Happy 2011 to all the Sins players out there! It's been quiet on the Sins' front for a while now due to other business, but as I promised late last year, we're working on a new Diplomacy update for everyone. The update will be released in beta first due to a number of changes we're making in the game, probably in the next two weeks. Once we're happy that everything is working as expected, we'll release a final version for everyone.
So what's going to be in the update?
Currently the Pirates can either be non-factors or incredibly nasty early on given how their upgrade system works and how their fleets are composed. If you get a streak of bad luck, you end up with Pirates that have an insane power curve that makes the game very unfun, very quickly. To fix this, we're switching the Pirates to a series of fixed fleet compositions and upgrade paths. What this means is that early on, if you get tagged with a Pirate raid from bounty, you'll find them annoying but easy to deal with. As the game progresses, the Pirates abilities and toughness will scale over time based on the amount of credits they collect from missions, bounty, their planet, etc. The Pirates will no longer simply scale in power, either! We're giving them unlockable special abilities that will give them an edge in late game situations. On the flip side, we don't want situations where in the late game, a player can send a massive Pirate fleet at another player by simply dropping 100 total credits on bounty. So we're adding in a new system that will scale back Pirate raids levels if the bounty isn't high enough to warrant a big deployment.
Basically, the Pirate bounty system will be a bludgeon, whereas giving the Pirates missions via Diplomacy will be a scalpel.
I might not express myself well. What I miss is the intention from AI actions regarding diplomatic part of the game including placing bounties. They do things only when some numbers directly triggers them to do so, I don't feel any strategy, calculations behind actions like in war management, researching and empire building in which I find AI can perform very well.
What you are suggesting suggests intelligence which as far as AI goes it's still at least 20 - 50 years away if ever...
@Greg30007
The sophisticated way you are probably imagining it might be 10's of years away, but using computations for simple analysis of limited factors using a matrix (such as a sixaxis personalitymatrix based on perceived emotions) can feel much more like a real personality than an input output system which the current diplomacy feels like. And with the advent of massive multicore giving each AI it's own thread(s) could lead to a much more alive and real AI.
I've never understood why the game isn't programmed in a way that the AI uses basically the same interface as the input from networked players (with a little more direct data access so the AI knows whats going on). That way, AI would scale far better on multicore than it does now
@Yarlen
Is there any remote possibility that you might consider implementing a scripting layer for modding sins (like you are planning to do with elemental)? That would be the single greatest help you could give us modders.
great news about the pirates. Is there any chance that the AI will be looked into re how it uses and attacks SB?
Pls fix Repair bay autocast priorities. You can have a capital ship at 200 hull and your repair bays choose to heal their fellow repair bays instead. Understandable heh but I have no sympathy for them. And microing repair is tedious, needlessly.
Capital ships and Starbases need to be top priorities for Repair bays. Everything else is secondary.
Will animosity be fixed?
Currently, its a very simple "I told you attack this you stupid ships" and the effect is effectivly broken.
Quite a few mods have various work arounds... you could look into those... but they are not really the simple "attack the radiance or attack nothing" system that i assume was wanted.
Another thing: Even though capital abilities are supposed to do 75% damage to other capital ships, Damage over time abilities seem to be doing 100% damage to other capital ships. In other words, when comparing kol GRG to death egg deathy of death... the nanites are doing 100% of their advertised damage straight to the hull, while kol GRG has to get though ~60% shield mitigation AND armor, AND *.75 damage multiplier.
So, while lv1 death egg does 625 damage exactly... for 75 antimatter... (and reduces armor) GRG does 600*.4 *.75*(say... 3 (pathetic) armor... .8695) = 156.5 damage... In other words... Not only does GRG do 4x less damage than the death egg, it also does significantly less DPS. Yes. the instant damage ability does less damage per second than the damage over time ability. Even when under the influence of a donov's lv6.... The kol STILL does less damage/antimatter than a evacuator... and much less dps.
(be careful though, you dont want to accidentally cause Heal over Time abilites to be suddenly 75% effective against capital ship hulls)
(Vasari desolators PMS also suffer from a similar, but less severe affliction... at least they are nice for bombing planets)
(On the note of Kol underperformance: The way things stack in Sins... the adaptive force shield is much weaker than advertised.... 15% -> 13% actual damage reduction. 25% -> 20% actual damage reduction. 35% -> 26% actual damage reduction... So not only is the Kol a fantastic paper weight, its not as weighty as we think it is.)
(suggustion: remove the silly speed reduction from GRG, and either significantly reduce the antimatter required to fire it, or significantly increase the damage... or both. Buff the range a bit while your at it. It Miiiiiiight be fun to have it like a big o' seige gun, in a park a kol outside starbase weapon range and wait sort of way... like what you do with death eggs currently. and In order to get 15/25/35% true damage reduction, you need 17.65/33.33/53.85% displayed damage reduction... 15/30/45% seems like a nice compromise. (which gives 13%/23%/31% true damage reduction)
Advent Guidance also suffers from displayed vs actual reductions...
