Maybe I'm playing Devil's advocate here, but is the turtle style of play not still a strategy some players may want to try? Gamers often attack particular styles of play calling it 'scaly' or 'noob' or 'unfair' etc etc, but I think a well balanced game that allows as many different play styles as possible is a true winner. Take the original starcraft for instance, you could turtle, sneak attack, directly attack, use special abilities etc etc. Most other strategy games do allow for defensive play styles, by eliminating that style, it makes the game less interesting in my opinion. It can be fun to try to crack a turtle's defenses and find and exploit his weaknesses. There are clever ways of defeating turtle players and it can make the game in question quite interesting (imo) if there is as much variety as possible. The statement 'don't ever build that' means that there is something missing i.e. balance in that area.

I have no problem with the turtlers, sneaks, bold attackers or even clever and manipulative backstabbers. It's a game afterall and every strategy deserves consideration. In a war game, like real war, you are justified in doing whatever is necessary to survive, even play defensively. The greater the number of combinations of play allowed, the more possible and varied endings one can have, and that for me = more fun

That's a really cool idea Deadjim, you could also have special add-ons effective against certain shipe types as well. It reminds me of the GDI turrets from C&C TS.

Oh dear It appears I must have hit the post button twice...plz excuse the double post!

Except Sins isn't quite a traditional RTS. In a normal RTS, once you break the turtle you're pretty much done. In Sins, the player can make each and every planet a death star if the defenses are too strong - which means to win you might need to break 5,10,15 turtles. And that would take a very, very long time and be extremely unfun.



This is true in every RTS that's played in MP. There are always units or buildings you don't build because they're not part of popular strategies or gameplay styles. That doesn't mean they're useless or unbalanced, just that they aren't suited to a certain style of play.

If you want to extend this logic, you could complain that most of the techs in Sins are completely useless because you never research them in the one hour long MP game. Planet population upgrades? Who needs them when you never have more than 2 or 3 of the same planet type because they're not cost effective. Weapon upgrades? Same thing, if you don't have a large enough fleet (1v1, small map). Resource extration techs? Yep, same thing..

See how it doesn't quite work that way - all of those techs are useful, but they're not used all the time. It's the same with defenses. If you only play quick games where you don't have 5-6 border planets to defend and 9 other people threatening to destroy them, sure it might be pointless to build defenses. But playing a large FFA game without them is suicide. At the same time, it makes it so that your 35-point defenses aren't enough to stop large enough fleets, so you can't just make one superfleet steamroller and wipe the map while the AI/player bashes his head against the wall of your defenses without success.

This I call good balance.

It is possible to turtle against the AI if you have a good economy.

However, in my experience, most strategy games do not reward turtlers at all. In most, you must expand and be very aggressive if you want a chance to win.

Aww Kitkun, you posted and I wanted to edit mine

Take this for consideration:

Enemy 2000 FP maxed out fleet vs your 2000 FP maxed out fleet + full 35 point defenses.

Now buff your defenses even more.

Now imagine you're the attacker, and realize how little chance you have to actually break that turtle. Now also imagine that if you finally do, he can just do the same thing at the next planet.

Now that I think about it, in Sins it's easier to defend in the game than in most just because the max fleet size limits the number of enemies and thus places they can be at while the scale limits how fast they can get there.


Then my post has served its purpose.

I don't like how all modern RTS games don't support defensive tactics. I can't think of one in the last five years that has.

Sins is no different. Sure, you can turtle, but as a previous poster stated you can simply go around it. The range increases available through research for cannons aren't enough, and hanger defenses are useless because the strike craft don't attack other strike craft, and it's impossible to build up enough hangers to mount a serious defense by themselves.

Sure, you could say that in previous real world historical examples defenses have been circumvented, but what you can't say is that the defenders had an "invisible line in the sand" that they couldn't go past to build defenses. Sins seems to be at its core a game that doesn't support defensive strategies. The developers put in a radius around the planets/asteroids that severely limits the player's ability to defend their territory, and then went a step further by providing only two defensive structures that can attack an enemy - and made each of those weak.

