View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0003226 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - New Features | Apr 7, 2011 9:10 pm | Jan 6, 2012 1:10 pm | |
| Reporter | Sunshine | Assigned To | |||
| Severity | feature | ||||
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 5.009 | ||||
| Summary | 0003226: Incentivizing Guerrilla Raids | ||||
| Description | As discussed in this thread: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,8529.0.html Right now, there's one giant anti-blobbing method being used through the AI Eye, but that's pretty much it for trying to get players to de-blob their forces. Barring an AI Eye, there's nothing encouraging players to act in a more guerrilla warfare style or not use a giant fleet blob. There are two thoughts I have, small incentives and big incentives. Small incentives would be something along the lines of destroying counterattack posts when the planet isn't on alert (as in, does not border your planet, has less than 50 of your fleet ships on it or less than 2 of your starships, Devourer Golem is not near) will simply not launch the counterattack. Think of it as the AI not having "primed" their response. Similar for alarm posts, they will have no chance of raising the alarm if their planet is not alerted. It would definitely need a couple other minor benefits to really ingrain this behavior in player's playstyles though. Big incentives would be the above, combined with an AIP reduction to any damage caused while a planet is not on alert, maybe by 5 AIP or so, not to be less than 5 (to prevent players from destroying all the warp gates in the galaxy for practically no AIP increase). So destroying a Warp Gate (or alarm post) on an unalerted planet would result in 5 AIP increase (and no chance of alarm), destroying the command center afterwards would be 10 AIP increase instead of 15. Think of it this way: a player loses a command station, they notice because they're given a message saying "blah blah happened!" If they lose a factory, they don't notice unless they're actively building stuff and waiting for things to happen. Same with the AI, possibly - it's "actively" using the command station and warp gates on an on-alert planet (to launch waves and the like), but on an unalerted planet, it may take less notice of what's been lost. If this were implemented, there should probably be a small change to the alert system in that alerting a planet through having ships on it keeps the alert on that specific planet up for an extended period of time (half an hour or so), so that players can't run through and neuter a planet, then leave and send in a token force to finish the job. Half an hour of alert should give the planet plenty of time to reinforce back up to a level where a 50 ship strike force is going to have problems accomplishing its task. Three more points I want to make: 1. Destroying all your command stations in this way will be impossible, because once you destroy one, all the neighboring planets go on alert. 2. For the cases where a forcefield ends up on a planet, this method will not work unless you've got infiltrators and the pro-rating 3. I'm torn between pro-rating the alert statistic (based on ship caps) for each of the ship caps, and not doing so. Not pro-rating it will make low cap ships (electric bombers, for example) much more worthwhile for raiding in a manner like this, but will make the Spire fleetships too powerful in player hands. It will also make weak, high-cap ships useless for this. If prorating happens (such that each ship gets an "alert statistic" which is how many ships it counts as when on an AI planet, normalized based on half of a cap of mk1 fighters), then certain raid-oriented ships should get a bonus to this statistic. Raiders, Teleport Raiders, Infiltrators, and probably most of the cloakers (maybe chameleons? though these are powerful enough as-is), should be able to field twice as many ships on-planet as their normal cap would allow (so, a full cap of mk1 ships instead of half a cap of mk1 would be the alert cut-off in isolation). As a method of determining where support lays, would it work to have supporters of the Strong change (which includes the AIP reduction) vote for Strong Support, and supporters of just the Weak change (which simply allows for eliminating counterattack posts, alarm posts, and other problematic AI structures like Raid Engines without retaliation) as the "inclined in favor" option? Can we see if that works, to give Chris and Keith some idea of where player opinion lies in an easily summarized format? Or (a question for Keith and Chris) would that make it problematic for some reason to compare to other suggestions for prioritizing in free DLC? | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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Going for the weak form. I don't see why the AI would consider the humans [i]less[/i] of a threat just because you took something out before they really noticed compared to taking it out while they were "paying more attention". Lore wise, I'm sure that their deaths would send out some sort of notification, regardless of if the "main" AI was giving that planet more attention or not. The "fancy stuff" I can understand that the AI would need to "arm" ahead of time, thus, putting the planet on alert would allow those effects to trigger. |
