Organic & As Hull rebalance Jan 2014

[Dilvish]

This is following on a recent discussion in the feedback forum but I thought this part deserved a dedicated thread. I also just started another thread about some new Hull characteristics that I think would be fun and assist with balance. Here I'll focus on some initial rebalancing of Organics and Asteroids, which I think could be started right away, regardless of those other ideas. Trying to balance everything in one big swoop seems to be too much for anyone to take on, so I think we should start with those earlier in the tech tree & gradually move forward (not necessarily waiting to be fully content with the hulls up to that point, but just to help break the task up into manageable chunks). Also, because I don't have a ton of time to put into adjusting the AI for all this, I think it would work best if we make changes in smaller steps even when we have agreed on a bigger change being the expected target. That will also give us more time to assess if/how the other hull characteristics idea is helping with balance.

A set of target changes that Yandonman and I have previously discussed and both supported would be as follows:

• Increase Domesticated mega-fauna tech to: RP: 30 (was 12), research time: 3 (was 2)
• Increase Organic hull tech to: RP: 24 (was 8 ), research time: 5 (was 2)
• Increase construction cost for Orbital Incubator to 50 PP (was 30), reduce construction time to 5 (was 10).
• Remove Heavy Asteroid ship hull from unlock set of Asteroid Hulls tech (which stays at 50 RP / 3 turns)
• Add a new Tech "Heavy Asteroid Hulls" stemming from Asteroid Hulls, costing 40 RP / 8 turns
• Double the construction cost of Heavy Asteroid ship hulls

I think Yandonman also was preferring these tech costs to eventually go up a bit more. Also, in response to some of Matt's concerns about organic hulls I'm thinking their construction cost should be increased also.

To get the ball rolling, I went ahead and just now put in some changes to partially implement this --

• Increased Domesticated mega-fauna tech to: RP: 18 (was 12), research time: 3 (was 2)
• Increased Organic hull tech to: RP: 16 (was 8 ), research time: 5 (was 2)
• Increased construction cost for Orbital Incubator to 40 PP (was 30), reduced construction time to 8 (was 10).
• Increased the construction cost of Organic ship hulls by ~40%.
• Removed Heavy Asteroid ship hull from unlock set of Asteroid Hulls tech (which stays at 50 RP / 3 turns)
• Add a new Tech "Heavy Asteroid Hulls" stemming from Asteroid Hulls, costing 40 RP / 8 turns
• Increased the construction cost of Heavy Asteroid ship hulls by 20%

I just briefly tested out these changes with some bare-boned AI adjustments & it seems the AI can live with them fine.

I also think I like the idea of reducing the Organic Hull to two external slots, but that would probably take a fair bit more AI adjustment, let's see how things go with this initial set of changes & perhaps those mentioned in my other thread linked above.

[MatGB]

This approach works for me, my earlier comments to the feedback thread are here and had a lot of detail, some of which you've already implemented.

Definitely like decreasing time but increasing costs of incubators—having done that, an AI tweak that we've discussed before would be to reduce the number of shipyards they build with them, finding a 5 planet system full of Chato, each of which has a shipyard and an incubator, is a bit daft and unnecessary, for example.

What I'd like to see is for colonising to not generally need incubators for cost viability, either the costs of the standard hulls need to be brought down significantly for balance or we need a "merchant hull" internal slot only for colonising, currently you build incubators just to get cheap colony ships out of a species, that shouldn't be needed or even a viable choice.

Increasing the cost of organics is good, that might be enough but decreasing their slots (and then looking at their cost again) is also viable, partially as with them having three slots, all other organic line three slot hulls are basically pointless which is a shame. I'd like to see them made more viable in one of the ways I suggested under point 2 in the linked thread.

I'll adjust my spreadsheet at some point overnight (and update my SVN files to play a game or two), but if we're adjusting up the cheapest hulls a bit (which I definitely approve) I do also think we need to adjust down the standard, robotic, gravitic & titanic a fair bit, they're far too expensive compared to all other hull types in such a way that using them is just a horrible idea.

[ccla]

I think that these are great changes and like the way that this discussion is going.

One disagreement, though: as I put in an earlier post, I think given that the large asteroid hull is at least comparable in power to the sentient hull, one reasonable guidline for how hard it should be to get would be that it should be comparable to the difficulty to get for sentient hull.

Sentient hull is at the top of the tech tree for organic hulls, so assuming that you already have the basic organic hull, and assuming that you have the bio prerequisites (which is a big assumption, because these are actually pretty expensive), how much tech is this?

Static multicellular: 20 RP
Symbiotic: 20 RP
Endomorphic: 90 RP
Protoplasmic: 90 RP
Endosymbiotic: 144 RP
Ravenous: 250 RP
Bio Adaptive: 250 RP
Sentient: 400 RP

These add up to about 1.3kRP. This to me also passes "gut check"--when I originally suggested locking large asteroid behind a separate tech, I was actually thinking around 1.5 kRP, 40 RP just to me seems negligible IMO.

So in conclusion, if you ask me, large asteroid should require 1.5kRP I think to fix the issue with hull balance (or make bio easier to get?).

[MatGB]

I disagree with this though, the different lines have different advantages and disadvantages, asteroid hulls are slooooow, organic line hulls aren't, and I'll pit my Ravenous, even my Endo, designs up against Heavy Asteroid no problems.

I do, personally, think Sentient Hull is underpowered compared to other endpoint hulls, it's definitely no match for the Solar Hull and the endpoint asteroid hull (scattered?) is awesome. I'd rather buff up the sentient than move big roks further down the tree than they now are.