It seems clear to me that the sole purpose of static defenses is to stave of AI. Further than that they are generally useless, which is unfortunate.

Thanks Annatar11 and Kitkun, I do appreciate your points of view and the fact that we are able to have a civilized debate without it deteriorating as so many posts often do unfortunately. I can understand that it could be crazy if a player builds a mega defense around every planet, but I find that unlikely since they cost a fair amount of money and time to put in place. An early attack can kill a turtler quite easily if executed properly. A suitable ability / strategy would need to be devised in order to crack an uber-turtler, but if he has no fleet to back himself up i.e. spent all money on turrets, there would be a natural disadvantage to constantly being on the defensive e.g. cultural subversion.

Let me propose this idea: I am a Vasari attacker vs a turtler, I use my Kostura cannon on his planet to cripple his defenses, I then move my fleet in and trash the place, secure, and move on. Yes a turtler is often a mission to kill in any game, but I still feel that sins defenses need a boost so that people can choose to play in this way against other humans if they want to without the certainty of defeat. I guess I just liked good old starcraft type stuff where a mass of photon cannons or whatever could do serious damage to an attacker while your fleet hits his base simultaneously. I have yet to see this strategy hold up in Sins MP games, but maybe I've been playing with the wrong people

**Slight indulgence:
All this defensive talk reminds me of the DS9 finale..."You may win this war Commander, but before you do you will have lost so many ships, so many lives, that your victory will taste as bitter as defeat" - female Chamgeling's words to Kira regarding Dominion defense perimeter around Cardassia Prime. Quite on-topic I think Excuse the Sci-Fi ramblings...lol

*Changeling's...typo

I've been thinking about this a little bit. I think what I'm trying to avoid being a proponent for this situation:



And this would be a problem. The big difference between SoaSE and most "classic" RTS's like Starcraft, Warcraft, C&C, etc. is that you generally have one main base with a large resource pool and possibly a few outposts. In SoaSE, every planet in itself is a viable target, and each planet can be time and resource consuming to take down. In those classic RTS's, there were counters to defenses too--generally, long range units like artillery. I'll get to that a little later here.

SoaSE can already be a very, very long game, and adding an element that makes it possible to have every planet have the equivalent of a strong fleet around its gravity well would make things both tedious and somewhat unfair. Furthermore, by simply "making defenses stronger", that would lead to a rather "rock-paper-scissors-TIGER CLAW" approach to the balance of this game... with defenses being Tiger Claw. There wouldn't be a good balance, and no, I don't think Javelis/Illuminators/Assailants would be a good counter because then it's just one more reason a player builds them en-mass--and another reason why people build more strike craft... and another reason people build (or used to build) flak... and so on and so forth. Currently, simply "beefing up" the defenses wouldn't work, it would screw with too many game mechanics as they are.



I see you here--however, what about a 2 hour long game? Then a lot of those techs might become viable. Lord knows that my TEC economy rush strategy NEEDS those resource extraction techniques, and for late-game, I start beefing up those weapon and hull buffs too. In a short game yes, you don't need many techs at all... but they can be useful later in game. That's the point of having those techs there--they are useful in some situations, but not in others, and in general they can be considered "useful" in the grand scheme of things, or equally useful and not useful. In general, the devs did a good job of allowing the player to be incredibly flexible in terms of how they wish to use their resources--should I upgrade my ships here, or should I just build more ships? Should I research more resource extraction upgrades, or just try to lock down this next planet? It allows some leeway for situations where it would just be stupid to research tremendously (like in small maps) and leeway for flavor. I think we can all agree, however, that defenses that shoot back generally have little value in SoaSE matches besides single player, and that simply because the computer isn't smart enough to fly around the defenses. I am simply a proponent of adding that dimension to SoaSE as a relevant addition; every military in the world still has SAM batteries, AAA batteries, bunkers, etc, if we want to get into real-world comparisons. I honestly think that we should probably keep those comparisons to a minimum, and only to use them for real-world value of why they are viable here in SoaSE as a matter of gameplay enjoyment.





