Okay, time for some serious minded discussion on these littlie horrors.
The more I look at titans and their interactions the more I feel their low tech requirements, excessive scaling with levels, and keeping of those levels is totally intentional. The basic point seems to be to make them available early so that they’re always a valid strategy, even in short MP games. Lovely idea. In theory.
When combined with the fairly hefty scaling and retainment of levels and XP it means that the titan also scales well into the late game with a lot of techs up. In effect it’s capable of going from this early/mid game asset to a late game asset all by itself. Again, lovely idea. And again, in theory.
In the most basic sense it’s a lot like a starbase, starts out weak, and then with research and the investment of a lot of resources it comes out really strong. Except that the titan doesn’t need resources, only XP.
It all falls apart however quite quickly. Titans don’t scale linearly. The simple fact that they require so much less XP for their lower levels means these come much faster. Also people will tend to focus on just a few abilities first, then any others later. This means those specific abilities scale sharply early on to full power. And abilities generally (for various indirect reasons), grow non-linearly in power.
Yet the solution is far from as simple as upping the XP per level requirements or fiddling with abilities and the like. Even if we raised the XP required where still not going to get a balanced solution. Too many game modes, too many gamplay styles, and too many unique circumstances produced by a whole range of circumstances can create sharp variances in the total XP per minute per player, and those same variances can also result for one reason or another in one ship, maybe your titan, seeing a greater than expected share of the available XP. I like to play slow games, using a fairly low level AI to start off with, and then winding it up after a while when I’m established, gives me the slow start I like, and plenty of action later on to boot. Even in that situation on 4 player maps I can happily have roughly 40-50K XP earned amongst my ships by the time I’ve got a moderate portion of my higher tier research done. I’m sure in the rare MP game that goes on that long the more aggressive early segments would produce several times as much total XP earned. Even before people start gaming the system that’s going to make it nearly impossible to balance. If the titan averages even a few percent more XP than average it’s going to pick up significant level advantages.
The idea is sound on the most basic level, but there’s no way to make it work out in any kind of balanced fashion. The timeframe differences between when a titan appears and when your able to start seriously accessing late game techs is just too long, there are too many potential variables in there to make the titans levelling anything like predictable.
The only real direct solution I can see is to make each level require research before you can earn XP towards it. If the devs really want a cheap solution to this, my suggestion is that rather than writing all new code to do it, they use a slightly messy workaround with existing code. Namely create new versions of the “ExperienceConstantGainRate” and “ExperienceConstantGainLevelCap” modifiers that apply only to titans. Then make the titan XP per level values really high, say 500K per level. Then use these new unique modifiers to make the titans gain a large amount of XP up to a steadily increased level cap.
Distribute the researches over levels 5 to 8 in the tech tree and the titan can then be made to scale with all other tech aspects. No matter the surrounding circumstances it’s never going to be pulling ahead of everyone’s tech level.
The only other option I can think of that MIGHT work is to make all the upgrades, (including abilities), cost resources. But I’m not sure that’s even possible, and even if it is, I’m not sure that would go over very well with anyone.
Thoughts everyone?
