Arcen Games

General Category => AI War II => Private Alpha Discussion => : chemical_art March 26, 2018, 04:38:35 PM

: Third look at early game
: chemical_art March 26, 2018, 04:38:35 PM
Made a third attempt today:

The good:
Was able to take first world within 15 minutes
Lack of shields did not break the game

The bad:
Game feels sluggish: The lack of friendly territory giving a speed boost can cause many ships to take 30-60 seconds to move from one world to another. This makes fleet moving a drag even in early game once you start getting a wave every five minutes.
Waves scale weird. I was getting eyebots and space planes. At 50 AIP they were sending waves of 1000 against them, then they'd promptly leave once my fleet arrived. This leads to the esclating threat that other players report as well.
AI makes no attempt to eliminate my controller. They will happily waltz right by to attack my fleet that is on the other side.
The lack of a bonus ship at starts makes the game feel samey and contributes to even the first planet taking longer then in the first game.
Vorticular cutlasses suffer from poor targeting and speed. Improving either of these things can compensate for the other.

The weird:
Got an UI bug where I could not select an owned planet that had no ships through the galaxy map, although manually moving to it via wormholes worked. Restarting the game fixed it on its own.
For the bonus ship blueprints, do you need to keep them or once you got the blueprint it is yours permanently?
I see references to people mentioning flagships (not the ark). I see I got a "MK V scout starship" that through context does this role. I understand it is done so the ark is not needed to move through worlds but its execution feels weird. I would rename it MK I Flagship, have it be built from the starship constructor (with blueprint already unlocked) and have it be small scale in terms of abilities. Later upgrades increase the passive cap, build speed/ repair, possible Area Defenses, etc.
: Re: Third look at early game
: x4000 March 26, 2018, 04:44:39 PM
Slick. :)

Random thoughts:

- I agree that friendly-territory speed boost would be nice, and it would play into our gravity plans well, it seems like.
- Waves scaling sounds like a bug, as does the AI not trying to get your controller.
- Vorticular cutlasses becoming faster sounds like a good idea to me.
- Lack of a bonus ship at start is just a current limitation of the lobby UI, that is coming.
- The UI bug you got will hopefully be auto-fixed by the fact that we're redoing the galaxy map in general.  But did it spit out any bugs into your PlayerData folder?
- The bonus ship stuff needs to be more clear in the interface; I'm not even sure on the answer to that, but I think it's "not unless you hack it."
- "Flagship" is basically the term for a "mark V starship."  But for the scout starship, I think that should be called Scout Flagship and just made markless.
: Re: Third look at early game
: chemical_art March 26, 2018, 05:07:41 PM
Only bugs noted were two minor ones of ship killed already in dying list. They were spaced 30 minutes out and I only noticed the no planet selection was after the second one so if there was a correlation it was very weak.

I am hesitant to call the ship a scout starship because it would confuse players compared to its use in AIW 1. Scouting is strategic, not tactical, in AIW 2 (from what I have gathered) so having a scout starship would cause players to question if it is needed for the traditional role of scouting such as accurate threat counts, etc. Just really muddles the water. It is much more similar to the flagship line of AIW 1 in that it's value is boosting the fleet ball. Granted the mechanism is different but the idea is there. Having it be markless is fine, although I can see the value of it being its own starship line. MK 1 can produce fleetships and basic repair and decloaking. MK II increases repair beams and increased decloaking (plus giving a spare so the MK I can tend to planets). MK III can produce starships (if the UI allows it). Experimental IV's and V's provide missile defense, laser defense or something like that.

Looking forward to the speed changes, those are really big before I can play again. My advances were stalled after 3 planets because I was spending all my time redeploying. Speaking of waves if they do not already have it they need that mechanic were as the game goes on the wave intervals (and the correspending strength) increases. Every 5 minutes even at the 45 minute mark was annoying.
: Re: Third look at early game
: TheVampire100 March 26, 2018, 05:16:05 PM
Proposal: Call it Supply Starship/Flagship. Because that's what it basically is.
A scout is a unit that is meant to investigate frontlines with little risk and gather information, I don't see the role would fit here unless you give it a cloaking aura (instead of shield).
Because it can build in enemy territory, it does not seem like a small, mostly unnoticed scout, more of a beachehad device.
So either Supply Starship or maybe you could call them Pioneer Starship (because it can build structures).
: Re: Third look at early game
: zeusalmighty March 26, 2018, 05:18:10 PM
- "Flagship" is basically the term for a "mark V starship."  But for the scout starship, I think that should be called Scout Flagship and just made markless.


