My Feedback

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MatGB
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Re: My Feedback

#31 Post by MatGB »

IamZeke wrote:
MatGB wrote:You are playing on Typical or above aggression, right?

They're gated to not appear properly for ages on the easy modes.
Nope, it is on Cautious mode, now that I've checked. It's been around a while too, say turn 200 when my radar made that area visible. It spammed a lot of wimpy monsters in the area I suppose because there were no monster nests to be found. I just ran my solar hulls through the area and cleaned out about 50+ monsters. Set up a few colonies around it just for grins but nothing has happened.
Right, you're playing on Easy Mode, if you're not at Typical or above, the Outpost will do nothing for at least 1000 turns (I'm actually thinking we should instead just turn it off for lower settings, does anyone play 1,200+ turn games?) Monsters in that area are likely Krill (which turn up everywhere) and Floaters, nothing to do with the outpost. On turn 1260ish, they'll start doing something in that game.

Transcendence won't affect it (mostly because we've not gated the Victories to stop other effects, I personally want to keep playing until I'm bored even if I do "win")

Play on Aggressive (or even Maniacal), on Medium or Low starlanes, and with 25-20 systems per AI, and you should see an Outpost while you explore (and you will need to explore), at about turn 260 they'll start doing things then you have the challenge.

They were introduced to give players something to do in the later game before the AI was working properly, it's now working but is still very much a work in progress (it remains better and more of a challenge than the AI in many commercially available games I've played over the years but even so).

However, if you've got Solar Hulls, what they do won't be that much of a challenge, they're designed to get started before most players have completed the tech tree.

(seriously, you come across as a player that likes a challenge, so I'm deliberately not giving too much away because working out what they do and how to defeat them was fun for me when I started as a player, now I've rewritten the scripts several times, they're not as much a 'fun' thing as a test, whereas I don't touch the AI so doing weird things with them is always a challenge—and the content scripts are dead easy to read/edit, I was only ever formally taught how to code in BASIC and it all makes sense to me, well, mostly)

Edit: I agree with wobbly and Kassi about scouts, I want to have eyed on the entire map as soon as possible and from then on, so high end stealth with sensors is one of my priorities—and I have plans in the works to reduce planetary detection in certain ways, I just need to update my code to the current backend.
Mat Bowles

Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

IamZeke
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Re: My Feedback

#32 Post by IamZeke »

Well, at present with a couple of moves at the outset I can see s decent chunk of my local area enough to find enough planets to capture that I need all my PP going to make outposts, troop ships, and colony ships. By the time I have enough of those locked down and taken I have a couple well placed planetary sensors expanding my visible area. I can't build the action ships fast enough to take advantage of what I can see.

I suppose if you nerfed the sensors a lot or made it much higher on the tech tree that could change, but with me researching sensors at my 8th research slot and giving me a view of targets faster than I can capitalize on them then scouts are useless to me within just a few early moves.

I suppose if I set the planet population to low AND star lanes were longer that could change. The latter would make the map physically larger. It's currently not something the player can assign at the outset.

I could definitely see a bigger value for scouts if the game allowed you to communicate/negotiate with AI opposition or indigs because scouts aren't especially a threat. But at present the game is purely military conquest when it comes to others. You can't simply ignore and let indigs prosper on their own unless you completely skip their home system. They could develop defenses that make using another planet in their system a threat to any ships that enter or are built there. Being able to peacefully incorporate them into your empire or negotiating a mutual ignore policy would be a grand use for scout platforms.

As for the Experimenters I'll skip waiting another 500+ turns to see if they do anything. Too much turn waiting with late game lag to bother with. Even though I've conquered the entire map the lag still persists, if not near as bad as when there were a lot of opposition ship stacks. If you are discretely saying they eventually come out of their hole and open up some kind of access then I just need to play at a higher AI aggression setting to see them in action.

defaultuser
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Re: My Feedback

#33 Post by defaultuser »

IamZeke wrote:If you are discretely saying they eventually come out of their hole and open up some kind of access then I just need to play at a higher AI aggression setting to see them in action.
That would be a reasonable summary.

defaultuser
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Re: My Feedback

#34 Post by defaultuser »

Regarding scouts, I would much rather spend the minimal production points on those in the early game than a lot of research points on Intelligence. The quicker one can get growth and production boosts going the better. Even after their main duties of scoping the map have quieted down, scouts serve as early-warning devices at critical junctures where you don't have outposts for scanning.

