Well thank you both for agreeing with me, I guess, but isn't the next step usually to talk about how to fix it? Fleshing out the AI isn't going to change what people do in multiplayer one bit, and it sounds an awful lot like the way the weapons and defenses interact needs to be reworked.



Maybe if shields and armor instead provided a penetration value that the attacker needed to exceed (bonus points for making bigger ships instantly more viable) and chaff changed to some kind of "targeting scrambler" so it would, lore-wise, affect all weapons.

Possibly

So I suppose nobody else has any thoughts at all on the way weapons and defenses interact in the game? Or is everybody off in the defenseless destroyer spam thread? I will admit that if nobody wastes their production on defense then my concerns are moot, but I'm not sure if defenses being valuable would be an improvement if they're left functioning as they do right now.

I like defenses but then again I tend to outclass AI's in research.

there was this other game that used the exact same setup of guns-lasers-missles vs armor-shield-flak that more or less solved this by making defenses 1/3 as effective against the 'wrong' weapons. this makes you not die instantly when you get countered hard and makes a rainbow defense slightly more useful.



as it stands though I like to go heavy on the flak, moderate on the shielding and easy on the armor simply because of how the phases play out. seems to work quite well most of the time. (I don't enjoy swapping armaments at all)

I actually think the devs have this pretty close. The key is using heroes effectively. By that I mean low level defenses can be quite effective when commanded by a hero with high defensive skill. Contrary to most players, I boost defensive skills on my heroes first so I can focus research on one defensive tech at a time. 5 or 6 units of level 6 or 7 flak with a highly defensive hero is nearly invulnerable to missile attacks. Of course if the opponent has a skilled offensive hero and high tech missiles, well, high offense seems always to win versus equally high defense. We'll have to see how this plays out when multiplayer is launched.



Regarding item swapping... yeah, I agree this is too convenient. There needs to more of a penalty to doing this. Perhaps ship XP level is reset to 1 with each upgrade. Or it takes X number of turns to complete the swap.



On a side note, I have seen the AI adjust its ship design to counter my weapon load-out. When I switched from Ballistics to Beams, the AI started showing up to battle with Shields instead of Deflectors. I was actually quite impressed. Unless this was just sheer dumb luck on the AI's part...

I don't know how much this will effect multiplayer, players could constantly retrofit but it can be expensive and the dust they spend could have been used to improve their systems quicker so it becomes a question of how much you want to cripple your economy to "win" battles. The counter-balance of the economic ramifications of retrofitting should address this issue but we won't be able to know until beta.

I'm quickly noticing a disturbing aspect of Endless Space's ship design setup: even assuming values are tweaked so that defenses are valuable on the optimum strategy (I prefer making all defenses at least half effective against the weapon they aren't meant to counter, plus weakening small ships relative to big ones) we don't end up in a good place when designing our ships.



A rock-paper-scissors setup is, thankfully, avoided by making it so each weapon is effective against two defenses. Still, players in a multiplayer game (or an AI programmed to think like one) will have strong incentive to constantly retrofit ships to take advantage of any imbalance in the enemy's weapons; the enemy will have incentive to give him this imbalance, because against an enemy with balanced defenses you can easily condense down to one weapon and blast his ships apart. The pain of this might be eased by the relative lack of anything else useful to spend Dust on, or perhaps by a Space Dock improvement in your systems that can spend Industry points towards retrofits (though that would be far too slow for this high-speed game of rock-paper-scissors), but it's still a system that incentivizes you to constantly change armaments and defenses. If espionage in the game perhaps that would be helpful, but if it were a feature (rather than a bug) you'd need the slow retrofit that the Space Dock improvement I suggested might give.



The AI, from my early games, doesn't seem to play this game. This is... Both good and bad. It's good because I'd be frustrated having to constantly shift my weapons and defenses around, but it's bad because it makes the AI pretty darn easy to build against and steamroll.



Am I reading too much into this? It seems like Endless Space leaves you at something of a Nash's Equilibrium of constantly shifting armaments. An empire with a large production superiority can get around this somewhat by having multiple fleets, pushing forward and pulling back as needed, but I don't see an Endless Space where the major tactic (after the obligatory rapid expansion zerg rush across the map to claim as much initial territory as possible) isn't focusing on getting strong weapons against weak enemy defenses rather than any sort of strategic prioritization of systems and technological upgrades.

isnt the obvious counter to prevent someone from using entirely one defense two put at least 2 different kinds of weapons on your ships? thats what i tend to do against ai's and it seems to work.