"Prototype Starship" sounds good to me; it's descriptive and suggests that it's the only one its class as well as being generally inferior to those that you find in the galaxy
: Re: Third look at early game
: etheric42 March 26, 2018, 05:19:06 PM
If I recall correctly, all flagships (and there should be a flagship for every line of starship) will have the ability to build and build structures.  What makes the scout flagship different is it isn't that strong offensively and uses a tachyon array to decloak enemy ships.

Maybe all scout starships (including the scout flagship) need to be renamed tachyon starships? 

edit: prototype flagship also works since there isn't a "scout" starship line that it is based off of.
: Re: Third look at early game
: x4000 March 26, 2018, 06:58:40 PM
There's only one scout flagship that I'm aware of, so prototype flagship works for me.  I assume Keith will come comment, but that would handle it for me at least.

Good to know about the waves being too frequent, incidentally -- can you be a little more specific with that, though?  We went from having hardly any waves to now having too many, so whatever details you can provide about your experience are helpful.
: Re: Third look at early game
: chemical_art March 26, 2018, 08:57:49 PM
I'll elaborate a bit. In the current early game state:

Right now it takes a ship 30 - 60 seconds to hop from world to world.

So to hop 4 worlds takes 2 minutes to 4 minutes.

Waves come every 5 minutes.

As a result I can't really attack anything because I am too busy moving to prepare for the next AI attack. I am given enough warning to get my forces there, it is just that I can't have time to actually do anything offensively as I twiddle my thumbs. Once the threat is removed the next wave is already coming and the cycle can repeat itself.  Shuffling the fleet ball to meet waves isn't exciting. So that aspect of the game needs to change. Make player ships move twice as fast and make the warnings half the length so as to allow a sense of player urgency.

Contrast with AIW 1 where you may get a 3 minute warning and your ships can get there in 30 seconds. That's not the issue, the issue is the wave is big because it's been 10 minutes since a wave last hit. So instead of having a constant probing attacks which keeps a player busy but nothing strategic happens on either side waves need to be much less frequent so both AI and player have time to make moves. AIW 1 had waves start at every 10 minutes and gradually got to the point that by mid game you may see one every 30 minutes.


: Re: Third look at early game
: keith.lamothe March 26, 2018, 09:05:13 PM
Thanks for the feedback! :)

Quick question: are you not able to defeat the waves with static defenses (removing the need to bring your fleet back) ?
: Re: Third look at early game
: etheric42 March 26, 2018, 09:19:53 PM
Since you only get one turret to start off with and there isn't much indication of how much science you should spend on turrets... and you can't refund other things to respec into turrets, I'd imagine it'd be easy to get yourself into a hole where you can't afford more turrets and can't afford to send the fleet away long enough to make some sweet sweet scibucks to buy turrets with.  Keith, is there any kind of discoverable strength that would make a planet "safe"?  Like "build this much turret power and you should be safe until AIP grows another 20-50 points"?  I'm wondering if maybe there should be some kind of "security warning" gauge....

Next time I get stuck in, I should probably try a "don't care if I lose some planets" playthrough.  Milk the scibucks and abandon planets you don't really care about and concentrate turrets on ones that have important structures (since turrets are back to galaxy caps).
: Re: Third look at early game
: chemical_art March 26, 2018, 10:07:27 PM
Thanks for the feedback! :)

Quick question: are you not able to defeat the waves with static defenses (removing the need to bring your fleet back) ?

As I eluded to earlier, at 50 AIP the AI was sending waves that a value of over 1000. Now they were space planes and were eyebots...so they were like paper. But that's too many for 15 turrets (1/5th of my turret budget) could allow.

Part of the challenge is that the power strength "combat ability"  of a turret is so disconnected from what other things are. To start with they have a cap of 20, when I was used to 100. Should a a turret be able to hold of 3 of what it is good at? 5? 10? 20? 100? I have no clue! Their caps are not the same as were fleetships so it is not apples to apples.
: Re: Third look at early game
: BadgerBadger March 26, 2018, 10:13:47 PM
My off the cuff answer is to corroborate  chemical_art's turret woes with my experience. It feels very hard to be able to defend more than about 3 wormholes total once you hit 120 AIP, even if you have spend a couple K Science on turrets. I think turrets could use a buff (either tankiness, damage output or build cap).