I think we're missing a point here too. So here we're saying, "Player A 1000-supply fleet vs. Player B with a 1000 supply fleet + all tactical slots used up around all your planets". Now, player ability being equal, to me this would indicate that the player with that many defenses around a planet had a hell of a lot more resources. Regardless, I'll move on to what I think you are trying to say.

Now the example you used: "Player A 2000-supply fleet vs. Player B with a 2000 supply fleet + all tactical slots used up around all your planets". Let's again assume equal player ability. Does this mean that someone has to wait to max out fleets before pumping money into defenses starts to somehow add to the gameplay? And why wasn't Player A rushing Player B when he figured out he was building defenses? More importantly, why was Player A not building defenses of his own? The example you used seems to be null. If you have players of equal ability and equal resource income, one with 1000 fleet supply and another with 1000 fleet supply + defenses, of COURSE player B will have a stronger advantage in the game. But that's no different than saying the same thing but taking away Player B's defenses and instead transforming those resources into an extra 500 fleet supply for Player B.

Now let me give this one more try to drive the point home: Player A has 1,500 fleet supply and Player B has 1,000 fleet supply plus fully loaded tactical slots across all planets (I have no idea what the resource conversion is between resources used to build defense and resources used to build more fleet, but assume that in this example it'll be 500 fleet supply). Who do you think has a stronger advantage? I'd say it's Player A, since we know that defensive turrets can be out-maneuvered, and repair bays have their place as well, but so do the repair/damage sharing vessels that fleets have.

Currently, I'd say that money spent on fleet is much better spent in terms of maneuverability/damage/repair/etc than defenses. That indicates a balance issue to me. I don't think they need to be of equal value, because again, that opens up a dangerous turtle aspect to make this game extremely slow. However, I am a firm believer that some balancing can be done to avoid this, yet still make things fun.

Here's how I think it can be done:

1.) My example earlier of making turrets customizable, but with balance still prominently in mind. Allow a "foundation" turret to be built, with parts that you can further purchase in the action menu, such as adding on either a anti-frigate weapon or an anti-strike-craft weapon. Include the opportunity for long-range systems, but at the expense of damage, or at the expense of a 360 firing arc. I still like the idea of having defenses with a 45 arc pointing at a phase junction with a lot of power, but the enemy fleet can still fly by.

2.) Make a turret just as effective in an early-game as in late-game. I thought that an area-of-effect attack, like a shrapnel shell, would solve this issue to an extent, since fleets get much bigger in late game. I think this would be an easy fix, and again, this could be a build option. Either have an AOE attack with low damage, or a single-ship attack with higher damage.

3.) Make sure the "rock-paper-scissors" aspect of SoaSE that I think we all love is maintained. So, like I was saying earlier, what would be a good counter for the turret I am talking about? I say that everything should be... just like it is currently. I think this can be done by adding a minimum engagement range to all turrets. So if you have turrets chilling back from a fleet battle, then yes, the enemy fleet will get softened up (and just softened up) from those defenses. However, if the enemy fleet chooses to prioritize, then they can move beyond the minimum engagement range and take care of the turrets. It all makes it about prioritizing, not having to build additional ships. It's an extremely flexible system, doesn't necessarily change balance of things now, and still makes turrets both fun and slightly more viable.

4.) Make sure balance is maintained. I don't think that buying a turret should have equal overall galactic combat capacity to a ship of equal resource value. I think it should be slightly less, but just as effective, if not more, if used properly. With that said, I think defenses should be expensive--I'm talking about in the range of a few light frigates or a heavy cruiser, but not as much as a capital ship. They should be priced in such a way that they shouldn't be built early, they can't be mass-produced without heavily sacrificing fleet production, but they can still be smartly used in a wide array of situations. It even occurred to me to have defensive platforms take away a certain amount/percentage of total resource income like fleet supply does if someone was REALLY concerned about people going too crazy with turtling. Hell, make a "defensive supply" like fleet supply. I don't know, but I know that it can be done.

