0018807: Number of Hybrid Hive Spawners seeded should not vary with map size

ID	Project	Category		Date Submitted	Last Update

0018807	AI War 1 / Classic	Suggestion - Balance Tweaks		Apr 29, 2016 12:40 am	Apr 29, 2016 12:40 am

Reporter	tadrinth	Assigned To
Severity	minor
Status	new	Resolution	open
Product Version	8.023

Summary	0018807: Number of Hybrid Hive Spawners seeded should not vary with map size
Description	Saw a Steam discussion thread asking for help with hybrids and decided to do some testing, because people were complaining about huge hybrid fleets. I haven't played with them much, but my current game has not had them be overwhelming, and I wondered if map size was affecting things, so I decided to do some testing. All testing is with a grid map and Diff 9, and both AIs with the same Hybrids intensity. No advanced hybrids (shouldn't matter). 60 planets, Hybrids 4: 11 planets, each with 1 spawner. 60 planets, Hybrids 10: 11 planets, each with 11-12 spawners. 80 planets, Hybrids 4: 22 planets, each with 1 spawner. 80 planets, Hybrids 10: 22 planets, each with 11-12 spawners. 120 planets, Hybrids 4: 36 planets, each with 1 spawner. So, hybrid spawners are seeded on all the Mark IV+ planets. The number of those varies sharply with map size, probably because the map tries not to seed them too close to the player home. Larger maps have more of those candidate planets, so they get more spawners. However, since the total number of hybrid spawners controls the total number of hybrids spawned, and since hybrids travel across the map to attack the player, this means that hybrids are dramatically more dangerous on larger maps! Doubling the size of the map TRIPLES the number of hybrids in the first wave. By comparison, going from Hybrids 4 to Hybrids 5 is only a 40% increase. Larger maps are supposed to be somewhat harder, but hybrids seem like they might have a little too much scaling with map size. In particular, this makes it hard to discuss how dangerous the hybrid plot is at various intensities, unless you know to take map size into account. I would suggest having the hybrid spawner map seeding decide on a total number of hive spawners it wants to place, and then spread them across the eligible planets. A further refinement would be to allocate a certain % of the total spawners to homeworlds, another % to core worlds, and then spread the rest across MkIV planets. Homeworlds and core worlds are much harder to remove spawners from, and the ratios potentially vary a lot by map type and size.
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