Slitherine

Hello. I wanted to ask a whole lot of questions about this game, so I compiled a lot of them here.

Do you plan on integrating what I call a peace timer and conventional war timer into the game ?

The peace timer would be exactly what it advertises, no one can attack someone else (or a non ally's territorial waters) until the time runs out.

The conventional war timer would be that nuclear weapons are unusable until the end of that timer, forcing the usage of normal bombs and missiles. Not exactly sure if the first tier of cruise missile is nuclear or not, but it might be interesting to have to prevent early game rush where if your single airbase (in the standard loadout) is destroyed you're usually pretty much dead in the water for the early game (as carriers don't really have that much of a threat radius with nuclear bombs at the beginning of the game), and most of your major cities seem get nuked without you being able to even give a token response.

Regarding modding, will there be hardcoded parts of the game, and if so, which ones ? Will we be able to mod in new options for the game launch menu ?

Will there be more "futuristic" technologies ? Most of the techs showed in the game are built and deployed, but satellites equipped with lasers, while having been theorized and possibly developped, none were actually deployed.

Do you plan on having a public beta for the game ?

Do missile platforms come with one free missile of their respective type ? It is in reference to Rimmy's stream, where sometimes his silos had the "no ammunition" symbol, yet when he put a new one down it was loaded with a single missile. Was it like the airbases, where it came loaded with a standard complement or just that it got a missile produced immediately after ?

Do you plan on airbases continuing to instantly upgrade all of their planes to a new model the second an upgrade is finished ? It has been shown in the streams that aircrafts not only can be highly overpowered if rushed early game, but that they also are instantly upgraded, all of them. Which means that contrary to MIRVs or upgraded nuclear missiles, where you have to produce the upgraded variants, with aircrafts you get them for free, giving you a straight time advantage, as you are able to deploy your new weapon immediately (and in some occasions, en masse) without having to use any production time. Given the lethality of basic nuclear bombs to any installation or ship, disarming an enemy and rendering him helpless merely requires rushing stealth aircrafts fast enough, as any other viable strategic options when it comes to defense (wether through the use of SAMs or the deployment of nuclear missiles to target the enemy's airbases) seems to come with massively more research and then production time attached to make it viable, and is essentially suicidal as if there are no defenses in place to intercept a massive bombing run (as planes have planet wide attack radius at this poinrt), which would be effectively impossible to intercept without utterly massive investments in SAMs and radars, both in research and installations, your installation will probably not survive long after firing. And while you're researching for virtually any other option, the stealth bomber strategist can produce airbases and stockpile planes while researching his new and improved aircrafts, allowing him to stockpile strategic weapons and research a production time free way to instantly upgrade them all simultaneously, which is a huge advantage.

It would probably be better to have airbases take some time to upgrade, either having a straight timer at the end of which everything is upgraded, or having them gradually exchange their obsolete planes for better ones. That would at least give some delay. I still would prefer if there was a requirement to build the upgraded aircrafts, and have an option to either upgrade one by one or recycle your old aircrafts (or hell, just keep them. Run out of modern planes and roll out the obsolete ones as a last ditch effort, that could be an interesting gameplay gimmick, if a little niche).

Keep in mind that I have not played the game and am currently operating on what I was able to see in streams and videos of the game. Thank you for your time !

playwars wrote: ↑Tue Jul 28, 2020 8:57 pm Do you plan on integrating what I call a peace timer and conventional war timer into the game ?

The peace timer would be exactly what it advertises, no one can attack someone else (or a non ally's territorial waters) until the time runs out.

The conventional war timer would be that nuclear weapons are unusable until the end of that timer, forcing the usage of normal bombs and missiles. Not exactly sure if the first tier of cruise missile is nuclear or not, but it might be interesting to have to prevent early game rush where if your single airbase (in the standard loadout) is destroyed you're usually pretty much dead in the water for the early game (as carriers don't really have that much of a threat radius with nuclear bombs at the beginning of the game), and most of your major cities seem get nuked without you being able to even give a token response.

