View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0009563 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - New Unit Ideas - Turrets and Defenses | Sep 12, 2012 2:11 pm | Sep 14, 2012 10:09 pm | |
| Reporter | Sunshine | Assigned To | |||
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 5.079 | ||||
| Summary | 0009563: Human Beachhead | ||||
| Description | Fortress that can move through wormholes. Much more expensive than other fortresses with lower range and many more hitpoints and armor, and still extremely slow, but can be used to establish a foothold on the other side of a heavily defended wormhole to allow for breaking AI wormhole clogs late in the game when even repeated warhead strikes may not be doing the job. Mark 3 version should be immune to anything short of a 500-1000 Mk5 bombers, but be expensive along the lines of a super fortress. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | |||||
| related to | 0009487 | new | Assault Fortress |
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500-1000 core bombers is a LOT, even for the price of a superfort. You'd have to anger the AI to an incredible degree to make that happen. Are you sure that the situations you're trying to break aren't the intended use case of the nuclear warhead? |
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Nuclear warheads can't destroy mark 5 ships... Also, that's for a mark 3 beachhead/assault fortress or whatever it may end up being called, and the knowledge cost hasn't been assigned yet. It takes the knowledge of 4 planets to get to Mk3 regular fortresses, it may be the same or more for these assault fortresses, so what you're looking at is +80 (or more) AIP in addition to the cost of a super fortress, and in the case where one of these may actually be useful (given its slowness, reduced range, reduced attack power; primary use is damage soak/fortified repair) that 80 additional AIP may cause quite the problems. |
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You assume the short range matters. A unit of this power is going to free the entire planet's forces and make them charge at the fort. |
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The short range does matter. A lot. Is a bombard just as useful with 5k range as with 32k range? How about a sniper turret? Not really. Now consider a human fortress with 20 million hitpoints and a metric crapton of damage output at 53k range. The thing dies to any relatively large number of bombers, so if the wormhole on the other side is absolutely packed with enemy ships of high mark you're not going to send a mk1 human fortress through, it's a waste of money. What you *are* going to use it for is sending it in AFTER you clear the wormhole, and abusing its 53k range. What about my idea? If it's super slow (speed 4), quite short range (6000), and has relatively low damage output (4 or 5 million instead of 20 million), then it is primarily a damage sink. It is there to send through *first* and aggro the giant mob on the other side so that when your fleet goes through it does not instantly get chewed up. You're not going to use this to neuter a planet or keep it clear, because the time (both in terms of money and speed) and effort are going to make it completely inefficient on any but the most gridlocked of AI planets. Our ideas are literally opposites of each other, and yours is far more abusable than mine. Imagine how trivial taking a typical AI planet would be if you could just send a pre-built fortress through to frag everything on the map all at once. It completely goes against the concept of battlefields within battlefields; sure, you won't be able to kill the guard posts because of the radar dampening, but you'll kill everything else. My idea, instead of contradicting the concept of battlefields within battlefields is instead complementary because it creates a new battlefield centered around a very specific human installation rather than an AI guard post, and that battlefield does not indiscriminately spill over into the rest of the planet as a normal fortress would. |
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6000 range is short enough that anything it's supposed to protect gets gunned down by enemy fleetships before they aim for the fort. It's also about the blast radius of a spirecraft martyr. The battlefields within battlefields disappear the moment you send a superunit through the wormhole, any golem, champion or likely fortress will cause a total ship release. A total ship release on a planet that's fortified enough that one wormhole's forces can wipe out your whole fleet is going to end you. Relative strengths don't seem to matter, I've had a core world with 1500 ships perform a full release upon seeing my shadow cruiser so any fort-equivalent would definitely cause a full release as well. If you want a damage sink then a force field may be a better idea, that guarantees that nearby units don't take fire before the field is down. I'm not trying to defend the assault fortress idea here, just pondering about the limitations of the beachhead fort. Also you can test how much health this thing would need by comparing a fully shielded spire shadow cruiser, that thing has over 100M HP. It would be rather terrible in terms of damage output but you could see how much 100M HP are worth against the wormhole clogs you have in mind and how much the beachheads would need to work. Hm, then again isn't this the domain of the armored golem? |
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Enemy units under forcefields don't get released, but on the other hand the actual number of ships at guard posts are pretty trivial in these situations compared to the 400+ ships camping the wormhole. In relation to the armored golem, yes you could use that, but those are non-renewable resources that you may not want to risk in such a maneuver, and some games won't have golems (or spirecraft) enabled and will end up needing some kind of beachhead. I think there's some kind of logic where if an AI unit targets something, it will shoot that thing until it dies (you can test this with fortresses; send in the bombers first, and the fortress will usually focus fire on one bomber until it dies, giving other non-polycrystal hull ships time to get in and do some damage). A forcefield would be more generally useful, but that forcefield will also let you take all your ships (very slowly) on the offensive rather than just being adept at holding a position. Suppose you're invading an AI homeworld; with a forcefield, assaulting the core guard posts becomes somewhat trivial since your entire fleet is protected, but having a beachhead structure isn't going to protect your ships from multi-shot units spreading their damage around. It's there to provide a distraction initially to clear a wormhole, and then hold the wormhole and be a location to retreat and repair. Maybe give it mobile builder status and a multiplex engineering suite so it can actually toss up a pile of turrets/forcefields relatively quickly to emphasize its role more without necessarily competing with spirecraft shield bearers or armored golems? |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 12, 2012 2:11 pm | Sunshine | New Issue | |
| Sep 12, 2012 2:12 pm | KDR_11k | Relationship added | duplicate of 0009487 |
| Sep 12, 2012 2:16 pm | KDR_11k | Note Added: 0028345 | |
| Sep 14, 2012 1:16 am | Sunshine | Note Added: 0028381 | |
| Sep 14, 2012 1:34 am | Sunshine | Relationship deleted | 0009487 |
| Sep 14, 2012 1:35 am | Sunshine | Relationship added | related to 0009487 |
| Sep 14, 2012 2:38 am | KDR_11k | Note Added: 0028389 | |
| Sep 14, 2012 4:00 am | Sunshine | Note Added: 0028391 | |
| Sep 14, 2012 4:21 am | KDR_11k | Note Added: 0028392 | |
| Sep 14, 2012 10:09 pm | Sunshine | Note Added: 0028402 |