I could go on and on and on.... I am not the only one with stupid ideas... many other people also have crazy ideas on preety much everything. (hehe, the 'balance mods'...)... There are gazillion threads... i prolly repeated some of the stuff from the 2 threads I linked to earlier in this thread... 2 days till (beta) patch day, And I cant wait! Then we can see what you all have changed... and give you feedback. ^^
Fix the Dunvo icon! its been backwards since the Damn Advent invaded.
We did some experimentation in a mod over the summer... and never really got anywhere with it. No matter how hard we buffed it, the ability was never useful at level 1, although we did eventually get it useful to level 6+ Kols when maxed out. I believe strongly that it needs a secondary effect to make it scale well; we just couldn't find a sweet spot for "pure damage" that got it working levels 1-3, early-late game.
More to the point, there are no capital ship abilities worth "speeding up" with guidance on the Advent faction. This ability probably should be scrapped and replaced.
That capital ship (Advent Revelation) needs to have its abilities revamped. I almost never see anyone building it, and when I say "almost never" I mean perhaps once a year (and the player who built it was probably a noob). I can't say that for any other capital ship.
Reverie is the only reason to build a Revelation. Clairvoyance is borderline acceptable since it's convenient, but that's pushing it. The other two are... garbage, sadly.
Unfortunatly, the devs have noted that they plain refuse to 'scrap and replace' any abilities.
Guidance could concievably reduce antimatter useage on its target without changing the ability significantly. This might make it usefull for telepush, detonate antimatter, reverie itself (you could shut down a whole host of skirantras!), both the support cap's abilities... the progen doesnt benifit much.. though continous shield restore might be nice.
In my mod if I didn’t like a buff on a Cap ship I removed and replaced it with something that was more in line with helping rather than hindering the race. Take the Human Carrier for instance. To try and reduce building crap loads of smaller ships that were pretty useless and mainly caused a lot of screen lag. I took the Healing bots and added them to the carrier adding another option to choose. This buff is great coming from a carrier. I know you guys might not care for it but the crowd I hang out with loves it. I gave similar buff to each of the other races so their carriers can heal the fleet. I also removed the Nov Cannons ability to destroy planets and made those into Local system Ion Cannons. Works great for protecting planets. I also increased the Cap ships armor, Hit points and weapons. Cap ships should never, ever have to sit and pound on a frigate for over a min to destroy it. I never released this mod, but the people I play with love the mod. I’m still undecided if Ill release it to the masses. I have added most of the other mods like planets and graphic effects to this mod too. Which is why I hate it when a patch comes out. it takes a while to do all of the updates. And why I’m not liking that they only want to fix Dip and not Entr.
dupe
I discussed this with Ironclad and the game is behaving as designed.
Mk, its nice to know that the game mechanics are working as designed.
(and it its nice to know that devs look into what I write on here )
Now I just need to some how find a way to keep myself from talking about balance till tomorrow... one day till patch... one day till patch...
Yarlen my brain translates this as "The GRG was designed not as a weapon but as an exhaust port for antimatter should it ever reach a critical level".
After reading it again I realize you were talking about the damage multiplier but some people might find that funny.
And people wonder why Diplomacy lags so bad.
I am a self taught modder who though entrenchment was great but Diplomacy sucked do to the lag so I got involved with the TSOP project where Major Stress had the bright idea of compressing most of the .tga textures to .dds saving a lot of memory. For the SOA2 Diplomacy projct I am taking this 1 step further and actually taking textures from 1 file and squeezing them on to others which so far I have gotten rid if about a dozen texture files.
Then I came across this waste of space in the Diplomacy Textures Directory. OMG, really guys, this is the best you could do?
Now it's no surprise that a 1024x1024 .tga makes the worst offender list with all the research icons and Fleet Upgrade pics but to add 4 more 1024x1024 sheets to fit 69 icons that would have fit onto the original 4 ButtonsResearch sheets easily.
Please learn how to not waste texture space needlessly and maybe I could play a 10 player game without it being a slide show.
GameLogo_Opening.tga 3mb
3mb - Whats this doing in my memory all game. Why can't it be a LoadonDemand if it needs to be here?
20mb with 2 file sets. Imagine when I get through them all.
Or how about this one. Relationships_PLACEHOLDER.tga. 3mb
What does this do in my memory?
These last 2 are also listed as worst offenders and I don't even have the game loaded yet .
Fix up my mod for those files I pointed out.
Spent more time on this post. Saved 21 mb in 10 mins
Hmmm, there are two portraits in that screenshot that aren't in the final release. I can't make out the bottom left one... looks interesting.
Admittedly, GRG needs more than a 33% damage boost to become viable.
The Kol has a serious issue with exponential growth. Its abilities are weak for two reasons in the early game: they don't pack much punch, and they require too much antimatter. As the Kol levels up, both of these problems are resolved through higher level abilities and improved antimatter regeneration (and at level 6 a virtually limitless well is unlocked). As a result, the Kol's power increases astronomically at each level up, to the point at which a level 1 Kol is not a real threat at all, a level 3 Kol is of little consequence, a level 5 Kol is a respectable and powerful warship, and a level 6 Kol is one of the stronger capital ships of its level. This power curve is unacceptably steep.