Thoughts?

That was the point I was trying to make. That not everything in a game is viable and useful in every situation, and that finding a situation where it isn't useful does not automatically make it imbalanced or useless as a whole.

Basically translating to say: just because defenses are generally not regarded as useful in fast-paced "attack quickly" MP games, does not mean they are useless in the game as a whole



You're thinking too hard, and most of it is not very relevant The point was that when people talk about defenses "sucking", they are only talking about stationary defenses vs enemy fleet as balance point. They do not consider "combined friendly fleet and defenses vs enemy fleet". This is what I was trying to illustrate, and why I used 2000 fleet points so that nobody could say "Well, just build more ships." Ultimately, there are many reasons why a player could end up with a full fleet plus defenses and another with just a fleet (focusing on economy earlier on and lucking out on not getting attacked, maximizing economy faster, getting left alone in FFA, getting money from his teammates to turtle up at a choke point, etc) and, again, not really relevant to the issue



But what if the player with defenses is a TEC with 2 or 3 shield gens aimed at the planet and protected by enough flak and repair bays/Hoshikos that your bombers get shredded before doing anything? Outmaneuvering the point defenses isn't going to do much, since it's going to take half an hour to bomb the planet down. You could bypass, in range of a PJI, and allow that TEC player easy shots at your passing by fleet, negating the 500FP advantage. It will, of course, follow you to the next planet you finally jump to where you're again greeted by shields, defenses and repair bays, a PJI, and now the enemy fleet that's squishing yours between his fleet and his defenses both preventing you from reinforcing yours and allowing him to reinforce his from multiple points (including right where you jumped from

See, it's not quite that easy.

You guys do make interesting points...

I have been thinking too and a *possible* way of avoiding the issue of every single planet becoming a 'Death Star' is to allow the researching of an ability to upgrade say 3 planets in terms of tactical slots. Example...research tactical slot upgrade in the research tree, then you have one more level unlocked than usual for upgrading of tactical capacity on every planet, but the first three you choose to actually upgrade the tactical capacity further lock out the ability on all other planets. That way, only 3 planets e,g homeworld and two other chokepoints of your choice can be heavily fortified in this way. Since it takes time and money to build an uber-defense, a player could still have real strongholds but without plunging the game into the tedium that Annatar11 is worried about. The tactical upgrade ability could perhaps increase the tactical capacity of the planets that are upgraded by a suitable factor e.g. 1.5x the usual maximum tactical capacity. I always feel that a homeworld should have an enormous defense, because it is usually the heart of a civilization, thus two other planets heavily upgraded could help to form a 'core world's' type style where you can turtle a bit, but not exclusively.

It would make the game more interesting imo because it could give a player who has been seriously ganged up upon or seriously beaten down, a chance to at least mount some kind of comeback without the certainty of "oh dear, my fleet is now gone - let's quit the game" - to the annoyance of all other players in that game.

I like the idea of upgradable defense / customizable defenses suggested by Deadjim as it could add a level of creativity to the game, especially since no ship design aspects are present - which I miss from other games.

Interesting stuff, but definitely not a simple issue

You know...

just a few ideas kicking around...


What if defences got a boost, siege frigates were given a long range (so they can attack OUTSIDE the range) of the point defences.

It would do great damages to structures but not much else.. its a gun designed for hurting targets that dont move.
Also give a reason for building them.. most people most games dont.. they just use there starting colonly cap... or even dont bother.. they go from system to system defeat the fleet there then just leave 1-2 ships to kill any construction ships if they reappear.. dont even worry about killing the planet.



Another thing I would like to see is as planets are upgraded they gain missiles.

Example.. A astroid just colonised has no defences.
Each upgrade gives it a intersystem missile that does 20 damage every 10 seconds.
This wont bother fleets... but it will bother scouts or indervidual capitals that attempt an assault agasint a fully upgraded Terran Planet.


