View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0027373 | AI War 2 | Suggestion | May 19, 2022 3:44 pm | May 21, 2022 12:50 am | |
| Reporter | Mission_1 | Assigned To | ZeusAlmighty | ||
| Severity | tweak | ||||
| Status | requires feedback | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 5.011 Autobuild And Home Ark Strength | ||||
| Summary | 0027373: Necromancer Empire Balance Tweak Suggestions - Diff 10 | ||||
| Description | Hey there, I'm reporting mostly to go over how I won in my last match in hopes of adjusting some of the more overpowered necro ships. For context this was on difficulty 10 with 2 AIs on expert (I know expert doesn't really matter much for necro but whatever). I also enabled a few factions to mix things up, specifically an intensity 10 Dark Zenith invasion with intensity 8 Dark Spire. I gave myself a Gray Spire Dyson Sphere ally at intensity 10 that effectively made the game much harder (I'll get into detail below). The match lasted about 4 hours. Early game: Starting fleet types: Skeleton Warriors - only skeleton type that can actually hurt Elderlings early on Ravenous Wights - fast, sturdy against similar threat Igors - better than life force totems Standard operating procedure for me is to get 3-4 minor necropoleis in safe locations to feed the main fleet and then having a choke that uses a defense necropolis. In this instance I had 4 minor planets near me suitable and a single entrance choke for the defense necropolis. I upgrade the warriors twice and ravenous wights once. Hacking: Necro gets a LOT of hacking points... probably way too much. I hack every single planet I plan on taking to remove the warp gate to save on the AIP you'd gain otherwise. This makes it so capturing 4 planets is as expensive as 3 otherwise. So I'll hack them and pretty much anything else problematic (raid engines, alarm posts etc) and not really feel like it costs anything. I'd suggest reducing the gains on higher difficulties and/or outright removing gains of hacking points from templar ships. Defense: As it currently stands there feels like no reason to upgrade totems unless you're very ahead with tech. The totems just aren't rewarding enough. You can get the benefit of treacherous totems at mk1 just like you can at mk7. The only time I've felt it kind of helpful was specifically to upgrade life force totems to get a damaged necrofleet back on its feet faster... but upgraded Igors do the job just fine. What is actually strong? Catapults. Catapults are busted strong. Every defensive layer I use involves a mixture of catapults, and later on add some Skull Piles to distract. To explain my reasoning, the AI and Templars favor hit and run tactics against the necro a lot which involves trying to hit your defense turrets, but by having catapults spaced out somewhat evenly along the gravity edge of a planet, the time it takes for ships to actually cause damage is so long that they get pelted down by catapult fire before they pull the job off. The other positive is Elderlings are very big juicy units for Catapults and they're the only defensive unit that can take them down in any reasonable amount of time. It isn't abnormal to have a defense planet with only 60 str hold off a 200+ attack without any actual fleet interference from myself. With that out of the way, after capturing my first choke planet, most of my early essence will go into upgrading that defensive necroplis to get as many catapults as possible and 1 treacherous totem to prevent escapes. An early tier 3 or so defensive necropolis with mk2 catapults can hold off most things I'll worry about in the 100AIP range. Flagships: I don't upgrade my Flagship until much later as it's just not worth it compared to getting necropolis tiers up. I also don't unlock alternate flagship loadouts because it costs AIP and they aren't powerful enough to warrant the biggest downside to them... the alternate forms take MUCH longer to repair than the base design. They might be a little bit tankier but taking multitudes longer to repair just doesn't feel worthwhile. Even a low tier basic flagship with cloaking will live a very long time in endgame if you're not careless. Offense: I've played around with most of the necro units at this point and their various forms, and there are 2 units in particular that are gamebreakingly overpowered compared to their similar brethren: Revenants. This unit is full on busted. Almost every factor of it is too strong. It is cheap to unlock AIP-wise, and only requires 2 hexes for 4 ships on a mk3 planet. Having even just a few of these will disable most fodder from causing any form of harm to you but their real strength lies in Ray of Disintegration. Having a fleet with just a few of these revenants is capable of destroying every endgame threat in the game in seconds: golems, mk7 nether drake elderlings, the Jormungandr (the Dark Zenith has 3 of these on diff 10), etc. They don't even take long to build! I upgraded these to mk5 ASAP and then to mk7 at endgame. Suggestions for nerfs: Reduce the amount of revenants you acquire per home from 4 to 2 Reduce the Ray of Disintegration damage or at least increase the amount of shots required to get the weapon points needed to fire Range needs to be not global. Such a hard hitting unit having global death lasers and paralyzing shots that thin out swathes of enemies is beyond compare for its tier. In my own game, I had enough of these revenants in my main fleet (I unlocked them twice) that I was able to kill the Jormungandr in 2 salvos of disintegration shots... from a range that the ship couldn't retaliate from. Next up. Decaying Mummies. Mileage here varies if you use an AI type that favors attrition immune ships or high hp ships like guardians but in general these ships hit a breaking point pretty quickly when you factor there being no mummy cap on flagships (that I can tell atleast). It's not too difficult to farm out a few dire guardians, get 10+ decaying mummies and then