Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

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TROYTRON
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Joined: Sun Jan 24, 2021 11:09 pm

Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by TROYTRON »

This is a long form critique originally posted on another Discord by player SillySMS. I am posting it here on his behalf, as the forum is more appropriate for long form critiques.

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Abstract

Current game balance and progression in Terra Invicta is dominated by two major factors: poor alien AI and an exponential increase in mission control availability once command centers are unlocked. The first makes the aliens feel unsatisfying as an opponent, and exponential growth in player capabilities throws any difficulty out the window once the exponential loop gets going. After you are able to put down significant numbers of command centers, the first endgame is a victory march, and subsequent endgames are boring slogs to polish off aliens who don’t yet realize the situation is hopeless.

Introduction

As I understand things, mission control and alien hate were introduced to keep players from going von Neumann (i.e.exponential growth) and trivializing the game.

However, as implemented, this merely delays the transition to exponential growth, thus putting all the difficulty into surviving up until a sharp transition to overwhelming power, a point shortly after researching command centers.

Exacerbating this is the combination of nominally overwhelming alien power and the sheer ineptitude with which that power is wasted by the AI. The aliens may outnumber your ships 10:1 with a major tech advantage, but that doesn’t matter if they send out penny packets to be dismembered by hab defenses and the occasional fleet to be destroyed by player point defense walls. The flipside is that if the aliens were made competent without any other changes, it would be extremely difficult or impossible for the player to win because of that overwhelming technological and infrastructure advantage.

Furthermore, the player is limited by a combination of limited mission control and inefficient drives during the early game, favoring passive gameplay until command centers alleviate MC limitations and space research swiftly clears out the tech tree. It is very difficult to spare the hydrogen and mission control for a mobile campaign, and easy to instead let the alien ships suicide themselves against static hab defenses and your Earth defensive fleet.

This leads to three phases of gameplay: a passive phase where you build your initial infrastructure, a defensive phase where you exploit AI weaknesses to preserve your infrastructure, then once command centers are available, an offensive phase where the player just tips a gigantic pile of research, space resources and mission control onto the enemy. The first phase is survivable due to alien passivity, the second phase survivable because of the AI’s difficulty in capitalizing on their overwhelming advantages, and the third phase is just mopup.

List Of Suggestions

1) Rebalance mission control to be much less dependent on command centers and thus less prone to exponential growth.
2) Rebalance defensive fleets to cost much less MC, instead using limits on space mining to soft-cap fleet growth. Fleet battles to defend your mining infrastructure are impractical when fleets are expensive, static defenses are cheap, and the aliens willing to suicide one corvette at a time.
3) Leave Jupiter open for the player early game. If the enemy has superior strategic mobility, then dispersed asteroid-belt bases further drive the player towards static defense because their fleets just can’t be everywhere.
4) Rebalance research to be less exponential, in particular dealing with the absurdly high raw research/month output of research campuses and universities. In brief: Earth for raw research/month, space for percentage-based category bonuses.
5) Make the aliens much less comically inept at using their fleets, both strategically and tactically. This is probably the hardest to actually implement, but right now it is far too easy to neutralize alien fleets as a threat.
a. An interim patch would be to give alien warships more lasers and plasma, letting them actually kill something rather than just splash endless projectiles at a wall of point defense.
6) Give the aliens some progression in tech, infrastructure and strategy.Right now, they’re the equivalent of a “you must be this tall to ride the rollercoaster!” deal where the only question is how much infrastructure/research you need before provoking the aliens into open war.
7) Increase hydrogen mining output so it’s not so expensive to shuffle fission-powered warships around the solar system. Strategic mobility for human warships is currently pathetic until the advent of fusion drives.
a. Fission pulse and NSWR drives might compensate for this if they weren’t so expensive and so close to vastly superior fusion torches in the tech tree.
8) Make Earth scale better with tech, rather than ring habs almost completely obsoleting the mother planet.

Exponential Growth

Exponential growth is characterized by having something which feeds back on itself to double in constant time without limit. If you can use something to make more of the same thing at a fixed rate, you have yourself an exponential curve.

In Terra Invicta’s case, once ring stations are researched, this simple condition is almost satisfied, producing a near-exponential growth phase. I can build a ring station at Mercury with 14 command centers producing 23 net mission control. Some of this mission control is used up to support nanofacturing complexes to keep you cash-neutral, and some more is used to build space mines to support all this.

However, you’re still left with a lot of mission control, which can be used to build more MC rings and their attendant mines/nanofactories. Even if you’re only left with 5 MC per ring after subtracting out the nanofactories and mines, that means a doubling time of one year. Each existing MC ring lets you support one MC ring under construction, and at the end of the year, you now have twice as many MC rings to start construction on MC rings 3-4, etc.

It’s not quite perfect exponential growth, as mining bases are not all equally productive and Mercury only has so many orbital slots, but near-exponential growth lasts long enough to trivialize the endgame.

How Games Currently Play Out

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Initially, the aliens dominate space, and the only reason the player isn’t immediately crushed is because alien hate is kept under control. The player builds up some mining habs until they reach the alien hate limit, at which point usually there’s a plateau as they wait for research to catch up without triggering a not-yet-winnable conflict with the aliens. Meanwhile, after their initial burst of hab construction in the outer solar system, the aliens are happy to just sit there and slowly build up fleet strength.

While the graph doesn’t show this, there is sometimes also a period of defensive conflict, where the player isn’t plateaued by the alien hate limit, but rather by the amount of MC they can build on Earth. This is usually a painfully slow grind as most of your CP is invested in nations which are already at their MC limit, slowing down your MC growth.

Then you get ring habs, and it’s basically all over for the aliens. You can go full von Neumann, with space resources powering nanofacturing complexes which fund command centers which support both research bases and more mining outposts. Within just a few years of ring habs, you’re out-producing the aliens, at parity and swiftly exceeding alien tech, and alien fleet control is still terrible.

A Tangent into Research: Earth for Raw Grunt, Space for Bonus Synergy

This is also the point where a few thousand scientists and engineers in space magically become vastly more productive than millions of scientists and engineers on Earth. A rich, well-educated, completely unified EU should not be eclipsed by two research campus rings at Mercury. While this will get somewhat more expensive once research campuses start costing mission control, this doesn’t change the fact that you can tap into some of that exponential growth of MC rings to instead send your research rate screaming upwards.

My preferred solution to this would be to eliminate research campuses and universities entirely, and instead orient space research around multiplicative bonuses, along with a reduction in cost of endgame technologies to compensate for the loss of exponential growth in raw research/month. Adding techs to boost Earthside research output can also help compensate for players losing their eight identical research campus rings orbiting Mercury.

As to Project Exodus, there are two solutions. The first is to force them into the dilemma of either keeping Earth or living with the trickle of raw research that the specialty institutes provide. The second is to give them a faction-specific project to let them build research campuses/universities. Otherwise, it just doesn’t fit with either realism or the Earth-centric philosophies of all the other factions.

I’d also suggest incentivizing player to build labs in places other than LEO. Unless I’m missing something, three T3 labs of each category in LEO max out category research bonuses and their bonus to Earthside IP priorities.There’s no benefit in sending geologists to Mars, chemists to Venus, particle physicists to Jupiter, etc: all science can be done either on Earth, in LEO, or in stations orbiting Mercury.

Adding bonuses for labs on diverse locations would also help keep up growth in research output. Turn the Galilean moons into forgeworlds? All well and good, but you’d be able to get more research if you also put down some labs at Saturn, Makemake and Venus.

Methods of Eliminating the Exponential Phase Transition

In addition to nuking research campuses/universities as above, there are several ways of softening out human growth in capabilities.

First, the command center deserves special attention for enabling exponential growth. I would boot it to a very late-game global tech. To partially compensate players for the loss of their exponential growth machine, several adjustments can be made.

Add some techs to improve Earthside mission control, both in the speed of building MC and in the amount of MC a single region can provide.

Increase the MC consumption of habs/stations, and vastly reduce the MC consumption of ships. Unless the aliens just sit on their hands for a couple decades and let you build 479 battleships to protect Earth, I see no problem with indirectly limiting human fleet growth by instead limiting human space economy. What I do see a problem with is how mining hab defense can be summed up as “slap a couple LDAs on it and let the aliens suicide a stream of corvettes against it.”

Ironically, the aliens do the “sit there and build an enormous number of warships” thing, and the only reason that’s not a problem is how ineptly the aliens use their warship doomstacks. Alien warships should be a threat, and right now they are not threatening. They suicide corvettes at LDA-protected isolated habs, and suicide doomstacks at 10 battleship/dreadnought point defense walls.

The next idea to permit more extensive defensive fleets (particularly before your drives are good enough to produce mobile defensive fleets) is to reduce MC upkeep for planetary systems with shipyards, command centers or both. If command centers are involved, you can still punt their +2 raw MC bonus to a late-game tech.

While less important, far too much is concentrated in the single global tech node of ring stations. Right now, it immediately provides expansion to five sectors, T3 labs, command centers, T3 hotels/geriatrics and T3 nanofacturing complexes. Agricultural complexes and solar/fusion farms should stay with the ring station global tech, as those are a near-requirement for making use of T3 rings.

