So, in my last game my Hissho fleets were in the process of cleaning up the last Craver systems on the other side of the galaxy at turn 120ish. At some point I spotted what I assumed was a Juggernaught, but I did not pay much attention since I had easily been dominating space encounters until then. A few turns later I spotted that familiar asteroid close to my home system. Apparently that Juggernaught had been an obliterator, and one turn later my home system was no more.

That just seems a bit silly.

This is a bit ironic, since a few months ago I strongly argued for the uselessness of core crackers. Unfortunaly that still holds true. In their current form, obliterators do not only obsolete core crackers, but also their supposed counters, aka system shields and citadels. In my current game, an empty behemoth costs 8420 production, with another 20k dust, the equivalent to roughly 2k production via buyout, needed for the upgrade to obliterator. A carrier with (only) a core cracker module costs 6500 production;  System shields cost 2240. All three are on the same tech level. So for roughly the same investment in tech and production, you can have either

•  an obliterator, 
• 2 core crackers  (actually less than that)
• 5 system shields or 
• 1 system shield and 1 citadel. 

Is there any situation in which you would not choose the first? 

The concept of obliterator and citadel being equivalent specializations for behemoths seems fundamentally flawed -- it's like saying you can have a gun or a bulletproof vest, but the vest only covers a small area of your body, and the gun user can choose to shoot whereever they want, from any distance, and you will actually still be harmed even if he happens to idiotically  shoot the protected area (additional points for ridiculous unfairness because you are shown enemy system shields, but not obliterators). So I would try to change the latter:

Obliterators should only be able to target systems directly adjacent via a hyperlane (or wormhole).

The fundamental problem with obliterators in their current form is the inability to anticpate and thus counter them, unlike say nukes in starcraft or civilization. With this change, they are more of a buffed version of the planet cracker -- you can actually protect your systems with fleet superiority. At the same time, it would make citadels/shields a lot more useful, since they would have some use when built in border systems, instead of having to be built in every single system. Please note that even if you put shields in every single border system for a considerable investment, an uncountered obliterator would probably still pay for itself quite quickly by nuking half the improvements and population of systems.

I would also propose that citadels give 100% cover without an additional system shield, since they are almost the same price as an obliterator but not very useful except as counter to them, and to further reduce needed core cracker idle time before firing to 1-2 rounds, since they should have some use as an alternative to obliterators, and having to fly to the system makes them (IMO) counterable enough. Maybe make unique planets restorable to reduce frustration and/or trolling with surprise nukes.

Please discuss :-)

Sure I feel little outperformed by AI spamming obliterators relentlessly with all the fidsi advantage.

But most games I am in, end prior to introduction of obliterators. But it definitelly makes the science factions look a bit more scary.

You are still mostly capable of rushing or getting rushed by someone completely ignoring the concept of behemoths sonner than that.

CoreCracker is still certainly useless for the most part - so sure I agree on that. If you can build a core cracker, you can also probably deploy 10k manpower and win over systems in one turn regardless.
Obliterator is certainly almighty and powerful - this can be easily tuned down by system shield being permanent and not spent on getting hit rendering obliterators annoying but immidiatelly worthless only to provoke a building of a shield as you can shield up all your systems simultaneously or even post-firing the shield price seems partially justified, but of course rendering citadels completely irrelevant, as at least now, AI seems to think they are cool.

But for the most part this is even ground, everyone has access to these toys and everyone is further motivated to get them to retaliate. Only one chilling are the unfallen, who on the other hand lose it all with their home so they just get rushed.

If we are to talk about how the access is uneven (*cough* +125% science on empire for 25 antimatter *cough*)  even then, uneven advantage is utilized to rush you without bothering with behemoths or planetcrackers altogether.

Personally, you made the mistake of not making a citadel and a shield on the hissho's home system.

That is like you dressing up in a clown suit danceing around screaming "IM VUNERABLE HERE SHOOT HERE!!!"