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AI will have a prioritization logic. Planets on alert have a higher priority status in the AI logic, so an occurrence on another planet may not cause such a huge spike in AI threat if it was caused by something deemed "not a threat," which is the whole point of a raid using an under-strength force. The AI may not understand the whole point of guerrilla warfare, so it may not realize what's actually going on until too late if it keeps consistently losing territory to extremely weak human forces. |
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Lore wise, the strong option makes sense like this: the destruction of stuff on non-alerted planets could be attributed to a separate, much weaker band of human remnants. The AI expects the main human force to be big enough to cause alert status and to attack only planets near their front lines. edit: perhaps a slight increase should also happen if the crippled planets eventually do go on alert - a slight boost from the AI realizing it has an under equipped planet. |
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I fear all we're really doing here is enforcing a specific playstyle and making the game easier. Making this change to counterattack posts just means most players will never see a counterattack wave again. Making this change to alarm posts means most players will never see an alarm post go off again. It's all too strong a positive for something that's simply too easy to do. Don't even get me started on how completely it would neuter raid engines. And of course the strong option just makes 2 hop jumps the defacto way to do everything. Again, the benefit is enormous, the drawbacks minimal, why would anyone ever take a system any other way? |
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Vinraith: The devs have been trying to get players to deblob for ages. Blobbing is the number 1 playstyle for this game because there's no incentive to do otherwise (barring AI Eyes). There's no positive incentives to make it a valid alternative in a good number of cases. An AI Eye enforces a specific playstyle in a very harsh way. This way, people can still blob all they want, and I think you'll find that accomplishing any of these tasks with just 50 ships would be problematic, especially starting mid-game. I mean seriously, a Raid Engine has 6 million hitpoints, and you're only allowed 50 ships to take it out. How long do you think that's going to take (barring use of Spire ships or Electric bombers)? Alarm posts have a decent attack, decent hitpoints, and are attached to guard posts or command stations. Taking one out with just 50 ships is again going to be very difficult. If this were implemented, there should probably be a small change to the alert system in that alerting a planet through having ships on it keeps the alert on that specific planet up for an extended period of time (half an hour or so), so that players can't run through and neuter a planet, then leave and send in a token force to finish the job. Half an hour of alert should give the planet plenty of time to reinforce back up to a level where a 50 ship strike force is going to have problems accomplishing its task. Edit: Three other points I want to make. 1. Destroying all your command stations in this way will be impossible, because once you destroy one, all the neighboring planets go on alert. 2. For the cases where a forcefield ends up on a planet, this method will not work unless you've got infiltrators and the pro-rating 3. I'm torn between pro-rating the alert statistic (based on ship caps) for each of the ship caps, and not doing so. Not pro-rating it will make low cap ships (electric bombers, for example) much more worthwhile for raiding in a manner like this, but will make the Spire fleetships too powerful in player hands. It will also make weak, high-cap ships useless for this. If prorating happens (such that each ship gets an "alert statistic" which is how many ships it counts as when on an AI planet, normalized based on half of a cap of mk1 fighters), then certain raid-oriented ships should get a bonus to this statistic. Raiders, Teleport Raiders, Infiltrators, and probably most of the cloakers (maybe chameleons? though these are powerful enough as-is), should be able to field twice as many ships on-planet as their normal cap would allow (so, a full cap of mk1 ships instead of half a cap of mk1 would be the alert cut-off in isolation). |