IamZeke
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Re: My Feedback

#35 Post by IamZeke »

defaultuser wrote:Regarding scouts, I would much rather spend the minimal production points on those in the early game than a lot of research points on Intelligence. The quicker one can get growth and production boosts going the better. Even after their main duties of scoping the map have quieted down, scouts serve as early-warning devices at critical junctures where you don't have outposts for scanning.
Production and research points are my first 5 researches. The next three on population boosts. Then the first radar. Then a whole lot on researching robotic ships and weapons.

Most of my earliest production is on several outpost and colony ships.

But the game assigns production differently for planetary buildings, especially scanners. Very little PP is assigned to building a planetary scanner regardless of your overall production capability. My early game and endgame planetary scanners take about the same amount of time to build. I could have hundreds or even thousands of available production power points and the scanner still takes the same amount of time to build as it did when I only had several dozen PP available in early game. It really doesn't slow down my ship production to buy a few well placed planetary scanners. But adding a scout ship will suck most of my PP capability away from other necessary ships until it gets done. I build planetary scanners instead of scouts because I can still keep building the other ships I need. PP allocation is a primary reason I skip scout ships.

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Kassiopeija
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Re: My Feedback

#36 Post by Kassiopeija »

I'm with Wobbly on that; but I realize that perhaps our different evaluation is based on different map-outlays. I play on 'Low Starlane' 'Low Planet Density' 'Low Specials' & 'Low Natives' almost exclusively because I find that limitation more challenging to overcome that if everything is basically within reach right on turn1.

Note: I've also used to mod in longer Starlane-length (which is easy to do): search for a file in your installations-folder named "universe_tables.txt" and change
<1x1>
MaxStarlaneLength 120
to whatever length you desire


[you can find also alot of other intriguing stats to change to adapt universe generation to your likeing]

First off, early on Scanning Facilities aren't even available & they are twice as expensive as a Scoutship. Then, they are immobile. Scouts are better for the early exploration but they cease to be useful once a decent level of scanning has been researched (the base bonus becomes enough) and also, around that time, when you start annexing planet from the AIs - they usually already have Scanning Facs build already.

So around the time Scouts become obsolete you don't decommision them (I never understood why people go at length to do that) when in fact they can be used as decoys and add a few extra HP to attack fleets. Even not much, but given how the combat system plays out, they can still take much fire during one round if luck decides so and save an expensive ship from being onehitted by a planet on defensefocus (as an example).

This is esp. helpfull when eg. a specialised ship, such as a Sentry-Killer (that can go against a single sentry but not against 2 simultaneously) needs extra help, in that case I let it join by 1 or 2 scouts with them wasted but system cleared with the expensive attackship surviving.

And I wouldn't advise to use sensors on regular attack ships. Because, such a ship may be lost in a battle & then you have to produce it anew all the while your whole fleet lacks vision. It's better to produce attackships in full military fashion and have a specialized scoutship join this fleet - separating it before any serious battle can take place.
Because such a Scout doesn't need to have any attackvalues at all you have more space left for fuel & propulsion - meaning it has more flexibility to go to places where a normal warfleet would get stuck (on low starlane setting you usually keep your warfleets on nodes that form a chokehold or entry into your territory)

At that point you never loose Scouts again, and you only need one for any direction you'd like to expand, so I usually only build 3 or 4 and this is less cost/micro than dealing with Scanning Facilities (I still build these sometimes but only when I can't get a Scout to fly into certain places, like when no Starlanes are available or enemy military presence too strong)

A scoutship also can bring in additional functionality than any Scanning Facility - eg. Distortion Modular; or as extra HP polster (if you base it on a Bioadaptive sporting lots of hitpoint mods, such a ship may then join any attackfleet permanently) or as fast Interceptor against unguarded Troopships if you give it a single weapon.
Rule of thumb is that you basically place all one-time-needed functionality on a ship designed as defensively as possible, to guarantee its survivability.
As the techtree unlocks more & more combined specialized designs are made possible for some exceptional situations. They're not required to win, not at all, but they're fun to play with.

defaultuser
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Re: My Feedback

#37 Post by defaultuser »

I don't buy IamZeke's reasoning. It's critical to scope out your surroundings as early as possible. Just missing out on an easy native world for a couple of turns would negate much of the PP saved. Now if you play with no monsters or something, you could explore with outpost ships and whatnot.

But hey, the great thing is that there are many ways to play. I'll stick to my ways for the most part, but I try to listen to other points of view as well.

