View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0009450 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - New Features | Sep 2, 2012 11:51 am | Nov 11, 2012 10:49 am | |
| Reporter | Wingflier | Assigned To | |||
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 5.076 | ||||
| Summary | 0009450: New AI Plot - Super Guardians | ||||
| Description | Created from the discussion in this thread: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,11577.0.html Basically, many players are unhappy with the current mindless blobbing mechanics that the game revolves around. Many players want mechanics that force to them think critically and adapt to every battlefield situation, instead of dealing with every planet the exact same way. AI Eyes were the intended solution for this, but ironically planets with these structures seem to have just devolved into their own mindless raid tactics, followed by blob tactics. Super Guardians seem to be a well-liked solution, added as an optional AI plot for players that want an extra and unique challenge, that keeps the game dynamic and fresh for every encounter. The main purpose of Super Guardians is to force players to adapt to every battle on enemy planets differently. Taking a huge blob into an enemy planet with Super Guardians on it is basically a recipe for disaster, and could very well cause you to lose the game. Super Guardians achieve this anti-mindless/anti-blobbing technique by each having a very unique counter that the player has to execute in a certain way. Failing to execute the counter correctly will typically result in disaster, and a large portion of your army. In theory, one of the best ways of dealing with Super Guardians is to approach them one at a time, instead of activating them all at once. To this end, the player is encouraged to strike at a planet with a smaller force, taking out each Super Guardian threat individually, rather than waking them all up at once and causing mass havoc. It goes without saying then, that Super Guardians will have a similar "activation" threshold as the current Guardians do: Namely, if the player force on the planet is overwhelming, they all come online. I've made a list of 8 ideal Super Guardians. The list is nowhere near extensive or final, it's just an IDEA of the kinds of things they would need to do to fulfill their purpose. I'd love to hear some community ideas as well :P Singularity Guardian: Creates a localized black hole around itself, pulling every closeby enemy ship towards it, and killing them instantly. Medium health, weapon does not work on ships with gravity immunity. Intended Counter: Long Range units such as Frigates or Snipers, or ships with gravity immunity. Anything that gets too close dies. Riot Control Guardian: Has a massive bonus against many Fleet Ships (Light, Medium, Artillery, Polycrystal, Close-Combat), and kills these ships in a medium-large range at a massive rate. Medium Health. Intended Counter: Starships without those Hull Types (such as Flagships, Zenith Starships, and Leech Starships) and bonus ship types without those Hull Types. Howitzer Guardian: If activated, shoots large plasma balls at massive range, killing large portions of your fleet. Low health with Medium Hull Type. Intended Counter: DO NOT activate it until you are close. Send a small squadron of Fighters to activate it and kill it quickly. Dark Beacon Guardian: When activated, makes a beeline to a player-controlled planet. Once it makes it there, begins rapidly spawning units as an AI Eye would until it is killed. High health, slow moving. Intended Counter: Kill it before it gets to your planet... Attritioner Guardian: Similar to the Attritioner Spirecraft, when activated, deals moderate damage to any player-controlled ship on the current planet. The Attritioner Guardian is unique in that it will avoid player ships at all cost. It runs to the edge of the galaxy and kites allied ships the best that it can. Intended Counter: Fast or long-range ships to catch it and kill it after it's activated. Regenerator Guardian: Similar to the Regenerator Golem. Has massive health to constantly resurrect fallen allied units. However, the Regenerator Guardian differs from its cousin in that, like the Zenith Mirror, all ships get a 10x bonus against it. It also has a Polycrystal hull type, meaning many ships already get a large bonus against it. Intended Counter: Trying to kill enemy ships after this thing has been activated is pointless, it will just keep resurrecting them. Instead you have to focus it instead with everything you have. Assassin Guardian: Invisible Guardian, primarily utilizes powerful hit-and-run tactics. Uncloaks at short range to wreak a huge swath of death amongst your units, then cloaks and runs away. Very low health, can be killed from a range. Uncloaks very briefly once every 20 seconds, so the player can see it if he's paying attention. Intended Counter: Watch out for these, then de-cloak them and kill them from a range or with inexpensive units. Anti-Entrenchment Guardian: Sort of like a modern-day Astro Train, once the Anti-Entrenchment Guardian is activated, it flies straight to a player-controlled planet and starts wrecking all the defenses there on purpose. It is