structures, that had a galaxy cap despite the turrets being changed to planet cap. Like fortresses.Maybe we could add some galaxy capped "aura" structures, that improve turrets in it's range (or simply on the planet) but you cannot buil an unlimited amount of them.

Another thing that bothers me about defenses is the way, the TD mechanic, that Badger mentioned. The reason AIWC had a TD concept to begin with, was because of the command stations. Ships would go after them and you got a path that was eay to identify. Now it's harder to notice which route the ships might take, especially if you have multiple planets connected together and they could take either wormhole.

An idea would be a "bait station" of some sort, a fake Ark wif you want it. The ships of the AI will think it is the real Ark because of some kind of fake signal and will go after it, altering it's route. However, you cannot build too many of them and a destroyed one takes a long time to rebuild (similiar to command stations in AIWC). Just an idea though.