Also, what would you say to a new structure under the "Defense" heading that unlocks 1 or 2 structures that would grant you bonus power on a planet? If even the Mark 1 of that structure cost Science then it wouldn't be broken, but it would really help the turtle playstyle.
: Re: Third look at early game
: chemical_art March 26, 2018, 10:15:03 PM
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/932682720125424237/1FF0DA085143C572FCDF71DB4C112F48C4D7D7EA/


I know a lot of it is UI stuff, but Just by going by numbers I have 75 turrets versus 1260 enemy units. It would *seem* that is a very lop sided advantage, but with the wonky turret caps and their scaling I'm not sure. It is weird all round because the build menu puts them out in groups of 5 (so you *only* get 20 turrets) but in the screen map it then displays the actual number of turrets. Also we are going back to total caps instead of planet caps. Now that I'm digesting it I see it.

Now that I see it, yeah, there is no way 75 turrets are going to handle that. They got that cool overall 3x unit per unit advantage, but that isn't enough.

Turret caps are wonky, actually, no, fleetship caps are wonky! I am rambling here just because I'm finally making sense of these numbers. Fighters have a 400 cap while needler turrets have a 100 cap? I mean I understand they have 3x the health and 2x the hp but...Wat? Frigates are more in line with their turret...sort of. Missile frigates have 120 cap to the missile turret 100...missile does 4x damage with 50% more health...yes turrets are all over the place, in no small part because the triangle ships are all out of alignment.

Anyway, I've entered the rabbit hole and now I'm crunching numbers. And things look funky.
: Re: Third look at early game
: x4000 March 27, 2018, 10:30:05 AM
Did we increase turret caps when we increased fleet caps?  Badger, could you look into this some?  This seems like your area, and Keith has a lot on his plate.  chemical_art really seems to be onto something, as usual.
: Re: Third look at early game
: keith.lamothe March 27, 2018, 11:01:07 AM
Ok, thanks for the additional info.

There's some major ui-failing-to-be-clear going on here. To give you an idea of how bad it is:

1) Turrets have 20 squads per cap, 5 sub-squads per squad (for most turret types), and 1 visual-thing per sub-squad.

2) Fighters have 20 squads per cap, 4 sub-squads per squad, and 5 visual-things per sub-squad.

3) The mouseover tooltip for either shows the max-health and dps of a whole squad.

So you see 400 and 100, because that's what the sidebar says, but the stats are showing for 20 and 20. This makes it almost impossible for you to compare their actual stats.

Subsquad stats can be shown (they can fire and die individually), but the visual-things have no sim existence at all.


For what it's worth, "15" needler turrets (3 squads of needler turrets) are roughly equivalent to "180" fighters (9 squads of fighters) in terms of dps and total health, so 75 vs 1260 is actually not too bad if you're dealing with relatively "high cap" attackers. Where you'd get into problems is if the attackers had bonuses against your turrets or something like that.

But it makes sense that you can't tell any of that the way the numbers are now.


Another thing you probably don't realize: with the changes to the tech upgrade system, when you unlock (say) Mark 2 MLRS turrets your existing Mark 1s will be upgraded (over a short time) to Mark 2s. Also, you'll go from a galaxy-wide cap of 20 Mark 1 squds to a cap of 40 Mark 2 squads. Their power cost per squad does not change at all. So you get more firepower AND you can defend more planets.

I'm guessing that the UI did not succeed in communicating this concept to you at all :)


Another thing that's not really balance but you might find helpful: if you hold Ctrl while adjusting the game speed, it actually changes the "size" of a sim-frame instead of the "frequency" of sim-frames (like normal + and - do). You won't want very large frames during a fight, but it can greatly speed up watching a fleet move from planet to planet, or waiting on a refleet or for an incoming attack to spawn.


Keith, is there any kind of discoverable strength that would make a planet "safe"?
The strength of the last wave. Or for that matter the strength shown next to the wave counter (is that currently shown in the wave-timer's tooltip?). Generally speaking the AI doesn't press an attack with merely-equal strength, because human defenses have a way of extracting inordinate kill-to-loss ratios.


Also, what would you say to a new structure under the "Defense" heading that unlocks 1 or 2 structures that would grant you bonus power on a planet? If even the Mark 1 of that structure cost Science then it wouldn't be broken, but it would really help the turtle playstyle.
That would be ok, but I think we're still dealing with a lot of UI non-clarity and other issues. I don't want to paper-over with something that just jacks the numbers so high that it masks the problems.

I think the structures for "penalize metal/fuel output, increase power output" are still on the build menu. It seems that dedicated turtling would put those on a chokepoint planet. Is anyone doing that?


