On Starbases, Mines, Defense busters, and AI (Beta 2.5 version)

from Sins Forums

Unfortunately I didn't get as much time on the 2/2.5 builds as I did the original beta 1, but I'll write on what I can.

Starbases

The changes to weapon banks having several targets was a gigantic improvement to starbases. It's great all around. They feel (and are) powerful enough when fully upgraded.

However, the change to time taken to deploy in the hostile grav well I feel was increased too much. It's now prohibitively long that really the only time you might use one offensively is if there's no hostile fleet in orbit. Which, incidentally, is when you really don't need to worry about a combat deployment. I think it should take longer than in beta 1, but still shorter than it is now so that it would actually be possible to defend a starbase under deployment.

Besides that, I can't say I have any other bad things to say, they're just that awesome. I'm worried about the new Meteor Storm and hull damage if it was left without a target limit, but I have not had the chance to try it.

As far as bugs, here are 2 recent 2.5 bugs and starbases:

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/338972 - Queued upgrades bug out
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/338786 - Weapons firing on single target

 

Mines

The new mines are much better than the old ones. The limit of 150 seems about right given the area you can cover. So you can't just mine the whole grav well easily, you have to be somewhat selective.

As far as deployment, the Vasari ones I think could use a little adjustment. I like that you select a deployment area and it spreads them out, but I think the area is too small and there are too few mines. It takes a while just to queue everything up. I wouldn't complain if the number of mines placed and the radius increased, with the cost scaling proportionately. I'm also a bit of a neat freak, and the TEC minefields look nice and even while no matter how hard you try to even out the Vasari ones, it's all in clumps :P

There's also some bad behavior when queuing mine placement. The TEC ones are a "building", so I can understand needing credits to place each one. The Vasari mines, however, require you to have sufficient resources for each queue of the ability usage. Ideally, I would like to be able to select my Ruiner, queue all the mine placements I want without having to babysit it to make sure I have the resources on each queue click. Needing enough on the first order is good, but after that it'd be great if they ignored current resources for queueing. It's already smart and waits for you to have enough before it actually casts it, so that works out nicely.

There's another issue that I'd like to bring up again: deploying mines at jump-in, and ship turning arcs. With the limit of 150 it's now harder to mine every jump in point, but it's still possible. It only takes a few mines to knock out the bulk of the fleet (light frigates, long range frigates, and most supports), rendering the remaining ships not only barely hanging in there but also useless for any serious fighting. Against a player, this isn't terribly bad since the chances are they can find a spot to jump in that's clear. But the AI will never be that smart, and it will be really easy to defeat large AI fleets with just a few mine placements right at jump in. Then there's ships turning. Quite often you can't simply keep your fleet back and let your scouts do the sweeping. There might be a starbase in system with fighters and other hangars, or there might even be a hostile fleet. If your scouts go forward alone, they'll get torn to shreds. But if you send your fleet forward, the ships simply cannot be allowed to move, giving the defender an immense advantage. Its ships are in no danger from mines, but most of yours cannot reach their back line to take out the LRFs and support ships. And forget about trying to retreat, as they'll make wide forward turns and detonate all the mines.

To solve both of these, I once again propose that the scouts' mine detection ability also disables abilities on the detected mines. That way, once the mines are spotted they can't be triggered until the scouts leave range or get destroyed. This would actually allow your ships some room to maneuver without watching in horror as they all get blown up with nothing you can do, and it would also solve the jump-in issue.

And, while we're on the topic of AI - they don't actually put scouts into their fleets, so they are completely helpless against mines. They don't even try to avoid them. I've seen a friendly AI plow right through a field of hostile mines when trying to retreat, losing pretty much everything. The AI has to put scouts in their fleets and it has to try and disarm the mines. The scouts' formation in the fleet could use a slight move up to the front. They should be behind the front line ships, but still a little forward of where they are now so that their detection hits a little bit further in front, giving your ships time to shoot them down before running into them.

 

Defense Busters

Their change to using weapons rather than abilities help with managing them, but they introduce another problem. Even though they prioritize buildings, if you jump into an enemy grav well with their fleet you either start hearing lots of really loud "raze planet" explosion sounds and get blinded by having a bunch of your ships lit up with them, or you sit through a constant stream of blue particles going every which way. Large battles can already be messy, and this adds to it. However, this way is still better than the old ability-based, so I wouldn't want to go back to the old way.

But, can you do something about the Ogrov sounds? It works ok on the Marza's Raze Planet because you don't hear 20 of them. It gets really bad when there are a bunch of Ogrovs constantly firing - it's a loud sound that drowns everything out. Making it quieter would be ok, or I wouldn't complain about a new sound that's less of a contrast to everything else.

3,441 views 13 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

You forgot 2 bugs:

1. The auxilary government upgrade does nothing ATM, 

2. The TEC starbase ( and possibly others?) can fire while under contruction, that's probbably not intentional right?

 I'd give a screenie of #2 but I can't find the file where it dumps when you press PrintScreen

Other than that I totally agree, but I find the orgovs bright blinding explosion more distracting and annoying (not to mention the repeated blast noises) than some of the advents adjunicator blasts, maybe they should have a ship to ship gun like the siege friggates do so as to fix this nusance, but it really is just a cosmetic thing. Great game Iron Clad, can't wait for Wednesday. but like Anatar says"I'll pass out the torches and pitchforks early, just in case".