Spaceworks, in addition to being made actually worthwhile compared to a pair of T2 shipyards, could be moved to improved shipbuilding techniques (the dreadnought/lancer global). Battlestations are in a similar place, of costing far too much for a meagre improvement over LDAs. Command centers have already been discussed for being wildly overpowered.

Allowing for 5-sector T2 orbitals/habs would give a midgame upgrade which feels like a worthwhile stepping stone between 3-sector T2 and 5-sector T3 stations. There are a few ways in which even T2 stations benefit from economy of scale in expanding to five sectors: you still only need 1-2 LDAs, refueling stops still only need 1 spacedock/supply depot, you still only need the same fraction-of-a-farm for the core, it takes up only one orbital/surface slot at the chosen celestial body, etc.

It would also solve a personal pet peeve of mine, that to get N labs/hotels in orbit, either I need to spam more T2 stations than I’ll want to keep, or I need to wait for ring stations.

Separating out some of the T3 buildings into new cheap global techs can help the player tune their progress to what it is they actually need most urgently: beeline T3 labs for more research, T3 hotels and nanofactories to stabilize cash flow, etc.

Overall, I would prioritize rebalancing mission control, making alien fleets [s]great againthey weren’t great to begin with[/s]threatening, then 5-sector T2 habs as an intermediate stepping stone, and then maybe breaking up the T3 buildings into new nodes.

The Missing Element: Alien Progression and Desperation: “We Might Actually Lose

As I mentioned before, the aliens are basically asking kids if they’re tall enough to ride the rollercoaster. They’re far too static in the threat they pose, and don’t adapt very much to the humans.

First: give them some tech progression, especially their drive systems. This should help keep the alien threat dynamic, keep the aliens believable as they try to keep their tech advantage, and make tactics and strategy more believable. Right now, until you get fusion torches, alien strategic mobility helps enforce the sudden phase transition from passive defense to stomping all over anything alien-shaped.

Right now, in the early game, their fusion torches virtually require you to use cheese strategies when defending yourself. Human electric drives accelerate so slowly that your surface habs will die before intercept, and the fission drives have so little dV that they can just run away until you need to RTB and refuel your ships. The only viable defense is the pincer attack, exploiting the “still in battle” state to force the aliens to engage the second side of the pincer.

On the offensive, you currently tie up a very large, expensive fleet for a long time, often burning a lot of hydrogen on a one-way trip to an alien station. Meanwhile, a theoretically competent alien commander could intercept said fleet at his leisure. This is exacerbated by how the time in between “can contemplate building an offensive fleet” and “have fusion drives” is so short that your torchships might get there first.

If the aliens’ drive tech starts within shouting distance of humanity, then the behavior can be made much more realistic. If they come at your NERVA drives with the equivalent of grid drives, then they’re heavily committed to the attack: they don’t have the acceleration to run away once they get too close to a fission drive. If they come in with the equivalent of a Pegasus drive, they can run away once or twice, but if you’re willing to throw enough ships and enough hydrogen at the matter, they’ll be forced to either retreat or do battle… and then if you chase them with ion drives, you can still force a battle a few months into their retreat.

On the offensive, then, you’re on the other side of that coin, and you better pray you brought enough ships, because your ion-drive warships are outdone by their grid drives, and your NERVAs are outdone by their Pegasus drives. You can force a defensive engagement or retreat with superior numbers, they can force the same just by having moderately more mobility.

In terms of realism, this can also help, because right now it appears that the aliens are technologically stagnant and won’t respond at all when they realize “hey, we might actually lose”. They can start to push out their own research and then start to just outright steal human technology if they start to fall behind.

Another side of that is infrastructure and strategy: an increasingly desperate Hydra administration can be made much more responsive. They can expand the wormhole, and more crucially, start to economize on their exotics usage. They can look at diamondoid-protected human warships starting to nip at their bases and think “Maybe we should start building our own diamondoid warships: while we’ll lose some tech advantage, we need good enough now, not perfect once they’re preparing an assault on the wormhole.” They can start to think “maybe a half-dozen mining outposts isn’t enough: we need to expand out even if it means committing more Hydras to the Earth operation.”

A component of Terra Invicta’s story is that the Hydras came in complacent, expecting to use a minimum of resources to take over Earth. A problem of the gameplay is that the Hydras seem to stay complacent, at most ramping up their shipbuilding, something mostly lost on players who are able to trivialize the threat of alien warships.
DarthVicious
Posts: 98
Joined: Sun Oct 30, 2022 7:38 pm

Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by DarthVicious »

I've finished a campaign on release and on validation version. The MC changes to unis do slow things down, but not by that much.

Even avoiding command centre use entirely in my last game, the progression was pretty much as laid out in your charts. It just takes a bit longer to build the MC earth-side which makes the game tedious.

To really improve the progression I would suggest the following (agreeing with pretty much all of what you suggested).

1) Do away campuses and unis. Adjust earth side research slightly.

2) Do away with the concept of mission control entirely. It's just a placeholder for hate which can be done slightly differently. (More below).

3) Make everything cost boost to maintain. All your bases will require staff and resources from earth anyway (to establish and to maintain) so really they should cost boost to maintain. Even your ships. The further away the base, the more boost it should require for maintenance.

4) Alien hate should be driven by tech and space infrastructure. Various crucial techs especially drive techs and weapon techs should have +1 hate modifiers. Also each planetary hub you expand to should include a base amount of hate. Maybe +10 per planetary system. Spamming your way through drive and weapon techs plus colonising Mars, Mercury, Ceres should be what sets the aliens on high alert.

5) The heavier alien ships (cruisers, dreadnoughts, motherships) should have way better weapon load outs and should themselves be locked behind [game events] for the aliens so they only start using them once they have a certain level of infrastructure in place.

6) Alien fleet behaviour can be significantly improved, so their ships are more likely to use formations and provide mutual support and concentrated firepower.

What you want to achieve is that the aliens themselves start out limited in their fleet capability, but slowly ramp up, build better ships, and use them better.

7) Various mid-late game techs should be locked behind location specific labs. So the later fusion techs should require fusion-labs on Mercury to unlock and advance. The antimatter techs should require antimatter-labs on Jupiter/Saturn to unlock and advance. This way you are limited in researching techs unless you've done the appropriate expansions AND incurred the related increase in Hate.
Richard Baxton held off four waves of mind worms. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character. People need heroes. They don't need to know he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy.
PAwleus
Posts: 106
Joined: Fri Mar 19, 2021 12:58 pm

Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by PAwleus »

@SillySMS, I don't know whether or not you will read it but congratulations for your post - I probably couldn't gather my thoughts better. I agree with most of your thinking but I have some reservations, eg. I don't know which versions of the game you played but you apparently missed a very important mechanic: Extensive Network of Mines (more of it later).
SillySMS wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am Furthermore, the player is limited by a combination of limited mission control and inefficient drives during the early game, favoring passive gameplay until command centers alleviate MC limitations and space research swiftly clears out the tech tree. It is very difficult to spare the hydrogen and mission control for a mobile campaign, and easy to instead let the alien ships suicide themselves against static hab defenses and your Earth defensive fleet.
If by "command centers" you mean the Operation Centers then I could almost agree with you here but in the current state of the game you don't need much of a mobile campaign even to remove Aliens from Jupiter and Saturn systems so in my Brutal Exodus game started in 0.3.26 and followed in almost all validation releases (up to .47) the main limit for me trying very hard to close the gap to the exponential growth is Volatiles, eg. at the end of January 2035 when I almost removed Aliens from the Jupiter space (they still have a surface base on Callisto) colonizing all large moons and I am on the verge of doing the same in the Saturn space (they will not have any ship presence there within a month) I have over 1400MC, over 120 ships with hydrogen-using engines (almost all of them Advanced Pulsar despite having almost 750 research daily - it's recent as just 2 years ago I had half that), over 80K Water stockpiled but despite of acquiring 230 Volatiles per day my stockpile of them is still close to 0 (and it was staying close to 0 for almost entire game). I build the Command Centers but I could achieve all of this in the same timeframe even with the Operation Centers alone (perhaps even earlier because I am not certain the Command Centers are worth building at the current stage of my game)
SillySMS wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am 3) Leave Jupiter open for the player early game. If the enemy has superior strategic mobility, then dispersed asteroid-belt bases further drive the player towards static defense because their fleets just can’t be everywhere.
I am not sure where you are going with this one - opening Jupiter earlier would just make getting close to the exponential growth easier and earlier.
SillySMS wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am 7) Increase hydrogen mining output so it’s not so expensive to shuffle fission-powered warships around the solar system. Strategic mobility for human warships is currently pathetic until the advent of fusion drives.
It depends on what you mean by "strategic mobility". My Jupiter class Escorts (24 tanks and Advanced Pulsars) are able to get from Earth to Saturn in under 40 weeks (close to the optimal launch window for them, of course - unfortunately, the game shows only the general optimal launch window which is different) and they can resupply their propellant by ISRU. I wouldn't say it's pathetic to get there in such a short period of time. What's pathetic is the Aliens not attacking them during their journey. Even Pulsars would be enough and unless Water availability was decreased after 0.3.26 I don't think changes to "hydrogen mining output" are need as my game clearly shows.
SillySMS wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am Exponential growth is characterized by having something which feeds back on itself to double in constant time without limit. If you can use something to make more of the same thing at a fixed rate, you have yourself an exponential curve.

