Viral shredders number limiting mechanic broke?

[keith.lamothe]

Flatline, on the subject of no-other-worthwhile-spirecraft, have you tried much with the implosion artillery?  They can be great against the mega-huge stuff in the later exos.

[Flatline]

Flatline, on the subject of no-other-worthwhile-spirecraft, have you tried much with the implosion artillery?  They can be great against the mega-huge stuff in the later exos.

I didn't say there aren't any "worthwhile-spirecraft" other than the martyr, just imo the other spirecraft don't compare to the power of the martyr (Again it maybe the way we use them and also martyrs power is obvious, where as other isn't necessarily so).

I just checked our latest game and the player that deals (and specializes) with our defenses doesn't have any Implosion Artillery Spirecraft and personally I can't say I've ever noticed the impact of them.

I maybe should explain.. The "we", I keep refering too... It's a group of 3 players (Known each other for.. well.. 30+ years).. 1 player deals with all our defenses on planets, 1 player is the attacker player, and I am generally the tactics & 2nd attacker player.

Thinking about it, maybe martys don't seem so overpowered on single player, due to smaller warp gate attacks. I don't suppose you get many waves of 3000+ ships on single player (And at times 2 very close together, seeing 7k ships incoming isn't unusual with 3 players)
Hmmmm...  

[Nalgas]

Thinking about it, maybe martys don't seem so overpowered on single player, due to smaller warp gate attacks. I don't suppose you get many waves of 3000+ ships on single player (And at times 2 very close together, seeing 7k ships incoming isn't unusual with 3 players)
Hmmmm...  

"Hmmmm..." indeed.  That's a good point.  I'm used to usually playing with 4-6 players.  Depending on what settings you're using, once you're past the early parts of the game thousands of ships at a time isn't just not unusual, it's...well, very usual.  A few hundred loose threat ships that might be considered a problem in single player are just background noise at that point.

The thing is, with Martyrs, the difficulty of those doesn't really scale up like it does without them.  Without them, 2000 ships compared to 200 ships is a big frickin' deal in terms of what you need to stop them.  If you have Martyrs handy, they're pretty much identical: park a mk1 Martyr in front of it, and the problem goes away.

They do a million damage to every ship in an enormous range, and you get roughly 40 hojillion of them on an 80-planet map.  When they're hitting hundreds or thousands of ships each, that's hundreds of millions or even billions of damage from each one.  A lot of that's overkill, but still...at that point, who even cares about the tractor beams or anything?  They make lots of ships very dead.

I don't use them as my only defense, but just using them for the particularly ugly situations and/or when I'm feeling lazy, I don't come close to running out, and they're good enough that I don't bother with much else other than things like the occasional implosion artillery when the situation calls for it.  "Throw Martyrs at it until it goes away" is a surprisingly effective and practical solution to many problems, and it often doesn't take more than one or two.

[Ranakastrasz]

How about giving them a damage cap, like electric shuttles have? The more untis they try to bust, the less effective they are? How about adding an additional Ion-component to the damage burst, dealing significantly higher damage (lower base damage tho) to units at or below their tier?

[keith.lamothe]

How about giving them a damage cap, like electric shuttles have?

Right, I was thinking of that too (think I even said it... anyway).

So yea, I can see why there's conflicting feedback here: some players are primarily single-player, some are speaking from MP experience.

Well, we can add some form or another of mechanic that makes the martyr not unlimited-aoe.  Frankly in my experience a ship that can hit an infinite number of targets for some flat amount of damage is not only inherently unbalanced, but inherently impossible to balance unless the game has pretty strict "how many units can fit on the head of a pin?" rules.  AIW most definitively does not have strict rules on that point

Anyway, yea, the potential for asymptotically high total damage output is kind of a bad thing.  So we can do something like the electric shuttle but let it hit everything (just with attenuated damage).

On the other hand, back to the MP question: in MP the exos (including from Spirecraft-Hard) have their point-budgets multiplied by the number of players.  Please refresh my memory: would the advantage provided by Spirecraft also scale upward with the number of players?  Otherwise you'd be stuck with the same number of martyrs (and whatever else) that one player would have, but you'd be getting hammered by much larger exos.  I as the developer would find that funny, not sure if you would

[Ranakastrasz]

How about giving them a damage cap, like electric shuttles have?