This is partially because, even with this change, in my first test game with it, organic hulls and their speed are a match for standard asteroid hulls, heavies give the AIs a chance, but they're slow and suit a more defensive approach.

Basically, you have a point, but the solution is to improve the Sentient hull to make it able to at least have a chance against Fractal, Quantum and Solar hulls, not neuter asteroids further, as that gives significant further advantage to organic rush, and that's still incredibly powerful.

[ccla]

I just reviewed the asteroid tech tree in order to come up with a list of more specific suggestions for what I would do if it were up to me:

• Add the "Large Asteroid Hull" tech as stated earlier, but up the research cost to the 1.0 kRP to 1.5 kRP range
• Requre the "Large Asteroid Hull" tech as a prerequisite for the "Scattered Asteroid Hull" tech
• Increase the cost of "Scattered Asteroid Hull" to the 1.0 kRP to 1.5 kRP range

To restate my motivation for my original post which launched the thread referred to above, after playing the game a few times, I was struck by how easy it was to chomp through the asteroid tech tree, and how these techs to a large extent negated the value of the other hulls up until quantum energy.

Thanks!

[MatGB]

Oh, the asteroid tech tree is dead easy to get through, but...

You can win and defeat all AIs on a large map with just organic/endomorphic/ravenous hulls, and each prereq tech they give you has other advantages in game that benefit you anyway, plus they're faster allowing you to overwhelm an AI using asteroids.

I've basically perfected this zerg rush strategy and it suits my playstyle, but it's far too good once you get the hang of it, I can see asteroids are powerful, but so what? We want good hulls, if we nerf heavy asteroids too early, you have to nerf basic organic hulls a LOT more than we have currently, as they can so easily swarm past any AI that hasn't got some decent heavy hull ships to stop you. As we've been typing, I've just lost a fleet to a few heavy asteroid hulls, I should have withdrawn them and waited for the reinforcements to come up.

As it is, by the time the AI has moved forward a bit with the asteroids, my organic replacements are built and racing towards them, I'm going to win that fight within a few turns despite the massive lossed because speed wins.

Yes, asteroids are powerful.

But, I can, if I want, get fractal hulls into battle by turn 100. They eat asteroids for lunch. Actually, they eat everything for lunch, including black kraken. They're easy to use, and easy to plan for, thus the AI can actually be programmed to be Not Awful, which is kinda important in a game like this. Heavy Asteroids aren't OTT compared to other hull lines., they probably were before this nerf, but even then organics were better.

[Vezzra]

IIRC there has been some consensus in the past that the entire hull lines need a major overhaul, not just some adjustments. However, it seems no one really got around to dive into that probably quite challenging and arduous task, so I guess I understand the need to at least do something about the current problem with a lot of hulls being vastly over/underpowered, and just limited number of them actually viable to use.

But I hope that's only intended as a solution for the time being, because a gradual approach like that can't solve the problem that the hull lines as a whole are quite messed up?

[Dilvish]

But I hope that's only intended as a solution for the time being, because a gradual approach like that can't solve the problem that the hull lines as a whole are quite messed up?

Sure, it's just that so much time had passed without anything significant happening, I decided to take on the limited bit I was willing to take on - no one let my little efforts here get in the way of someone spearheading a more ambitious rebalance.

[Dilvish]

ok well it seems like it didn't take too much of a push to get the ball rolling again on this. I think I need to focus my available FO time better, so I'm hoping that Yandonman and/or Matt can take the lead on figuring out the further next step changes, and I'll try to keep the AI in sync. For further rounds of tech/hull/part changes, if we could have details settled on by, say, a Thursday, I would try to have corresponding changes to the AI by Monday in time for the next round of weekly builds.

[Dilvish]

As a sidenote:

an AI tweak that we've discussed before would be to reduce the number of shipyards they build with them, finding a 5 planet system full of Chato, each of which has a shipyard and an incubator, is a bit daft and unnecessary, for example.

Ya, that's not really an intended behavior. I'm pretty sure it started when I added some code to try ensuring that the best pilot planets had shipyards, but the cutoff for 'best' wound up really set at the middle. I was also trying to have them build Drydocks for repairing, which I figured should probably be more common than the just 2-shipyards-per-species that I had previously been having them build. The end effect so far as you've seen was for them to starte over-building shipyards but not building any Drydocks at all. The whole repair thing had needed more coding anyway and I put off debugging this, but I just put in some changes that should help a fair bit with the shipyards at least.

I also tweaked the AI's Energy shipyard building (which has had code for a while) & will try to get them some actual Fractal Hull Designs later today.

[MatGB]

I also tweaked the AI's Energy shipyard building (which has had code for a while) & will try to get them some actual Fractal Hull Designs later today.

I never did get around to uploading my savegames for that race to fractal setup I did, possibly not helped by Windows Update rebooting my system before notepad had saved the techlist I did.

For Fractals, pretty much always 50/50 guns vs armour, with one in 5 built having a sensor array in place of a gun until such time as all theatres have a couple with sensors, is my normal approach, did another playthrough yesterday using them with my not-finished-yet bad-at-everything species and when I saw their homeworld had a blue star went for it. Nasty, walked the floor with everyone really easily.

Specifically, I noticed if I want to build troop ships, quantum hulls are ludicrously cheap, even for taking an independent Kobuntura homeworld, the cheapest way to do it is a Quantum with 3 troop pods. Given how powerful those thing are the costs basically need to go up-happy to have them cheaper than other hulls due to their other restrictions, but nowhere near that much cheaper.