Pirate balance currently broken » Forum Post by starhunter83

lyssailcor

Join Date 02/2004

+28

I always set pirates to uncommon which since 2.5 or so makes them really rare (on ludicrous maps) so I don't have to deal with them a lot although I get the message about raving pirates now and then.

But if I meet them they are so weak I can ignore them most of the time. Especially they are too slow and don't move very far from their base. If you have a pirate base near your home world from the start that may be different but that didn't happen to me yet in all my games.

I made a personal mod some time back that made at least pirate ships (and precursor ships guarding anomalies) stronger, but since the game changes so much at the moment I haven't brought it up to date yet. Perhaps pirates will get an overhaul by Stardock (better ship design, better tech progression, better AI, even more options like attacking civilian ships, asteroid bases, demanding ransom etc.) so that a mod would not be necessary anymore.

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I played a game today and had a pirate survey vessel (6 moves/6 sensor/31 hitpoints and all three weapon types) near my home world which destroyed my survey vehicle and first colony ship so I restarted the game because even though I was playing on gifted I find that if you get even further behind you will be the little kid in the playground being bullied by all the big kids.

Thankfully this start is rare as I have pirates on rare in the setup.

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Yes, it's rare, and that is PRECISELY the problem. In most games, most civs can just expand without a military at all. One or two civs, however, cannot, due to pirate snipers flying around their home world. Not only is this a problem in 20% of your games when the pirates shut you down and you autolose, but it's actually a problem in 100% of games. That's because even if the pirates don't shut you down, they exist somewhere on the map. That means they shut someone down. On a large map there are 8 players. That means at least one player has been knocked out of the game randomly, which benefits their neighbours. If your neighbour got shut down by a pirate sniper and that means they weren't able to send colony ships in your direction, and you end up getting 25 planets, it is in effect an autowin for you based on luck.

The balance is waaay off. Pirates need to either be everywhere or nowhere. They can't just effect 1 or 2 civs in an 8 civ game.

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erischild

Join Date 01/2012

+136

Quoting starhunter83,

reply 3

Yes, it's rare, and that is PRECISELY the problem. In most games, most civs can just expand without a military at all. One or two civs, however, cannot, due to pirate snipers flying around their home world. Not only is this a problem in 20% of your games when the pirates shut you down and you autolose, but it's actually a problem in 100% of games. That's because even if the pirates don't shut you down, they exist somewhere on the map. That means they shut someone down. On a large map there are 8 players. That means at least one player has been knocked out of the game randomly, which benefits their neighbours. If your neighbour got shut down by a pirate sniper and that means they weren't able to send colony ships in your direction, and you end up getting 25 planets, it is in effect an autowin for you based on luck.

The balance is waaay off. Pirates need to either be everywhere or nowhere. They can't just effect 1 or 2 civs in an 8 civ game.

I am dubious that you are going to lose one of your eight players and you are the only recipient of the extra planets. Other factions are just as likely to profit. It may indeed happen, but frequently enough to unbalance the game repeatedly seems unlikely. Is there any other benefit that this re-coding will help?

It is my opinion that the devs find infrequent game extreme conditions are not broken, but part of a supply of replayability situations that come up and give unique challenges. The Pirates can indeed affect and maybe destroy a couple factions every once in a while, and that would not be considered broken from their point of view, both the coders and the Pirates.

On my maps, such a thing would be a very rare event and end up being quite memorable, whether hard or easy or anywhere in between.

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When I say "shut down" I don't literally mean the pirates wipe out a civ. I mean, on high difficulty, the game is so unforgiving that if you lose a colony ship and a scout in the first 5-10 turns of the game, it is such an enormous disadvantage that your entire game is now in jeopardy.

It's like a high level game of chess and one player loses their queen before any other pieces are gone. Good luck with that, you've got a 1% chance of coming back from that. Why bother playing?

Again, I'll bring up Civ. In Civ, everyone must deal with barbarians, thus there is no balance issue. In Galactic Civ, only one or two out of eight players will have to deal with pirates. I'll be totally honest with you, I just restart the game when a pirate blows up my colony ship. Should I "learn from my mistake" and escort colony ships? Uh...no, because in 80% of my games I can send them out alone and there are no pirates.

This is stupid. In Civ, if you send out an un-escorted settler, it's almost certainly going to get snatched by a barbarian, so everyone must escort their settlers. Again, this is balanced. Everyone sends warriors or archers out with settlers. You do it, everyone in MP does it, the AI does it. In Galactic Civ, however, it makes no sense to build early fighters. So you just send out colony ships and hope this is not one of the 20% of games where you will just be forced to restart due to a pirate sniper. Really, really stupid. This does not add to flavour or replay value. All you do is restart. I know I'm not the only one. Really stupid.

And you must realize it's even more stupid than it first appears, because even though it only happens to you 20% of the time, it happens to SOMEONE 100% of the time. In every game, someone will get a colony ship/constructor blown up by pirate snipers, and they are put at a tremendous disadvantage. Again, really stupid.

I have no problem with pirate events. I would have no problem with pirate snipers all over the map. I just have a problem with pirate snipers only effecting 1/4 of the players.

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lyssailcor

Join Date 02/2004

+28

Quoting Skulbow,

reply 2

I played a game today and had a pirate survey vessel (6 moves/6 sensor/31 hitpoints and all three weapon types) near my home world which destroyed my survey vehicle and first colony ship so I restarted the game because even though I was playing on gifted I find that if you get even further behind you will be the little kid in the playground being bullied by all the big kids.

Thankfully this start is rare as I have pirates on rare in the setup.

Huh, I never met such a strong pirate ship ever ... but then I didn't encounter them in my 2.6 game yet. So the devs may have buffed the pirates eventually

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lyssailcor

Join Date 02/2004

+28

Quoting erischild,

reply 4

Quoting starhunter83,

reply 3

Yes, it's rare, and that is PRECISELY the problem. In most games, most civs can just expand without a military at all. One or two civs, however, cannot, due to pirate snipers flying around their home world. Not only is this a problem in 20% of your games when the pirates shut you down and you autolose, but it's actually a problem in 100% of games. That's because even if the pirates don't shut you down, they exist somewhere on the map. That means they shut someone down. On a large map there are 8 players. That means at least one player has been knocked out of the game randomly, which benefits their neighbours. If your neighbour got shut down by a pirate sniper and that means they weren't able to send colony ships in your direction, and you end up getting 25 planets, it is in effect an autowin for you based on luck.

The balance is waaay off. Pirates need to either be everywhere or nowhere. They can't just effect 1 or 2 civs in an 8 civ game.

I am dubious that you are going to lose one of your eight players and you are the only recipient of the extra planets. Other factions are just as likely to profit. It may indeed happen, but frequently enough to unbalance the game repeatedly seems unlikely. Is there any other benefit that this re-coding will help?

It is my opinion that the devs find infrequent game extreme conditions are not broken, but part of a supply of replayability situations that come up and give unique challenges. The Pirates can indeed affect and maybe destroy a couple factions every once in a while, and that would not be considered broken from their point of view, both the coders and the Pirates.

On my maps, such a thing would be a very rare event and end up being quite memorable, whether hard or easy or anywhere in between.

I agree that the game hasn't to be balanced in every way every time. On the contrary I would find that kind of boring. Having the potential to surprise the player is something I like in games. As far as I'm concerned the game could be even more imbalanced in giving different civs really different abilities without regard how strong they are then in respect to all other civs. It's then a matter of adjusting difficulty level which civ you choose to play.

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