In Terra Invicta’s case, once ring stations are researched, this simple condition is almost satisfied, producing a near-exponential growth phase. I can build a ring station at Mercury with 14 command centers producing 23 net mission control. Some of this mission control is used up to support nanofacturing complexes to keep you cash-neutral, and some more is used to build space mines to support all this.

However, you’re still left with a lot of mission control, which can be used to build more MC rings and their attendant mines/nanofactories. Even if you’re only left with 5 MC per ring after subtracting out the nanofactories and mines, that means a doubling time of one year. Each existing MC ring lets you support one MC ring under construction, and at the end of the year, you now have twice as many MC rings to start construction on MC rings 3-4, etc.

It’s not quite perfect exponential growth, as mining bases are not all equally productive and Mercury only has so many orbital slots, but near-exponential growth lasts long enough to trivialize the endgame.
It's actually very far from "perfect exponential growth" - it's possible to get close to the exponential growth for some short periods of time (and I agree they are gamechangers) but because of limitations (MC, Volatiles, time to construct structures, research needed) I am quite happy if I am able to get it linear for most of the game of catching up to Aliens. I also agree that those short periods can trivialize the endgame but only because Aliens are too passive and they are not trying to keep up the pace. Ultimately, there will be a final plateau and not because there is only so much bodies with mining sites in the game but because of the Extensive Network of Mines mechanic that you seem to have completely missed: at some point opening a mine on an additional body will cost so much additional MC that resources from this body won't be enough to build that much MC. This is why going "full von Neumann" is simply not possible in this game. Perhaps the limit of ENM should be lower, though, so it has a meaning earlier and makes the exponential growth periods harder to achieve earlier.
SillySMS wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am This is also the point where a few thousand scientists and engineers in space magically become vastly more productive than millions of scientists and engineers on Earth. A rich, well-educated, completely unified EU should not be eclipsed by two research campus rings at Mercury. While this will get somewhat more expensive once research campuses start costing mission control, this doesn’t change the fact that you can tap into some of that exponential growth of MC rings to instead send your research rate screaming upwards.

My preferred solution to this would be to eliminate research campuses and universities entirely, and instead orient space research around multiplicative bonuses, along with a reduction in cost of endgame technologies to compensate for the loss of exponential growth in raw research/month. Adding techs to boost Earthside research output can also help compensate for players losing their eight identical research campus rings orbiting Mercury.
I wouldn't go so far as to eliminate them but I agree that they should be limited further. However, in general I think they are overvalued by players because they think that the game will be more interesting when they have better engines than Aliens and grind to achieve this. To the contrary, for me the game is the most interesting when I fight Aliens being vastly inferior technologically and in the current state of the game it's still possible to fight them successfully using low-tech ships (and perhaps it should be kept) and to completely ignore the Alien Hate so I value the Research Campuses and Universities much less (their cost in Volatiles is prohibitive for me).
SillySMS wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am A component of Terra Invicta’s story is that the Hydras came in complacent, expecting to use a minimum of resources to take over Earth. A problem of the gameplay is that the Hydras seem to stay complacent, at most ramping up their shipbuilding, something mostly lost on players who are able to trivialize the threat of alien warships.
I think it can't be overstated: the Hydras staying complacent is the main problem of the game in its current state (apart from some UI and human AI issues, of course :) )
SillySMS
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Joined: Wed Dec 21, 2022 3:58 am

Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by SillySMS »

So, signed up, and it took a while for the first messages to be approved. I have also just noticed how badly I abused italics. I abused them so very badly.

@PAwleus, a few comments:

1) I don't think you ever explained what you meant by "Extensive Network of Mines"?

2) A big thrust of my argument is that once you have command centers, no, new mines do not cost MC to open, not until you're scraping the bottom of the barrel for new mining sites. They just cost a bit of time, as your new source of space resources lets you build and support more command center/nanofacturing complex rings at Mercury*. Mission control stops mattering once you have a fast loop to build more MC with near-exponential growth.

*At very large scales, you might need to open up Venus and other bodies, but it's been my experience that by the time you tap out all of Mercury's 8 surface sites, all 32 orbitals and the L1 Lagrange point, the aliens are just waiting to die.

As you exhaust the best mining sites and the best ring-hab sites (i.e. Mercury's orbits), the loop starts to slow down until you reach asteroids so abysmally resource-devoid that they cannot pay for themselves, but you're going to run out of aliens long before you run out of worthwhile mining sites.

3) Strategic mobility isn't just about having a sub-year transfer to Jupiter. It's the question of whether you can shift to intercept a raid on 129 Antigone, then shift to intercept a raid on 65 Cybele, then Mars, then Mercury, then 65 Cybele again, then Earth, then Mars, all without running out of propellant. That's part of why I'd suggest leaving one of the gas giants open initially, because it's much easier trying to defend multiple bodies in the same planetary system than it is to try to defend multiple bodies in the same solar system.

If the alien AI were made even remotely competent, in the early/mid-game they could easily take a large fleet and systematically smash your asteroid-belt bases with near impunity. They transfer between asteroids far more quickly for far less hydrogen than you do. If the only change made was to give players Jupiter at the start of the game, that would be counterproductive. Giving players Jupiter to compensate for the aliens now massacring your asteroid bases, on the other hand...

4) The early game being more interesting is what I'm complaining about; late-game techs swiftly trivialize the aliens and make the endgame a meaningless string of victories against an opponent which doesn't realize it's already dead. Even the early game suffers, though, as the comical ineptitude of the Hydras means that once you figure out how to exploit them, that too becomes trivial.

By now through my different campaigns, at least a couple dozen large Hydra fleets must have come to Earth only to be smashed to pieces, for minimal or no casualties, by fleets of 10 relatively primitive battleships. Even when I still have just T1-T2 railguns, introtech/composite armor, pulsar drives and molybdenum pipe radiators, I still wind up with comically favorable K:D ratios on account of possessing both PD particle beams and a basic understanding of overlapping point defense envelopes.

I would expect these K:D ratios... the other way around. I would expect ten human battleships to die screaming so the eleventh can get close enough to get a shot at one alien destroyer, but what happens in practice is massive alien fleets dying just to take down one or two battleships, if that.
PAwleus
Posts: 106
Joined: Fri Mar 19, 2021 12:58 pm

Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by PAwleus »

SillySMS wrote: Wed Dec 28, 2022 3:22 am 1) I don't think you ever explained what you meant by "Extensive Network of Mines"?
Actually, I did explain it in general terms but let's do it more clearly. When you hover your pointer over MC at the upper edge of the screen you can see the MC tooltip that explains what the Extensive Network of Mines means but there is a bug in the tooltip that makes understanding it more difficult - basically, it means that after a particular number of bodies (I've not counted yet how many and the tooltip unfortunately doesn't provide this number) with opened mines every new body with an opened mine added to your mass driver resource network will cost additional MC (so apart from the MC cost of a mine the first one on the first body after the limit will additionally cost 1, on the second body - 2, on the third one - 3 ... on the twentieth one - 20 etc.) - it makes opening mines on single-site bodies much more problematic than it is otherwise and finally it will make adding more mining bodies to the network costing more MC than you can maintain from resources of your mines (I am extrapolating here as I've never achieved this).

SillySMS wrote: Wed Dec 28, 2022 3:22 am 2) A big thrust of my argument is that once you have command centers, no, new mines do not cost MC to open, not until you're scraping the bottom of the barrel for new mining sites. They just cost a bit of time, as your new source of space resources lets you build and support more command center/nanofacturing complex rings at Mercury*. Mission control stops mattering once you have a fast loop to build more MC with near-exponential growth.
*At very large scales, you might need to open up Venus and other bodies, but it's been my experience that by the time you tap out all of Mercury's 8 surface sites, all 32 orbitals and the L1 Lagrange point, the aliens are just waiting to die.
As you exhaust the best mining sites and the best ring-hab sites (i.e. Mercury's orbits), the loop starts to slow down until you reach asteroids so abysmally resource-devoid that they cannot pay for themselves, but you're going to run out of aliens long before you run out of worthwhile mining sites.
I was trying to show you that you had this part of your thinking wrong but I see you were still not persuaded despite I gave you the example of my game of trying hard to achieve the near-exponential growth for as long periods as possible. Perhaps some more numbers will show it to you more clearly: at the beginning of 2035 I have all mining sites of Mercury (and of course all orbits are taken by me) and Mars (apart from Fobos and Deimos), almost 40 mines on asteroids, all mining sites on multi-site bodies of Jupiter and Saturn (apart from 3 sites taken by Aliens) but I would say that I am still far from "scraping the bottom of the barrel for new mining sites" (there are still quite many nice multi-site bodies outside Saturn which I am going to exploit soon) and, yes, most of my mines on asteroids are currently unpowered despite they are very valuable because of the Extensive Network of Mines mechanic (I am in the process of upgrading many Operation Centers) so, yes, these asteroid mines cost me a lot of MC when powered (over 300 additional MC when I power up all that are not mainly distractions for Aliens). You are missing this probably only because you haven't really played, yet, seriously using the strategy of near-exponential growth but you have just extrapolated some trends, instead.

