View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0021565 | AI War 2 | Gameplay Issue | Sep 4, 2019 3:32 am | Sep 5, 2019 9:46 pm | |
| Reporter | Asteroid | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Severity | major | ||||
| Status | resolved | Resolution | fixed | ||
| Product Version | 0.886 Zombie Homebodies | ||||
| Fixed in Version | 0.887 Ending Scenes | ||||
| Summary | 0021565: Repetitive clicking and turret boredom | ||||
| Description | Having captured or hacked 4 or 5 GCAs, I have upwards of 500 turrets available to place on military planets. The clicking is causing me RSI, not even joking here. It's also a supremely tedious job - once you determine a winning formula for placing your turrets, you're gonna repeat it with only a slight positioning variation on every world. The elephant in the room is that we could just scale down the game. Do we need so many icons on screen, which just leads to the need for silly stacks? Dividing everything by a factor of ten or more might be the solution. Of course it might feel less epic, but I don't think being attacked by a single icon with "600" under it feels epic anyways. But if that's not acceptable: One solution to this would be the ability to assign a "Governor" to the sector that autobuilds everything for you, like in most 4X games. I'd use it for all non-border worlds such as economic stations where you still want to build every turret available in case enemies slip through. Of course, this AI has to be developed and maintained, which requires some effort. But that leaves quite a bit of irritating clicking to do depending on how well this AI handles border worlds or systems containing special buildings to protect or special capturable turrets. Another, which would reduce the number of clicks to setup the typical planet to one per turret type, would be to place "Turret Nodes" instead of turrets. When I play I tend to place all turrets of a same type at the same spot. Occasionally when I really need to defend in multiple directions, I'll split them in 2 or 3 groups, but that's as precise as I'll get with the placement. The turret cap would split evenly between all nodes, which would sprout turrets around them. If not always spawning up to the cap is desired, the player could have access to a slider or other control for each turret type to determine how many he wants to spawn. But by default, if you have a cap of 90 Pike Turrets and you place 3 Pike Turret Nodes, each of them would sprout 30 turrets around itself - a bit like some AI guard posts surround themselves with turrets. "Mine nodes" could also work, but that might involve introducing "nodes" that have a linear shape instead of being just a discrete point - I guess they'd just be call "spawners". You could also go "boardgame-like" and divide the system in a number of hexagons. Each one of these could be purchased to host a certain number of one type of turret for a certain energy cost. It would be neat and discrete and might emphasize choice rather than the current spamming feel. You could even introduce some local "terrain" factors affecting the cost of these "tiles". But turrets' stats especially range might need revising so their range works in terms of hexes. I call this boardgame-like but it's also akin to tower defense games, which typically provide you with a fixed number of good positions to deploy turrets to, forcing you to make interesting choices. Finally as was already envisioned at some point I think, we can make turrets bigger and able to target multiple units, so we have to place less of them. I believe the "Turret Nodes" solution is the most practical if we don't want to change the game too much or invest an inordinate amount of time into this issue. The boardgame-like approach has the most potential for improving the game depth. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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"The elephant in the room is that we could just scale down the game. Do we need so many icons on screen, which just leads to the need for silly stacks? Dividing everything by a factor of ten or more might be the solution. Of course it might feel less epic, but I don't think being attacked by a single icon with "600" under it feels epic anyways." I've had thoughts on this before. I don't understand having so many ships for an "epic" sense, then having to stack them to bring down the unit count anyhow. It's felt kind of roundabout, and has introduced numerous problems requiring odd workarounds, as well as a bunch of performance work. I guess there's the idea of...each unit still contributing, via extra damage and shots? But it still feels weird. A group of 200 Zerglings, compressed into 10 stacks of 20, doesn't feel like 200 Zerglings, but instead 10 Super Zerglings. I personally greatly increase the stacking limits for my own use, player stacking to the point it's disabled. I wouldn't mind the game being downscaled, but I'm not really into giant fights in general. |