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I'm ambivalent about this. On the one hand, I like the idea of something to enforce a playstyle of using fewer ships and better tactics to accomplish things. But I just don't like the idea of shoehorning the alert mechanic in as the controlling factor. It's designed for a specific purpose, and that is to control AI reinforcement. Trying to make it match up to the goal of de-blobbing seems like we're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. From a gameplay perspective, it's just going to force a lot of arbitrary planet hopping, perhaps pointlessly. Like I mentioned in the thread, I'd rather any de-blob rules focus on what ships I have present on the planet in question, not on what I might have on the planet next-door. If you want something else to encourage deep-striking, or at least medium-range-striking, that's fine, but there's no reason it needs to be tied up in suggestions for anti-blob mechanics. Also, tying this to a straight numerical value is a bit arbitrary as well. (for one thing, it would need to take unit cap scales into account, but that's a side point) As overbearing and blatant as the AI Eye is, and as much vitriol as there is directed at it, at least it takes into account the measure of your forces vs the enemy forces. It doesn't ever expect you to take a planet with 300 ships on it with a force no greater than 50. And strict numbers are a bad measure of force power anyway. If anything, it would be better to use firepower measurements. A mixture of 50 low-cap ships like blade spawners or starships is going to be drastically more powerful than 50 MkI nanoswarms. Treating them as equal is sort of nonsensical. I do like the basic thrust of this idea though, I just think it's going to need a lot more polishing before it would be viable. |
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[i]If this were implemented, there should probably be a small change to the alert system in that alerting a planet through having ships on it keeps the alert on that specific planet up for an extended period of time (half an hour or so), so that players can't run through and neuter a planet, then leave and send in a token force to finish the job. Half an hour of alert should give the planet plenty of time to reinforce back up to a level where a 50 ship strike force is going to have problems accomplishing its task.[/i] [i]If prorating happens (such that each ship gets an "alert statistic" which is how many ships it counts as when on an AI planet, normalized based on half of a cap of mk1 fighters), then certain raid-oriented ships should get a bonus to this statistic. Raiders, Teleport Raiders, Infiltrators, and probably most of the cloakers (maybe chameleons? though these are powerful enough as-is), should be able to field twice as many ships on-planet as their normal cap would allow (so, a full cap of mk1 ships instead of half a cap of mk1 would be the alert cut-off in isolation).[/i] Given the alert changes outlined above, and taking your points about command station destruction alerting adjacent worlds (how I didn't think of that I'll never know) and force fields, I'd switch my position to tentative support. |
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System on alert and killed -> "I was overwhelmed there, need more firepower!" System not on alert -> "Meh, guess I wasn't paying attention." |
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Bob: I addressed the one about "shoehorning" this into the alert mechanic by prorating the alert cut-off by ship cap, and by ship "stealthiness" (see point 3 in my previous post). Alert being tied to what you have on the planet next door makes sense to me, because if you have a giant fleet on a certain planet, the AI is going to put all nearby planets on alert to try to prevent a breakthrough. Think of it like a battle on a contested front in a war. If your entire army breaks through the enemy lines, the enemy goes "oh crap" and starts piling in reinforcements to that area; maybe you can move fast enough to cause a ton of damage before your enemy can react, maybe you can't, but either way you've made quite an impression. If you send a small squad of commandos through the enemy lines, the enemy won't know until things start blowing up, so they'll be off guard AND the enemy force will be so small they won't commit full divisions to finding the commandos. They will likely put together some type of security force to hunt down the commandos, but it's not going to be anywhere along the lines of a full military response, if you get my meaning. That's why ship count on the surrounding planets matters, and why this should be tied to a certain cut-off for ship count. I had been considering using firepower to do the prorating, but players have no clue what the firepower of any given ships are, whereas prorating by ship cap (plus a note for "infiltration" ability or something to denote when some ships can get twice as many ships on planet without triggering alert) is much easier for players to see so they can make some quick calculations. I've always thought the alert mechanic was underused anyway, and it already exists rather than having to program a new system. Edit: I'm going to change this in the OP, but I want to change the following: For the "strong version," destroying an AIP increasing target on an unalerted planet will decrease the AIP gained by 5, to a minimum of 5. That way it applies to larger things like Command Stations, the occasional Raid Engine, Black Hole Machines and Grav Drills, but it won't let players willy-nilly run around and destroy all the warp gates in the galaxy for 1 AIP each. |
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I think you should probably add the proposed alert system changes from your response to me to the OP as well. |
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OP updated with my response to you. I'll compile a list of what I think should be the ships with the "infiltration" ability (this can be renamed) sometime in the next couple days. |