Other notes:

- Will rename that thing to Prototype Flagship

- Will have the wave time scale to 7.5 minutes at AIP 50, and 10 minutes at AIP 100, and stay around 10 minutes from there on out. Hopefully that will give you more wiggle room.

- Will increase overall ship speed by 20% or so and see if that has any negative impact. If you want to experiment you can change the distance_scale_ship_speed="167" line in GameData/Configuration/ExternalConstants/KDL_VanillaConstants.xml , and that will adjust everything's movement speed.

- Will increase turrets from roughly 3x the strength of mobile units to roughly 5x (but with most of the strength going towards hp rather than dps, except for the deliberately-fragile turret types). I'm guessing that will be excessive, but it's worth seeing what happens.
: Re: Third look at early game
: keith.lamothe March 27, 2018, 11:11:01 AM
Did we increase turret caps when we increased fleet caps?
I think it would actually help to make turrets 1-subsquad-per-squad, and thus your basic cap would be 20 Needler Turrets. So they'd be a middle ground between fleet ships (with 400 visual-things per cap being common) and starships (with 1 visual-thing per cap). It's a lot easier to realize that "oh, turrets are not like fleet ships" with each of those three categories being at a different order of magnitude (1s, 10s, and 100s).

Though I don't know that we're ever going to get much clarity with the sidebar showing visual-thing count, because its relationship to the actual stats is so variable.

As it is, there's evidently temptation for AIWC veterens to assume that individual ships are comparable across different types and categories, which is very far from the truth.
: Re: Third look at early game
: BadgerBadger March 27, 2018, 11:16:28 AM
Keith beat me to my response with a better response.

The "Metal/Fuel to Power" thing gives you (if my memory serves) 500 power each, but you can only ever have 2 total. I've tried using them and it just doesn't feel like enough; If you get unlucky (lets say that the planet that makes the best choke point only has 1000 power naturally, or is generally resource poor) then you can wind up kinda screwed just through the map layout.

I don't really know how to best defend a planet with (say) 3 wormholes to AI space and one wormhole back to human space. If you build your defenses around the wormhole to your space then  your turrets get ripped to shreds by long range attacking units. But if you don't then you need to spread your power budget across multiple wormholes, so your (say) 1.5K power can turn into "500 power per wormhole of defense" which gets crushed easily. Turrets are too short-range to lend supporting fire between wormholes for the most part.
: Re: Third look at early game
: keith.lamothe March 27, 2018, 11:32:47 AM
The "Metal/Fuel to Power" thing gives you (if my memory serves) 500 power each, but you can only ever have 2 total.
They give a % boost to power production, so a higher-power planet gets more benefit and a lower-power planet gets less.

That said, I don't think those things are the way of the future because reversible resource-conversion tends to be a fiddly mechanic (AIWC certainly showed that). So perhaps the science-for-power trade is a better thing to offer. My concern there is that you can already dump science into increasing your static defenses by upgrading turret types, so it feels a bit redundant.


If you get unlucky (lets say that the planet that makes the best choke point only has 1000 power naturally, or is generally resource poor) then you can wind up kinda screwed just through the map layout.
It is very intentional that different planets are easier or harder to defend than others (both in wormhole count and power output).

This means that "picking a chokepoint" is more complex than it was in AIWC. It's not just the map-graph, it's also the planet's power output, wormhole layout, etc.

That said, the actual numbers are probably too harsh right now.

As a side note, on "generally resource poor": each planet is really good at one resource, semi-good at a second resource, and normal at the third and fourth (hacking is handled differently). So no planet is just terrible, and no planet is great at them all.


I don't really know how to best defend a planet with (say) 3 wormholes to AI space and one wormhole back to human space.
A few ideas:

1) Kill the warp gates on 2 of those 3 neighbors, so waves only come from one wormhole.

2) Focus on defending the other side of the wormhole-back-to-human-space (so you'll have one main kill-zone instead of 3). That does assume that your "outer" planet is going to get smashed, but we do want defense-in-depth to be a thing here. In this case just having a chokepoint and a pre-chokepoint.


If you build your defenses around the wormhole to your space then  your turrets get ripped to shreds by long range attacking units.
I think I left too many of the turrets with the Structure defense type, whereas more should have Armor, but we'll see. Or are you seeing Armor-based turrets get shredded in this way too?


Turrets are too short-range to lend supporting fire between wormholes for the most part.
That will depend somewhat on the planet's wormhole configuration, but I get what you're saying.

