0022107: Fleet Differentiation - Arcen Idea Tracker (Bugs and Features)

ID	Project	Category		Date Submitted	Last Update

0022107	AI War 2	Gameplay Issue		Nov 6, 2019 6:20 am	Nov 6, 2019 11:45 am

Reporter	Strategic Sage	Assigned To
Severity	feature
Status	new	Resolution	open
Product Version	1.005 Answering Your Top Requests

Summary	0022107: Fleet Differentiation
Description	Didn't see a current discussion on this, sorry if I missed one. Something's been sticking in the back of my mind and I just realized why it's bothering me. This is NOT at all a 'make AI War 2 like Classic' thing but for purpose of comparison, I felt each galaxy had a lot more character and individuality in Classic. One of the reasons was stuff like the Fabricators and Design Backup Servers. If you got a particularly good ship type such as Mk V Munitions Boosters or whatever it is you particularly gravitated towards, it really changed how things played out. AI War 2 has plenty of randomness of course but it doesn't feel like it means as much vis-à-vis fleets, and with the expanded ARS functionality that's even moreso. I think part of it is the lack of significant choice in even how you acquire ships. I.e. to take a fleet you have to capture a planet, you hack ARS, whereas you have a choice which to do with GCA and then have to defend them, which can be problematic if they are poorly positioned so sometimes you let a juicy target go. I find my turret setups have much more variance than the combat fleets. I don't claim to know the answer to how things should be off the top of my head here, but I do think there's something missing in this general area. What ships you get with the early fleets you acquire matters some, but not enough to make a big difference. That variable, unpredictable element that moves the needle at all doesn't seem to be there.
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Chris_McElligottPark Nov 6, 2019 11:45 am administrator ~0054391	I do see your point, and I think that it gets at a fundamental design paradox that we've run into with both games, and there are pros and cons to both approaches. 1. On the one hand, you can have ships that are HIGHLY differentiated. The ship vs hull type bonuses in the first game were extreme, and having mark 5 stuff was also an extreme bonus. There were a lot of good things about this, in that it really makes it so that you need to choose which ships go where if you have multiple fronts. But it also leads to incredible information overload, interface bloat, and so on. 2. On the other hand, in the sequel we've over time made the differences between the marks less severe (mark 1 to 2 used to double power like the first game, but wow that was making mark 1 useless), and we've also made it so that while ships do have specialties it's more of an augmentation than a requirement. You can take down structures without bombers, and you can kinda-sorta trust the relative strength numbers in a generalized sense when gauging risk of waves and hunters and defenders -- versus having the contents of the strength elements really skew things THAT much. Overall I think this is how things needed to evolve for most ship v ship battles, and I don't really see changing this up much because it would make the game impenetrable again. THAT said, I do think that you've hit upon a very really thing that could be better, and some of my design notes elsewhere address my own feelings on this in some ways. But they don't go far enough. My initial instinct has been to have certain large structures around the galaxy that are a lot harder for you to fight, and that you'd need to use certain ships or tactics to defeat. That would add to the puzzle-y nature of figuring out how to best win, and I think that does definitely serve a purpose. But there's also something to be said for... more than that. Essentially having large weapons on your side and the enemy side that require specific counters. And basically moving THOSE to having the really specific bonuses and penalties, much more starkly like the original game or even moreso. I think that this is something that would get to the sort of feeling you note as missing while not making the general fleet battles something that people can't understand at all. How exactly to handle this I don't have a fully fleshed-out idea on yet, but I see it as being something that is centered around really large units in small quantities rather than something we change all that much with the existing ships. At the moment that's my feeling, anyhow.