Right, I was thinking of that too (think I even said it... anyway).

So yea, I can see why there's conflicting feedback here: some players are primarily single-player, some are speaking from MP experience.

Well, we can add some form or another of mechanic that makes the martyr not unlimited-aoe.  Frankly in my experience a ship that can hit an infinite number of targets for some flat amount of damage is not only inherently unbalanced, but inherently impossible to balance unless the game has pretty strict "how many units can fit on the head of a pin?" rules.  AIW most definitively does not have strict rules on that point

Anyway, yea, the potential for asymptotically high total damage output is kind of a bad thing.  So we can do something like the electric shuttle but let it hit everything (just with attenuated damage).

On the other hand, back to the MP question: in MP the exos (including from Spirecraft-Hard) have their point-budgets multiplied by the number of players.  Please refresh my memory: would the advantage provided by Spirecraft also scale upward with the number of players?  Otherwise you'd be stuck with the same number of martyrs (and whatever else) that one player would have, but you'd be getting hammered by much larger exos.  I as the developer would find that funny, not sure if you would

Too true. Do asteroid counts scale up with more players? I think they ought to.

[Zeba]

Flatline, on the subject of no-other-worthwhile-spirecraft, have you tried much with the implosion artillery?  They can be great against the mega-huge stuff in the later exos.

Implosion arty are my system nueter of choice. Nothing kills the wormhole guardposts as quickly as they do.

[Flatline]

Trying a single player game to see what, if any, difference there are. 8.0 Hard Non-Technologist, Hard Golem (For exo-waves), Advance Hybrids (To spice it up), only 30 systems as didn't want a long game.
Tried the Imposion Artillery Spirecraft (Had 8 of them) Took out an Artillery Golem before it even fired.
Still using Martyrs like water. Asteriod counts are same as 3 player game as far as I can tell (Haven't used 1/3rd of the availabe asteriods so far)

Be able to give a more balanced opinion after I've finished.

[Commiesalami]

Huh ... Ive noticed that there a lot more asteroids in my 2-player games than in my solo games.  Differing between 3-4 per system in solo, with 5-8+ (one time there was over a dozen!) in a 2-player game. 

Theoretically you could test this with a 8-planet start and scout out till you see the first batch of asteroids.  (Im at work and can't test this now)

[keith.lamothe]

Just checked and the quantity of asteroids seeded pays no attention to the number of players.  The rationale is that in MP the group takes somewhat more planets than usual anyway.  And it appears the quantity of asteroids is already quite ample

[keith.lamothe]

Just keeping a grocery list of probably-need-to changes from this thread:

- Make viral shredder growth-slowing calculations factor all shredders under that player's control.
- Increase severity of viral shredder growth-slowing by, say, 20%.

- Cut martyr-per-asteroid production.  The only clean way to do that right now is to make the ones that currently produce 2 to produce 1, and the ones that currently produce 4 to produce 2.
- Put some kind of cap on the total damage a martyr blast can do so that a mkI doesn't wind up doing billions upon billions of damage.

- Revisit balance of other spirecraft to make sure there's some reason to build them.

[Hearteater]

perhaps have the scaling much harsher if the player doesn't actually have the bonus ship type for shredders (i.e. they got them from a reserve).

Still thinking of making this change as well?  Seemed like a good idea.

[keith.lamothe]

perhaps have the scaling much harsher if the player doesn't actually have the bonus ship type for shredders (i.e. they got them from a reserve).

Still thinking of making this change as well?  Seemed like a good idea.

Waffling on it.  I do like it, but seems like it would lead to confusion and bug reports when players can't figure out why their shredders are doing so much more poorly in this game as opposed to the one they just played, etc.

I would be more likely to simply have reserves just not give shredders, since they're pretty unique in the whole "getting a handful of them is almost as good as getting the bonus ship type itself" thing.

[keith.lamothe]

On the other hand, what about leaving the martyr the starkly annihiliatory thing it is but cutting it so that each asteroid produces exactly 1 martyr of the corresponding mark (taking away the option to build 2x as many of the next lower mark)?

Too much? Too little?

[Mayjori]

On the other hand, what about leaving the martyr the starkly annihiliatory thing it is but cutting it so that each asteroid produces exactly 1 martyr of the corresponding mark (taking away the option to build 2x as many of the next lower mark)?

Too much? Too little?

just right imo