Yes, you are right that even currently (0.3.47) all you need are mines on Mars and Mercury (if you are very careful with resources and this is why you say that there is not enough Hydrogen) for the strategy of waiting until late techs that allow you to win on normal in late 2040s/early 2050s (of course, it's different for different factions and it's harder in recent versions of the game) but this is very far from the strategy we discuss here: the strategy of near-exponential growth in which you have to entirely ignore the Alien Hate - in this strategy you could win on Brutal even in late 2030s/early 2040s (but only because Aliens still stay complacent). It is limited mainly by Volatiles (unless their availability changed since 0.3.26) and MC is of secondary concern. In this strategy you can win even without "late-game" techs (but again, only because Aliens stay complacent) so the late game could be almost as interesting as the early game (almost only because it's still too easy) and if only Aliens were not staying complacent it could be much more interesting (assuming some UI and human AI issues were also ironed out).


Strategic mobility in your meaning is of course not possible with low-tech engines (it shouldn't be) but it's not necessary (and it wouldn't be necessary even if Aliens were competent in combat). Such strategic mobility is also difficult to achieve with late techs because of UI issues (it's easy to forget about threatening fleets and it's easy to be forced to trajectories that strand your ships - and conversely, it's easy to exploit it and strand Alien ships even with low-tech but moderately high-exhaust velocity drives, too). However, you certainly can achieve much better strategic mobility with low-tech drives without fixating on large ships such as Battleships and my game reflects this as my largest ships are still Monitors with Advance Pulsars and I lost something like 5 of them up until this moment (over 1100 Exotics acquired from combat) - I could build larger ships but at this moment of my game Monitors are objectively a better choice and they are used only in large battles or against larger combatants (Escorts consist vast majority of my over 120-warship force). I repeat: in the strategy of near-exponential growth (and I also repeat that it's still far from near for most of the game) where my best engine is still the Advance Pulsar having such a force I have absurdly large amounts of Hydrogen in comparison with the amount of Volatiles and at no point in the game after commencing combat in space the situation was different (although I admit I started the fight using ships with chemical engines that basically wasted some of my Volatiles as I underappreciated the later need for them).


With the rest I agree with you.
SillySMS
Posts: 9
Joined: Wed Dec 21, 2022 3:58 am

Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by SillySMS »

I did check, and yes, ENoM does exist. Not that it really kicks in until you have so many mines you can just bury the aliens under a tidal wave of materiel.

I checked my biggest save, and I have an ENoM penalty of -105 (the equivalent of just 3.75 command center rings) from 15 outposts, 48 settlements, and 21 colonies. I have a net input of +506 hydrogen, +340.5 volatiles, +178.9 metals, +58 noble metals and +20.6 fissiles daily despite running dozens of nanofacturing complexes at Mercury.

Meanwhile, each of my CC rings costs me 496 funds, 1 base metal and 3.3 noble metals/month while providing +23 MC, and each of my hybrid CC/nanofacturing rings nets me 2.3k funds and +5 MC while costing 271 base metals and 28.5 noble metals/month. If you balance that out, each pure CC ring needs 21.5% of a hybrid ring, leading to the following costs per MC:

2.47 base metals per month per MC
0.39 noble metals per month per MC

To support a 5-MC mining settlement, then, you need 12.3 base metals and 1.96 noble metals/month. There are an awful lot of mining sites which produce an awful lot more than that.

While you are technically correct that I haven't sustained exponential growth for very long, it still lasts more than long enough to trivialize every problem I'd been having up until that point and turn the game from a boring slog of exploiting AI weaknesses into a boring slog of just pushing a gigantic stack of ships and research over onto the enemy. I quickly reach the point where the question of "do I build a fleet?" is not a question of "do I have the resources?" but rather one of "can I be bothered to click the mouse that many times to assemble a new fleet to join the four already traveling the solar system and smashing everything alien-shaped with ease?". It is a very sharp transition from being resource-limited to being limited by your willingness to click the same buttons over and over.

So: while technically the ENoM mechanic can prevent unlimited exponential growth, it doesn't matter because it kicks in so late that the aliens have become a punching bag. It's weak enough that I literally didn't notice until pointed out. It's weak enough not to change the difficulty, just to keep your faction from becoming an almost literal cancer on the solar system.

What does matter is that command centers permit growth from "able to hold the line" to "roll gigantic doomstacks over the enemy", particularly since there are a lot of fixed MC costs like defending Earth which go from being a huge chunk of your MC budget to being an afterthought once you roll out the command centers.

Finally, I will point out that it's not the exponential growth which lets you ignore alien hate. It's the sheer ineptitude with which alien fleets handle themselves in combat. Once you're able to defend Earth and your habs, you can just stalemate the aliens forever whilst waiting for ring habs to pop and your MC availability to go from a few hundred up to 1500+ with more than enough funding to kick your MC budget up even higher.
PAwleus
Posts: 106
Joined: Fri Mar 19, 2021 12:58 pm

Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by PAwleus »

I like that you actually counted those values and you are right that ENoM should probably kick in earlier but I already said it in my first post here: "Perhaps the limit of ENM should be lower, though, so it has a meaning earlier and makes the exponential growth periods harder to achieve earlier."

It would be helpful to limit such a growth if Aliens were more competent in combat, I agree, but if they (and human AI) do not answer to player's effort at exponential growth with their own similar effort at some point then their combat competency won't really matter, anyway. However, you are also right that the current UI is killing much of joy from the game becoming epic in such situations so it definitely needs substantial improvements and I even feature-requested the most important of them some time ago :)

So to sum up, we need:
1. Aliens realizing at some point that staying complacent is their doom and making some effort at their own exponential growth. What should be considered as such a point (or points), though? The same should be equally carefully considered for AI human factions.
2. ENoM to matter more earlier, perhaps even from the beginning (at least on Brutal)
3. UI improvements to make fleet operations substantially easier
4. More combat competency for Aliens (and generally AI). It's probably the hardest to make but fortunately it's less important.
rookie.one
Posts: 42
Joined: Sun Feb 05, 2017 6:08 pm

Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by rookie.one »

I followed this thread now for a while and as I recently finished an Initiative / Veteran run I thought to post my 2 cents in here.

Some timeline of that run:

4 / 2035 started researching phasers: 91/231 MC (all earthbound), 8.3k monthly research (daily 130 from Nations, 55 Habs, 65 distribution)
5 / 2039 went Aggro: 150/400 MC (all earthbound), 15.3k monthly research (daily 200 N, 150 H, 125 D)
5 / 2043 finished the general techtree: didn't check MC, 33,6k research (400 N, 400 H, 250 D)

Now to a few points about that run:

1. Research: I went late to Mercury (~2030), simply cause i was lacking the MC to develop the bases there. The 90 MC used in 2035 consisted of 12 mines + outpost cores on mars / belt, 12x reasearch campus and 4 mines on mercury aswell as a couple of reasearch stations LEO. I really felt the nerf to research campus / university and it was painful being at 3.6k research (councilor advised) around 2031 when most of the available global research was at 25k plus and the other factions where focusing on researching their individual projects. So I don't think a further nerf to the research buildings is warranted, espacially if you compare research per MC between Mercury bases (~60R / MC, volotile neutral) and LEO stations (30R / MC, some volotiles).

2. Going Aggro so late: I simply didn't feel the need to go to war earlier. I had the tech, I even had the ships designed. But as Academy, Resistance, Exodus and Humanity 1st went to full war with the aliens around 2029, the aliens had build up some serious doomstacks (4fleets, 25 ships each, mostly corvettes and destroyers, 1 frigate fleet using laser cannons and missiles) and so I waited for better tech.

Another reason was the lack of suitable drive tech. Researched Molten Core III and Lars Drive around 2032, Fission Spinner unlocked 2039 (after Zeta Boron and Antimatter Massproduction), Pegasus after 2nd iteration of Future Tech. Advanced Pulsar didn't unlock at all that game. And Burner Drive is simply too close to Fusion Drives to still matter.

3. Mercury: As i wrote before, I went there pretty late. I'm playing due to some hardware constrictions on medium solar system (only 3x8 Orbital slots there), but i usually don't really need those anyways as there is plenty of real-eastate for MC available on my mining sites. yes, mercury is more effective, but why add another orbital when you have 6-8 empty slots on a mining base.

