Yet another person's beta feedback

from Sins Forums

So, I spent the last day playing the new beta of Entrenchment, and it's time for some feedback.  This is going to be all over the place, so bear with me.  For reference, I was playing a custom map (single star, lots of choke points), 6-player, 5 AIs on Random Hard, large fleets, fast everything.  I usually wipe the floor with the AIs on that map; once you hit a point where you own 1/3rd the map and have a noticeable tech advantage, it's just mopup time.  Last night, though, I only had 1/3rd the map and STILL had a horrendous time advancing.  A few reasons for this:

 

1> The AIs are far more of a threat than they used to be; they'd build up some massive battle fleets, and they used them more intelligently than they used to.  It used to be that I could maintain four 4-cap battle fleets, each of which was an even match for the best fleet an enemy would throw at me; last night, I had one battle that required three of those four fleets AND a starbase just to get the upper hand.  (It completely broke that enemy in the process.)  Part of it was that the AI wouldn't retreat nearly as often as they used to, but they also built their fleets more intelligently (fewer dinky frigates, more heavy cruisers and carriers).  Also, they seemed to focus fire far better than previously; my capships were taking damage one at a time, very quickly, instead of the slow uniform decrease they used to have.

2> Starbases are insanely good now thanks to the multitargeting bank change; fully upgraded, they can wipe fleets of frigates in short order.  The AI seemed to know this, and would sacrifice swarms of frigates to take out starbases under construction (or that hadn't been heavily upgraded yet).  If I didn't have a support fleet there to help the starbase, it'd die.  (On the flip side, that support fleet's capships would gain massive XP.)  In several battles, my key tactic was to bring a ship along to construct a starbase right as I warped in; by the time we were heavily engaged it'd be done constructing, and the balance of power would swing heavily in my direction.  Likewise, if the enemy had a starbase in their own systems (which they almost always did), I'd need a large fleet to neutralize it, far more than pre-patch.

3> I didn't see ANY mines being used by the AI.  They might just be a little too expensive now.  700 credits and some minerals, for six stationary mines?  With the new minesweeping changes, I'm not sure it's worth it at even half that price, especially since there's now MORE micromanagement involved (at least for the Vasari).

4> The game was very stable for me, only crashing once when I misclicked on a Kostura Cannon's targeting.

5> Pirates are a joke now.  Between the starbase upgrades and the bank improvements on capships, a swarm of 30-40 pirate frigates/cruisers just doesn't pose much threat.  Additionally, their systems aren't any tougher to take than they used to be; pirate systems should begin with 150 mines and some kind of starbase.

6> The Phase Stabilizers on the Vasari starbases didn't always seem to work.  I had one on the base I'd built at the central star, and the game didn't seem to register it; any ships warping to that star would travel to one of my nearby planets and then follow a line in, as if the stabilizer wasn't there.

3,243 views 10 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

 i dont know, the game seemed to be more choppy for me, and the visari starbase didnt deploy the first time i wanted to build but it still took the money. i was pissed. it even said it was in the process of building the sb but did nothing.  

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

I can confirm what mspilot said, as this has happend to me too. After this it seemed to trigger all kinds of wierd vassari starbase shinanigans

Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

I believe one of the devs posted that only TEC AI is using mines right now, deliberately until they get the mine detection code better tested.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

A Starbase fully upgraded with weapons and armor with a respectively sized support fleet is extremely difficult to take down. I had 5 caps, one a level 10 (with the gauss cannon ability) and the rest between level 5 and 8 Two of them were the ones that had shield restore ability. So far they had been able to to defeat anything that came at them on their own.

 

I decided to push my luck and attack one of the enemy homeworlds with just those 5 caps. The battle didn't go so well. The enemy star base had nearly 20,000HP and planety of shielding to keep me from having any chance at destroying it, so I tried retreating, Lets just say that didn't go so well, they had a cap that kept disabling one of my hyperdrives, so that ship was a goner, plus a phase destablizer that made them all charge up 700% slower. I only made it out of there with 2 caps out of 5, and I retreated as soon as i got there almost. I was pleased that my level 10 survived, but he escaped with a mere 2,000/5,000 HP  I reevaluated the situation and came back with 10 caps, and 25 heavy cruisers, and 20 LRMs. That eventually won me the system. Lost all but 4 of the heavy cruisers and didn't lose any caps that time.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

I don't understand how we are suppose to test this beta 2, if Vasari and Advent aren't going to make mines. That means us TEC players cant tell how effective scouts are/will be to remove /detect.

Plus no one will know for sure how the game will eventually run on their rig if the cause of most of the crashes and lockups are not there. Im sure the devs will impement the mines soon enough, but we are not testing the FULL game and ALL the varitables.

On another note..still don't see the ai building superweapons......am I the only one?

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

This is in reference to the micromanagement of the Vasari mine ships.....

Shift+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+

click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+

*BREATH*

click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+click+

forces you to use a keyboard, but that was my solution to laying swarms of mines and moving on.

Either case, that should solve that problem you are having.

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

The game was ie buggie for me i played 1 star agesnt 1 normal ai on far side of system medium star cluster.

the game started off like it should , this is in sp mode. Game seemed to be laggy like in a worse case online game where the screen would jog out. strange, beta 1 was fine. all but in mp mode. I belive i was playing verasi i think it was the starbase that has the move ablility, I think as well that all star bases should beable to move around the gravity well, and not just sit there like the tec starbase does so you have even a stronger defence on a planet and you can plant your star base in bewteen phase lines and know that your planet is going to be safe untill backup arrives.

