View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0023789 | AI War 2 | Balance Issue | Sep 23, 2020 3:10 pm | Oct 6, 2020 11:02 am | |
| Reporter | DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY | Assigned To | |||
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 2.510 Astro Train Safety Training | ||||
| Summary | 0023789: Turret Balancing: Comments wanted | ||||
| Description | Some turrets like seeker and countersniper obviously overperform, while some like ruffian are blatant underperformers. I'd like to see some of your guys' thoughts on turret balance so I can note it for later and fix at a different date. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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This is anecdotal, but the one turret that always makes me worry when I see it in the AI's hands is the Solar Flare. When it gets half-decent numbers of them early on it can practically force a turret hack. Now, I'm not saying this is a bad thing, necessarily, but it stands out that it is the only turret that ever manages to pry my hacking points from me. |
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On the player side of things, I usually find the subverter turret to be terrifying in player hands. |
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The Fortified Tesla Turret tended to be a bit of a grind to break down, especially if they start building up in large numbers, and even if I'm able to constantly send ships to the cluster of them. |
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The ruffian turret's damage reduction against distant enemies is not very useful since other turrets or the CC just gets targeted instead. Its damage is also quite bad. Raid turrets in general are pretty terrible when in a GCA. |
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Since GCA acquired turrets are only usable on defense the raid turrets outside of the Blitzkrieg one that breaks down into a *lot* of drones under perform. Though the small makeshift that breaks into drones is definitely better off than the scrap and ruffian turrets. Ruffian in particular could probably do with a touch of multi-shot because the damage per shot is average but it doesn't scale well later into the game as the wave sizes grow. Seeker could use a range nerf so it isn't as stupidly domineering in both player and AI hands in making entire sections of a gravity well a deathtrap for larger vessels. Harmonic takes way too many turrets to "cap" the bonus to the point where you'd need three GCAs with that turret line to even come close. Which lends to it having a reputation of sub-par damage output. It taking 3000 power per turret instead of 2250 also adds up when you realize you need to build to cap to even get damage out of this line. Blaster straight up needs a touch of multi-shot. High general DPS looks nice until you realize that the range is on the lower end and it takes a long time to thin the waves compared to other turret types. This is again due to the fact the turret has no multi-shot and later in the game that seriously hampers it compared to alternatives. A simple 2x multi-shot would help. Go for 3x Multi-shot and you can lower the damage a little too. Interceptor is nice for hitting two targets at a time, but the speed bonus mostly only applies versus players in AI hands. Knock some of the bonus off and bring the base damage up a little. |
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I agree Seeker turrets are incredibly powerful, especially without a damage cap. You can even use them to easily delete the Devourer Golem if it comes around; a niche use, but it shows how incredibly powerful they can be. Counter-snipers can also be ridiculous against all but the tankiest units (i.e. Exo-units, and even then they can do huge damage to the Tier 1 versions); if there is a large amount of them on an AI planet on the other side of a gravity well from where you can enter I just expect to lose my entire fleet at least once unless it's really late in the game. They're still more balanced than Seeker turrets in my opinion. Harmonic turrets are garbage; utterly dreadful, and I actively avoid them whenever I can. You need way too many turrets to get to the damage cap, and when/if you finally reach the cap you basically have a Blaster turret with a bit larger range and it fires twice as slow. Gemini Turrets seem a bit weak, but I don't usually see them fighting small and large ships at the same time so it could be just that. I remember strongly disliking the Holocene missile turret the only time I used them; maybe I went up against nothing but Vanguards and Pulsar Tanks in that campaign, but they didn't feel worthwhile against large amounts of units. On the other hand they seem like they would be useful against Sentinels, Snipers, and Bombards, so maybe I just had bad luck concerning the ships sent against them. If the AI has large amount of them I'm not usually concerned so they're probably a bit weak. Fortified AI Tesla turrets are a pain to remove when massed, but that is rare and I don't really have any issues with them other than that. I want to say the Mini-fortress felt disappointing damage-wise considering it's high energy cost, but I might be comparing them to a game where I had Seeker turrets and Counter-snipers. Currently, I'd rather use more small turrets than build a single Mini-fort which says a lot about the impression they left on me. |