No, we do not have such plans. To prevent the early game rush there is the "Nuclear Warhead Efficiency" coefficient, that makes it too cost-ineffective using the nuclear weapons in the beginning of the match.
In your example, even if you have no airfield (it is destroyed or you invested in something else in the beginning) and another player is bombing your major cities, this means another player mostly does bad for himself.
Actually, attacking early is the best way to lose the match
Experienced players often start the game without any attacking units at all (no airfield, no carrier), but having the SAM tech + advanced radar tech enabled.

If another player bombs you early, this means he pays 10x price for each nuke -> one 1M nuke costs just a little less than a SAM site and they do mostly "psychological" damage than really affect your GDP. So while he wastes his construction points for building overpriced nukes, you can just ignore the damage, build the stock of 5-10 SAM sites, deploy them at once and completely disable his attack possibilities. So finally you will have a marginal drop in GDP and minor negative score in exchange to the great technological and/or military advantage. This means you will build the more advanced units first and retaliate in full strength completely negating the initial points loss.

Regarding modding, will there be hardcoded parts of the game, and if so, which ones ? Will we be able to mod in new options for the game launch menu ?

The biggest hardcoded limit is the max number of factions in the game, that is 7. This is due to the limitation of the network engine used (Photon Engine) that allows to send only up to 500 messages per second per room.
If you have the game running at speed 4, the game handles 600 game ticks per second. Even if one message is to be broadcasted per game tick, this already gives 4800 messages per second ( (1+7)*600), so even with 7 players cap I am struggling hard to send no more than 1 message per 10 game ticks.

Will there be more "futuristic" technologies ? Most of the techs showed in the game are built and deployed, but satellites equipped with lasers, while having been theorized and possibly developped, none were actually deployed.

I don't think so, this is the field for modding.

Do you plan on having a public beta for the game ?

I hope we will have it later.

Do missile platforms come with one free missile of their respective type ? It is in reference to Rimmy's stream, where sometimes his silos had the "no ammunition" symbol, yet when he put a new one down it was loaded with a single missile. Was it like the airbases, where it came loaded with a standard complement or just that it got a missile produced immediately after ?

Yes, but it is not "free". It costs production points. This means they are also affected by the "Nuclear Warhead Efficiency".

Do you plan on airbases continuing to instantly upgrade all of their planes to a new model the second an upgrade is finished ? It has been shown in the streams that aircrafts not only can be highly overpowered if rushed early game, but that they also are instantly upgraded, all of them. Which means that contrary to MIRVs or upgraded nuclear missiles, where you have to produce the upgraded variants, with aircrafts you get them for free, giving you a straight time advantage, as you are able to deploy your new weapon immediately (and in some occasions, en masse) without having to use any production time.

Yes, I plan to leave this as it is. Aircrafts are not overpowered at all. They "feel" OP when you have no defence against them, like in Rimmy video
A couple of cheap SAM sites completely disables the early aircrafts, good layered SAM defence + some cheap radar tech do extremely well even against Stealth aircrafts.

Also, the aircrafts are not free, you need to build them as you lose them.
Once again rushing with aircrafts early is extremely bad strategy. Aircrafts in early game is a good mean to do recon plus protect your coast against big ships.

Given the lethality of basic nuclear bombs to any installation or ship, disarming an enemy and rendering him helpless merely requires rushing stealth aircrafts fast enough, as any other viable strategic options when it comes to defense (wether through the use of SAMs or the deployment of nuclear missiles to target the enemy's airbases) seems to come with massively more research and then production time attached to make it viable, and is essentially suicidal as if there are no defenses in place to intercept a massive bombing run (as planes have planet wide attack radius at this poinrt), which would be effectively impossible to intercept without utterly massive investments in SAMs and radars, both in research and installations, your installation will probably not survive long after firing. And while you're researching for virtually any other option, the stealth bomber strategist can produce airbases and stockpile planes while researching his new and improved aircrafts, allowing him to stockpile strategic weapons and research a production time free way to instantly upgrade them all simultaneously, which is a huge advantage.

No, this is proven wrong by a number of play tests. Researching stealth is costly, basic bombs are actually really weak, defence is cheap.
Example:
Basic 100K bomb makes 14 points from Tokyo
50Mb bomb makes 714 points.