So appart from having a game that should have run like a gem play like it was massivy laggy but still ran with everything appearing to funtion well. i had no problem defeating just 1 ai but as other people have tryed even more ai's i shall attempt this and see how my stratergy works.

As for mines well people are right theres no much going on in ways of mines. but i did find the ai did build mines on some planets i dont think it fased me that much , i really didnt even notice when i hit a world with mines.

Building up tec level up, allow build of skrmishers, and shraken's < not proper word for them i think its something close not taking much notice of ships names, but there further down the chain on wepon tech. appart from building a average fleet of those say 10 skermishers , 20 sherakens, 10 cargo fleets that hold attacking fleets only. and 1 cap ship, seemd to wipe out enemys starbases easily.

but thats my blurb anyone else?.

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top

I only played for one night so far, but I like the mine changes for the vasari (haven't tried advent or TEC yet).  Actually, I find the vasari minelaying LESS micro and chaotic than it used to be.  You tell it where to stick a mine field, it sticks a minefield there.  Like one guy said, if you want to blow a ton of money at once, you just hold down shift and say "put minefield here, and here, and here, and here" and it will do it.  Other than an auto-minelaying mode, doesn't seem like it can get much better than that, and I like that it lays a field of mines vs. dropping them out one at a time like it did before.

As to starbases, I can say that with a midgame fleet composed of 5 TEC torpedo frigates, and the rest bomber strikecraft, I blew the smithereens out of a 15,000 hit point Advent starbase in maybe 30 seconds, and it didn't even have a chance to fire a shot back.  But if it makes any difference to the analysis, he did not have any repair bays, nor did he have any flak or fighters (but honestly, flak or fighters wouldn't have done anything in that short a period of time, and I'm guessing repair wouldn't have either).

Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top

One thing I really miss playing Vasari is to have, say, two mutually exclusive options that could be enabled with autocast for a minelayer:

1)Auto lay mines near phase lanes

2) Auto lay mines near planetary bombardment range

Sure, the current system works with excessive clickage and allows you to place the mines exactly where you want to, but the ability to give decent (though not as good as if you micromanaged it) orders for repeating minelaying patterns, which would stay on and thus replace used mines with new fields so long as the minelayer lived would make them much more of a strategic weapon than a tactic one once you control enough space to be able to afford them in large numbers.

Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Peter, reply 9
One thing I really miss playing Vasari is to have, say, two mutually exclusive options that could be enabled with autocast for a minelayer
End of Peter's quote

There needs to be SOME sort of automation.  I should be able to tell a ship "fortify this system" and have it do so without user micromanagement.  It'd seem fairly straightforward to create a minelaying "rally point" for a system, where any mines laid in the system will be placed in a cloud near that point.  All you'd need to do then is just click the Mine ability how ever many times you want, and the ship will take care of the placement.

The bigger problem with the Vasari minelayer, to me, is that it's just such a pathetic ship otherwise.  It's like the colony ship; you make it back at your home system and only send it out when you're ready to lay down a huge minefield; anything else just ends up costing you a ship.  That's because the thing sits idle most of the time, so if pirates or enemy raiders show up, it goes to engage them with its peashooter, and dies quickly.  Contrast with the other races.  The TEC is easy; no ship needed, just build the fields.  Then the Advent method, where mines are laid by a ship that can hold its own in combat as part of your fleet; if you decide you really need a minefield in a recently-conquered system NOW, you can do it without having to create a specialized ship, bring it up to the front, protect it while it mines, then send it home.

What I'd love to see is to have the Ruiner converted into an actually useful cruiser, the kind of thing that can be useful as part of a fleet even without the minelaying.  Instead of a 7-point ship with a dinky gun and no other abilities, make a 12/14-point ship that has decent guns and some sort of activated special ability, possibly a mine-clearing one (i.e. "Spend 100 AM to blow up all enemy mines within X meters").  Or just have it count as a scout for purposes of mine detection.  If you have reason to keep one near your battle fleets, then mines become much more practical as something you can lay on a moment's notice, NOT something you have to go out of your way to do with a ship that will sit there doing nothing 99% of its life.  Even if it's overpriced for the amount of combat utility you'd get, it'd be much more viable to bring with the fleet to use as needed.  And since the Vasari don't get an anti-starbase torpedo cruiser, it'd be nice if they got SOMETHING out of their new ship.  (I'm thinking: planetary bombardment of some kind.)

 

And on a related note, I played another round last night, same setup as before, and it was even more brutal than the last time; I've got just under half of the galaxy under my control, the tech tree is maxxed except for the last couple logistic fleet upgrades (I can't afford a higher upkeep percentage at the moment), and it's HARD.  The four remaining AIs are fighting me on all fronts, and progress is very slow; I need starbases in every newly-acquired system just to wipe the responding fleets quickly enough to keep me moving forward. I've lost several starbases when I couldn't respond to an incoming fleet quickly enough.

Even with no mines, things really slowed down compared to vanilla Sins; with mines, it'll be horrible unless something is done.  For instance, I think we need a tech upgrade that increases the mine-detection radius of the scouts (i.e., rank 1 adds 25%, rank 2 adds 50%, rank 3 doubles the radius).  To help counterbalance this, you could add mine-improving tech upgrades for each race; increase the proximity range of Advent mines, increase the damage of Vasari mines, and maybe decrease the cost of Terran?