Now to some earlier points in this thread:
PAwleus wrote: Wed Dec 28, 2022 11:05 pm 2. ENoM to matter more earlier, perhaps even from the beginning (at least on Brutal)
That is something I'd really hate to see: In a previous run Luna prospected for <4 Fissiles, Mars for <7 Fissiles and <150 Volotiles. So there I had to use Asteroid Mining to make up for that. A change in that will pretty much force players to abandon runs due to bad luck in propesting / RNG. And for an average propescted run i won't matter, as Mars, Ceres and Mercury usually give you enough resources to reach Jupiter.
PAwleus wrote: Wed Dec 28, 2022 11:05 pm 1. Aliens realizing at some point that staying complacent is their doom and making some effort at their own exponential growth. What should be considered as such a point (or points), though? The same should be equally carefully considered for AI human factions.
4. More combat competency for Aliens (and generally AI). It's probably the hardest to make but fortunately it's less important.
I think that is the main problem in the current state of the game. While they got some improvements (.27 doomstack, normal: 1 Mothership, .42+ doomstack veteran: 25 ship fleets) they need to realize that it is looking grim for them. Maybe some hardcoded progression there would help:
- AI looses 1st doom stack -> fill up base slots in home system
- Player colonizes one of Jupiter's moons -> Colonize a Kuiper Belt dwarf
- AI looses 1st Station -> build 3 more in home system
- AI looses 1st Base -> Colonize another Kuiper Belt dwarf / build more stations
- AI looses 2nd Station -> add 200 MC

That would propably help. Maybe even seperate MC for bases/stations and ships for the Aliens (Why shouldn't they have the tech for that).

And then there sould propably be some change in the Alien ship disign. Missile boats don't cut it at some point anymore. By the time the AI changed their designs, they seemed to be constricted by MC used of those defensive fleets around their stations.

Another thing to change i guess would probably be how Combat strength is calculated. Lasers are generally valued way to low (guess that is one of the reasons the AI doesn't like to use those) and get rid of the delta-V part in combat strength: A 14k fleet leaves MakeMake, arrives a year later at 6k and tries to turn around cause suddenly their fire power seems to not be sufficient enough anymore.

TROYTRON wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am 3) Leave Jupiter open for the player early game. If the enemy has superior strategic mobility, then dispersed asteroid-belt bases further drive the player towards static defense because their fleets just can’t be everywhere.
Not sure if that helps, as the Jupiter moons are the main resource income in my campaigns and expanding further after settling those isn't needed imho in the current state of the game. After those 50 sites are developed, adding a single Commercial Mining Org to one of your Councilors usually provides more income than establishing more bases. This is also where the theory of the
TROYTRON wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am Exponential Growth
of MC comes to an halt, as you outscale the Aliens at this point by so much, that adding further MC / bases simply isn't necessary anymore. So IMO having a single Jupiter moon gated by a relativly weak station and fleet seems to be fine for me.
TROYTRON wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am 4) Rebalance research to be less exponential, in particular dealing with the absurdly high raw research/month output of research campuses and universities. In brief: Earth for raw research/month, space for percentage-based category bonuses.
7) Increase hydrogen mining output so it’s not so expensive to shuffle fission-powered warships around the solar system. Strategic mobility for human warships is currently pathetic until the advent of fusion drives.
a. Fission pulse and NSWR drives might compensate for this if they weren’t so expensive and so close to vastly superior fusion torches in the tech tree.
For now I believe the recent nerf to Campus and University was enough. The players need some crutch to overcome the scaling of mid game global research and for that a limited amount of research buildings is fine, especially due to the drastically dimishing returns of the percentage based modules.

I think it is the Techtree itself that needs to be looked at next. I would really like to see an improvement to the accessibility of fission powered drives: Higher initial unlock chance of Advanced Pulsar and Molten Core Drives, maybe even putting the advanced version of those drives behind some global tech, so that they become close to 100% to unlock. Also reducing the research cost of Fission Pulse Drives as I believe those to be obsolete due to them being so close to Fusion Tech.

An increase in the reasearch cost of "Nuclear Fusion in Space" from 25k to somwhat 50k+ would also be acceptable as this is the core tech that allows for rapid expansion of your bases / stations outside of mercury and opens the path to the different fusion drives.

It might also help to look into the research cost of Gas Core Fission and Advanced Fission Systems (also obsolete IMO) as I usually research those after I complete most Fusion Tech.

And on a further note regarding strategic mobility: With the recent changes to bombardement it is sadly not needed anymore, as 2 pda's are all you need to deter the Aliens from ever attacking your base. In a previous run it was fun shuffling around fast defensive fleets around the belt to prevent alien bombardement.
TROYTRON wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am 5) Make the aliens much less comically inept at using their fleets, both strategically and tactically. This is probably the hardest to actually implement, but right now it is far too easy to neutralize alien fleets as a threat.
a. An interim patch would be to give alien warships more lasers and plasma, letting them actually kill something rather than just splash endless projectiles at a wall of point defense.
6) Give the aliens some progression in tech, infrastructure and strategy.Right now, they’re the equivalent of a “you must be this tall to ride the rollercoaster!” deal where the only question is how much infrastructure/research you need before provoking the aliens into open war.
I totally agree with every point.
TROYTRON wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am 8) Make Earth scale better with tech, rather than ring habs almost completely obsoleting the mother planet.
I think earth scales pretty well, but just very late into the game ( ended my Initiative run with 65+k research a month, 1k+ a day coming from nations).

I guess that's it for now. Have fun commenting.
delor
Posts: 18
Joined: Mon Dec 26, 2022 4:21 pm

Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by delor »

rookie.one wrote: Thu Dec 29, 2022 1:28 pm2. Going Aggro so late: I simply didn't feel the need to go to war earlier. I had the tech, I even had the ships designed. But as Academy, Resistance, Exodus and Humanity 1st went to full war with the aliens around 2029, the aliens had build up some serious doomstacks (4fleets, 25 ships each, mostly corvettes and destroyers, 1 frigate fleet using laser cannons and missiles) and so I waited for better tech.
This has been the case in all three long-running games I've observed- one friend, one YouTube streamer, and one gaming podcast. The aliens aren't particularly aggressive for a long time, especially if you don't engage them. Even when the aliens start bombing your space stuff, you might just want to let them do it an rebuild versus fight to avoid attracting their attention.

Not only must you be this tall to ride, as this thread put it, but you're actively discouraged from even trying to ride until you can because of the hate mechanic.

Somewhat glibly, it's a mechanic that discourages you from defending humanity from an alien invasion in a game about defending humanity from an alien invasion.* Even though I get that the early game is about uniting humanity, I think the game currently leans too far away from the invasion defense aspect and this makes the game less fun. With all of the spaceship technologies and the choice of having space combat instead of X-Com's ground combat as this game's battle system it really seems like a waste of a bunch of the game's content.

What I might suggest is a rework of the hate mechanism. After this rework it no longer really impacts the tempo of alien operations: they'll explore, bomb facilities and the earth, and invade on a fairly steady timeline no matter what you do**. Your assets and power base are in danger even if you leave the aliens alone, and you want to slow them down any way you can lest you be neutered before your space war program gets off the ground.

Instead, hate does two things:
1) A sum, non-decaying, non-faction-specific hate score accumulates is tracked. As it goes up the aliens get increasing quantity of MC and better ships with better tech.
2) A faction-specific hate score that decays over time and decreases when the aliens inflict damage remains, similar to what we have now. The impact of this score is to weight aliens towards selecting the hated faction as a target, causing them to prioritize the human factions that have done them the most damage.

This provides stabilizing effects and some control over the tempo like the current system does- if you can't fight the aliens they'll remain weaker and give you more breathing room, not to mention if a rival human faction gets their attention you could just let the destruction happen for a while to improve your faction's relative power. However, they're coming for humanity no matter what you do and you'll be forced to start fighting in space sooner let your space mines get razed before you get off the groun

*Yes, only for five of the factions and only as a means to an end for the Initiative and Exodus. Still...
**They should probably do so earlier but with weaker initial ships.
anonusername
Posts: 49
Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 11:10 pm

Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by anonusername »

I think that 1, 4, 5, and 8 are the most important parts.
1, 4. I already play the game this way as a self imposed challenge, and it massively mitigates (but doesn't entirely solve) the other problems. I would make research centers provide a small % bonus to all earth research, not a flat bonus. For command centers, I would limit them to mitigating the local MC cost of the base/station they are built at. e.g. Maybe they reduce MC costs by up to 50%.
5. This would make a huge difference. Once I hit phasers I can defend most bases with only 1 or 2 destroyers, turning the late game into a giant game of whack-a-mole as my dreadnought fleet defeats the alien defense fleets in detail.
8. This is needed to help compensate for 4, but will probably be rather tricky to balance.

I disagree on some of these.
2. I think fleets should retain some non-trivial amount of MC usage, and this change would need to be accompanied with a wider re-balance of alien hate.
3. This is already feasible, you just need to fight for it. It was much easier before marines and bombardment were nerfed, but you still have a chance in mid-game by building a solid FOB on one of the less lucrative moons. Mid-game drives have enough mobility to fight between Jupiter's moons. Admittedly, this is much less practical if 5 was fixed.
7. I think the advantage of late-game fusion drives is perfectly reasonable. Fission is still viable until you go beyond Jupiter, it just requires a less mobile strategy. It would also implicitly nerf the Fusion Torches, which require a massive investment to unlock. I would, however, increase the unlock rate for late-game drives.
anonusername
Posts: 49
Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 11:10 pm

Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by anonusername »

rookie.one wrote: Thu Dec 29, 2022 1:28 pm I followed this thread now for a while and as I recently finished an Initiative / Veteran run I thought to post my 2 cents in here.