proceed to attrition out every enemy in the game while Revenants clean up any tankier units. Suggestion for nerf: Reduce attrition damage OR increase the damage but only 1 mummy can attrition on any given planet The Factions: Gray Spire Dyson actually turns into an amusing situation for the AI. Even intensity 10 Gray Spire can't remotely defend itself against them and what ended up happening in my game was Elderlings would go to the dyson planet, farm the ships there and grow stronger. I actually had mk7 adult elderlings harass me due to the farming very early into the game which were almost impossible to kill. Any gray spire that did escape ended up suiciding to either a nearby raid engine, triggering more attacks, or into the dark spire, triggering vengenace strikes. It was not pleasant. The Dark Spire acted as you would expect. Nothing to really say here. The Dark Zenith on the other hand is definitely too weak on intensity 10. The only notable difference I could really tell compared to fighting it on 10 vs. 7 was that it got 3 Jormungandr instead of 1. This ended up actually being a buff because it meant I got that much more science from killing them. The other issue being that their planets are free to capture, and from what I can tell, they don't seem to value recapturing their old planets very much... so if I capture their 5 starting worlds but leave them 'alive' elsewhere, they'll effectively protect my new planets for free. The map screenshot is a bit hectic but hopefully you can see what I'm describing. Now that the early game has been cleared up. This is where the strategy comes into play: - unlock Revenants ASAP once or twice. - unlock Decaying Mummies if the AI type is vulnerable to attrition (most are) - do not unlock anything else unless you need to cycle rifts because you got unlucky on choices Once that's been done: - Farm every templar structure/constructor you can find using Revenants, ignore most other stuff on the planet unless there's a good reason to neuter it. Only capture planets needed to extend deepstrike range and turn them into defensive planets like the one labelled before. Try and avoid brutal lairs, sabot eyes etc. - You shouldn't need to farm Elderlings because they'll stroll into your catapults and die on their own but if you find yourself lacking, the Revenants/Mummies make very quick worth of them. After a bit of time farming/neutering I had mk5 of most of my fleet, mk5 defenses and a defensive planet beachhead a few hops away from both AI homeworlds and still at 100AIP. Last steps: - capture a 2nd collection of planets to host a 2nd fleet using the same ships that is 'safe' - destroy any remaining datacenters and 4 coprocessors This should result in still being under 200 AIP which is safe for defensive necropolis to handle. Last steps were to simply use a fleet to bash both AIs over the head at the same time and then wait until the station becomes vulnerable for the Revenants to snipe. It takes the exos far too long to cause any real damage to the choke worlds and the backdoor wormholes also get slowed down hard by bone dragons spawned from the minor necropoleis. Even if they did break through quickly and get to the phylactery it would just respawn elsewhere, buying more than enough time to finish the job. To summarize this into a TLDR version: - Revenants are disgustingly op - Decaying mummies are op* - Hacking points are too prevalent - Defensive necropolis needs adjustments, totems are weak and turrets are strong - Templar/AI need to 'go for the throat' more against necro so they don't waste so much time dying to aforementioned defenses - Flagships aren't worth transforming or even uptiering with essence because cloaking exists and they're fast - Dark Zenith are way too weak - Elderlings like a nice breakfast diet of Gray Spire I can go into more detail if needed of course and provide saves or other screenshots to clarify anything. My handle on discord is Leftclickz#7352 | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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Thank you for the detailed feedback! |
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I have applied many balance changes, a bit too numerous to easily copy/paste here, but the wiki is updated Thanks for the very informative feedback! |
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Significant buffs to the Templar and Dark Zenith, and some major nerfs to the offending Necromancer units for the next patch Hopefully, these changes really make a difference (I did nothing to the Spire Sphere as I've not been involved in its development and wouldn't know where to begin) |
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> - You shouldn't need to farm Elderlings because they'll stroll into your catapults and die on their own but if you find yourself lacking, the Revenants/Mummies make very quick worth of them. There is a new galaxy setting to make this not a viable option for getting essence, as the rampaging elderlings that attack your planets give 5% the essence they normally do. (Though some will still claim your planets of territory and join attacks against them). |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 19, 2022 3:44 pm | Mission_1 | New Issue | |
| May 19, 2022 3:44 pm | Mission_1 | File Added: aiwar2_winscreen_necro_diff10.png | |
| May 19, 2022 3:44 pm | Mission_1 | File Added: aiwar2_winmap_necro_diff10.png | |
| May 19, 2022 3:44 pm | Mission_1 | File Added: aiwar2_winfactions_necro_diff10.png | |
| May 19, 2022 4:25 pm | BadgerBadger | Assigned To | => ZeusAlmighty |
| May 19, 2022 4:25 pm | BadgerBadger | Status | new => assigned |
| May 19, 2022 4:26 pm | BadgerBadger | Note Added: 0066815 | |
| May 20, 2022 6:04 pm | ZeusAlmighty | Note Added: 0066819 | |
| May 20, 2022 7:14 pm | ZeusAlmighty | Status | assigned => requires feedback |
| May 20, 2022 7:14 pm | ZeusAlmighty | Note Added: 0066823 | |
| May 21, 2022 12:50 am | tom.prince | Note Added: 0066825 |