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Counter-sniper turrets are not at all what I expected from the name. Having a damage bonus against "things that are far away" is effectively a universal damage bonus, because a human player can put them on the far side of the gravity well and an AI can just cover the planet in them so you can't close with them all at once. I would suggest moving some of their power out of their damage multiplier and into taking less damage from things that are too far away. Enough to force things to close to, I dunno, MLRS turret range or so. |
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@tadrinth This sounds interesting. The practical result will be that snipers will just aim at the command center or at literally anything else, which tbh is an improvement over the current situation with them trying to take out the counter snipe first, This should have added to it a reform of the ruffian turret to gain a new niche since it uses a similar damage reduction from distant enemies, but it is quite weak. More damage being done at a distance is easy to overcome by just spreading them out, allowing them to do good damage to everything. Ideally they could do more damage against snipers instead of just distant enemies, but I have no idea how to distinguish a unit that is a sniper from one that isn't, seeing how their stats very wildly from the tripper to the planetcracker. If there is a way to deal bonus damage to enemies with a weapon of over say 20k range or whatever, that sounds very nice on this. |
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I do have a few ideas of my own, some of which I already mentioned in Discord or the google doc. The main point is boosting turrets range, and preferably making sure a lot more techs have some High1/High2 or infinite range option. Currently Concussion, Gen and Subterfuge dominates the meta because they are the techs with the very high ranged turrets or straight up infinite range turrets. Seekers dominates, but part of it is because the game has become so heavily invested in multi-tons units. That's mostly due to DLC1 changes (Scourge, Fallen Spire and AI War units), and it gets worse with DLC2. So nerfing Seeker alone wouldn't solve the problem. Having more lower tons and lower range units around would be better, but that's beyond the scope of this thread. -CounterSnipe: maybe bonus damage against immobile targets. Snipers would always qualify and it would prevent the crazy damage boost of counter sniper. *Melee -Shreeder: make it release shreeder drones like the AI Shreeder guardian. It'd give Melee an infinite range turret fitting the melee theme. For performance sake, it might be better as a large turret. -Deathgrip: a super tractor that can only get 5-20 units but that can catch units below 7 tons and below 7 albedo. So some units can still avoid it but Deathgrip would still provide a counter against multiple units otherwise immune to players tools. -Crusher: More range and more attraction. Mostly because we don't play enough with physics in the game and Crusher is a tad too weak to be fun. *Gen: -Blaster: Make it a long ranged turret to compensate for the lack of exotic effect. -MiniFort: A slight buff because Eyebots and a number of anti-heavy units can demolish a minifort. It's also crazy energy intensive. Probably health buff. -Tritium: make the sniper bonus be x4 rather than x8, which would help with sniper focusing War units they don't even have a bonus against. >_< (Concussion could have the same change.) -Beam cannon and Solar flare could use firing three and two beams rather than one, because the mono-focus and stacking mechanic means they often under-perform. Also player transports really needs to be 7 tons to stop being stun by solar flare, that's just annoying (battlestations and support fleet being stun are fair game though). -Tesla needs to be reworked. it has too little range to matter on defence, and either Ambush or Bastille or Grenade launcher are far superior options in any scenario. It's also painfully annoying to kill tesla turrets because ships refuse to close in and will kite away from tesla. Manually having to make the player fleet close in melee range of tesla then locking them with "Hold when shooting" every-time is a tedious timewaste. I'd suggest something anti-stealth like make a damage bonus against cloaked or weapon jamming that only work on Alebdo =>0.7. That