General Category > AI War

Things to focus on when development resumes

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TechSY730:
Based on both my own experiance and feedback on the forums, I have decided to list a few big* the game issues regarding balance, flow, pacing, and "fun factor"
*big as in number of things it touches in the game, not necessarily severity, though nothing here is a quick fix

I would like to point out that although these issues are not minor, they are not big enough to really start crippling the fun of the game. 5.032 (the latest version as of this writing) is a very solid version, and the "good" of the current balance vastly outweights the bad.

Please do NOT discuss how to fix individual issues here. Post in its relevant topic or make a new topic for this.
Please do mention things that could be added.
Also, I have NOT attributed the the original person who posted the idea, nor have dug through to find the relevant topic for each of these. If these are worked on, the original author of the idea will need to be found and creditied. I am mostly just listing.

Not everything listed here (in either list) will nessecarily require any changes, but it seems that there is enough commentary by the community to at least look at every point.

Things that could feasibly be worked on before AI War becomes the focus again:

* Starship rebalance (notably, cap usefulness normalization and knowledge costs)
* Guard post rebalance (which includes core guard posts)
* Guardian rebalance
* Golem rebalance (mostly durability issues and multiplayer/multi-HW numeric scaling)
* Warhead rebalance
* Fleet ship rebalance (nearly done actually)
* Capturable rebalance (Z reserves, Z resources deposits, captive human settlements, et al)
* Harvester and econ station rebalance
* AI "stalking at wormhole" behavior review
* AI retreating behavior review
* New AI "homeworld is under attack" behaviors
* Ability to turn off hybrid hive "plot interactions"
Things that are pervasive or tricky enough that they will probably have to wait until AI War becomes the focus again:

* Armor system revision and rebalance
* Energy system revision and rebalance
* Make every fleet ship "feel" distinct
* Turret rebalance and possible system revision (due to the complexities of keeping turrets balanced for single chokepoint setups, multi-chokepoint setups, and beacheads all at the same time, this is here instead of the category above)
* Minor faction rebalance
* Spirecraft rebalance
* New hybrid hive "plot interactions" (too limited in scope to be here?)
* New "plot interactions" in general (too limited in scope to be here?)
* Add more variety in the fallen spire campaign segments (to reduce the feeling of "grind")
* Dealing with the HP and damage "inflation" (You could basically divide all damages, armor, and max HP by 100 and barely impact the game and rarely find anything low enough to start running into rounding error)
* Better rewards for "guerrilla warfare tactics" (which implies revising how AI alertness is triggered, and also better advertising that guerrilla warfare can work well)
* UI work (make it more intuitive, incorporate improvements found during UI work on AVWW, and most importantly, FIX UI BUGS!)
* Re-evaluate overall flow and pacing (broad enough subject that I can't break it down much further, but of particular interest is the mid game, its too easy to play in such a way such that the mid game becomes grindy, and ways to play such that it doesn't aren't advertised well enough)

Eternaly_Lost:
I would throw Golem Rebalance into the list. Golems from what I had read about first thought about them, were very limited superweapons. Yet far too often I find myself with a golem that goes in after the whole fleet has cleared up a system, so they don't get instant killed when they come though the wormhole rather then sending one, even if it dies, to clear the system without the fleet.

zharmad:
Which golems did you try? Super-weapons are relatively fragile, but I find them a bit overpowered except for the Armor Golem (which you can practically send to clear a plane on its own, expensive though).

I would suggest minor-faction interactions to go into the grand design of the next iteration.

Eternaly_Lost:

--- Quote from: zharmad on April 07, 2012, 07:15:26 PM ---Which golems did you try? Super-weapons are relatively fragile, but I find them a bit overpowered except for the Armor Golem (which you can practically send to clear a plane on its own, expensive though).

I would suggest minor-faction interactions to go into the grand design of the next iteration.

--- End quote ---

Armored, Botnet, Hive. I tried all three of them together because they felt like a good idea, but all three just died without killing much of anything, Hive died before it had the chance to unload along with the botnet. Armor did not even last long enough to turn around and get back to the system it came from. Botnet tends to die from just random Exo-waves unless it is carefully kept under 4 mk3 human FF at all times. They don't feel that much like superweapons without taking an insane amount of micro and second them in second. I would much rather that Golems got a lot more powerful at a lot more cost. They don't feel like what I expected of a Golem, save for the botnet's unique mechanic, I don't use them that much, and most of the ones I see is when the AI sends in several dozen of them in each Exo Wave.

I would much rather have them be powerful enough that the AI sends 1 as an Exo wave, not that the average Exo Wave has 12 to 24 of them.

_K_:
Are you playing games with like 6 homeworlds, or just against 10/10 AIs with capturing 20 systems?
Because i sure dont remember golems being weak, or seeing them in groups of over 3 in exo-waves.
In fact, in my most recent game it took me like 3 whole minutes of my entire fleet focus fire to kill an armor golem. And IIRC the AI versions of golems are actually weaker than the ones used by players.

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