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I'm strongly in favor of something to make blobbing less appealing, but I'm not sure if these changes would really do the trick --- if it's going to be really hard to take out these posts with the 50-ship cap, won't we just wind up blobbing again? At any rate, I'll be happy to see some response to blobbing, but I have no real opinion about the best method. |
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I've said what I though in the topic linked, quickly redone, together with a though on how I would imagine this could work in a more balanced environment. My stance: Mindly in favour of the global idea, strongly against the balance currently set. Reasoning: 5 AIP is a huge bonus if it can be gained /planet. Having to do this with 1 starship in order to achieve it quickly become a huge grind. Effectivly both part of the balance are 'too strong', imo. Suggestions: 1 AIP reduction for gates 2 AIP reduction for CCs 1-2 AIP reduction for other AIP-triggers (alarms/muni-boost/etc) 1/3-1/2 decrease in stenght for counter-posts retweak 'alert-status' trigger to at the very least 2 starships (50 fleetship are soooo much more potent than a single starship) (I'm not sure about the alert-status sticking, but it cant really hurt to balance it like that at first.) If you can effectivly pull it of to clean planets with a single starship AND not get seriously annoyed with the overly extreme micro needed to pull it of, you should deserve a 5 AIP decrease imo. That however only supports my opinion about it being balanced 'too strong' currently. |
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It can't be done per planet. The change I posted above, where there's a minimum gain of 5 AIP (but a reduction of 5 AIP on anything you kill, so command stations become 10 AIP increase instead of 15) means that you can't pick off all the warp gates for no AIP, so there's that. Also, taking out one command station will put the other command stations on alert; you'll get the 5 AIP reduction on maybe one out of every 4 command stations if you're really trying for it. The whole point is to give some incentives to play with small strike teams some of the time if it would take less effort to raid a counterattack post than to actually deal with the counterattack wave. You will not end up deblobbing for most of the normal course of the game, however. Alert could probably be raised to either [100 fleetships, 4 starships, or 1 spirecraft], but I'm worried that might make things too easy, or keep it at 50 fleetships but increase to 2 starships. As I have said before, if you're concerned with this being too difficult to pull off (and why shouldn't it be difficult to pull off? You're getting something for free here with a little effort!) you can test it in game right now, to see if you can take out that counterattack post, command station, or raid engine without putting the planet on alert. The thing is, I want you to go test it, because I can do all the testing in the world and come back with conclusions, but the only way you're ever really going to get a good sense of what you're getting into is to try it yourself. |
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I'm all for raising the alert cutoffs. As noted, 1 starship, is no longer worth really being scared over. Even 2 starships aren't that big a deal, especially once you hit the mid game. However, I think a flat cutoff for fleet ships is awkward with the current state of fleet ships, as the range of [i]individual[/i] fleet ship power is quite HUGE currently. For example, what should you fear more? 100 laser gattlings, or 5 Spire maws + 5 Spire blade spawners? Clearly, the latter is more threatening (assuming all are of the same mark level). Guess which one the AI will get alerted about? Yep, the former. These extreme situations may have been quite rare in the days where the flat alert cap was set, but now, its common enough that the AI should consider the firepower of ships when determining whether to raise alert. Of course, this is also what the "alert points" mechanic suggested by Sunshine. However, I don't see why we need to introduce a whole new variable that will need to be balanced. Why not just tie it to a function of firepower, possibly with certain multipliers or modifiers for certain abilities? Yes, that still does give new variables to balance, but significantly less of them. |
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Simply because Firepower is an arbitrary statistic that players cannot see on a per-ship basis. Players are going to try to figure out where the alert cutoff is, and they're never going to be able to do it without a giant table of information sitting next to them at all times (in addition, firepower changes across mark levels, meaning you can either send in a pile of mk1 ships or a handful of mk3, which means you're making the task even MORE difficult). Ship cap is something players can see and are familiar with. It should be a relatively simple, easily understood mechanic if alert is tied to half ship cap, with one modifier to allow some ships to use full ship cap. In general, ship cap is a good approximation of the relative powers of the individual fleet ships for players. |