would give a second option against stealth stuff beside Ablative turret, and it'd slightly reduce the dominance of cloaked stuff in player fleets. -EMP should be Tech and Gemini swapped to Ambush. It's really counter-intuitive for EMP to be in Ambush rather than Tech. Like many turrets, gemini also needs a range buff and probably some stats buffs in general because it's too pricy. -Seeker: a rate of fire nerf, to 17 seconds like holo targetting. That'd nerf it quite a bit on defence and a lot on offence (newly-built turrets needs to cycle their entire reload time before starting to fire). DPS could be the same or lowered by 30% to see how it perform. Lower firing rate matters quite a bit, because it means they can't hit as many targets. That'd keep seekers as the anti-heavy turrets by excellence, but would make it far less of an all-rounder turret. *Fusion: -Fusion turret is a good candidate for infinite range. It has abysmal DPS and currently terrible range. The bypassing shield mechanic is nowhere near enough, because even if we add 50% DPS to calculate the shield bypass, it still has horrible DPS and is never worth building. Especially because it has terrible synergy with essentially every turret in existence except fuseball. -Fuseball needs range, not much but a bit more. Holocene is just much better due to the ability of hitting no matter the range. Fuseball could be good but Fusion just lacks synergy with other techs. -Bliztkrieg could use a buff too. It's much more efficient to build makeshift, especially on offence. Blitzkrieg needs a range buff, and maybe being able to be built near-instantly even without engineer support. It'd be a nice tool for dynamic defence/offence for the player, and it is both too costly and limited in DPS to become overpowered. That's it for now. |
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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FOiwCr6NfB1sU2nlR0RukMuugm-8dIs8WxO4lW1SFmA/edit?usp=sharing if you have any comments you want to add for me to take notes, comment on this document as well, but I will continue to watch this mantis report. |
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Current changes: * Seeker Turret base damage reduced to around a third. Versus things such as normal Guardians and Starships, it does less than a Nucleophilic Turret would, but would still start to outscale it on larger targets. ** Said larger targets is around mass 8. * Ruffian Turret range increased 25%, damage increased 50%. * Scrap Turret reload time 2s -> 1s, damage doubled, shots to self destruct 15 -> 20. ** Results in it doing 4x the DPS it was before, allowing it to get more shots out overall if under enemy fire. Double damage and 33% more "shots until self destruct" result in an overall 2.6x damage increase before being destroyed, assuming no enemy fire. * Blaster Turret damage increased 30%. * Counter Sniper damage reduced 20%. * MLRS Turret damage increased 20%. * Tripled Harmonic Turret base damage, doubled Harmonic effect damage and cap. * Increased Fortified Tesla range and AoE radius by 50%. |
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Fusion and fuseball turrets still need some help, as they both are quite lacking in damage and dont really synergize well with much. Deathgrip turret feels like just a worse version of the ambush turret, and its tractor beams are inferior to more readily available ones from the sentry. Interceptor turret rarely ever finds something to fire at due to the low number of 1000+ speed units, and as soon as they stop moving (which doesn't take long due to their speed) it loses its damage. It once had a role shooting down spire exos due to them once having 1800 speed, but now that they move at 800 it is no longer useful for this purpose. Micro mlrs turret looks like a greatly nerfed version of the mlrs turret in exchange for its damage bonus being applicable on slightly more targets, which doesnt do much good if the damage is bad anyway. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 23, 2020 3:10 pm | DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY | New Issue | |
| Sep 23, 2020 4:33 pm | Lord Of Nothing | Note Added: 0058641 | |
| Sep 23, 2020 4:41 pm | Lord Of Nothing | Note Added: 0058642 | |
| Sep 23, 2020 8:00 pm | Sigma7 | Note Added: 0058643 | |
| Sep 23, 2020 8:41 pm | crawlers | Note Added: 0058644 | |
| Sep 24, 2020 12:12 pm | CRCGamer | Note Added: 0058649 | |
| Oct 4, 2020 5:54 pm | GreatYng | Note Added: 0058965 | |
| Oct 5, 2020 3:25 pm | tadrinth | Note Added: 0058982 | |
| Oct 5, 2020 10:32 pm | crawlers | Note Added: 0058997 | |
| Oct 6, 2020 3:20 am | ArnaudB | Note Added: 0059009 | |
| Oct 6, 2020 3:57 am | DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY | Note Added: 0059010 | |
| Oct 6, 2020 3:58 am | DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY | Note Added: 0059011 | |
| Oct 6, 2020 11:02 am | crawlers | Note Added: 0059018 |