IamZeke
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Re: My Feedback

#38 Post by IamZeke »

With a high planet population game you have more than enough suitable planets and indig races that can be exploited than you have PP to build the necessary colony ships and troop ships to take them once you have a few planetary scanners. Scouts to show you a longer distance away is just showing you what you can't readily exploit.

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Kassiopeija
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Re: My Feedback

#39 Post by Kassiopeija »

Well to have an extended outside view of your surroundings can quite positively influence strategic decisions - you may find an outside world with a needed growthspecial (in order to unlock previous uninhabitable worlds) or a Monsternest or Ancient Ruins, so someone might deem it worthwhile to construct a specialized fleet in order to occupy & defend such a place outside your standard influence.

You also encounter the enemy faster, or get at least a glimpse from where their major forces are to be expected. Sometimes its strategically wise to not colonize right between 2 such opponents - and let instead them fight it out while instead expanding into safe backland territory.

IamZeke
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Re: My Feedback

#40 Post by IamZeke »

Kassiopeija wrote:Well to have an extended outside view of your surroundings can quite positively influence strategic decisions - you may find an outside world with a needed growthspecial (in order to unlock previous uninhabitable worlds) or a Monsternest or Ancient Ruins, so someone might deem it worthwhile to construct a specialized fleet in order to occupy & defend such a place outside your standard influence.

You also encounter the enemy faster, or get at least a glimpse from where their major forces are to be expected. Sometimes its strategically wise to not colonize right between 2 such opponents - and let instead them fight it out while instead expanding into safe backland territory.
Nothing wrong with your logic there, just the premise that it needs to be a scout.

With the basic research investment into sensors, which you would need to make a decent scout anyway, then your planetary sensors will do exactly what you want from the safety of planets you own. They won't be thumped by a random monster and have to be replaced either.

Research sensors, send colony/outpost/troop ships out behind your warships to snag new territory, and build a planetary sensor at the far edges of your territory.

The allocation of PP will allow you to keep creating new warships, while still building those planetary sensors. Building a scout diverts the PP to building that instead of warships.

It all boils down to the setting at start. If you play a sparse planet population then you might not have enough colonies or outposts at your edges to build an effective planetary sensor net. That's a case of where a scout fleet might be handy. I personally don't like games with too many empty systems because you can't connect the production web easily that way. Since I want no more than 2-4 jumps between colonies or outposts, for reasons of production, then scouts have no real value to me because I can push a wider sensor web out using the planetary sensors. Plus I have no diverted production or ship loss.

Unarmed scouts may have far more use in a game where encounters aren't automatically hostile. If you could make nice with an opposition AI then they could have a good value. Diplomacy or trade could definitely boost the value of scouts. But this isn't that kind of game. All the AI's hate you. It's only a matter to the degree of aggression. It's only their fear of loss that will keep them deciding if they will attack. But if any warship of theirs meets your unarmed scout, or any monster type, they will automatically attack. I just played a game where I found the opposition AI was my exact same race. The laws of randomness in the game make that a possibility, but you have to admit that seems pretty silly to be at war with your own race automatically without choice. Every opposition AI is going to try to beat you militarily if they can and scouts are lowest hanging fruit. They are a niche use item for very limited map types. You are far better served with pushing muscle out and using the planetary sensor net instead in normal or abundant planetary populations.

IamZeke
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Re: My Feedback

#41 Post by IamZeke »

Wow, the lag is getting really appalling as I add more AI opponents and monsters. Last game was only a 100 system game with medium monsters and 3 AI opponents. By turn 300 the lag became oppressive and just settled for a tech victory at turn 330. I was just at the point where I could tank rush the opposition and blow them all out, but the lag started taking actual minutes between turns. It's not like I have a cheap system either. A 3ghz i7, 12 gigs of Corsair registered RAM, and a fat new $150 video card make playing just about every other pc game easy.

So I get to thinking about it and realize some of the factors going on. It's all the decisions for all those ship stacks. The AI is too invested in the numbers game. It has to meet the firepower of the opposition no matter the size and is limited by how much it can stuff in one ship. So it just makes more ships. Then it tries to cover the star lanes in deep depth. It does realize about choke points but then tries to cover every intersection as well. The game, both players and AI, create too many ships. There was one game where I was cruising around using 50 stacks of solar hulls because that was the amount needed to win space battles without loss. The AI was stacking them 20 high with the solar ships and 100 high with the asteroid ships. It took 50 solars to knock them out clean. Kind of silly using those numbers.

Hulls are too cheap and firepower/armor too limited and expensive. Plus there is no big incentive to recycle old hulls and hull designs. Easier just to ramp up production further and build more hulls. It's just a numbers game to match opposition firepower.