Researching Stealth takes 55 minutes, researching Advanced SAM + Advanced SW radar to counter Stealth bombers takes the same 55 minutes.
Building one airfield takes 11:48, building one SAM site takes 1:10. Plus your DDs are automatically upgraded to have SAMs as well.

And SAMs are later upgraded with ABMs.

It would probably be better to have airbases take some time to upgrade, either having a straight timer at the end of which everything is upgraded, or having them gradually exchange their obsolete planes for better ones. That would at least give some delay. I still would prefer if there was a requirement to build the upgraded aircrafts, and have an option to either upgrade one by one or recycle your old aircrafts (or hell, just keep them. Run out of modern planes and roll out the obsolete ones as a last ditch effort, that could be an interesting gameplay gimmick, if a little niche).

Well, this requires a lot of micro-management

Thank you for the answers !

One little thing is that when I was talking about early game rush I was more referrencing demolishing installations with basic nuclear bombs, not using them on cities. It is sad that there will not be a peace timer added as an option, since it would have been interesting to give everyone some setup time before launching the war. Or will we be able to mod the number of points to distribute your start with at the beginning of the game ?

playwars wrote: ↑Wed Jul 29, 2020 10:54 pm One little thing is that when I was talking about early game rush I was more referrencing demolishing installations with basic nuclear bombs, not using them on cities. It is sad that there will not be a peace timer added as an option, since it would have been interesting to give everyone some setup time before launching the war. Or will we be able to mod the number of points to distribute your start with at the beginning of the game ?

Yes, the amount of points to distribute is the setting one can configure before starting the game. Currently it can be set from 0 to double the default. So if you set it to zero, you'll have the "peace timer" naturally

As to the early attacks. As the nukes are very expensive initially, it is difficult to select the target that worth it. For example destroying the radar makes only marginal sense, as its cost is like 150% of the nuke. Destroying the airfield worth it, but it is usually defended by its fighters, so usually it is not an easy task. I'd say the success of initial strikes more depends on you strategy/experience, but even losing everything in early game is not a big issue - it is always possible to rebuild/regroup and retaliate later. For example, if you take Rimmy's second game (he was Africa), his problem there is his own attempt to attack early, then not choosing the correct recovery strategy. It was absolutely possible to rebuild and win. You may remember in one game Sam was completely destroyed early on, but managed to resurrect and nearly win.

I hope with more play tests we will be able to iron out all the potential exploits

Ufnv wrote: ↑Thu Jul 30, 2020 8:21 am

playwars wrote: ↑Wed Jul 29, 2020 10:54 pm One little thing is that when I was talking about early game rush I was more referrencing demolishing installations with basic nuclear bombs, not using them on cities. It is sad that there will not be a peace timer added as an option, since it would have been interesting to give everyone some setup time before launching the war. Or will we be able to mod the number of points to distribute your start with at the beginning of the game ?

Yes, the amount of points to distribute is the setting one can configure before starting the game. Currently it can be set from 0 to double the default. So if you set it to zero, you'll have the "peace timer" naturally

As to the early attacks. As the nukes are very expensive initially, it is difficult to select the target that worth it. For example destroying the radar makes only marginal sense, as its cost is like 150% of the nuke. Destroying the airfield worth it, but it is usually defended by its fighters, so usually it is not an easy task. I'd say the success of initial strikes more depends on you strategy/experience, but even losing everything in early game is not a big issue - it is always possible to rebuild/regroup and retaliate later. For example, if you take Rimmy's second game (he was Africa), his problem there is his own attempt to attack early, then not choosing the correct recovery strategy. It was absolutely possible to rebuild and win. You may remember in one game Sam was completely destroyed early on, but managed to resurrect and nearly win.

I hope with more play tests we will be able to iron out all the potential exploits

You probably won't be able to get them all (you are, after all, only human, can't exactly spend several centuries testing strategies like Alphastar), but it's reassuring to know you're dedicated to making it the best game you can rather than just dumping all the problems on the modders to fix, a trend that has sadly become more and more prevalent in the video game industry as of late.

In any case, I suppose I will see you when the game comes out ! Or the public beta is put into place (or when I inevitably have even more questions :p).