fast and has small Radar Dampening Area. It has low health but since it can take out most defenses one at a time, you need to kill it with fast Fleet Ships or it will wreck your base. It does huge damage to 1 target every few seconds, making it ideal against Turrets and Fortresses. It has Polycrystal armor to give it Immunity to Fortresses. Intended Counter: Kill it quickly once you wake it or chase it with fast units before it kills all your precious defenses! Replicant Guardian: Makes a perfect enemy Replica of any ship that comes within its range. Therefore, bringing your whole army against this ship will give the AI a replication of your entire army. Intended Counter: Bring only the necessary forces to kill the Guardian, or kill it from a range. Royal Vanguardian: Sports a huge and powerful mobile shield, which, when activated, serves as a defensive safehaven for enemy units. Enemy units will attempt to hide under the Vanguardian's shield as it moves slowly through your base :P Intended Counter: Take out all the other enemy forces on the planet before activating this Guardian; it's fairly useless on its own. If it's activated, use Bombers and especially Plasma Siege Starships. Runaway Messenger Guardian: Extremely slow but with massive health; once activated, the Runaway Messenger Guardian will retreat to the closest AI Homeworld. Every 30 seconds after activation, it will launch a Counter-Attack Wave against a random allied planet. The wave it launches is pretty much exactly the same as Counter-Attack Post wave, and is based on the level of the Guardian and the current AIP. Intended Counter: After you activate it, kill it quickly... Once again, I'll reiterate that these ideas are just conceptual. I'd love to hear some of your ideas as well. Thanks for reading. Edit: OH, I should add that Super Guardians would have MK levels as well. The MK level and number of Super Guardians you would be facing on any given planet would be based on 4 things: Game difficulty, Planet level, AI Progress, and AI Plot level (1 out of 10). On smaller planets, you may only be facing 1 or 2 Super Guardians, on higher level planets with a large AIP, you may be facing up to 9 or 10. The higher Mark Levels of these things would be deadly, and would generally only be seen if the AI Plot was ridiculously high, or your AIP was ridiculously high. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | |||||
| related to | 0009088 | considering | Dynamic Defence Guardians |
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Hmm, after thinking about this for a while, I don't see how these guys are going to do much better than the Eyes, as the core idea of the Eye is the same - thing with a specific counter that wrecks you if you don't do it. Once you know the counter, what else is there to think about? Though I'll throw in an idea for a Super EMP Guardian that would do planetwide EMP pulses of X duration every Y seconds. Try X=3 and Y=6, for example. |
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The difference with the Super Guardians is that the counter changes for every situation. Yes, if you're just facing 1 Guardian, the counters are the same, but if you're facing 1 Guardian and a crapload of fleet ships (say you awaken an entire enemy planet), things would get really tricky and difficult quickly. If you're facing multiple different types of Guardians at once (say a Singularity Guardian, a Riot Control Guardian, and a Howitzer Guardian), you would deal with that in a VASTLY different way than you'd deal with an Eye. In fact, pretty much any combination of Guardians must be dealt in a vastly different way. In other words, there is an easy counter to each individual Super Guardian, but when you throw in other factors (like other Super Guardians, AI Eyes, Ion Cannons, Fleet Ships, Regular Guardians, Starships, and whatever else), countering them is much more difficult and thought-provoking than countering an Eye. |
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But if the players do as you say and try to kill the Guardians off one by one, then how are they going to combine with each other, exactly? I mean, I see your point, but the eyes do this same thing right now. The problem is, the 80 or something percent of the time that an actually challenging situation doesn't present itself, they still force you to go through the motions, and it's just frustrating at that point. |
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I think it is a bit easy to accidentally awaken multiple guardians, just like it is now. And certain setups are very interesting. Look, a super fort with a howitzer guardian next to it... Having certain Super guardians sending out tachyon pulses out might also be interesting. Perhaps even over multiple AI planets. Or even have them damage cloaked units. |
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@Minotaar, I don't think you realize how easy it is to wake up a planet :P I mean I accidentally wake things up all the time. |