Some timeline of that run:

4 / 2035 started researching phasers: 91/231 MC (all earthbound), 8.3k monthly research (daily 130 from Nations, 55 Habs, 65 distribution)
5 / 2039 went Aggro: 150/400 MC (all earthbound), 15.3k monthly research (daily 200 N, 150 H, 125 D)
5 / 2043 finished the general techtree: didn't check MC, 33,6k research (400 N, 400 H, 250 D)

Now to a few points about that run:

1. Research: I went late to Mercury (~2030), simply cause i was lacking the MC to develop the bases there. The 90 MC used in 2035 consisted of 12 mines + outpost cores on mars / belt, 12x reasearch campus and 4 mines on mercury aswell as a couple of reasearch stations LEO. I really felt the nerf to research campus / university and it was painful being at 3.6k research (councilor advised) around 2031 when most of the available global research was at 25k plus and the other factions where focusing on researching their individual projects. So I don't think a further nerf to the research buildings is warranted, espacially if you compare research per MC between Mercury bases (~60R / MC, volotile neutral) and LEO stations (30R / MC, some volotiles).

2. Going Aggro so late: I simply didn't feel the need to go to war earlier. I had the tech, I even had the ships designed. But as Academy, Resistance, Exodus and Humanity 1st went to full war with the aliens around 2029, the aliens had build up some serious doomstacks (4fleets, 25 ships each, mostly corvettes and destroyers, 1 frigate fleet using laser cannons and missiles) and so I waited for better tech.

Another reason was the lack of suitable drive tech. Researched Molten Core III and Lars Drive around 2032, Fission Spinner unlocked 2039 (after Zeta Boron and Antimatter Massproduction), Pegasus after 2nd iteration of Future Tech. Advanced Pulsar didn't unlock at all that game. And Burner Drive is simply too close to Fusion Drives to still matter.

3. Mercury: As i wrote before, I went there pretty late. I'm playing due to some hardware constrictions on medium solar system (only 3x8 Orbital slots there), but i usually don't really need those anyways as there is plenty of real-eastate for MC available on my mining sites. yes, mercury is more effective, but why add another orbital when you have 6-8 empty slots on a mining base.

Now to some earlier points in this thread:
PAwleus wrote: Wed Dec 28, 2022 11:05 pm 2. ENoM to matter more earlier, perhaps even from the beginning (at least on Brutal)
That is something I'd really hate to see: In a previous run Luna prospected for <4 Fissiles, Mars for <7 Fissiles and <150 Volotiles. So there I had to use Asteroid Mining to make up for that. A change in that will pretty much force players to abandon runs due to bad luck in propesting / RNG. And for an average propescted run i won't matter, as Mars, Ceres and Mercury usually give you enough resources to reach Jupiter.
PAwleus wrote: Wed Dec 28, 2022 11:05 pm 1. Aliens realizing at some point that staying complacent is their doom and making some effort at their own exponential growth. What should be considered as such a point (or points), though? The same should be equally carefully considered for AI human factions.
4. More combat competency for Aliens (and generally AI). It's probably the hardest to make but fortunately it's less important.
I think that is the main problem in the current state of the game. While they got some improvements (.27 doomstack, normal: 1 Mothership, .42+ doomstack veteran: 25 ship fleets) they need to realize that it is looking grim for them. Maybe some hardcoded progression there would help:
- AI looses 1st doom stack -> fill up base slots in home system
- Player colonizes one of Jupiter's moons -> Colonize a Kuiper Belt dwarf
- AI looses 1st Station -> build 3 more in home system
- AI looses 1st Base -> Colonize another Kuiper Belt dwarf / build more stations
- AI looses 2nd Station -> add 200 MC

That would propably help. Maybe even seperate MC for bases/stations and ships for the Aliens (Why shouldn't they have the tech for that).

And then there sould propably be some change in the Alien ship disign. Missile boats don't cut it at some point anymore. By the time the AI changed their designs, they seemed to be constricted by MC used of those defensive fleets around their stations.

Another thing to change i guess would probably be how Combat strength is calculated. Lasers are generally valued way to low (guess that is one of the reasons the AI doesn't like to use those) and get rid of the delta-V part in combat strength: A 14k fleet leaves MakeMake, arrives a year later at 6k and tries to turn around cause suddenly their fire power seems to not be sufficient enough anymore.

TROYTRON wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am 3) Leave Jupiter open for the player early game. If the enemy has superior strategic mobility, then dispersed asteroid-belt bases further drive the player towards static defense because their fleets just can’t be everywhere.
Not sure if that helps, as the Jupiter moons are the main resource income in my campaigns and expanding further after settling those isn't needed imho in the current state of the game. After those 50 sites are developed, adding a single Commercial Mining Org to one of your Councilors usually provides more income than establishing more bases. This is also where the theory of the
TROYTRON wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am Exponential Growth
of MC comes to an halt, as you outscale the Aliens at this point by so much, that adding further MC / bases simply isn't necessary anymore. So IMO having a single Jupiter moon gated by a relativly weak station and fleet seems to be fine for me.
TROYTRON wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am 4) Rebalance research to be less exponential, in particular dealing with the absurdly high raw research/month output of research campuses and universities. In brief: Earth for raw research/month, space for percentage-based category bonuses.
7) Increase hydrogen mining output so it’s not so expensive to shuffle fission-powered warships around the solar system. Strategic mobility for human warships is currently pathetic until the advent of fusion drives.
a. Fission pulse and NSWR drives might compensate for this if they weren’t so expensive and so close to vastly superior fusion torches in the tech tree.
For now I believe the recent nerf to Campus and University was enough. The players need some crutch to overcome the scaling of mid game global research and for that a limited amount of research buildings is fine, especially due to the drastically dimishing returns of the percentage based modules.

I think it is the Techtree itself that needs to be looked at next. I would really like to see an improvement to the accessibility of fission powered drives: Higher initial unlock chance of Advanced Pulsar and Molten Core Drives, maybe even putting the advanced version of those drives behind some global tech, so that they become close to 100% to unlock. Also reducing the research cost of Fission Pulse Drives as I believe those to be obsolete due to them being so close to Fusion Tech.

An increase in the reasearch cost of "Nuclear Fusion in Space" from 25k to somwhat 50k+ would also be acceptable as this is the core tech that allows for rapid expansion of your bases / stations outside of mercury and opens the path to the different fusion drives.

It might also help to look into the research cost of Gas Core Fission and Advanced Fission Systems (also obsolete IMO) as I usually research those after I complete most Fusion Tech.

And on a further note regarding strategic mobility: With the recent changes to bombardement it is sadly not needed anymore, as 2 pda's are all you need to deter the Aliens from ever attacking your base. In a previous run it was fun shuffling around fast defensive fleets around the belt to prevent alien bombardement.
TROYTRON wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am 5) Make the aliens much less comically inept at using their fleets, both strategically and tactically. This is probably the hardest to actually implement, but right now it is far too easy to neutralize alien fleets as a threat.
a. An interim patch would be to give alien warships more lasers and plasma, letting them actually kill something rather than just splash endless projectiles at a wall of point defense.
6) Give the aliens some progression in tech, infrastructure and strategy.Right now, they’re the equivalent of a “you must be this tall to ride the rollercoaster!” deal where the only question is how much infrastructure/research you need before provoking the aliens into open war.
I totally agree with every point.
TROYTRON wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:10 am 8) Make Earth scale better with tech, rather than ring habs almost completely obsoleting the mother planet.
I think earth scales pretty well, but just very late into the game ( ended my Initiative run with 65+k research a month, 1k+ a day coming from nations).

I guess that's it for now. Have fun commenting.
The aliens are already hardcoded to build more bases once they enter a "total war" with the player. The issue is, they don't make effective use of the ships built by those bases.
Pekish79
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Jan 06, 2023 8:59 pm

Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by Pekish79 »

A lot of excellent analysis here from the point of view of the Pro player, and very knowledgeable. They address the mechanics and the typical infinite progression curve that make (every) game easy toward the end.

The game should be divided into chapters, as the other post described. There are 3 phases
keep it all together, tire the player, and some of the micromanaging of the older phase is a drag.

A player likes to finish staff, get a score, see what they have done, be helpful, and carry over to the next phase. (plus score and leaderboard stuff like that). Let alone in the cutscene between the steps, the Devs could add an evaluation of your result, so you would be away if your first phase was terrible and is just a waste of time to carry on! It's annoying playing 40 hours and getting to a second phase very badly to waste more time in an almost impossible catch-up.

Not only does the game's balance need some tweaks (and alien more aggressive that could be easily tailored to phases), but the experience needs to be broken down. In King Crusaders III, the boundary is all much more limited. In this game, Space, distance, and mechanics scream for some "rescale" during the experience to avoid tediousness (and some feedback; you don't want players to hate you because they waste too many hours and find themselves with a terrible hand)

Last but not least, strategy games should not use "roll of dice/luck" so heavily; sometimes, they look like mechanics to slow you down (and this game doesn't need to slow down mechanics). I can see a roll of dice when you interact aggressively with other players/ai. Still, when you try to take over an empty control point, it should be a matter of strategy and time, for instance, to get a particular control point instead of a roll of dice if it's an easy spot one turn if it is USA place four turns (I know this would force a vast rebalance so I don't expect it ever to happen, but I am freaking tired of a stupid roll of dice/luck. It's a turn game. Does chess have a roll of the dice? The strategy game should work with little to no "luck" if well done!)