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Thanks! * We already had range_multiplier_to_all_weapons, which we use on the AI versions of turrets to halve their ranges. Now it's time to add some more differentiators to the player stuff. ** damage_multiplier_to_all_weapons does the same thing for weapons. ** multiplier_to_all_costs does the same thing to metal and energy costs, and ai cost to purchase, and exp gains from killing them. ** multiplier_to_all_healths does the same thing to hull and shield healths. ** multiplier_to_all_fleet_caps does the same thing to FINAL fleet caps after whatever bonuses. ** multiplier_to_all_scales does the same thing to the visual scale of the model, and the amount of area that it takes up in sim space (the circle around it). ** These are fairly large changes and so if you see any strangeness, please do let us know. ** These will help us to balance things in an efficient manner in the future, either between different ship variants (different factions with mulitipliers of one another), or just to change values without manually doing the math. * destroys_self_until_not_over_ship_cap_if_planetary_command now also works on defensive battlestation/citadel fleets. ** Otherwise it was possible to have WAY too many turrets in cases with them. * Player turrets and AI turrets were already separated out so that the AI turrets could have half the range of the human versions. Now we're going to further differentiate them to avoid the cases where you have things like 500 turrets at a planet because of the GCAs you've been capturing. ** That not only slows the game down performance-wise, but it also is cluttery and is a royal pain in the rear to place them. *** There were never meant to be this many turrets in the game, as we designed the turret counts as a static thing long before we added in GCAs. So things got bonkers, and now we needed to scale that back into the realm of what the engine and interface is meant to handle. *** In certain very large late-game savegames this actually seems to help performance quite notably. ** If we missed anything, or you don't agree with our numbers in how they feel in practice, please do let us know! ** For all AI turrets, things are left the same, but for player turrets the following changes: *** multiplier_to_all_costs is 5. *** multiplier_to_all_healths is 5. *** multiplier_to_all_fleet_caps is 0.1 (yes this means fewer turrets in general, but that's part of having GCAs in general). *** multiplier_to_all_scales is 3. ** All of this should seamlessly affect existing savegames, so you'll probably see a lot of your turrets explode right on start of an existing game because of being over-cap. |
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Thanks for the quick reaction, my wrist should be happier. I guess that the net effect on my current game is that the actual number of defensive guns of my planets is going to be reduced by a factor of ten (slightly compensated by the fact they'll live longer, therefore shoot longer) which is gonna hurt - even worse on the offensive where with my two battlestations and my citadel I could bring to bear 300+ spider and sniper turrets: now it's gonna be 30, and the health buff doesn't help them at all! With the Hunter and Warden fleets battering my front door, I think I'm screwed. So as any player whose stuff he worked hard for is getting nerfed into oblivion, I'm not super happy. But it might be for the best in the grand scheme of things. BTW I wasn't kidding about the "epic" 600-ships-strong icon attacking me: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1853989560 and https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1853989267 |
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I don't think it's intended to be a nerf? |
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Well unless I'm misreading something, the multiplier changes only affect turrets. So you replace 10 guns by one, which costs five times as more energy and metal and lives slightly longer, and there are still just as many ships attacking you. So yeah, it's a massive nerf to defenses and battlestations. Expect the complaints to come streaming in after release :P . |
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They were meant to have a damage boost apparently - that's a mistake. The scaling is...slightly off otherwise, yea. |
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I've changed it so it's only replacing 5 guns with 1, and added the damage bit that was missing. So they should roughly stay the same. Spider Turrets now fire 5x as many shots as well, since the effect wasn't touched by the other changes. |
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*wipes sweat off brow* Thanks RocketAssistedPuffin, this was a close one. The release notes will have to be edited too https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_The_Refinement_of_Fleets#Version_0.887, or people who are paying attention will go into a panic. If you want to tweak it further, I think that replacing 10 guns with one is fine, to really cut down on turret placement tedium, as long as the other stats compensate. But nothing wrong with doing this over two releases. |
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Already did the notes. Issue is with making it go down to 10 is...you kind of start to get into overkill territory? Then we need to put multishot on, which weakens them versus single targets, or make them all fire really fast...not exactly impossible, but the concern has came up in the past. I hope to get Minefields done in a similar manner, but they need a bit more work I think due to a possibility of wasting their entire damage potential on the first unlucky unit. |