I like this idea because currently scouts are extremly hard to stop, if someone wants to scout deep into your systems they would need to build 3-4 scouts because they would lose one at each heavily upgraded planet.


This game could do with a bit of mystery and surprise attacks, not quite knowing what your enemy has.

Ick. Don't limit me because you wanted to buff defenses well past the bounds of balance.

Defenses are the way they are. Anything else leads to turtling (which isn't a bad thing on its own) and stalemates (which are). I heard an argument earlier in this thread that strong defenses add to strategy--au contraire. Strong defenses rob players like me of the ability to make raids with small groups of ships, without committing to a full attack. Don't take that away.

Lergedemain said: "Strong defenses rob players like me of the ability to make raids with small groups of ships, without committing to a full attack. Don't take that away."

I don't think what I proposed will take that away, but you may have to use those raids early in the game to take out a player's defense line or to slow him down before he develops one. Besides, a small hit and run attack is not likely to dent a fully armed homeworld anyway imo, it doesn't make sense to me that a homeworld can be such an easy target , almost as easy as an asteroid. Different personal preferences I guess...and the bounds of balance are in question constantly with any game, so my ideas are merely suggestions for consideration and debate...but I understand where you are coming from


Btw: Drathkar, I like those ideas, that way the 'Siege frigate' could be salvaged from the realm of near uselessness

Space is a big place, and ships slip through unnoticed through wormholes, uncolonizable gravity wells bordering your empire, etc... ...I don't see how anyone could call fault on that...

Once I had most of the galaxy conquered, and high levels of defense on most of my worlds, and the enemy mounted a serious attack on a core world that I missed defending properly (It had a couple Novaliths, but those were useless in defending the planet

Fleets like to hide in uncolonizable gravity wells, and strike when your fleet is too far away to help...

Oh, and about the comments on homeworld defenses:

I changed the GalaxyScenarioDef to give your homeworld a few extras to make rushes a bad idea...

Just toss in a few point defenses, a Hangar, a couple research stations, and a repair facility, or whatever you want into the GalaxyScenarioDef file, and you can save yourself fifteen to twenty minutes of waiting for your resources to pay for those things and the game goes quicker...

Of course, the repair facility will be non-functional until you research it, but at least the enemy fleet will attack it first and give your defenses time to do some real damage :CONGRAT:

I really agree. I hardly use turrets in SP games simply because I enjoy massing a fleet, although I may use turrets on chokepoints--again, turrets themselves are only effective because the AI isn't smart enough to move past them. I think this entire problem of turret defenses would be a lot more apparent if the AI became smarter. However, yes, in SP they seem to have a much larger spectrum of effectiveness than is comparable in MP games, but that's due to a shortfall in how the AI attacks. Regardless, AI sophistication is a null issue in this context.



What I'm aiming for is a tweak to turret defenses that will make them more useful as a whole--both to SP and to MP But again, definitely in the watchful eye of balance.



I thought it was relevant (obviously). My entire point is that turret defenses need to be balanced, and that's why I was making a point of having the example have an "everything else being equal" clause. I'm fairly well-versed on why another player could have more resources, and I think taking care to identify why turrets are unbalanced is critical to this argument--not the level of skill a player has in amassing resources. I think that everyone can agree that turret defenses are far less effective at doing their job--defending--than most ships are for an equal investment. If we don't want a turtle situation being commonplace in the game, then at least give the option to play around with turret customization to make them useful and (most importantly) fun in certain situations.

My basic point is this: I completely agree that every ship and every tech has a certain spectrum where it is effective and where it is not. I am simply saying that a defense turret's spectrum is much more limited, and I think it should be given equal consideration to make turret defenses more fun and engaging rather than having the grand majority of players focus primarily on fleet tactics. Yes, I understand that SoaSE is primarily that kind of game. However, I think that all of the things I have been mentioning can be done without sacrificing the fleet tactics that made me fall in love with SoaSE in the first place



I'm not entirely clear what point you are trying to make, but I'll give it a shot: I think you are saying that cleverly assigned defenses, as they currently stand, are enough as-is. I always thought that is true (and now, you have provided me with another one! ), but I still think this doesn't necessarily make the turret issue invalid. First, some of this example seems to be exclusively a TEC defender problem (the planetary shields). Secondly, I am pushing that turrets be upgraded, but with balance heavily in mind. I think that tactical supply for customizable turrets should go up significantly, as well as their price. I suggested a method (defense supply) to prevent over-placement of turrets.