It may be that the "wormholes too spread out" case is a place where we'll need that unlockable one-per-planet shield generator so that your turrets don't die to sniper-range and long-range fire before they can respond. But we'd also need to make sure that case wasn't too common, as otherwise it changes from "unlockable" to "mandatory", which would be no good.
: Re: Third look at early game
: chemical_art March 27, 2018, 12:08:33 PM
Looking forward to try the next update Keith.

I know the UI is in the works, but I don't feel like I'm going on a limb in saying that in its current form the numbers on the side do not communicate information in a clear fashion and in my case actually gave me detrimental information in just wrong I got it.

How about aside from showing the total number of ships on a planet (which can give fighters 400 and missile frigates 120) it instead shows "(actual number of ships / max number of ships)  * max number of squads". This would give both ships 20. If both ship groups lost 100 units the fighters would show "(300 / 400) *20 = 15" while the missile frigates would show "(20 / 120) * 20 = ~6.66"

This would a normalizatiom of numbers which would then allow a player to actually make sense of the data. Numbers were done quickly, will double check later

Update: Math on my end checks out. This would allow fleet ships and turrets to have a common number to compare values too. So 20 groups of fighters and 20 units of missile frigates and 20 groups of turrets would all show as 20 on the UI number. As the squads shrink the number displayed will as well proportionally. This would make it much easier for I as a player to discern things.

Update 2: What I am asking for might be easier said then done. Glancing at the UI files it seems it may need to make its own variables to do values for what I am asking. It can certainly be done, but I'm not quite skilled to try it myself >.<
: Re: Third look at early game
: etheric42 March 27, 2018, 03:38:56 PM
chemical_art: Would it be clearer for you to show the amount of STRENGTH of that class unit instead of the number of squads or the number of individual vessels?

Keith: Also, am I wrong in thinking that if fighters have 40 ships per squad, there were two squads in system, and each squad was reduced to half HP, the UI would show 40 ships, but their DPS would still be two squads worth of damage because damage is calculated per squad and not per ship?
: Re: Third look at early game
: x4000 March 27, 2018, 03:45:38 PM
chemical_art: Would it be clearer for you to show the amount of STRENGTH of that class unit instead of the number of squads or the number of individual vessels?

Keith: Also, am I wrong in thinking that if fighters have 40 ships per squad, there were two squads in system, and each squad was reduced to half HP, the UI would show 40 ships, but their DPS would still be two squads worth of damage because damage is calculated per squad and not per ship?

DPS is calculated at the subsquad, so it would be properly lowered.
: Re: Third look at early game
: chemical_art March 27, 2018, 04:11:45 PM
chemical_art: Would it be clearer for you to show the amount of STRENGTH of that class unit instead of the number of squads or the number of individual vessels?

Strength I think would help even more elegantly for it can better show the differences that different marks could have. It would take a new player a bit of time to understand why the number is but the fact that it gives a ball park number to contextualize different things is an improvement.
: Re: Third look at early game
: etheric42 March 27, 2018, 04:14:30 PM
Chris made an icon for strength that could be plunked right down at that number.

Chris, any objection for showing strength instead of numships?

The only one I can think of is it might be weird to say I have Str4k Assault Ships when I know I only have 2... but then again with that icon there it might not be an issue.

This might also solve the problem with the AI having more than one Mk of a ship on the same planet.
: Re: Third look at early game
: x4000 March 27, 2018, 04:22:50 PM
Strength numbers can get insanely huge and are really abstract.  I very much understand the desire to compare things in an apples-to-apples fashion, but I can tell you for a fact that these would be illegible even in the new interface pretty fast without a ton of abbreviating to the point where it becomes hard to read from that angle.

My personal feeling is that this is something that should stay ships, as it presently is.  The fact that turrets are amazing and 75 of them can stave off 1000 enemy fleet ships is a learning opportunity, and the experience of seeing 75 turrets stop those 1000 ships is pretty epic, hopefully.  Those are really direct and understandable, concrete things: 75 Big Guns just destroyed a thousand Little Ships.  Woohoo!

But when I see that 563 strength just destroyed 497 enemy strength... that's just so abstract as to be kind of meaningless.  If I was zoomed in at the time I could see some number of ships blow up, but how many was it really, etc?

That was the problem with showing squad counts instead of ship counts, incidentally: you can see the number of ships if you zoom way in, but the fact that there are so many isn't really evident unless you manually count, and seeing small (double digit) numbers on the sidebar made the game feel smaller than it was.