Recycling hulls should cut production time somehow.

Hulls need to be even more expensive, slots for firepower and armor need to be easier and cheaper and far more common on earlier hull designs. If both players and the AI's gear more toward bigger stronger ships earlier they may not be so inclined to make ridiculous stack numbers that must all be computed for every turn. And the AI doesn't need to defend that far in depth. A strategic reserve is fine, but there is no need for a reserve at the next intersection behind the reserve intersection. As you add more starlanes to the start settings this only exacerbates this defense in deep depth habit.

The game just needs far less ships at one time to make decisions on. The game needs bigger and badder ships earlier on and far less of them.

There are too many small ship hulls in the game. All these small slot hulls are about useless, especially since all players can use all hull types. Maybe if you limited certain races from accessing certain hull types then all these research trees would make more sense. Make the lithic races commit to the asteroid hulls more. Robotic races should favor robot hulls. Organic races using organic hulls. And then offer larger slot hull types earlier.

Include more inner slots too. I was looking to make a very fast, long range, and very stealthy outpost ship. That's at least 4 inner slots. Only the big late game hulls with all those useless exterior slots and the slow camo asteroid hull qualify. To be honestly fast you need a fast hull already and then add extra drives if you want to get it up over 150 speed to outrun a lot of the competition.

Too many small and weak hull types out there. Go bigger with slots. Make the biggest limiter the cost of each empty hull.

OK, rant over on that.


I'm still kind of stuck on the disappointing assortment you get from ancient ruins. Right now it is death ray 1, multispectral shield, neutronium extractor, krill spawner (still not seeing much value in that), and the dragon tooth ship. 4 good ones, a dud, and the chance of nothing that becomes vastly more common as the game goes on.

Do something first about the value of the krill spawner to make it really desirable. It might as well be a "you got nothing this time" kind of choice. The other techs are quite good and need no adjustment. The dragon tooth ship really is a good all around choice that makes it hard to suggest other ship types, though I will make a stab at the idea. As far as techs go you might consider a one turn percentage bonus on research. Say you have 300 research points going. For one turn make it 600 by doubling research for one turn. No need to decide what is yet another good tech choice and no need to give a long term benefit. Don't like the idea of doubling research points? So just pick a percentage you can live with. No one will complain they got some amount of research done faster. Though if you absolutely want a tech then cyborg troops is a pretty darn good one to add to the mix.

As for the ships, my ideas are based off two monster types. The Warden is really solid as a system defense monitor. Those sentries are punks not worth getting as a freebee. The other is the Maintenance ship if done right. A slow moving platform with massive defense, enough stealth to avoid battle, enough firepower to kill a light scout or colonizer, has a high sensor range like a Dragon Tooth has, and has the ability to heal ships like the Logistic ship can makes for an awesome ship to locate at an empty choke point. Battle fleets won't need to run back to a populated system to repair and then run back to defend the empty choke point. The battle fleet could stay in place and be repaired. A good defensive ship to compliment the things the Dragon Tooth doesn't do. Empty system choke points suck and this ship solves that without being an offensive weapon.

That Panopticon sensor boost bonus would also be a decent ruins gift. Some kind of power generator would be nice too.

So once it's late game and research gifts are useless then there would still be Maintenance ships, Wardens, Dragon Teeth, Neutronium Extractors, power stations, and Panopticons to be found. Even with more "sorry, nothing for you" results it would be worthwhile to chase distant uncovered ruins.

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MatGB
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Re: My Feedback

#42 Post by MatGB »

I don't think I disagree with a single thing you say here. I especially like the slow moving maintenance ship as a bonus idea, I shall ponder on that one.

If anyone (including you) wants to put up a pull request for extra ruin unlocks I'll be very happy to review them. For what it's worth, we sometimes use ruin unlocks to test 'proof of concept' things, the krill spawner being the most obvious, Geoff coded it up to see if a monster generating part was even viable—note it subsequently gained a fairly substantial stealth bonus so it's not completely useless.

And yeah, I've been coming to the same conclusion regarding hulls and slots, have some poor quality big hulls earlier then a) the heavy asteroid hull isn't as unbalanced as it's got competition and b) you can research tech to improve the hulls rather than unlock new ones.