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Sounds good. Well, this means I'm still up for 12 clicks just to to place my 60 spider and sniper turrets five at a time when sending in all the battlestations in. Up to around 40 clicks to place all types of turrets. Not as aggravating as the current 60-180 clicks for sure, but still pretty annoying. I hope one of my suggestions in the OP such as the "turret node" which auto-places your blob of turrets (even when more become available through GCAs) gets considered down the line. |
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Is there a reason we don't have a "hold this key to place 10 structures at a time" button to go with the "5 structures at a time" button? |
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ALT click? Don't think so. That honestly seemed like a really simple fix for the last time this came up, but no idea why it didn't. |
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Even just the ability to hold left click and have it constantly input build orders might work. So just hold CTRL or ALT, and left click, wave mouse, done. Then we might not even need to do all this turret shenanigans. |
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I'm glad Chris stayed away from "Alt-click places 10". Actually, I think that having to hold Ctrl-click most of the time for one of the most common actions in the game is already a serious thorn in the side of AI War II's attempt to make the game more approachable and streamlined. If the most common action is to place five turrets, I'd argue that single-click should do that, and that the modifier key should be to place a single one. A game that plays just with the mouse for extended periods of time is instantly more player friendly! You can eat your salad or some chips with that free hand instead of holding down Ctrl - or putting a paperweight on it, for the crafty ones. |
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I can't stand games without keyboard shortcuts, and find needing to use the mouse for things frustrating. But then again I use emacs.... |
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I don't see any downside to having the ALT function. Having the default build 5, and the modifier build 1 seems a tad odd and counterintuitive. Combine ALT with the "wave mouse about to rapidly input" sorta thing would I think greatly improve the problem, but I'll go with whatever approach is decided. I have some concerns about the Turrets, but need to actually see them in action. I wonder if the new feature allowing for these Turret changes could be extended to replicate the High Cap, Normal Cap, Low Cap and Ultra Low Cap settings from Classic? I'd like that, though I'm in a tiny minority seemingly about the battle size. |
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There's nothing wrong with adding keyboard shortcuts per se, they're great for advanced players. It's just that all basic gameplay elements have to be covered by basic and organically discoverable controls if you want your game to be approachable. If the game *requires* to use Ctrl-click or Alt-click not to be tedious, you will lose a lot of players who did find out that the game is tedious, but never even found out that you could press Ctrl or Alt. Everyone's attention span is short when trying new games, and the window to win a gamer's heart is small. Case in point: I'm a Dwarf Fortress player and I bounced off AI War 1 three times over multiple years because of the boring tutorial, tens of units introduced all at the same time, and general feel that the controls and options were overly complicated, and not worth the effort learning compared to the fun I was having. So please, let's leave advanced shortcuts for advanced stuff. We should resist the temptation of "solving" problems with easy solutions that will actually only solve the core problem for seasoned players. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 4, 2019 3:32 am | Asteroid | New Issue | |
| Sep 4, 2019 3:35 am | Asteroid | Description Updated | |
| Sep 4, 2019 3:49 am | Asteroid | Description Updated | |
| Sep 4, 2019 9:04 am | RocketAssistedPuffin | Note Added: 0052811 | |
| Sep 4, 2019 11:14 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Sep 4, 2019 11:14 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => resolved |
| Sep 4, 2019 11:14 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => fixed |
| Sep 4, 2019 11:14 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Fixed in Version | => 0.887 Ending Scenes |
| Sep 4, 2019 11:14 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0052812 | |
| Sep 4, 2019 1:47 pm | Asteroid | Note Added: 0052814 | |
| Sep 4, 2019 1:55 pm | BadgerBadger | Note Added: 0052815 | |
| Sep 4, 2019 2:08 pm | Asteroid | Note Added: 0052816 | |
| Sep 4, 2019 2:50 pm | RocketAssistedPuffin | Note Added: 0052817 | |
| Sep 4, 2019 3:01 pm | RocketAssistedPuffin | Note Added: 0052819 | |
| Sep 4, 2019 3:51 pm | Asteroid | Note Added: 0052824 | |
| Sep 4, 2019 3:57 pm | RocketAssistedPuffin | Note Added: 0052825 | |
| Sep 4, 2019 4:11 pm | Asteroid | Note Added: 0052827 | |
| Sep 4, 2019 4:19 pm | BadgerBadger | Note Added: 0052828 | |
| Sep 4, 2019 4:21 pm | RocketAssistedPuffin | Note Added: 0052830 | |
| Sep 4, 2019 4:24 pm | RocketAssistedPuffin | Note Added: 0052831 | |
| Sep 5, 2019 1:49 am | Asteroid | Note Added: 0052838 | |
| Sep 5, 2019 2:08 am | BadgerBadger | Note Added: 0052839 | |
| Sep 5, 2019 10:46 am | RocketAssistedPuffin | Note Added: 0052846 | |
| Sep 5, 2019 9:46 pm | Asteroid | Note Added: 0052879 |