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Well, I want to be able to make a deliberate decision with these kinds of threats and not have it be accidental. Calculating firepower that you can bring safely is not a remotely feasible thing to do, and once they're free, they're free forever. With things like the Eye or Raid Engine, you at least have a strict condition, if you break it, you asked for it (or blame honeycombs :P) Either it's always on or you have to really trigger it. It's the same thing as with alarm posts: 50% might as well be 100%, because you have to be prepared anyway. If you're okay with giant overpowered ships wrecking your face because you misclicked somewhere, then please have fun with that. :) I'm more the kind of person that would rip the Eyes from their game if allowed to and never play with anything like them anymore. I completely agree with Faulty Logic's post over in the forum thread in that "strategic blobbing" is absolutely fine because you have to choose between offense or defense. So I don't think attempts at punishing that kind of thing are where we need to go. But that particular discussion would be better suited for the forum thread, really. |
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I'm vaguely against this. Right now the biggest hard-counter in the game are fortresses and polycrystal which the devs have said they do not really like and would like to do something about. (In my recollection from a while ago.) This is adding more hard-counters to the game. What if every system had a fortress so you had to use bombers (their hard-counter) and had no other option? |
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I like these, with the exception of the Assassin guardian. Some of these should patrol around AI space as well. I also disagree that the game "revolves" around mindless blobbing. For other guardians that require personal attention, see the newly linked issue: Dynamic Defence Guardians. |
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"Well, I want to be able to make a deliberate decision with these kinds of threats and not have it be accidental. Calculating firepower that you can bring safely is not a remotely feasible thing to do, and once they're free, they're free forever." That's the idea Minotaar, I think you're missing the point of this whole change. Real battle is not formulaic; you cannot predict every factor nor manipulate every aspect. Sometimes things happen that you don't expect and that you have no control over, but that you have to adapt to in order to succeed. Some people like the game where they have control over pretty much every aspect - basically the game in its current formulaic form. But make no mistake, the game's current state does not represent the hectic and unpredictable state of a real battlefield; the Super Guardians would. Some of us like being challenged and pushed to our limit in dynamic and ever-changing situations, during which we're forced to adapt to survive. I could understand if you don't like that too, but then you can just leave the AI Plot off. |
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Added some new Guardian ideas. "This is adding more hard-counters to the game. What if every system had a fortress so you had to use bombers (their hard-counter) and had no other option?" Actually none of the Super Guardian ideas have "Hard Counters", most of them have several different paths of attack. For example, the Riot Control Guardian only has bonuses against 5 different kinds of ships (Light, Medium, Artillery, Polycrystal, Close-Combat). Anything outside of that is strong against it, so there's tons of different options in the game. Against the Howitzer Guardian, you can use Fighters, or any other fast ship; or you can even use a slow ship as long as you make sure not to activate it before you get close. All the Super Guardians can be dealt with in several different ways. Granted, the amount of ways is fairly limited...but that's the whole point of this AI Plot - that blobbing can't solve everything. If you like blobbing, then don't use it :P |
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I'd just like to point out that guardians were added to fill [b]this very role[/b]. So no, I reject this idea. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 2, 2012 11:51 am | Wingflier | New Issue | |
| Sep 2, 2012 11:57 am | Wingflier | Description Updated | |
| Sep 2, 2012 12:02 pm | Wingflier | Description Updated | |
| Sep 2, 2012 12:07 pm | Wingflier | Description Updated | |
| Sep 2, 2012 12:20 pm | Wingflier | Description Updated | |
| Sep 2, 2012 12:55 pm | Minotaar | Note Added: 0028135 | |
| Sep 2, 2012 1:45 pm | Wingflier | Note Added: 0028138 | |
| Sep 2, 2012 2:07 pm | Minotaar | Note Added: 0028139 | |
| Sep 2, 2012 2:15 pm | Soyweiser | Note Added: 0028140 | |
| Sep 2, 2012 3:42 pm | Wingflier | Note Added: 0028142 | |
| Sep 3, 2012 5:07 pm | Minotaar | Note Added: 0028165 | |
| Sep 3, 2012 7:56 pm | Dazio | Note Added: 0028166 | |
| Sep 3, 2012 8:37 pm | Faulty Logic | Note Added: 0028167 | |
| Sep 3, 2012 8:37 pm | Faulty Logic | Relationship added | related to 0009088 |
| Sep 4, 2012 12:33 pm | Wingflier | Note Added: 0028191 | |
| Sep 4, 2012 12:47 pm | Wingflier | Note Added: 0028192 | |
| Sep 4, 2012 12:47 pm | Wingflier | Description Updated | |
| Sep 4, 2012 12:52 pm | Wingflier | Note Edited: 0028192 | |
| Nov 11, 2012 10:49 am | Draco18s | Note Added: 0028935 |
