Overpowered superweapons- Balancing issues

Novaliths are entirely countered by building starbases with axillary government or equivalent upgrades. They prevent the planet from being lost to bombardment, including Novaliths.

They don't prevent you from losing your population and infrastructure, though. I like how shield generators (TEC only) mitigate some of the damage, but the advent are screwed.

I recently had an issue where my AI ally had his main fleet stationed at my planet, because it's the only planet accessible from a phase lane to the star (it's a huge 2-star map, where me and my allies had taken over all the planets in our solar system and the enemy completely controlled the other solar system). It makes sense that he'd station his fleet there because waves of enemy fleets are occasionally phasing into this system from the star's gravity well.

Well my ally just so happened to have an Akkan stationed literally right next to my planet, and the enemy was bombarding it like crazy (along with all my other planets, but hey). In anticipation of losing my planet, I also had a Progenitor with autocast Colonize parked right next to the planet, with its forward arc facing directly toward the planet.

Well as expected, the novaliths came at a rate faster than my infrastructure could rebuild, so I lost the colony after it survived about 8 volleys. And despite manually ordering my progenitor to colonize the planet, somehow the ally's Akkan snuck in there faster and stole my own planet from me. I about declared war on him right then and there, as we both had a titan in the gravity well along with several cap ships and my maxed starbase would have probably tipped the balance in my favor... but then I realized I'd lose 4 diplomatic Pacts plus all the trade with that guy if I declared war on him. Plus I'd have to purge my own solar system of an enemy before I could start attacking the idiots spamming me with novaliths.

Still, it put a very bad taste in my mouth and I saved and exited the game to come post here. I'm currently very tempted to flat-out delete the novalith's entity file and be done with it. It's gay and completely ruins the point of having a fleet. It's Supreme Commander and the nuke wars all over again.

I bought this game because I wanted to see giant space ships shoot each other with lasers, NOT to see some stupid-looking space station spam population-killing bombs at my planets from the other side of the galaxy. And the Advent Deliverance engine isn't even a viable counter, because I shot EIGHT simultaneous Deliverance engine bombs all at the exact same moment at the same enemy planet and nothing happened. N-O-T-H-I-N-G. It's like I didn't even fire at it. If you're going to make a gay TEC superweapon, at least make the Advent superweapon equally gay. Sheesh.

Novaliths make up for the fact that (until the Rebal titan came out) a late-game TEC fleet (usually) got steamrolled by either other faction (in my experience). Starbases are the best counter.

In a related note; I thought they could only fire in the same star system, but other day I was playing and the AI was constantly exchanging shots with the other system.

Hardened Cities mitigates bombing and novalith damage.

Regardless, I still despise the Novalith, I just avoid talking about them except when someone actually tries to propose making it stronger.

yeah it does really frustrate.

i also bought the game because of the tactical massive fleet space combat part.

just like in command and conquer, going through all the trouble of populating and building infrastructure then in the blink of an eye its gone. it kinda doesnt feel fair. you should have to wear away and earn your victories, not stockpile superweapons and spam accross the galaxy while keeping your fleets for defence.

as i said before the obvious and easy solutions would be:

1. make it so you can only have 1 superwepon and it be at your homeworld.

2. make the cooldown much longer

3. reduce the damage that they do, 1 hitting planets is NOT ok.

4. as Allquixotic said you could have EVERY team with some sort of viable countermeasure not just one team with a partial one. eg some sort of missile defence system that has a CHANCE of shooting down the missiles. it wouldnt negate the point if its just a chance of shooting down and/or you have to build them on every world you want to protect like every other tactical building.

please make the game about space combat/diplomacy. not about who has the most nukes.

as far as i can work out the novalith does about 4.5k damage (im probably wrong).

as far as i can tell you cant upgrade meteor or moon settlements to this much health. thats where it annoys.

plus the fact that you can only upgrade actual planets to 6000 health so if someone has...ooh lets say 5 (not uncommon) they can still take out 2 full planets and a moon base in just a few minutes without having to dispatch a single ship from their territories.