Furthermore, if this really does become a problem, then tweak the other defenses as well to reflect a more balanced game. I am under no assumptions that the tweaks I am suggesting would be easy, or wouldn't require slight changes from other defenses and such to reflect a proper balance. As a matter of fact, I'd be more horrified if the devs didn't put a lot of thought into balancing and implemented some of these changes, but not all.


Definitely. By gauging how many times this specific issue has been raised, I think that indicates that it's 1.) obviously a hard problem and 2.) one worth reviewing



I like this. However, I think this would be viable only if turrets were just given extended ranges or simply had more damage output (or both). However, if turrets were given options to have firing arcs, I don't think sieges would need a range increase.



If turrets weren't significantly tweaked, I think this would be a nice compromise. However, if these missiles were able to reach scouts, that would likely indicate a very long range. How far are we talking about?



Yep. I think that's what's important about tweaking the defenses. Not enough to make them overpowered, but viable enough to give players a little breathing room in tight situations until allied forces can come along.

Great ideas everyone!

We are talking entire range of the gravity well for the planetary defences.


Sword of the Stars
Both took this method...
We are not talking about a urber defence system whih can wipe out entire fleets, just a system which can wipe out a scout or a lone low level capital.

IT makes sense.. a heavily populated and industrilised planet is gonna have its own land planet based defences.

This allows three things.

1.Caps and seige frigates can have there planetary damage upgraded again.
2.Single caps and seige frigates cant take out a fully colonised and upgraded world.
3.Destroying all the structures in a system and moving on but leaving 1-2 units to kill any construction frigates that rebuild before they can build anything is out.. you have to take the planet out.. If you dont you risk them rebuilding.. if you try to send forces to your fleet attacking another of there planets there gonna get hit by each system they passthrough.

People should be punished for not dealing with a planet and leaving it behind them.. currently there not.. infact they are rewarded for not finishing off a planet with a fair chunk of time that it would have taken.

Yes, bypassing and not killing a planet just its structures should be valid.. but it shouldnt be the end of the game by itself and it should come with risks. Having a fully upgraded planet behind you when your forced to retreat could take out your capitalship if its heavily damaged.

Personally I like the defense structures as they are. You can use them to help fortify a few choice buildings but can't rely entirely on them alone for defense of a gravity well.

As for turtling not being a strategy in this game due to comparatively weak defenses compared to other RTSs, it still is. Capital ships with a support fleet backed by some hangar defenses, repair bays, and a few turrets can still decimate a superior sized fleet. I've done it. The fleet is a viable option for defense in this game because relatively speaking, they can soak up more damage than typical units in other RTSs.

The game is balanced with stronger units, more "hero" units, weaker defenses, it all balances out to a style of play lost in other RTSs. I don't mind the changes you've all been putting forward, but please do it in a mod and leave the style of the original game alone that put SoaSE apart from the rest.

Before talking about additional changes, there's one change in the beta that directly impacts this: Augmented Defence Grid. (Advent, +5 tac slots per upgrade, 2 upgrades.).

Why is this not enough to make defences viable?

My only wish is that the defence grid be shaped like a grid... ...I want the computer to auto-place point-defence cannons on the intersections of the tactical grid lines... ...instead of, or in addition to the standard circle auto-placement...

I like it in beta in those bigger 9 ai games. More Hangers on my planets that are near the shifting battle lines.

Maybe we should be able to build turrets in static locations like we can now as well as in orbit of a planet body so that the turret would be able to fire around the entire circumference of the colony at a reduced range. That would allow the player to make the choice of defending the colony or defending other structures or ships in the gravity well.