As and when Influence is introduced as a mechanic (hopefully next cycle) this is definitely a direction I want to work on moving down I think, have the bigger hulls unlockable a lot earlier but nowhere near as good then have them refittable over time. Also imrpove the ship scrapping system and/or tie it to Influence in some way.
Mat Bowles

Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

IamZeke
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Re: My Feedback

#43 Post by IamZeke »

Yeah, those basic hulls at the beginning with more slots would work nicely. Raise the PP cost of all hulls and then keep the bolt-on costs low. This lets the AI achieve firepower parity without piling up massive stacks. Maybe give 50% of the PP value for scrapping and see if there is a way to encourage AI to scrap and replace without forcing it as mandatory. Some kind of cost benefit algorithm that gives a favorable rating to lower ship stack counts. The higher its ship stacks get the more it feels it needs to just get bigger ships instead. As for needing to cover every last starlane junction in their territory, that's just silly. Too any ship stacks going unused instead of on the front lines, that the game still has to make a decision on every turn. Proximity to the opposition should draw their fleets closer.

I'll keep a strong reserve somewhere central to cover a breakthrough, but I sure don't try filling every junction point that is inside my territory. I want most of my battle fleet ships where they count, blocking or attacking. Far fewer decisions necessary to run my fleets. The AI needs that to overcome lag.

Being able to upgrade existing ships would be awesome too. Anything that slows new hulls being built all the time should help with the lag problem.

I was really kind of surprised I hit on the Maintenance ship idea. I was thinking about possible ruins gift ship types and I was consistently only coming up with something just bigger than a Dragon Tooth. No originality at all. The DT is already a decent ship for it's size range and the time it first comes available in the ruins. It's a good scout too. Once you take away scouts and battle fleet ideas there isn't much left. A colonizer type seemed like a weak idea and then I felt I had covered all the basic types that players used. That's when I looked to the monster ships and saw promise in the Warden as-is and the Maintenance ship is it could be. Neither idea seemed to throw game balance too far out of whack either. Maybe others can come up with something truly original, but these ideas were just laying there waiting to be noticed. Perhaps if new elements are added to the game later, like trade or diplomacy, then some truly fresh ideas for ruins gift ship types will occur, but but just those two will triple the possibilities without a lot of effort.

As for the krill spawner tech, that also goes back to the dearth of internal slots. Internal slots are just too valuable real estate to waste on it. It might help to actually state what the stealth bonus is in the Pedia. Maybe have it spawn extra tasty krill that really draws krakens from a long distance. Then it would be great to use as a stealth weapon to keep the opposition busy with kraken attacks. Something like a 10 starlane range.

I could perhaps see making a scout style stealth ship with bioterror weapons and a long range krill spawner to really tie the opposition into knots.

Definitely consider the cyborg troop research skill, the Panopticon, and some kind of unique power generator. All are of parity to the the current selection or even just a little weaker, but they would still be popular enough.

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Vezzra
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Re: My Feedback

#44 Post by Vezzra »

Two remarks:

First, the problem isn't so much that ships are too cheap, but that resource output increases too fast/too much. The current boni granted by techs, buildings, specials are simply far too high. You start with a PP output of ~10, which ramps up to several K in the later stages of the game. That is insane and impossible to balance. This issue has already been pointed out repeatedly in the past, we just didn't get around to redo all those boni, as that's one hell of a task. But it has to be done at some point.

Second, regarding how the AI places its fleets, contrary to the impression you apparently got, the AI currently has no idea of topology and can't identify chokepoints (AFAIK). It just assigns some kind of "score" to each system to decide how much defensive fleet power to station there. Which leads to what you have observed, ship stacks at a lot of systems where they aren't really needed, or don't make much sense. It also leads to the problem of fleets of troop ships sitting at systems where you can easily pick them off, instead of more protected areas.

The perks of an unfinished game... ;)

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MatGB
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Re: My Feedback

#45 Post by MatGB »

Vezzra wrote: First, the problem isn't so much that ships are too cheap, but that resource output increases too fast/too much. The current boni granted by techs, buildings, specials are simply far too high. You start with a PP output of ~10, which ramps up to several K in the later stages of the game. That is insane and impossible to balance. This issue has already been pointed out repeatedly in the past, we just didn't get around to redo all those boni, as that's one hell of a task. But it has to be done at some point.
I'm basically thinking that, once Influence is in the game at roughly the same time we should half all the bonuses (so that it's 0.1, or 1 per 10 population), once we've taken fleet upkeep out of production it'll be far easier to balance things better, and I would really like it to be each extra planet is a real bonus once it's gotten going and not, as currently, another production centre churning out stuff.

But, until we've sorted fleet upkeep into Influence, I think we need the big bonuses (although I do plan to tone a few more down at some point post Release regardless).
Mat Bowles

Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

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