Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

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MatGB
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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#121 Post by MatGB »

Scara wrote:I still have this "Shield Bug Ship" design in the producible list.
Was questioning myself for some time now:
Is this actually a functioning ship design, or is it to demonstrate a not yet solved bug?
It's meant as a functioning ship, but I've never been happy with either the design or the name—I've been playing around with shielded ships more since I put the costs change in, and a fleet of organics with two guns and some zortrium plus a defence grid can be quite effective, but one gun is pointless, might as well put in fuel and build more of them.
The producible list update, having the buildings vanish from the list when queued is nice!
Agreed, if it could be done to detect any colony building being built then that'd be perfect—actually, that should be easier than I first though, just give them all a tag and exclude the tag from the build.

I've definitely seen the AI using MSshields post costs change, so it should be happening.

Re Scattered and cost, I put the build cost up a lot and reduced structure, I dislike ships that take ages, even if they are powerful, we'll see, it's better than it was.
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Kassiopeija
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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#122 Post by Kassiopeija »

BlackUnicornPress wrote: Playing with these settings, I pretty much have to race for deathrays ( few fights with anything until the galaxy is over run) and just build the cheapest ships I can. Big expensive ships are a waste because 6 bloated juggernaughts tear through even 20 to 50 ship fleets of them within a couple of turns.
You can counter them by placing alot of decoys in your fleets which will take up the hits from them. Small Asteroid hull or Spatial hull are good because they're cheap, either leave them blank or put some armour on them until they cross, at least, 30 hp, so each ship can take up two hits, 2*Rock Armour Plating will do. The latter approach is a little bit more costly to produce but the benefit is that some ships will only see a single hit and survive and repair back, decreasing your total loss.

It's a bit cheesy but the AI is coded to use decoys as well, although I've seen this only stationairy.

Speaking of decoys, does the Scattered Asteroid shield bonus still add up to the Mini Asteroids shield bonus? I remember I once build these together and put only armour on the Mini Asteroids so they were rather cheap to build and had alot of shields and could basically soak in all damage from the main ship....

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Vezzra
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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#123 Post by Vezzra »

Scara wrote:Maybe is 8 a bit to good for these mighty ships (+5 shields) so, IMHO maybe lift it to 10.
+5 shields is indeed a bit much, it has been suggested to at least reduce that bonus.

Scara
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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#124 Post by Scara »

build 2015-06-06.8cb623c:
My last game Starlane/Planets low, Specials medium, Monster/Natives high, 3 AI maniacal in 250 Systems as Human
was dedicated the SM Hull.
So I tried to relay on static multicellular hull in battle and it went quite well.
I researched better armour and they were able to keep back the robocruiser, in larger amounts even asteroids.
I skipped building (great) asteroid hulls and robocruiser, directly going to quantum energy ships.
SM Hulls are fast researched and have better boni than the organic hull and more slots,
making them a good alternative to robocruiser in early game. Later there are organic hull available with more slots,
but for these you need to build addons to your orbital incubator. SM Hulls are found to be useful,
but I'm honest not having used the organic line very much so far for their weak structure.
That's why I don't really know were in the research tree it was placed before, but it certainly is good to get now.
I like the feature of some of the organic hulls to grow in structure over time, but I think the effect is way to low.
I like the idea that it starts out with 5 as 'it's born'.
But adding only another 15 structure over 30 turns is something I won't be waiting for.
The research proceeds much faster (new armour, weapons) and if they grow,
the structure change should raise IMHO to levels of medium spacemonsters something like ~+100-150 in maybe 30-50 Turns,
to keep them useful even later on.
I haven't made use of decoys or empty ships in combat fleets yet, although I have seen this behaviour by AI Players regularly.
I already thought it might be a kind of defensive strategy, but I haven't thought of using them in offensive fleets as well.