I can't stand the abuse of luck these types of games do to keep it challenging because AI is too stupid, and then they have to make it even more foolish to counter the unlucky guys that get it bad with the dice rolls.

That's mostly it for now.
SillySMS
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Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by SillySMS »

One brief guess as to some of the differences of opinion: I do tend to deploy fleets conservatively. If I can't send at least a dozen battleships, I don't even bother, under the assumption that the aliens can intercept and destroy penny packets. I have never actually tested if aliens take advantage of their torch drives to send large fleets to destroy small, dispersed fleet elements.

Given the steady stream of suicide corvettes they send at surface habs, I would be unsurprised to learn that yes, the aliens are dumb enough to neglect both the concept of mass and the tremendous strategic advantage torchdrives give them to destroy small human fleets in detail. It's not like they bother with the should-be-obvious strategy of sending out fleets of ~20 ships to obliterate surface habs before the LDAs can return significant amounts of fire.

If this is the case, then I could see how other players can expand much more aggressively in the early game, as they've found a better way to exploit AI weaknesses to pull off feats which would be suicidal against a competent opponent.
PAwleus
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Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by PAwleus »

I played the early game about 20 validation versions ago so I could only estimate the current state of it depending on changelogs but what happens at this stage is not really a problem because the Aliens should be overconfident and a determined skillful player should win many spectacular victories fighting defensively, then. The problem is that the Aliens don't react to these victories in a way that is significant - their escalation after entering the Total War is far, far from being sufficient if a player is not timid and if he supports it with rapid expansion.

I believe I don't have to explain it to "peace-loving" Humans but perhaps the Aliens are relatively inexperienced in the art of war because they depend too much on their societal manipulations so here are some things for them to rethink:

1. Their small fleets are repeatedly defeated again and again and they don't react by sending larger ones more rarely but they even make it worse for themselves by sending smaller ones more often - such strategy can be effective if these smaller fleets can be sent to poorly defended places but if there are no such places (or they can become sufficiently defended during their travel) it only creates defeat in detail on larger scale (in my game the largest fleet I've fought is a 6-ship fleet up till 2036 when they don't even have defensive fleets that are larger than that and their main base is defended by a single Assault Carrier!). 

2. A player rapidly develops new habs year after year and they don't react by escalating their efforts at establishing new habs, especially on multi-site bodies they already have bases but after initial colonizing rush toward the inner system they seem to focus almost exclusively on shipbuilding - the military answer should be only a small part of equation because usually in the end (especially when facing a rapidly developing opponent and in total war) possessing a large enough infrastructure that can support large enough military becomes decisive.

3. Humans research astonishingly fast year after year and they neither react by specifically targeting space science infrastructure nor by focusing on disrupting countries that provide most research. I've seen players constructing juicy targets with a lot of Research Universities within each and they are ignored when they should be primary targets.

4. Their fleets fall into trap after trap and are annihilated and they continue not taking into account how large a defensive force is awaiting their arrival not just in the vicinity but even in the exact orbit of their target - are the Hydras that landed on Earth so condescending that even in such situation they choose to ignore what they've certainly already heard from their human supporters about ancient human thinkers that advised to attack where enemy is weak? Why they were chosen for such a mission when they are such poor learners? Or perhaps they keep this knowledge to themselves for some reason? Have they actually acquired too much taste of our blessing and curse: human factionalism?


Hmm... I have nothing against them making poor decisions in a story-based strategy game but I would love to see all of this answered by in-game events. This is why for me the main problem is not AI for the Aliens (in lack of supporting events I can explain it for myself in many ways) but bad AI for human factions in comparison to a player-led faction (their very poor decisions are much more difficult to explain even seeing what's been done in the real world).


Pekish79 wrote: Fri Jan 06, 2023 9:26 pm I can't stand the abuse of luck these types of games do to keep it challenging because AI is too stupid, and then they have to make it even more foolish to counter the unlucky guys that get it bad with the dice rolls. 
I don't know why you think this in context of TI. Luck-based mechanics don't seem to me as having anything to do with how challenging AI is because these mechanics look like affecting AI in the same way as a player in case of the TI.

Generally, although I am not averse to luck-based systems in strategy games (I even like them especially if they force me to invent or at least change my strategies/tactics) I would appreciate if they were implemented in ways that don't allow savescumming, eg. the implementation of unlocking techs is OK because it's not immediately obvious what the result of a roll is so the potential for savescumming is negligent but the implementation of almost all councilor missions and events is bad because it's obvious either immediately or soon what the result of a roll is AND after loading a previous save the roll will have a different result so savescumming is very tempting even though loading still takes a quite a long time. 
Pekish79
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Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by Pekish79 »

Which is the smarted AI you will meet in a game, I guess Chess... how many random rolls of dice do you see in Chess?
The more you add randomicity & luck, the less strategic the game will be.

AI doesn't care if they lose just because of some bad luck. A player may get ten matches of lousy luck in raw and get pretty pissed. That's why when there is a lot of "luck" involved, the AI usually is stupid enough to allow a player with the bad luck to catch up.
Ultimately this is a game made for sale not to frustrate consumers, so you want them to win a reasonable amount (not leave everything just to "luck"), but because they can't control luck, the only thing you can control is how forgiving the AI is.

The less roll of dice and luck is involved, the more it becomes just about skill and the more challenging you can do the AI because you don't have to keep in account that random factor that ultimately will make the player upset. It's not about game mechanics (games of luck work just fine in real life) but sociology and psychology. Luck in player vs. player (or real life) is much more acceptable than player vs. AI
The player is willing to accept defeat if outplayed by AI; he is a little less if, for 5-10 times, he lost to an AI because of a stupid roll of the dice! (especially if a game last 60-80 hours!)

Anyway, In this game, it never happens. AI is obviously moronic! It has a vast "facade-advantage" that doesn't/can't use because If It uses this advantage, humans would always lose. And last but not least, it waits and holds your hand in case you are unlucky with the rolls. You can fix the facade-advantage with some background made up-story or lore, but it would be nice to fix the roll of the dice with thoughtful new balance and mechanics.
PAwleus
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Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by PAwleus »

I wouldn't like if this thread evolve into discussing luck but I think you perceive it wrong and it's just the other way around: the most strategic game is our life and you will probably agree it's not bereft of luck. Chess is just a game with simple rules that can be easily coded and this is why it can have strong AI.

I have no idea why you would think that randomness is introduced to help bad AI when your example is actually proving that bad AI needs less randomness (that was why chess was one of the first games that had AI that seemed decent). Just see: a player with bad luck can load a previous save or catch up using human ingenuity, a bad AI with bad luck is even more helpless and seems even worse.

I would perhaps be too bold but I would suggest you stop blaming luck. If someone loses a game for 5-10 times it's usually not because he is unlucky but because his strategies are not elastic enough and he needs to rethink and work on them more. Specifically in case of TI, I am certain that loosing 5-10 times means that a player is doing something very wrong.

It's actually a sign of a good strategy game that it's not easy for a human to form a universal winning strategy - such a game can be created both with and without random element. Personally, I like when games that try to reflect reality have random elements because it's one of factors that makes them more realistic. I agree that sometimes randomness is introduced only as a cover for a bad game design but I don't think that TI is such a case.
Pekish79
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Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by Pekish79 »

I would perhaps be too bold but I would suggest you stop blaming luck. If someone loses a game for 5-10 times it's usually not because he is unlucky but because his strategies are not elastic enough and he needs to rethink and work on them more. Specifically in case of TI, I am certain that loosing 5-10 times means that a player is doing something very wrong.
And right here you just proved to me you are not worth talking to and why you have no clue of what you are talking about the moment you presume I lost 5-10 times and make it personal lost all credibility.
PAwleus
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Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by PAwleus »

Didn't you just presume too much? I didn't suggest you stop blaming your luck - just luck, generally. I took the example you provided as if it wasn't about you - perhaps when you read the cite again you will see that I am saying "someone", "a player" not "you".

Why do you assume so hastily that I make it personal and you go personal yourself? I am not offended - I am just curious.
2alexey
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Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by 2alexey »

IMO, Operation center is a non-issue. Earth MC is more than sufficient to win campaign, the limit on decent mining cites pretty much means any spam strategy is pointless. You would probably win much faster by not wasting your resources to get more MC to waste more resources and MC to build mines, to waste more resources to defend those exposed mines.

The real issue, however was properly outlined, the game for player really only starts with late game fusion tech drives, so dashing there as fast as possible is the only "real" strategy.

The second issue, is that it is very easy to deny mining to AI by marine or nuclear boats.
The third, AI doesn`t defend it`s substantial mining and space bases with fleets, and so they are ripe for the tanking, as soon as player can muster a fleet powerful enough to assault alien base.

Earth research being a pittance is really bad, on the other hand, I want to raise a counter-point, Earth is way too easy to defend, at least large amount of campuses in space open you up to alien aggression somewhat.