If you have two guns on your ship you're just making it easier for me to be able to counter some of your guns through dumb luck but not at all changing the fact that I can tailor my defenses to your weapons. I have to research more defenses, but you also need to research more weapons so it evens out unless one of us has a tech advantage.



But that is one of the three end states I see in multiplayer: each player tacitly agreeing to a particular mix, likely an even mix of all three. Given the way the game is balanced right now it's far more likely nobody would bother with any defenses at all, but if they did use them it would be a game of rock-paper-scissors until a truce was called.

I just use all 3 weapons and have no defences.......yeah im the zerg.....WANNA FIGHT ABOUT IT?!!

GC13 wrote:
The AI, from my early games, doesn't seem to play this game. This is... Both good and bad. It's good because I'd be frustrated having to constantly shift my weapons and defenses around, but it's bad because it makes the AI pretty darn easy to build against and steamroll.



Am I reading too much into this? It seems like Endless Space leaves you at something of a Nash's Equilibrium of constantly shifting armaments.

I've noticed the AI doesn't seem to care about my weapon loadout either, which seems particularly odd in this game. Granted there are sometime situations where they don't have the resources to alter their response, but they don't currently seem to be responding at all. But that part of this game is still being worked on.



This seems like a bit too much theory though, which has the general problem of compartmentalized focus. No mention has been made of using combat cards, heroes, superior numbers, tech advantage, or territory to name a few possible advantages.



Once we have a historic record of many PvP battles, we'll be able to assess the outcomes of battles with a more accurate view.

Yeah, the constant change of weapons and defenses is likely mostly theorycraft. I've come to believe that a far, far more likely outcome is that players will simply ignore defenses altogether. I have a blog post guessing as much now, and I'm trying to gather my thoughts and get some reality-checking in before making a new thread.



Of course our first multiplayer battle datasets might very well be poisoned by pair of facts: that it is wiser to build small ships than big ships and that with a destroyer's tonnage bonus weapons overpower defenses.

Nice blog post. I'd like to point out though, that weapon damage is not a smooth linear line in terms of effectiveness. More is not necessarily better.



Ship hulls have specific hit point ratings (which can be improved). So damage output below that threshold is not a good thing, and damage significantly beyond that threshold is wasted space in the general case.



With this in mind, ship designs can be made that output the 'right' amount of damage for their targets. And that may leave empty space in the hull for extra equipment.

Honestly, now I'm not sure what the point is you're trying to make here - not trying to bash you, just trying to understand better. A major element to strategy games is using cunning and intuition to outwit your opponents.

GC13 wrote:
"oh, you destroyed my fleet? Oh well. *redesign* Here's a new one that will destroy yours."

By this, do you mean you do not want any form of RPS? If I send 5 beam ships with deflectors at your 5 kinetic ships with flak and I win, I will assume you will build new fleets with beams or missiles to bypass my deflectors. Knowing this, I'll refit my ships as well. We end up trying to outguess each other. That makes for a great strategy game and is a general basis for all wargames. Even if all you had was one ship type and one weapon type the whole game, the best strategist will always win. It's more poker than RPS. There's bluffing and predicting - I might send a fleet of crap next time just to see what you have brought before I send in my real battle fleet. But perhaps you were predicting that and held back your upgraded fleet until next battle. I like this kind of tension.



So what needs fixing? If you just keep coming at me with destroyers maxed with weapons, I will counter in some way, whether it be with higher defenses or larger hulls or destroyers maxed with stronger weapons or simply predicting the combat cards you play. This is the meat of the battle portion of the game. Not everyone will endlessly spam destroyers at each other. Individual style will ultimately determine the level of enjoyment each player receives from this or any game. If you're not having fun churning out missle-maxed destroyers, then don't do it. If your opponent won't stop doing this, then adjust your strategy to compensate (he's just a brainless dweeb after all and will probably rage quit as a result)



Sorry if I've completely missed your point - maybe be more specific what's perturbing you?