Indeed, they do substantial economic damage but if you would have had axillary government present you wouldn't have had to lose the planet and thus your ally wouldn't have taken it. Just preventing you from needing to rebuy the planet upgrades make it more than worth while.

It doesn't ruin the point of having a fleet. It ruins having a fleet sitting in your territory doing nothing to stop the novalith. I find the novaliths are actually a pretty refreshing in that they prevent the your economy from snowballing to the point you don't have to worry about it. Puts you under much more pressure to use your resources wisely.

Is not supposed to do the same job as the Novalith. Its whole point is to buff up your fleet like everything else Advent. Your fleet will get +25% damage (+30% if Advent loyalists), +6% shield mitigation and (not relevant now but will be huge when the Vasari are added) +20% phase missile block, either due to the engine directly or just for being in friendly culture. Still not as good as the novalith over all, and you won't need more than a few, but I suspect everyone will actually start using them now late game.

 I believe its 3500.

The Novalith does 3500 damage if you haven't researched anything to mitigate bombing damage. It does 2975 damage to advent after having researched the bombing protection upgrade. It should be similar to the Vasari. A fully upgraded planet shield (TEC) reduces the damage to something around 750, making it a viable alternative to Starbase protection in small systems and on planets.

Note that an enemy building a Novalith seriously weakens the planets defenses, making it easier for you to push through.

For the AI loving that weapon, played a round on random medium, faced a total of 14 Novaliths from two TEC loyalists. I take it as a gameplay bug related to the new techs, Rebels don't build nearly as many. I hope they'll fix it so the AI builds more normal levels of that thing.

I have no idea why the TEC got the planet shield, being the ones that have the Novalith. This has been the case since original sins, and at that time there was no starbase with auxiliary government to protect your planets. Maybe it's a lore thing...

yeah so its 3500 damage (i said i was probably wrong.)

it still means it can one hit any territory that isnt a full on planet as they are the only ones that can get the lvl 3 health upgrades.

i played a few more hours on that save and i basically spend more time telling my ships to repopulate planets than i do sending my fleet to attack.

im really hopeful they will fix it because its a bit of a game ruiner.

the one TEC team im not friendly with now has 9 Novalith launchers despite me killing 5 so far. its just a case of trying to save up to put space stations near the smaller planets i know but i have 11 planets that can be 1 hit so it takes a lot of time and money to cover them all.

If you can afford to recolonize and redevelop those planets, you can afford a starbase to prevent you from losing the planet.

That said, the AI does spend a bit too much on them currently, that I'll agree, but that's just because its not competent enough with all the new changes to fleets to do much else effectively. I think it will improve as the game progresses.

Yea. Playing against large groups of AI's it seems to just be a race among them to build as many superwepons as they can and fire at eachother and u. The unfortunate result is any AI who are not TEC die off early in the game without any fleet battle hapening. This is problematic to fun

you will see in my last post i put why i havent put starbases on all my planets. i have 11 that need them and between maintaining a fleet and reparing the damage from warheads i dont really have the money to get all 11 done very soon.

yeah its down to me and 4 other teams now from the full amount. 3 of the others are TEC. only me and my neigbour are advent and the only reason they are still alive is because i have saved them several times .

needless to say the TEC have a whole lot of planets.

I personally dispise anything thats a superweapon (i dont count titans as them because they cant hurt from absolute safety and dont do anywhere near the same damage) however when you look at the other races who are "more" advanced they dont have superweapons either really. Advent is a buffer that doesnt stack with sequential hits (if it did it would put it on par or above the novalith depending on the fleet size) the Vasari have a warhead that impacts a planet that doesnt do damage to it but somehow manages to hurt anything in orbit (its 1 hell of a weird-shaped shaped charge lol) So really there is only 1 superweapon in the game and the owners have the only defence because the starbase upgrade isnt a defence when it lets millions die when you think about it.

Is that actually working right now? In the beta 2 games I've been playing the Deliverance Engine isn't actually overcoming the local culture on half the planets I shoot it at, so it's not giving me the in-culture bonuses. I'm getting the 25% damage boost and that's it.