Basically I think that this is a problem in any way things are shown, but right now the game feels suitably big, and battles feel suitably epic, just looking at numbers alone.  75 turrets taking out 1000 enemy ships is cool, too.  I don't think that the number of turrets per squad should be dropped, although the number of turrets you can build is a maybe.  If you can't defend your planet because you have too few turret squads, that's one thing.  If it's a cosmetic "this seems unbalanced" thing, then we need to get on the tooltips and note "each one of these can hold off like 10 fleetships, so don't be scared if you're facing down a thousand ships with a hundred turrets."  It's a tutorial and a tooltip thing, in my opinion.

Wow that was a lot of words.  But hopefully that position makes sense.
: Re: Third look at early game
: chemical_art March 27, 2018, 04:43:43 PM

But when I see that 563 strength just destroyed 497 enemy strength... that's just so abstract as to be kind of meaningless.  If I was zoomed in at the time I could see some number of ships blow up, but how many was it really, etc?


The value of is that during the learning curve a player needs context to know what works or doesn't. It provides data points that I player can recall later which is a key component to actually learn a game.

Having 75 turrets blow up a lot of little ships is cool! But that actually doesn't help much with learning. I'll give an example from AIW 1:

Planet has 200 turrets. Incoming Wave of 1200 incoming. It is broadly established a turret is worth three ships so Using quick maths those 200 turrets can take ~600 - 800. So I should aim to bring in at least 600 ships to have a good chance to take it. That is a fairly simple example of how UI helped me learn. That 3x turret value is a quirk but the rest is really straight forward.

AIW 2:
I put down 15 turrets. But those turrets are really worth 75. So I have 75 turrets. 75 turrets * ??? > 1000 ships. It is not as simple mental math and that leads to an overall longer learning curve. Eventually I will work out a math, but it will be a lot fuzzier for much longer which leads to a longer curve.

Curves are not good.

They are much more deadly to a player than the AI.


The game itself is fine. It just presenting data points that provide context for a player to make sense of it all. A lot of it can't be helped when you get to things starships and bigger but at least on the fleet ship and turret level a solid sensible base provides an anchor that lets a player learn other things.
: Re: Third look at early game
: x4000 March 27, 2018, 04:50:19 PM
You're putting down 15 turret squads, each of which has 5 in there, so you'd be seeing 75 turrets as active.  Parts of the interface right now are not correctly showing you individual ships/turrets all the time, which makes it harder.  You should never see the number 15, only the number 75.  You'd only click 15 times, but each click decrements it by 5 rather than 1.  The interface right now that you're looking at is an atrocious blend of multiple intentions and paved-over partial implementations of multiple things.
: Re: Third look at early game
: chemical_art March 27, 2018, 04:53:47 PM
You're putting down 15 turret squads, each of which has 5 in there, so you'd be seeing 75 turrets as active.  Parts of the interface right now are not correctly showing you individual ships/turrets all the time, which makes it harder.  You should never see the number 15, only the number 75.  You'd only click 15 times, but each click decrements it by 5 rather than 1.  The interface right now that you're looking at is an atrocious blend of multiple intentions and paved-over partial implementations of multiple things.

Not trying to be obtuse, once it was said on here I realized it was the case. I was at fault and have learned. But I was observing that it did happen to me  ;D This actually was a case of the sidebar being great in clarifying that.
: Re: Third look at early game
: x4000 March 27, 2018, 06:33:09 PM
I actually think there was a bug that was adding to your confusion, but hopefully that is increasingly not the case as the new GUI starts rolling out. :)
: Re: Third look at early game
: keith.lamothe March 28, 2018, 08:21:17 AM
I think wait-and-see is fine at this point, to give the new GUI a chance to try this, but I think the purpose of the sidebar is at odds with the purpose of the ship counts.

1) Ship Counts: purpose is to influence the player's thinking towards "this is a big game".

2) Sidebar: purpose is to help the player understand what's actually happening.


As long as #1 is a priority over #2 (especially to the extent that squad count, the number which actually represents controllable units, is deliberately hidden), the interface will be deficient in achieving purpose #2, especially for new players. Experienced players would get used to it, as they did with various UI deficiencies in AIWC.
: Re: Third look at early game
: BadgerBadger March 28, 2018, 08:58:18 AM
Why not have "Show Ship Count in Sidebar" or "Show Squad Count in Sidebar" as user settings?
: Re: Third look at early game
: keith.lamothe March 28, 2018, 09:02:33 AM
On further thought, most of the "this just isn't going to work long-term" problem with the sidebar showing visual-thing-count is that the tooltip shows the HP and DPS of the entire squad. They could also be shown for an individual sub-squad, but that wouldn't help. In either case, a player looking at a group of fighters on the sidebar and at the fighter tooltip would come to very-wrong conclusions about the durability and power of that collection of fighters.