All of those ideally need to be addressed.
PAwleus
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Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by PAwleus »

2alexey wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 10:22 pm IMO, Operation center is a non-issue. Earth MC is more than sufficient to win campaign, the limit on decent mining cites pretty much means any spam strategy is pointless. You would probably win much faster by not wasting your resources to get more MC to waste more resources and MC to build mines, to waste more resources to defend those exposed mines.
I am not sure why my arguments from this thread are not getting to you (you are of course entitled to your own opinion) so perhaps I will illuminate them by comparing your 2036 from your post to mine (both from Brutal campaigns and my strategy of entirely ignoring the Alien Hate by expanding as fast as possible and fighting early is almost not affected by the campus nerf - additional consideration is that my game is played after about 6 months of not playing TI so my strategy in it is far from optimal): in 2036 my Volatile shortages ended and will probably never return (over 500 per day), now Nobles (over 100 per day) are limiting my growth (mainly because I build Supercolliders on a massive scale), at the end of June I have over 2700 MC, over 1600 research per day, over 2x as many ships as the Aliens and with my first wave of fusion combat ships that are coming I surpassed them in the total combat power - the Aliens are not really a threat anymore in any place but they were almost not a threat even in 2035 when I had only less than 200 defensive ships with Missiles and Advanced Pulsar. Are you still thinking I've wasted my resources, despite the Extensive Network of Mines is additionally eating over 600 MC?
 
2alexey wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 10:22 pm The real issue, however was properly outlined, the game for player really only starts with late game fusion tech drives, so dashing there as fast as possible is the only "real" strategy.
Look again at my 2035 - I still have only ships with Advance Pulsar, then, and I've basically already won the game with only mopping up to do by ships with fusion engines. I've not been under pressure to develop fusion engines fast - would you tell me, please, in which way this strategy is unreal?
2alexey wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 10:22 pm The second issue, is that it is very easy to deny mining to AI by marine or nuclear boats.
It's actually even possible to deny before they establish them (before you have marines and fleets) when you take over the general research lead early and direct it in such a way that establishing habs in a particular place becomes available only when you are fully ready to take all sites you need.
2alexey
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Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by 2alexey »

PAwleus wrote: Mon Jan 16, 2023 1:51 pm
2alexey wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 10:22 pm IMO, Operation center is a non-issue. Earth MC is more than sufficient to win campaign, the limit on decent mining cites pretty much means any spam strategy is pointless. You would probably win much faster by not wasting your resources to get more MC to waste more resources and MC to build mines, to waste more resources to defend those exposed mines.
I am not sure why my arguments from this thread are not getting to you (you are of course entitled to your own opinion) so perhaps I will illuminate them by comparing your 2036 from your post to mine (both from Brutal campaigns and my strategy of entirely ignoring the Alien Hate by expanding as fast as possible and fighting early is almost not affected by the campus nerf - additional consideration is that my game is played after about 6 months of not playing TI so my strategy in it is far from optimal): in 2036 my Volatile shortages ended and will probably never return (over 500 per day), now Nobles (over 100 per day) are limiting my growth (mainly because I build Supercolliders on a massive scale), at the end of June I have over 2700 MC, over 1600 research per day, over 2x as many ships as the Aliens and with my first wave of fusion combat ships that are coming I surpassed them in the total combat power - the Aliens are not really a threat anymore in any place but they were almost not a threat even in 2035 when I had only less than 200 defensive ships with Missiles and Advanced Pulsar. Are you still thinking I've wasted my resources, despite the Extensive Network of Mines is additionally eating over 600 MC?
I wouldn`t compare these 2, I consciously was interested in how new brutal is "supposed" to be played, don`t see any reason to compain that aliens rolled over.

Yes, I do think you wasted a tonne of resources on unusable ships, but to each his own.
 
PAwleus wrote: Mon Jan 16, 2023 1:51 pm
2alexey wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 10:22 pm The real issue, however was properly outlined, the game for player really only starts with late game fusion tech drives, so dashing there as fast as possible is the only "real" strategy.
Look again at my 2035 - I still have only ships with Advance Pulsar, then, and I've basically already won the game with only mopping up to do by ships with fusion engines. I've not been under pressure to develop fusion engines fast - would you tell me, please, in which way this strategy is unreal?
You spammed unmovable missle boats and already "won" the game? :lol:
2alexey wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 10:22 pm The second issue, is that it is very easy to deny mining to AI by marine or nuclear boats.
It's actually even possible to deny before they establish them (before you have marines and fleets) when you take over the general research lead early and direct it in such a way that establishing habs in a particular place becomes available only when you are fully ready to take all sites you need.
[/quote]
I meant alien AI.
PAwleus
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Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by PAwleus »

2alexey wrote: Mon Jan 16, 2023 2:53 pm Yes, I do think you wasted a tonne of resources on unusable ships, but to each his own.
2alexey wrote: Mon Jan 16, 2023 2:53 pm You spammed unmovable missle boats and already "won" the game? :lol:
I am not sure why you missed this info from my previous posts but these "unusable" and "unmovable" missile boats were able to acquire over 1100 Exotics and get to Saturn in about 10 months.
Do you really think that the Aliens still have a chance of winning when they can't do anything to my habs or Earth and I am beginning the colonization of Kuiper Belt objects playing as Exodus?
2alexey wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 10:22 pm The second issue, is that it is very easy to deny mining to AI by marine or nuclear boats.
2alexey wrote: Sun Jan 15, 2023 10:22 pm I meant alien AI.
I would suggest you try to do it in the recent versions (including .53) before you say it's very easy.
PAwleus
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Re: Critique of Mid-to-Late Game Progression, by SillySMS

Post by PAwleus »

Perhaps it will be good to emphasize above points by showing end results of a campaign based on ignoring the Alien Hate and developing as fast as possible (Brutal Exodus main map game started on 0.3.26 and played on almost every validation version up to 0.3.76 - good to remember that my strategy was not optimal because I didn't know the game enough after 6-month break from it and it changed a lot during my playthrough so I had to adapt often):

- game won on 18 July 2038 (Bifrost launched)
- 5195 MC at the end (4778 from habs and only 409 from nations) with 5154 MC utilized (503 used by ships and 4651 by habs including the Extensive Network of Mines cost of 1711 MC) and still during expansion
- 3072 research daily (2139 from habs, only 196 from nations despite substantial efforts at improving it with 948CP used, 709 from the distribution bonus!), so 93.5K monthly (I still have many engineering projects to research including some useful ones and still some good engines to unlock)
- balance of cash was -5838 daily (because of it I had to sell 100 Antimatter and 300 Exotics during the game, IIRC), so -177.7K monthly (it was actually worse because I also Direct-Invested in countries)
- Water reserve 989.9K, +1827 daily (342% mining bonus) - as you see, @SillySMS, there is plenty of Water in the Solar System (I don't think it is changed for the worse in newer versions of the game) and I was using ISRU and atmosphere re-propellant only for testing purposes
- Volatiles reserve 421.4K, +1166 daily
- Base Metals reserve 63.1K, +1232 daily
- Noble Metals reserve 5.7K, +188.3 daily
- Fissiles reserve 14.3K, +16.1 daily
- Antimatter reserve 49.4, +0.35 daily
- Exotics 692.2
- 396 ships with 121K total combat power (mostly Coil Gun Zeta Boron Corvettes, about 300, and Destroyers - very good at high maneuver late game tactics, even better with Daedalus but it unlocked too late to have an impact)
- 22 alien ships (all but one in transit) with less than 3.5K total combat power and 8 alien bases on the verge of destruction (some still able to construct ships) but without any stations (I was actively destroying the Alien presence while waiting for Bifrost to be built).

Changes during the game that could affect it:
- changes to research hab modules had negligible effect (MC is not the main limiting factor in this strategy)
- changes to the Alien preference for weapons had exactly zero effect (perhaps there would be some effect if the Aliens didn't disperse their ships in so many small fleets). However, this change is debatable because missiles are currently a very strong weapon when used properly, especially against fleets that can't maneuver much (even absurd amounts of PD can't save them) - AI just needs to be taught how to use them efficiently (especially important for small ships with high acceleration) and try to avoid missiles launched by a player.
- probable changes to the AI combat behavior (I think I've seen some improvement there, but they still cannot keep formation when needed, what is especially important for large ships and are prone to defeat in detail because of it by highly maneuverable fleets) had exactly zero effect (for the same reason as above and because they came too late in my game)
- changes to the cost of hab modules in radiation zones had substantial impact (very good idea!) and could have impacted it greatly slowing my expansion if implemented earlier (so in my next game they will be important)

This strategy is manly limited by Volatiles in the early and mid game and by Base Metals or Noble Metals alternately in the later stages of the game. Money can also be a huge problem if selling resources is not viable for some reason because available Boost heavily limits money-giving hab modules (good idea!). Of course, it's micromanagement heavy so it's not for many players unless unnecessary micromanagement is removed eg. by future hab templates. The group orders in combat were a very nice step in the right direction and made combat using numerous highly maneuverable ships very satisfying (from 6-9 my standard fleet went up to 25 ships after it).

Currently, the AI (both human and alien) is entirely unprepared for competing with a player using this strategy so it's fun and gripping up to a point (for me, 2033 was already the year of breaking point when I realized the Aliens had no chance anymore).
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