It's incredibly underwhelming compared to "fire two of these and if the planet isn't wiped out entirely, it's got no tax income."

huh. I got hit by one on a 6k planet and it had 1800 health left after.

novaliths are problematic when playing other races besides the tec.

when playing as tech, building  axillary gov prevents loss of planets

the shield generator uses minimal tactical slots and when fully researched novaliths only deal 900 dmg 

and with catastrophic recovery (not sure if its called this) increases the rate of which the planets "heal" itself

tech have a good chance against novaliths but other races aren't as lucky 

Putting a starbase on every single one of your planets is a ridiculous investment.

Not really.  On backwater planets that aren't likely to get invaded, you can sacrifice the weapon upgrades for the trade port upgrade to help beef up your income, which will help mitigate to some degree the cost of building them.

Just make the novaliths do less damage and increase the cycle time I guess.

Unfortunately, as far as I have seen, the AI has no idea how to counter novaliths at all, so it's pretty much an insta-win against them if you even build three or so. I suppose you could argue that one could just choose to not use them, but I'm not a fan of limiting my gameplay options because the AI literally doesn't know how to react to it.

Indeed, the AI is quite vulnerable to it. Normally most human players don't go for that kind of super weapon spam, but maybe the TEC loyalist players will start doing that now. Of course if you build enough novaliths to beat the AI you probably had enough resources to win the game with a fleet, so I don't think its a huge deal.

All the factions have a starbase upgrade that does the same thing as axillary government, but yes the TEC certainly have the most options. I don't think that's a bad thing though, as most of the time shield generators suck and the TEC has few other advantages late game.

Well the Advent AI is certainly getting rid of my culture with it. Sometimes the AI builds a ton of culture centers though, and in that case it might not do anything. But yeah, it could use something that would stack with multiple shots.

That wasn't exactly my point. Putting a starbase on every single planet to block a novalith is pretty dumb. Which is what im saying. No one realistically does that.

Myself in another superweapon thread (wow all those double threads are really annoying)

*raises hand* Uh I have a solution. Just add a limit to the number of superweapons or add an option to limit the number with a slider that lets you decide the max number (0-10 for example) so you can change the number based on the size of the map if you so choose. Simple solution.

the ai does know how to block the nova but it just takes them a lil while and the tec ai does build shields which is how i learn that the shields blocks the nova cuz i have never built the shield

the nova is do damn easy to counter just build a damn sb with aux gov thats the first thing i do when i conquer a new planet

and if u guys think that the nova is OP the just wait till the vasari gets in their super weapon damages and disables ur structures and opens a phase gate at ur world and with that vasari rebels that mean u could have a fleet with at titan and a fully-upgraded sb at ur world within seconds

There needs to be a way to defend against Novalith population damage.

Personally I'd like to see planetary shields buffed a bit & Advent hardened cities reworked.

OF course 1 technology shouldn't provide an empire-wide resistance to novaliths(there should be a per-planet investment).

So I'd like to see something like this:

Hardened Cities:  Reduced planetary bombardment suffered by 5/10%.  Additionally any planets with upgraded Emergency Facilities improvements suffers 10/20% less population damage from bombardment/novaliths for each level of emergency Facilities(up to a maximum of 30/60% at level 3 Emergency Facilities).

That way on a terran/desert world the advent fully upgrade the emergency facilities of, the population damage of nvalith could be reduced from 150 per shot to 60 per shot(which is managable).   Additionally with 60 pop damage still going through, several novaliths could still suppress one world pretty well.  Not to mention the trade penalty is still in full effect so the novalith would undoubtedly still eb useful.

The point is, every faction needs some defense against the novalith, just like the culture spread of deliverance engine can be countered with culture buildings and the Kostura Cannon can be made managable with starbases(not disabled like other defenses) and hull/armor upgrades.

Just being able to pay 1800 per world to not technically lose the world simply isn't good enough- you can't have starbases everywhere and even if you do Novaliths can still gut your economy by killing population & reducing trade.