I don't believe there is any scalar buff that could be given to the Kol to fix it. You'd either push it over the edge at higher levels, or it will remain worthless at lower levels. I think Finest Hour needs to be reworked so it's not a "endless antimatter buffet" anymore, and the other abilities need to be scaled at each level so they don't progress quite as sharply.
If the Kol could be somehow redesigned, I'd love to see some way for it to regenerate its own antimatter reserves.
I consider Finest Hour to be less of the issue... its not an endless antimatter buffet... It has a long cool down, and a significant portion of the gained antimatter must be used to pay off the initial antimatter investment.
Lets say we have... A Kol, lv 6... in its own culture, with substatian cultural upgrades (+antimatter/second)... and maybe a lv 6 donov around... whatever... a KOL with unlimited antimatter and lv 3 GRG.
ehh... woops. I missremembered my damage for GRG... so... my previous post, saying GRG damage... 1/2 it. lv 1 does 325 damage, not 600.
ehh so, lv 3 GRG... 975 Damage every 6 seconds
With finest hour on... it gives a 16.6% increase in rate of fire (remember, fun, sins stacking)... which actually translates right back into 20% increase in dps.
SO, 195 DPS. Sure looks nice compared to death egg's 25 DPS + -4.5 armor.
Actually... huh... that is kinda nice.,.. 71 fleet supply worth of (unupgraded) LRMs... huh.
I mean, its still, 195*..75*(armor)... for the 3 armor case it gets down to 51 true DPS. or, against shields, 58.5 DPS.
so... best case: 58.5 DPS. That is using 75 antimatter every 5 seconds. Almost able to break a progen's shield restore.
If we factor in the fact that 120 seconds are 6seconds per shot, and 60 seconds are 5 seconds per shot, we get an antimatter useage of 13.33 antimatter/second.
A lv 10 kol is able to produce 1.47 antimatter/seconds (without upgrades) throw in upgrades and we get 1.764 antimatter/second next is... Last Stand, over the 3 min cool down, does the equivilant of an additional .83 antimatter/second (factoring in the cost of last stand itself)
If we assume our perfect lv10 kol is sitting in its own, completly researched culture, we can tack on an additional 1.5 antimatter/second. We end up with a grand total of 4.1 antimatter restored per second.
In other words... A lv 10 kol in perfect of perfect of circumstances will only be able to use GRG(and last stand) to full effect if there are 3x LV 6 DONOVES PERFECTLY CHAINING FLUX FIELD . just dont try to use flack burst, or adaptive shielding.
Assuming we dont have 3 lv 6 donoves... we find that we are a factor of 3.25 short of being able to set GRG on autocast. So, multiplying EVERYthing out... we end up with 15.6 TRUE DPS. The equivilant of 3.55 LRMS.
ehh, i seemed to have forgotten the possibility of a starbase with lv2 resupply.... which adds another 4.166 antimatter/second for 60 seconds every... 105 seconds... another 2.381 antimatter/second. Grand total TEC maxed out rediculously everything KOL regen of 6.5 antimatter/second. STILL less than 1/2 the required antimatter to spam GRG in a stupid manner.... And not nearly enough damage/second to beat the regen of perfectly chained lv3 powersurge. (33.75 heal/second vs 22.14 damage/second (thats at 65% shield mitigation, which a lv 5 kortul will have)
Lets hope really really hard the enemy doesnt have any advent light frigs, detonate antimatter, or a kortul, or donoves themselves.
any questions? hopefully my math is right... cause that was about 1.5 hours of my time right there i expected to spend doing homework.
got that? punch line: lv10 maxresearched,maxcultured kol inside starbase resupply range cannot out DPS a lv5 kortul's shield restore rate. Thats my theory. Anyone wanna verify with experimental data?
Actually... that didnt factor in standard weapons... go ahead make the kortul lv 10... thatll buff up its antimatter regen to fully chain powersurge... which should do it. just remember to not put any points into disruptive strikes.
Oh, GRG is way out of the ballpark. It needs substantial improvement just to get to the point at which we can start to have serious debate about its merits (currently: none). I was speaking more of the Kols we do see on occasion: Flak Kols with maxed out burst and adaptive shields as their secondary. Flak Burst isn't always spammed as soon as the cooldown is up; you usually time it to maximize effectiveness. As the Kol does its job, you need to use it less and less often. So in practice, level 6+ Kols do not run out of antimatter.
The problem, as I mentioned already, is that level 6+ gives you both the antimatter leeway to use your skills more often, while also making the skills powerful enough that you don't need to use them as often. The end result is that low-level Kols are capital ships who run out of steam before the job done, and high level Kols are capital ships that can get the job done quickly with antimatter to spare. Right now GRG isn't on the radar, but if we buffed it enough, I strongly suspect it would suffer the same issue as flak burst in this respect.
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