So if we change the tooltip to show HP and DPS divided by visual-thing-count, that would help. The main drawback is that the tooltip would be showing numbers which don't actually exist in the sim, but they would at least be useful.

(Edit: we'd also have to divide the metal/power/fuel costs, which would involve some fabrications like "0.8 Fuel", but again it would be useful, though it would need to somehow be clear that they're built in batches and that the cost is not for the full batch)

The tooltip would also need to show something indicating "there are X of these in each squad".


After the first release or two with the new GUI's sidebar, it would also be good to add a toggle button for "show strength instead of visual-thing-count". This would allow the player to say "ok, I get that the ship counts are big, now please show me the number that's actually useful" ;)

Heavy abbreviation is fine, along these lines:
1 = 1
11 = 11
111 = 0.1k
1,111 = 1.1k
11,111 = 11k
111,111 = 0.1m
1,111,111 = 1.1m
11,111,111 = 11m
111,111,111 = 0.1b
1,111,111,111 = 1.1b
11,111,111,111 = integer overflow (not really, we use FInt, but you get the idea)


@Badger: that occurred to me as well, but would squad count be useful if we already had both visual-thing-count and strength as display modes?
: Re: Third look at early game
: x4000 March 28, 2018, 09:50:01 AM
Keith: I like all of the things that you just said.  It feels like the natural balance between item #1 and #2.  Also, some units using 0.8 fuel or whatnot for "individual ships" really does help emphasize "this is a big game" when you see a larger ship that uses 200 fuel or whatever just for that one thing.  It feels... right.  It reminds me of how Homeworld gave me a good sense of scale, even though their units were not squads, and were far fewer in number, etc.
: Re: Third look at early game
: chemical_art March 28, 2018, 10:30:16 AM
Sounds very cool Keith and I think a very good balance from #1 and #2 like Chris said.
: Re: Third look at early game
: x4000 March 28, 2018, 10:47:24 AM
chemical_art, I can't express how happy it makes me that you're more engaged now.  Can't wait to have more folks on, but your feedback is always invaluable.  Hopefully with the new GUI we can suck in Cyborg as well. :)
: Re: Third look at early game
: keith.lamothe March 28, 2018, 11:00:47 AM
Since the new GUI isn't ready for a release yet (right?) I'll try to get a release with other changes out today, including the switch to the tooltip stats.
: Re: Third look at early game
: x4000 March 28, 2018, 11:13:28 AM
I suppose that would make sense, yes.  I should have the gui in an internal-release state today, but aiming for later in the week for a to-Steam version is wise.  Having the intermediary release now is a good idea.
: Re: Third look at early game
: chemical_art March 28, 2018, 11:33:06 AM
chemical_art, I can't express how happy it makes me that you're more engaged now.  Can't wait to have more folks on, but your feedback is always invaluable.  Hopefully with the new GUI we can suck in Cyborg as well. :)

Encouragement is always nice.

Once Keith pushes out that next update with slightly increased ships speeds and longer wave times I'll give another go. It shouldn't be so hard to be bogged down also now that I'm a bit more aware of the turret power.
: Re: Third look at early game
: keith.lamothe March 28, 2018, 08:30:21 PM
The feedback is very helpful :)

0.716 is out now.

Some specific thoughts on avoiding the "My fleet is always moving to stop a wave" syndrome:

1) All ships are 20% faster now, so your ships don't have to head back as soon.
- Honestly I'd like to dial it back to what it was, if possible, as currently it's possible for short-range ships to close really fast against long-range ships, which makes long-range stuff less interesting. I could increase ranges, of course, but if I increase ranges and speeds it's mathematically very similar to just reducing the size of the planet area, which contributes to the whole thing feeling like a cage match.

2) Wave interval increases with AIP (until it hits 10 minutes at 100 AIP), so you'll simply have more time between waves.

3) For the very-low-AIP waves that are still closer to 5 minutes apart, you should be able to stop those easily with turrets.
- Turrets were seriously buffed; short-range turrets are now much tankier on average, medium-range are significantly tankier and do more damage, and the longer-range ones are still squishy but hit like a truck.
- Also, most turrets now cost less power, so you can fit more of them on a planet.
- You'll still probably need to spend some science on turrets before 100 AIP, but with the Mark 1 versions only costing 250 each it's not hard to get enough cap to cover a few frontline planets.

