Feedback and Plea to the Developer re: Fleet Compositions

[bright stirrup]

I will post this in Steam forum as well, but it's important to me that the dev hears it.

You are making CW: IXE with preset counts of units available in each stage. This is how you did it in Particle Fleet, and I felt it was a mistake back then too. The Creeper World games let you make cannons or mortars, for example, in whatever number you choose. This is how strategy games do it, and that's a big part of having a feeling of ownership and satisfaction in completing a stage.

By contrast, this game style you've made with PF and IXE takes that fun and personal strategy completely out of the picture. It's like if the whole of Starcraft was the campaign missions where you start with units and have to keep them alive instead of building your own composition and tech. You're not making a strategy game, you're making a puzzle game.

All the considerations (Max supply, efficiency, size, lore, etc.) can easily be fit to serve this game. This is the only way I will love this game, and I want to love it, because I know how great the Creeper World games can be.

Please give us Strategy, not Puzzle Pieces.

Thank you for your consideration.

[leaden lichen]

i just want to point out that in the campaign, units will be collected across many levels, not necessarily in a linear order. the goal for the campaign is that you dont start with preset amounts, but the amounts you have collected, based on the order you went in.

at the same time, custom levels will allow the mapmaker to choose how many units to give, and maps could easily give an abundance of units

[spare niche]

I'd also point out that at this point in development, such a radical shift in design would sent Knucklecracker back to the drawing board.

[leaden lichen]

well, in particle fleet i agree that even if you wanted to, you couldnt give out more ships than the maximum allowed. IXE is a lot more flexible than that. all the game needs to do is give out more ships, so you can actually use up your energy stores.

i think having a maximum is overall a good thing, so you cant just spam the map with 50 defenders on standby, but there should be some choice between which ships to have operating and which on standby. heck, maybe it makes sense to have an innate operating cost, so it doesn't always make sense to build every single ship that you have

[spare niche]

at least, have the Op-cost to be optional in certain maps. Would bring an interesting new way of playing

[raw pasture]

I'm really going to have to disagree with your characterization of "strategy" vs "puzzle" game. There is, IMHO, great strategic value in making decisions on how to deploy a fleet of a specific size.

I also want to point out to you that PF had a fixed number of slots, and each slot ony (if my memory serves) supported one ship of that type. In IXE, each slot supports a type, but the count of that type can be specified. That intrinsically means there can be quite a number of ships made available to the player.

Of note is that we always have a concern about how mapmakers use the options at their disposal. Most custom maps in Particle fleet suffer performance issues because mapmakers just went for "maximum particles - performance be damned" (to misappropriate a phrase). In IXE, because of the design decision (for whihc I have a great deal of responsibility), one of the concerns is the impact of large fleets on performance - essentially all units are custom units and all units traverse through the single-threading dispatcher for units. Having 100s of units are sure as heck going to hurt performance.

Also, the playstyle of having vast fleets of units that gets dropped into Creeper, or turtling to build up a massive energy bse are intrinsically not supported in IXE, Energy is also limited, pathfinding for energy packets are quite expensive and performance is sure going to be "not great" if mapmakers exceed the design intent.

[granite ivy]

I respectfully and strongly disagree with this post. There are other strategy games I play that have unit caps. That isn't 'not strategy', it's a different kind of strategy, which of course you are free to not enjoy.

[bright stirrup]

I don't know why people keep conflating what I'm saying with supply caps. I'm not asking for massive #s of units. I'm saying that this game gives you the composition of ships and you're only solving the puzzle of how to use each one, whereas it would be much more fun to let the player decide WHICH TYPES to build in order to solve the level how they wish.

Regarding the Operational Cost idea, it's not bad, but I don't see why it would be necessary. There's already an energy economy and the ships can have different upkeeps. E.G. If I'm gaining 6 energy/sec, and a Gunship costs 2/sec, and a Cryon costs 3/sec... Then I should be allowed to either build 2 Cryon or 3 Gunships to be energy neutral.

[leaden lichen]

because no matter how many ships you add it always makes sense to build them all even if you only use some to fight with, so they can sit back and defend

i also agree that it would be good if we had to choose our ship composition, and we would if we had more ships

but just having more ships, we still build them all

[granite ivy]

You said it was a mistake to have preset counts of units available. I think I just replied reasonably to what you said? You advocated for building, in our words, 'whatever number you choose'. 🤷

[bright stirrup]

Oh, I see what you mean about building them all. Just need a supply cap and a supply cost for each unit type.

