| Description | Part of the reason a low AIP strategy is so effective compared to many planets is that going from mk 1 to mk 2 with the same AIP of ships is about an 80% increase in difficulty, even with the mk modifier to wave size applied. It is a little over double difficulty if only triangle ships are used because mk 2 bombers and frigates are more than twice as powerful as mk 1. This causes a huge breakpoint where you either stay under mk 2 level, or setup a bunch of planets so you can quickly punch it up to just before mk 3 or just before mk 4 so you can handle the huge jump in difficulty from going mk 2. If the goal is to punish the player harshly for getting to the mk 2 breakpoint and thus incentivize staying minimal progress OR breaking through it to just before mk 4 as rapidly as possible after blowing up all counterposts while at floor AIP, this is fine. If the goal is more for ship spawn count minimizing, I suggest the step 7 mk level wave size modifiers be changed to the following:
Step 7 Mark Level Multipliers
Mk1 1.5
Mk2 .9
Mk3 .7
Mk4 .6
Mk5 .5
This will overall increase wave sizes early game and have a small decrease late game compared to now per difficulty setting, but the mk1 count being increased should still be well handleable and this layout will give a much more smoothe difficulty transition through the mk level AIP breaks rather than there being a huge difference for daring to go mk 2. The mk 4 and mk 5 breakpoints will still see significant power jumps, but that is a very high quantity of planets anyway that you'll probably only reach by using missiles or trying to capture all the planets. This should help even out the parity between a low AIP deepstriking strategy and a high AIP many-planet strategy, mainly by making a low/floor AIP strategy more difficult to defend. Right now it is trivial to defend against waves of 200 mk 1 ships in a low AIP strategy at difficulty 8. It will still be trivial to defend with floor AIP barring a change to that, but it will make it more viable to go over the mk1 to mk 2 breakpoint in a low-but-not-floor game instead of the very binary choice that exists now between low/floor or just before mk 4 (where only one option is really good anyway).
There might be some grumbling about having to notch down difficulty by people using low/floor AIP strategies exclusively, but this change would go a long way to make AIP not be the most precious resource in game like it is now. Without a change to the floor or amount of data centers though, this is only a setup for making the planet count choice non-binary should you not have enough data centers to properly floor your AIP. |
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