Some other things I thought about:
- I don't exactly know if there are any Specials that stack in their boni? Example, if you have two Computer Moons?
Maybe add an info that only one is requiered in the supply group.
- Close Stargate after use and return to preverious focus function
- Building costs and time of Terraforming and Gaiatransformation depending on the size of the world it's been produced.
- Terraforming and Gaiatransformation micromanagemant -> Autoimprove planets on tech research?
Or implement a productionqueue adder for the Objects Table, where you can already easily sort planet enviroments.
I mentioned a productionqueue adder for the objects table once, with the example of genetic bank.
I was wrong with that, genetic bank needs only build once and it's good explained in Pedia.

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Sloth
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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#125 Post by Sloth »

Scara wrote:
But adding only another 15 structure over 30 turns is something I won't be waiting for.
The research proceeds much faster (new armour, weapons) and if they grow,
the structure change should raise IMHO to levels of medium spacemonsters something like ~+100-150 in maybe 30-50 Turns,
to keep them useful even later on.
I agree that 15 extra structure is a little bit low, but 100-150 in 30-50 Turns would make them too powerful (without rebalancing them completely). Maybe there could be a tech that unlocks further growth?
Scara wrote:- Terraforming and Gaiatransformation micromanagemant -> Autoimprove planets on tech research?
Or implement a productionqueue adder for the Objects Table, where you can already easily sort planet enviroments.
This has been discussed multiple times before, but hasn't been really solved yet. An Autoimprove Feature would destroy the diversity of the universe, all the planets would become the same save for size, which is imho boring. The idea was to make Terraforming and Gaiatransformation so expensive that they are only rarely worth the effort.
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MatGB
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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#126 Post by MatGB »

I'd be happy to consider further ideas for organic growth as a buff (remember it was first introduced as a penalty as at the time they were the over-dominant hull type), but not before 0.4.5 as it'll take time to balance and test, I've always thought it was a cool idea and did increase the growth rate of some of the larger hulls when I did the big patch last summer (when introduced it was .2 per turn for all of them, now the mid point hulls get .5 per turn and the Sentient gets 1 per turn which I'm, mostly, happy with at the moment).

Definitely want to do something with terraforming and the growth specials, especially the ones that make hostile worlds habitable, at the moment they're too easy to research making terraforming fairly pointless for the most part, but again not going to happen for the next release.

Given we now have colony buildings, I'd also like to reassess the idea of remote terraforming on outposts &c, but that's currently only a vague desire to look at it.

For what it's worth, I tend to only terraform poor worlds unless they're huge, in which case gaia transform can be a worthy investment in the long game.
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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#127 Post by Scara »

Kassiopeija wrote: Speaking of decoys, does the Scattered Asteroid shield bonus still add up to the Mini Asteroids shield bonus? I remember I once build these together and put only armour on the Mini Asteroids so they were rather cheap to build and had alot of shields and could basically soak in all damage from the main ship....
I tried to put Mini Asteroid together with Scattered Asteroids, but it didn't seem as if the Miniasteroids provided any further shield bonus or shield bonus at all when in a fleet without scatted astros.

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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#128 Post by Scara »

Sloth wrote:
Scara wrote:
But adding only another 15 structure over 30 turns is something I won't be waiting for.
The research proceeds much faster (new armour, weapons) and if they grow,
the structure change should raise IMHO to levels of medium spacemonsters something like ~+100-150 in maybe 30-50 Turns,
to keep them useful even later on.
I agree that 15 extra structure is a little bit low, but 100-150 in 30-50 Turns would make them too powerful (without rebalancing them completely). Maybe there could be a tech that unlocks further growth?
Nice idea, maybe something like "Cyberhormons", "Biotechnological Expansion Technology" or "Power Nursery" ??? ;-)
Sloth wrote:
Scara wrote:- Terraforming and Gaiatransformation micromanagemant -> Autoimprove planets on tech research?
Or implement a productionqueue adder for the Objects Table, where you can already easily sort planet enviroments.
This has been discussed multiple times before, but hasn't been really solved yet. An Autoimprove Feature would destroy the diversity of the universe, all the planets would become the same save for size, which is imho boring. The idea was to make Terraforming and Gaiatransformation so expensive that they are only rarely worth the effort.
I'm not really to fond of automatising to much, but look at it that way. Normally we play with all kinds of species, that's why the planets don't end up all being the same after all, but almost as rich as the species variety.
I thought of it as something that comes from the population of a planet itself, naturally the inhabitants want it cosy on the planet they inhabit. So as soon as the technology gets available start to change their Environment in a maybe much slower manner, than producing terraforming from 'above', towards a better environment. 20 Turns per environmental step towards good? And keep Gaia Transformation as a luxus you can build on all the worlds that already have reached the optimal enviroment for their inhabitants. Oh, a planets population was wiped out for some reason and you colonise with a different species and the process of environmental changes starts again if necessary. That was how I thought of it might be in future.
MatGB wrote: For what it's worth, I tend to only terraform poor worlds unless they're huge, in which case gaia transform can be a worthy investment in the long game.
Sorry don't understand what you mean. Gaia Transform can only be applied to good environment planets, so you always need to terrafom to good first no matter what size.
I choose the planets for terraform or gaia transform in the objects table, if the expected production output equals the actual, they need to improve to get further growth.