Those are also accesable the shield and the citadel a tier below the obliterator.  

The fire once per turn thing is getting fixed.  Sorry to be so blunt in my counter point.

Just a unprotected Hissho homeworld is probably the most vunerable point of any empire in game and I am not sure why you did not chose to protect it?

Adder007USA wrote:

eeeeeh....be careful.  Don't bring food into the obliterator problem.  Besides, vodyani are borked on endless game length, they run out of food and starve to death before you have enough time to build your drone network to get your food production positive on your starting system.

Alright, I thought about economic behemots first, because those do change the early part of the game a lot and we all know the early game is where the most important decisions are made and when it will snowball into the late game. 

Adder007USA wrote:

Honestly, the main thing that oblits need in order to be balanced is counter play.  I'm not talking shields; those help, but are expensive, and if you get one of those weird galaxy gens that has a crap ton of titanium but no hyperium, you're SOL (It's 50/50 for just one shield!).  Some ideas that I've tossed around;

1. Obliterators need to be anchored to be fired.  Once done so, they then start building up their charge.   

2. Obliterators should be revealed when they fire.  If you're getting the nuke of doom headed your way, your opponent should have a chance of knowing where it is, and thus a way to find it.

3. Massive penalty to approval.  You're committing mass genocide.  If your population freaks out just because you raze a planet in ground combat, why the hell are they just peachy if you're destroying an entire star system?

4. There should be free war declaration on the race that used an obliterator, regardless of if they were the target.  If you use oblits, you've lost your right to complain via diplomatic channels when the galaxy wants your head on a plate.

I was not aware you can freely send obliterator shots onto someone, without declaring war. But of course this should not be the case. I like your ideas, so im going to expand with my own:

1. Obliterators should need turns to charge up, during which they will be vulnerable (- 50% maximum health, unable to move, revealed on the map to everyone) 

2. Either, you should be unable to fire obliterators without declaring war, or firing an obliterator shot should automatically declare war. 

3. After firing an obliterator missile, you should be unable to make peace with any faction for 1 political cycle, (20 turns on normal speed, 10 turns on fast speed)

4. You can shoot obliterator missiles at alliance members, however doing so will put you permanently at war with them and lock you out of any alliances in the future. (This one is more experimental, though I wanted to still enable the ability to backstab someone, with big drawbacks.)

5. I agree shooting an obliterator missile (not destroying, but just the act of shooting) should put a massive approval penalty on all your systems, something like -20 approval until the next election cycle, unless your political system is dictatorship or autocracy. This is similar to how razing and pillaging a system works with dissaproval.

It might be true that Obliterators are somewhat OP or gamebreaker but ES2 is facing espionage expansion. Spying activities will give several tools and opportunities to detect/monitor/sabotage Obliterators. I think notification for possession of Obliterator is enough and it shouldn't be nerfed. Rather, Obliterators need some diplomatic advantages in order to encourage players to use it as a diplomatic pressurizing measure or deterrence rather than actually firing it.

If there is one thing that Obliterators need some nerf, it would be multiple-shots-on-the-same-turn problem. A single shot can be defended somehow but even the Citadels cannot completely defend multiple shots arriving at simultaneous turn. At least for the Citadel-possessing systems, shield should be able to resist multiple shots on a single turn.

Obliterator/Citadel balance has the offense massively outclassing the defense - a modest advantage would be fine, but in almost all dimensions of gameplay, the offense has a staggering advantage.

The number one problem is the informational advantage - even in the ultra-late-game, most of the map is in fog-of-war.  You don't get to see it until it's literally a few turns from hitting your system.  You have no time to defend, and essentially have to pre-emptively defend your systems at random.  Because the offense knows which systems you've got defenses on, they simply target a different system, and you lose a pretty similar cost, since the way things are currently generated, there generally aren't "a few amazing systems, with dreck filling out the other majority" - rather, a substantial minority (30-40%) of your systems are equally good "core systems" that are devastating to lose.