[raw pasture]

This is seemingly going off the rails for whatever purpose I can't determine.

I don't see what would prevent some players from going crazy

There are 33 build slots (Perhaps before release the Apex ship will be locked down, leaving 32). There is apparently build limit per slot that goes at least into 3 figures. What else would satisfy the original plea?

[leaden lichen]

This is seemingly going off the rails for whatever purpose I can't determine.
i was entertaining the possibility of having more ships than the player can feasibly do with.

the goal of the original post is to allow us to have more ships than we can manage with the energy economy. this would mean that instead of building everything, the player picks and chooses their fleet to fit the strategy needed in a map.

what you have shown is that indeed, we can allow players to have massive fleets.

however, even though we can do it, it may not be great for gameplay, because having a lot of ships doesn't necessarily encourage only building the ones you need. ship building is rapid and it's always good to have more ships running defense. so in my eyes the original goal isn't met; instead of building ships strategically, all that is done is that the player can spam the map with a lot more ships.

as a way to remedy this, i considered if it would make sense to have an operational cost to every ship, i.e. a ship needs a steady supply of ammo (but nothing too crazy) simply to exist. you know, ships have to fly, they need fuel etc. they can't just exist in stasis without resources, so it would make some sense. and what is being theoretically solved by this idea, is that even if the player is given five hundred ships, if they spam the entire map with them, they will not have the energy to operate any of them.

as it stands, this is, in my opinion, a concern that the game is currently facing. KC has only shown us gameplay with only being given the right amount of ships per mission. but the question is, how the gameplay changes when many more ships are given. ships are currently very cheap to operate and are free to exist if they are not shooting, which means that building all available ships is not only not deterred, but also in some way encouraged

[leaden lichen]

what do you mean by supply cap and supply cost? not sure i follow, because it sounds like what we have right now (e.g. when you have 3 ships, you have a "supply cap" of 3 and a "supply cost" of 1?)

[sage stump]

I had a similar line of thought. I characterize threats as "static", "linear", and "exponential"

In almost every creeper world game, the creep's threat level is linear. There's a certain amount of creeper added to the world every second.

In almost every creeper world game (except notably particle fleet) the player is exponential. You add more and more energy and that allows you to make more and more ships at a faster and faster rate. The creeper world series is about whether you can get your stride going before the creep grows too large to overcome.

However, in Particle Fleet. The creep is secretly linear! while a constant number of particles are created every second, old particles go away. particles that are too far from emitters go away. There is a world particle limit (like 3000).

IXE does not feel like it has these safeties. The creeper doesn't care and will build and build until every open space is filled. Your entire fleet is barely enough to tackle one objective at a time. On the second bonus map, I pushed my entire fleet against the tree as soon as the map started and the creep not only pushed out any anti-creep that I was building on the tree, but it cratered my whole fleet.

My suggestion: put limits on the creeper in IXE. World total limits like those seen in CW4, maybe particles die after a certain amount of time. Otherwise, make it like creeperworld 2 where you can build and build ships. If you worry about filling the map (like I do on every other creeper world game), just make ships have a small amount of upkeep energy. That ships lose energy slowly. Keep a limit on reactors. Practical reactor energy output could determine your power level.

[leaden lichen]

i just want to point out that your capability is not exponential in CW2, either. you have very limited reactor space, meaning your energy is the bottleneck of your offensive capability. just like in IXE, in CW2, in a more difficult mission, you can definitely let the creep get too strong for you to be able to handle it anymore

the only difference is that in IXE capturing more land doesn't equate more offensive capability, but there are many situations in CW2 where you've harvested all that you could and if you let the game run too long, it isn't enough.
all mechanics are subject to change, but at present, IXE is actually better at this than CW2, because you can wait for overflow to knock a lot of creeper out that way

[sage stump]

true

In all of them, there is a limit when you fill the whole of the map with reactors

oh. just read on this overflow business. I'll have to see if that makes any of the maps turtleable

[granite ivy]

Why would you consider it to be a good idea to limit the creeper?

I definitely don't think your fleet is barely enough to handle one objective at a time, in most of the missions it is well above that.