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MatGB
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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#129 Post by MatGB »

Scara wrote:
MatGB wrote: For what it's worth, I tend to only terraform poor worlds unless they're huge, in which case gaia transform can be a worthy investment in the long game.
Sorry don't understand what you mean. Gaia Transform can only be applied to good environment planets, so you always need to terrafom to good first no matter what size.
Note the unless there, small worlds I rarely terraform, medium and large worlds get done if they're poor, sometimes large and any huge worlds get done up to good if I think the game's going to last long enough to make the investment worth it, but I rarely take worlds up to good unless they're both large/huge and it's a long game, at which point gaia transform is worth it.
I choose the planets for terraform or gaia transform in the objects table, if the expected production output equals the actual, they need to improve to get further growth.
Yup, the new multicolum feature and actual sorting by numeric value features Geoff's added recently are incredibly helpful. I use similar techniques to decide where my Megaliths are going, temporarily moving my capital to every Volp Uglush or Gysache homeworld conquered is always worth it ;-)
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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#130 Post by Scara »

There were two other issues already mentioned, how is progress with them?
Both of them have some overlapping in common ;-)
First:
overlap1.jpg
overlap1.jpg (20.06 KiB) Viewed 923 times
It isn't that serious as you can still shift over it with the mouse an can read the location.
overlap2.jpg
overlap2.jpg (15.9 KiB) Viewed 923 times
The problem here I think is that the flighttime isn't elsewhere expressed.
As solution it would be great to have an additional 'in * turns' at the End of this:
inturns.jpg
inturns.jpg (5.2 KiB) Viewed 923 times

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MatGB
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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#131 Post by MatGB »

They're UI issues, sorry, above my paygrade (ie, I can't even read the code that creates those effects let alone try to fix them)
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Dilvish
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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#132 Post by Dilvish »

Scara wrote:The problem here I think is that the flighttime isn't elsewhere expressed.
As solution it would be great to have an additional 'in * turns' at the End of this:
It's on my todo list to add some info on this to the Pedia: manually edit your config.xml file, search for "<show-fleet-eta>" and change the value from a "0" (off) to a "1" (on). Perhaps this should default to on for 0.4.5?
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MatGB
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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#133 Post by MatGB »

Dilvish wrote:
Scara wrote:The problem here I think is that the flighttime isn't elsewhere expressed.
As solution it would be great to have an additional 'in * turns' at the End of this:
It's on my todo list to add some info on this to the Pedia: manually edit your config.xml file, search for "<show-fleet-eta>" and change the value from a "0" (off) to a "1" (on). Perhaps this should default to on for 0.4.5?
I'd forgotten the option was there, yes please

*goes to reboot current game*
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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#134 Post by Scara »

Dilvish wrote:It's on my todo list to add some info on this to the Pedia: manually edit your config.xml file, search for "<show-fleet-eta>" and change the value from a "0" (off) to a "1" (on). Perhaps this should default to on for 0.4.5?
Works great, looks fine at the first glace! Now that was fast :-), Nice! I would say default on!

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Vezzra
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Re: Game balance in 0.4.4 release—feedback needed

#135 Post by Vezzra »

Dilvish wrote:Perhaps this should default to on for 0.4.5?
Yes.

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