The one and only defense against this in the current game is the 50-pilgrims law - to have full vision on all ships of all players, so that you can turn on anyone who constructs an obliterator and immediately seek-and-destroy the ship.  This is very difficult to achieve, even if the RNG has graced you with pilgrims in the first place, easily takes longer than obliterators to reach, and of course ... obliterators themselves are an exceptional way to nullify this tool if an opponent has it, or prevent them from ever reaching it.

A critical problem is "snowballing" - if you successfully launch an obliterator, well ... you're all set up to launch another one!  You've got the tech, you've got the ship, you've got the hidden location.  It does take a while to reload, but it's not that many turns, and - hey, there goes another system.  But your opponent is losing one of the single biggest investments they've made over the course of the game.  If you lose the ship, you can build another one.   If they lose the system, they most likely can't even restore the planets before the game ends, let alone restore the pop/buildings.   It's gone.   Because of this, if you successfully tech up to obliterators and manage to start launching them, the opponent won't be able to muster a counterattack.  You are destroying all tools/means they could use to muster this counter-attack - and they have only the faintest idea where to look.  The only situation in which "unlocking obliterators when your opponent doesn't have them" wouldn't be an absolute, complete trump card against an opponent is a situation in which an enemy on the extreme losing end of a war, facing the siege of their final systems, manages to sneak some obliterator shots to try to turn the war.  The problem here is that nothing in the mechanics contains this into the role of being a "comeback" tool, so it's overwhelmingly strong as a "win more" tool - if you're ahead in military power and dominating an opponent, you're equally likely to have a tech advantage that also allows you to beat them to obliterators.

For all intents and purposes, it's only a tool to allow an already winning player to annihilate the runner-up.

The cost advantage is also brutal.   You only need one obliterator to wipe out numerous systems (provided the enemy can't muster a force to fly to the other side of the galaxy, find it, and destroy it, by which time the missiles have been launched and the damage is done).  To defend just one system against an obliterator shot, you need to use up an entire behemoth, with the associated scaling costs.   I recently had an AI game as unfallen, and just getting 6-7 citadels up (defending perhaps 1/6 of my systems) was bankrupting my empire despite me being near an economic victory.

The opportunity cost is really uneven - factions with any kind of significant science advantage (sophons for example) are much better suited to beeline obliterator production, and get it far sooner than opponents - they're at similar cost-points in the tech tree, so if you're able to get to obliterators before your opponent gets to obliterators, you're also able to get to obliterators before your opponent gets to citadels.  Because of this, game theory gives the offense a huge advantage here, since offense can act as a form of defense;  there's no advantage to getting citadels before obliterators, when you could instead just grab obliterators, wipe out your opponent's core words, and eliminate the chance of them ever getting their own obliterators by annuling their science/industry production.

I think they can be fixed, but unless drastic changes are made,  I'd consider them the first outright design failure in the game.  I've otherwise been running completely unmodded for the vast majority of my playtime (~700hrs or so), but this is the first thing in ES2's history I'd want to have a mod for to simply delete from the game.  This is an incredibly harsh thing for me to say, and I've never said it about anything you've designed before.  My heart sank when I read the release notes, and I'm sad to say the consequences of the mechanic are exactly what I feared.  I'm sad about this because I'm a big fan of you guys, and I'm a huge cheerleader for this game - and generally the last person in the world to complain about things (c.f. my unusually low usage of balance mods compared to the average player).

I think you can salvage their design, but unless you're willing to admit there's been a serious mistake, it will remain a huge problem.  You must have the will to make BOLD changes to how they're meant to work - half-hearted changes aren't going to fix this.   Please consider this.

I've never written a criticism like this before, so I hope that "a quiet man raising his voice" will weigh into this.  I hope that these comments will be taken in good faith, and that you're willing to consider a major overhaul to this mechanic.