Capital Ship changes

from Sins2 Forums

Small post here, I'm a semi regular player, mostly with AIs and with friends. But me and my friends all strongly dislike the new "crippled state" for capital ships. In our playing, it made all combat way, wayy too slow. It made capital ships feel vastly more powerful than really any basic ships, and deeply disrupted the entire balance and flow of the game. 

We are  not super high skilled in the game, I'd say we're like medium level players. We are not at all versed in the community or the overall meta, we just play by ourselves. So I could accept there are deeper systems at play here, and I haven't kept up with the communities posts about it. Just wanted to voice my own personal thoughts. 

I really like the new differentiation between Armour and Shields as separate health points. And I like the durability system too. And if part of the purpose of the new health systems was to make capital ships die less quickly, then I think those changes alone are plenty sufficient. The crippled state mechanic just feels really awkward to play with. It makes it very difficult to ever know what ships to target, because attacking capital ships feels basically pointless. They soak up so much damage, and then they get to just fly away for a minute, regen, and come back. And the overall flow of combat feels pretty terrible. 

The same with starbases. They just take so damn long to actually kill, that it makes every single planet siege feel so slow. It creates this weird feeling as a player where i feel disincentivized to actually attack those targets in a battle, but if I don't target them at all, then the enemy will almost certainly win. So it feels like my only option is to only ever fight when I have a massive advantage so I can completely blow through the doubled health bars of capital ships and starbases. 

Before this update, I loved how the pacing of Sins 2 combat was compared to sins 1. I was honestly worried it would become Too fast, but before this update, I felt like it was excellent. It felt faster than sins 1, but not rushed. Now, it feels the complete opposite end of the spectrum, and it takes absolutely forever to end a fight. I've basically stopped playing until the next update, where this system is hopefully either removed or reworked. 

I've also noticed that the AI behavior seemed to get way dumber after this update. I'm not sure what was changed about their behavior, the update only said "many AI improvements," but in our games we have observed the AI repeatedly sending large chunks of their fleet to random planets and then just sitting there, doing nothing, for nearly the entire game. And they will only move when their capital planet is being actively bombed, and even then they are so slow to respond. 

I suspect that the AI is having some kind of backlog of orders, where they get a series of missions that they have to complete in a specific order, and those missions do not at all adapt to the game scenario. Especially because this issue gets worse and worse as the game goes on, so the AI get's more and more backlogged in objectives. So at a point they become completely unresponsive to the actual game, and rarely ever move their ships, or even attack. 

I am not a programmer at all, that is entirely a subjective guess, based on their behavior. 

I'm sure the AI is not the primary focus of the game currently, I just wanted to point it out. It's another large factor that made the game experience worse for us after this update. 

Overall I still love the game, but I do want the crippled mechanic to either be vastly undertoned, to make combat speed back up, or for it to be removed entirely. It has had an exclusively negative impact on our gameplay experience so far. Which is a shame, because I think just the changes to the Armour and Durability would actually have an overall positive on the game. I think those do a great job of making larger ships feel stronger and more resilient. 

And personally I am really looking forward to some major AI improvements, whenever that is possible. I would assume things like that would come after the full Advent release (which I am SUPER excited for). 

These are just my personal thoughts as a medium-level player, and my experience playing with AIs and my friends. We all love the game, and I personally have been so impressed with all of the work so far into Sins 2. This specific update, for me, was just a bit of a miss,  or maybe an overcorrection. Hope this was helpful to anyone :)

combat feedback capitalships sins ii feedback
8,390 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Sins2 Forums Top

Thanks for the feedback much appreciated, in regards to the AI would you mind posting a replay and a timestamp of what you consider broken AI behavior? Would greatly help on tracking down AI issues, thanks.

Reply #2 from Sins2 Forums Top

Edit: google drive link with replays:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ofoUXqQi1-F8uzLz2Nuia8xZ_o-cWtvI?usp=sharing

This is my first time doing this, so I am going to assume this is how this works. First replay code is 6733ac: starting at time 2:30:00. 
This first example is a small one. Dark blue (Nitheim Rebels), starting at about 2:30:00 and then lasting for about a full minute, had half of their fleet sitting on an allied asteroid. It seems like they prioritized getting the ship wreckage, but even after the wreckage was gone, they didn't move. Not even when an enemy fleet, Red, sent ships to attack their home planet (we were playing with home planet win condition). Eventually they did move, in the opposite direction, to attack a green planet. And one minute isn't a lot of time overall, but when 2 of their own planets were being attacked, including their homeworld, it was very frustrating for my friend (light blue) to see that the AI wasn't actually attempting to protect itself. The AI also had a bit issue with hoarding resources, especially Crystal. I assume this was partially because they repeatedly tried to build their titan, but after around 2 hours they always had over 10k crystal that wasn't being spend, and over 5k of metal most of the time. Not a big issue, but it did mean that they seemed very slow to build their fleet back up after being destroyed. So after one big fight, there was very little challenge for the rest of the game. 

Second game: 71aa30
This one had bigger examples.

Starting at 54:00, both the purple and dark blue AI basically stopped doing anything. Dark blue sent some ships to attack me, then immediately retreated because I had a star base. After that, most of their entire fleet seemed to just stop working. And purple had lots of ships just sitting on the Ice planet Manulis. Dark blue would attack me with some ships, but the bulk of their feet just sat on their planet and didn't move for a very long time. 
I've observed this kind of behavior happens often then the AI retreats from a battle. The ships that retreated often seem to stop functioning for large chunks of time. These dark blue ships didn't even move at all until 59:40, but they didn't actually go anywhere, they just moved between their own planets for a while. 
I believe both of these AIs were set to the "Defensive" behavior type, so perhaps that's why they very rarely moved. But it seemed like a very large departure from the kinds of behavior they showed before this latest update. The difference between the Purple and Dark blue AI was also big. Blue was primarily protecting themselves with some periodic attacks on my (green) nearby planets. But purple largely did nothing, for most of the entire game. 
It is possible that this is intended behavior for the Defensive AI. And going through it all now and seeing the map from a total POV, it makes a bit more sense. But because it felt very different from how the previous AI was behaving, it felt very strange. Especially because there were no details in the recent patch notes about What was changed about the AI, there was little indication of whether this was normal. 
What doesn't seem normal is at 1:43:00, Green (me) is starting to attack some of purple's planets, but purple's fleet is on the entire other side of the galaxy, at Dark Blue's homeworld. And then they proceeded to only travel between the very outskirts of the map, going from allied planet to planet, away from where I was invading them. That just seemed bizarre. And even when I was rapidly approaching their homeworld, they made no move to protect themselves. At that point my friend and I decided to just end the game there. 

Each of these individually were small examples, but every game we played we saw repeated things like this, so it overall gave the impression of the AI making consistently bizarre decisions. Hopefully this helps at all. 

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Reply #3 from Sins2 Forums Top

Quoting animusauctoritus, reply 2

This is my first time doing this, so I am going to assume this is how this works. First replay code is 6733ac: starting at time 2:30:00. 

Hi animusauctoritus,

Replays are stored locally on your machine. Replays are located in this folder: "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\sins2\recorded_games"

Below that folder you'll see a numbered folder, currently it's either 1006 or 1007 (future googlers may see a higher number). Whatever is the higher number will have your most recent replays. In order to send us the replay, you'll have to upload that ".sins2_record" file to some sort of file upload site like Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc and then link it to us here.