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

To solve both of these, I once again propose that the scouts' mine detection ability also disables abilities on the detected mines. That way, once the mines are spotted they can't be triggered until the scouts leave range or get destroyed.
End of quote

Personally, I vote NO on this change.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top


And, while we're on the topic of AI - they don't actually put scouts into their fleets, so they are completely helpless against mines.
End of quote

 

Actually, i witnessed an attack to my heavily mined planet by Medium AI that consisted of three scouts, and five siege frigates. However, after witnessing my fortifications, they retreated immediately, so i don't know if they could have survived the minefield.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

2. The TEC starbase ( and possibly others?) can fire while under contruction, that's probbably not intentional right?
End of quote

I've seen this one posted, but I haven't seen it for myself :( I know the Transcendia at least does not fire under construction, because I blew a bunch of them up in my current game.

Actually, i witnessed an attack to my heavily mined planet by Medium AI that consisted of three scouts, and five siege frigates. However, after witnessing my fortifications, they retreated immediately, so i don't know if they could have survived the minefield.
End of quote

That is interesting. I have seen AI build scouts, but whenever I fight their fleets they don't have any in them. Last night while I was writing the thread I had a huge battle a gainst an Advent that was fully teched up. It had 5 capitals, heavy cruisers, subjugators, carriers, the works. But it did not have a single scout. I fought it on its turf, however..

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

Personally, I vote NO on this change.
End of quote

For the sake of a good discussion, why? :P

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top


Their change to using weapons rather than abilities help with managing them, but they introduce another problem. Even though they prioritize buildings, if you jump into an enemy grav well with their fleet you either start hearing lots of really loud "raze planet" explosion sounds and get blinded by having a bunch of your ships lit up with them, or you sit through a constant stream of blue particles going every which way. Large battles can already be messy, and this adds to it. However, this way is still better than the old ability-based, so I wouldn't want to go back to the old way.
End of quote

 

I wonder if it would help if their missiles made large explosions when they hit structures, and mini-explosions when they hit ships.  It would also make the damage levels a lot more intuitive.

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Annatar11, reply 5

Personally, I vote NO on this change.
For the sake of a good discussion, why?
End of Annatar11's quote

For one thing, it seems to be a change you want because the AI is too dumb to not charge into mines.  But we shouldn't cater the entire game, unit balance, etc. around the AI.  We should cater it around human opponents.

Second off, I don't think we should protect people from the risk of warping into a system and landing on a few mines.  It has been my experience so far that it is actually quite hard to get enemy ships to hit mines, even if you stick them all around where the phase lanes are.  Oh, you might eventually do it if you spam enough mines there, but it certainly seems like you will spend far more money on mines than they will spend on lost ships.  So bottom line, it doesn't seem like mines need to be weakened any more.

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top

Actually, i witnessed an attack to my heavily mined planet by Medium AI that consisted of three scouts, and five siege frigates. However, after witnessing my fortifications, they retreated immediately, so i don't know if they could have survived the minefield.
End of quote

 

When I was playing yesterday as TEC I had a dead asteroid set up with about 110 mines all protecting one phase lane (the others came from my worlds) a starbase with all weapons upgrades, all armor, 2 fighter bays and one docking boom level, then four repair platforms behind it, a phase inhibitor, and about fifteen gauss turrets with full weapons upgrades. I figured this would be safe enough while my main fleets were off decimating theother AI.

 

Trouble started when about 20+ enemy scout ships (advent) arrived, and started shooting up my mines as I watched, and as soon as they cleared a bunch, the bulk f the enemy fleet showed up, which was probably 'all' of their ships that existed, and proceeded to shoot their way through my minefield without taking any noticeable losses to mines as they approached the defences. D: I was like "Oh no they did not just do that." THEN... about 12 Adjudicators arrived behind their fleet. x_x my own fleets were about seven jumps away, one of which I turned around (containing four Marzas at level 6 or higher ;D ).

 

They easily decimated the starbase in like 2 minutes or so, only taking minor losses really, and then took out all the gauss platforms, repair platforms, and swept away half of the mines there, before I could show up and barrage them into oblivion. That was really disturbing though, I didn't know the AI could .. well. . proceed so intelligently after watching the Vasari AI run carelessly into my mines a number of times at another planet. Now I don't know what to think. Apparently the AI can actually do this right, but not all the time. (?)

Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Psyco567, reply 1

2. The TEC starbase ( and possibly others?) can fire while under contruction, that's probbably not intentional right?
End of Psyco567's quote

We've had a thread on this recently and come to the tentative conclusion that whether you like it or not, very reasonable arguments can be made for why they should be able to fire under construction given the scope of the construction project. (Arguably not all at once - would fit better if the strength of the weapons systems scaled somewhat with construction percentage to reflect systems being brought gradually on line). In short, it is hard to imagine any warring space civilization building something intended as a defensive platform of the size of a city with a long construction time and with thousands or tens of thousands of people working on it during construction (and many, many, more afterwards) only installing weapons after everything else is done.

Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top

For one thing, it seems to be a change you want because the AI is too dumb to not charge into mines. But we shouldn't cater the entire game, unit balance, etc. around the AI. We should cater it around human opponents.
End of quote

It's not about AI, but the amount of space needed for ships to turn. :P

Just try it. Get a scout to detect the nearest mine in a fluffy minefield, then tell it to retreat. Now imagine you had to retreat a fleet. ;)

Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top

Played Vasari last night and the Phase gate ability of their SB wouldn't work because their Antimatter was always at 0 - never went up - makes getting a gate to operate a tad difficult.

Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top

Oh and on the mine issue - the game had TEC, Vasari and Advent AI - none built mines at all that I saw.

And the icons for the VAsari SB and Minelayer didnt show up in the build screens nor on the overview of planet systems - you had zoom right in to see the actual ships/SBs

Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top

Not sure if this is supposed to happen, but when you are queuing (wow, 4 vowels in a row) up fighters/bombers and you cancel a fighter and choose bombers instead, you can still see the construction progress bar on the grayed out fighter icon.