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@Sunshine Good point. If we are trying to encourage guerrilla warfare, and part of that depends on not raising the alert status, trying it to a number that players have a hard time getting the value for is a bad idea. I didn't think of that. Ship caps do seems like a good approximation the threat to that planet contributed by each individual fleet ship. Yes, firepower is a better approximation (as that is what is was built for), but unlike firepower, ship cap is easily visible. Though as you said, some abilities will need some modifiers on this calculation. |
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There's only two efficient ways to fight: Blobbing and Starship Commando. The first minimizes losses through superior firepower and the second relies on strong individual ships to avoid taking losses altogether. you could call blobbing 'concentration of force' - there's really no disincentive to bring as much firepower as you can to a fight, and only limited need to reserve ships for defense - between defences and the AI's fairly conservative attack philosophy you can often commit your entire mobile strength to an attack without too much worry. I like the current state of Eyes, they strike a good balance between roadblock and manageable. One big reason blobbing is viable is that there's nothing except electric AOEs and Spire photon cannons that scales up with massive blobbing, and even those are a limited effect. Well, there's heavy beam guardians and beam starships, but frankly they are both kinda poop. I'm not necessarily sure that's a bad thing, ships die fast enough in those big fights as it is, though i'd love some dramatically powerful weapons that work a lot better on blobs than on small strikegroups. Eh! basically the alert mechanic feels pretty arbitrary and overcomplicated to me. |
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I don't really like this idea in it's current form, but I have a solution for the raid size group problem: If you have selected some units and open the context menu, show a new point "These units will (not) alert the enemy". This way the player doen't have to care about how the alert system works. |
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@Burnstreet You should put that idea up as a separate mantis suggestion. It is excellent, although I don't know it needs to be hidden in the context menu. Just having the "65 ships selected" in red (or with an *) would be great. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 7, 2011 9:10 pm | Sunshine | New Issue | |
| Apr 7, 2011 9:11 pm | Sunshine | Description Updated | |
| Apr 7, 2011 9:26 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0011775 | |
| Apr 7, 2011 9:46 pm | Sunshine | Note Added: 0011776 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 12:47 am | HTL2001 | Note Added: 0011781 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 12:50 am | HTL2001 | Note Edited: 0011781 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 9:04 am | Vinraith | Note Added: 0011782 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 9:05 am | Vinraith | Note Edited: 0011782 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 9:05 am | Vinraith | Note Edited: 0011782 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 10:01 am | Sunshine | Note Added: 0011785 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 10:01 am | Sunshine | Note Edited: 0011785 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 10:38 am | Sunshine | Note Edited: 0011785 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 11:52 am | BobTheJanitor | Note Added: 0011791 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 12:26 pm | Vinraith | Note Added: 0011792 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 1:30 pm | Vinraith | Note Edited: 0011792 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 2:52 pm | KDR_11k | Note Added: 0011797 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 3:42 pm | Sunshine | Note Added: 0011798 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 3:47 pm | Sunshine | Note Edited: 0011798 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 3:48 pm | Sunshine | Description Updated | |
| Apr 8, 2011 4:17 pm | Vinraith | Note Added: 0011800 | |
| Apr 8, 2011 6:08 pm | Sunshine | Description Updated | |
| Apr 8, 2011 6:09 pm | Sunshine | Note Added: 0011803 | |
| Apr 13, 2011 12:31 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Added: 0011881 | |
| Apr 13, 2011 12:53 pm | Red Spot | Note Added: 0011882 | |
| Apr 13, 2011 8:40 pm | Sunshine | Note Added: 0011899 | |
| Apr 13, 2011 10:30 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0011900 | |
| Apr 14, 2011 9:25 am | Sunshine | Note Added: 0011902 | |
| Apr 14, 2011 8:53 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0011917 | |
| May 5, 2011 5:55 am | TheDeadlyShoe | Note Added: 0012099 | |
| May 5, 2011 5:58 am | TheDeadlyShoe | Note Edited: 0012099 | |
| May 5, 2011 6:50 am | TheDeadlyShoe | Note Edited: 0012099 | |
| May 5, 2011 8:37 am | TheDeadlyShoe | Note Edited: 0012099 | |
| Jan 5, 2012 6:36 pm | Burnstreet | Note Added: 0017995 | |
| Jan 6, 2012 1:10 pm | Hearteater | Note Added: 0017998 |