After the 100 AIP mark you can decide whether to involve your mobile fleet more in wave defense (much easier with the extra speed and the extra interval between waves) or spend more science on turrets to just stonewall the enemy. Which one you decide will likely depend on whether you found high-power-production border planets, and how many of them you're having to defend.


On the numeric clarity, the tooltips now show the per-visual-thing stats for HP and DPS (I kept costs at the squad level, but with a bit of extra text to spell that out).
: Re: Third look at early game
: chemical_art March 28, 2018, 08:35:04 PM

Very good timing Keith, I will punch holes into the AI and see if I can advance.
: Re: Third look at early game
: keith.lamothe March 29, 2018, 01:15:24 PM
Oh, one other thing I did want to emphasize: if you're simply waiting for something to happen you can speed it up with Ctrl+Plus; it maxes out at *10, which gets just about any wait over with very fast. The tricky thing is pressing Ctrl+Minus fast enough to not pass too much time.

That's different from the normal +/- controls, which just cause your computer to crunch frames faster (it probably can't go much faster than 2x or 3x normal speed right now).

The overall effect is to kill waits, but allow ships to not be really fast in the middle of combat.
: Re: Third look at early game
: x4000 March 29, 2018, 01:28:53 PM
In the new gui, I wonder if the speed up and speed down visual buttons should be that or the non-ctrl version. Right now it's the latter, it seems like it should be the former. Or maybe right-clicks do the former.

There's some oscillation of ships at higher frame granularity, FYI. It's on trello, but lower priority.
: Re: Third look at early game
: etheric42 March 29, 2018, 01:38:59 PM
I'm confused about the purpose and effect of the two different speed modulations.  Could you help me understand them?

Normal (+/-) is the "typical" way of increasing game speed (correct?).  Ships move faster.  Things build faster.  Etc.  But it seems to cap out at a certain point where you can keep increasing the number but it doesn't really speed up (I am assuming based on processor power?)

Control (+/-) is doing something differently?  It seems to also make ships move faster, but doesn't seem to suffer from the same cap?

What's the functional difference?  (And if you've already explained it in this thread, I'm sorry, but I didn't get it.  Could you try again on link me to a different thread?)
: Re: Third look at early game
: BadgerBadger March 29, 2018, 01:49:25 PM
My understanding is "Normal makes each frame go faster. Coarse skips frames entirely"

So instead of executing frames in this order (with the spaces representing speed)
1  2  3  4  5  7  8
increasing normal speed would be
12345678
and increasing coarse speed would be
1  3  5  8
Both happen a lot faster than the base case.
: Re: Third look at early game
: etheric42 March 29, 2018, 01:59:02 PM
Great explanation!

How does that affect the game?  If the ship is supposed to be completed on a frame that's skipped, is that ship now gone to the ether?  Are bullets scheduled to fire on one of those skipped frames gone and those ships now sitting ducks to ships that fire on included frames?  Should I be using normal +/- in combat but control +/- out of combat?
: Re: Third look at early game
: x4000 March 29, 2018, 02:09:43 PM
That explanation is slightly off. Coarse frames makes frames "bigger."

If normally a unit or shot moves x amount in one frame, then at twice coarseness it would move 2x. It's no extra CPU load, but it's running twice as fast. It probably looks less smooth, though.
: Re: Third look at early game
: keith.lamothe March 29, 2018, 02:17:25 PM
Yea, coarse-speed doesn't look as good, and is less "correct" in that under extreme circumstances a fast ship might pass "through" a short-range ship's range-bubble in one frame, and not actually ever be in range. But that's really an edge case. The onus is somewhat on the player to not break the game, and just use it to speed up things that would otherwise be uninteresting.

And yes, I know about the ships bouncing back and forth on coarse-speed. It's probably just a matter of detecting "that would overshoot your destination, so just snap to your destination".
: Re: Third look at early game
: x4000 March 29, 2018, 02:23:21 PM
Cool, that all sounds good.
: Re: Third look at early game
: chemical_art March 29, 2018, 06:41:45 PM
By default, I would have the +/- buttons by default to be where they would in AIW 1: It is intuitive and follows the practice of most other games and I think for the majority of players be the optimal solution. I would resolve the more creative coarse speed to use ctrl +/-. It is a very powerful tool but not intuitive and can lead to perceived bugs without knowing the context. Having it be a bit more behind the scenes means that when a player does stumble upon it they are also more likely to simultaneously see the description to it.
: Re: Third look at early game
: x4000 March 29, 2018, 06:49:50 PM
That's a really excellent way of putting it.  You're right, that's how we should do it.