SitRep - October EA - Sovereign Echo

Introduction:

I am Sovereign Echo, and I have been playing Sins on and off since Entrenchment. Approximately four years ago I became a modder, initially working alongside Lord_Set on Dawn of the Reapers (Prolific Interactive). After a few releases of this mod, I was invited to join both the Ages of the Federation team (Stellar Parallax) and the Sins of the Prophets team under Unikraken (Chokepoint Games). My role in all three of these mods is as Lead Gameplay Engineer. Examining and creating gameplay interactions via faction design, stats and abilities is my standard fare, and in recent years I have branched out to advise other members in the Sins modding community with my knowledge.

 

Foreword:

This SitRep is based on the October Early Access build, specifically the Main branch, not the Test branch.

But Echo! I hear you say. Why are you doing this nearly a week after the game came out? It's November now!

Yes. I wanted to take the time to fully understand the build as it stands now. To achieve that I have completed 4 matches and played several more to half way-ish. I have also been file diving in the Entities and Uniforms, as well as testing numerous specific interactions in controlled tests (as much as possible without dev mode). I have played an unmodded match of Sins 1 as TEC loyalists on normal speed settings, limiting myself to ships currently present in Sins 2 to help calibrate my expectations. Finally, I have been modding to the extent I am presently able to, in order to test my assumptions thoroughly.

I am aware that numerous features are very WIP. I should also add that I found a number of what I assume to be very useful dev mode settings in the settings.json file and turned them on to help me analyze the game (though not before playing a few matches without them). With that said, let's get to the SitRep:

 

Gameplay:

I shall begin with first impressions. In my first match resource income was a bit of a rollercoaster. First I ran short on credits, not from under-development - I learned the lesson to not expand excessively in Sins 1, but instead from over-investment in mining. The instinct to get my asteroid mines up ASAP is a strong one, trained into me from countless hours of Sins 1. I later over-corrected and neglected asteroid mining. Despite this it was relatively clear what I needed to do to improve various aspects of my economy even in my first match. My early experience with combat was mostly just messing around with the Kol and a few Cobalts, and this was overall very satisfying. The high AP Gauss cannons chunk enemy HP a satisfying amount, as does its beam. My first impression of the tech tree was one of it being overwhelming, but I had begun to understand it fairly well by the end of my (4.5 hour) match. My first interaction with ship and planetary items was to squeal in excitement like a little girl, because this system is amazing.

Now specifics in a wider view:

 

Economy:

The economy feels relatively clear and satisfying to use overall. Once I adapted to the new prerequisites for asteroid mines and learned that all types of upgrades will work to get rid of the under-development penalty, I found the economy to be relatively responsive to my needs. Trade is quite a lot more fun now that it is interactive and able to generate other types of resource. I love the concept of exotics and the abolishing of capital ship crews, however I would say they are acquired at a very awkward rate over the course of the match. Initially being very hard to get and then suddenly becoming trivial with exotic refineries.

 

Empire Building:

I find Empire building to be filled with many more interesting choice than in Sins 1, and crucially, these interesting choices remain interesting to make for a much greater portion of the match than Sins 1. The need for more labs overall, combined with granting them a secondary function in phase detect. The dynamic removal of under-development. The requirement for idle yards to get garrisons working. The new trade system with its pairing and varied resource generation. The synergy of planetary surface structures. All of these help to eliminate standardized logistic layouts and make me really think about what I'm doing with each new planet and I love it.

Although this does still eventually devolve into trade port spam, it takes a lot longer for that to happen, and even when it does begin to break down there are still considerations to be made around garrisons and labs.

 

Research:

I know this is one of the more WIP systems in the game at the moment, but overall I've found it reasonably interesting to interact with even in its current format. Although having only a single research queue feels fairly limiting, this is mitigated somewhat by the ability to re-position techs in the queue, as well as the degree to which early techs can be sped up by overflowing the lab requirements. That said, I do think that the overflow stacks a little slowly for mid and late game techs. This may just be because we lack game speed settings at the moment, but I feel very little incentive to overbuild labs past about 25, as the return on investment starts getting very slim indeed for high requirement techs.

 

Minor Factions:

Took a bit of getting used to, but overall I feel they are now considerably more interesting map features than they were in Sins 1. Auctions are a nice touch, especially when they offer things like unique ship items, and tying the markets to them definitely makes me want to keep them alive more.

 

Combat:

On the subject of making things dead, there is a lot to like here. Turrets are a godsend, and it is still a bit surreal to see them in action. The responsiveness of damage is also nice to have after so many years of limited damage ticks in Sins 1. I very much approve of the new defense stat mechanics (mitigation, Armor and AP) - its nice to have most relevant combat data visible upfront instead of hidden in a massive chart that very few people even knew existed, much less memorized.

That said, there are some pretty big issues with some of the turret firing arcs right now. Declination is the big one - Sins may only be 2.5d, but that .5 still matters, especially when the default formation is wall. Only a little declination makes a big difference, especially when combined with firing tolerance. The Kol runs into some issues with bringing both Gauss turrets to bear on some targets due to its height and complete lack of declination, meanwhile the Akkans point defense can only protect it from attacks from above, again due to having 0 declination capability. There are a few more - I will post specifics for these and others in the Bugs section.

 

Orbiting Planets:

This is a great feature, even with the fairly conservative map layout we currently have to play with. Half way through playing my Sins 1 comparison match, I suddenly exclaimed "Man I really miss having orbiting planets!" This feature shakes up chokepoints and contributes heavily towards splitting fleets up, generating more combat of varying scale over the course of a match. These are all good and interesting things. I will say though, that the UI surrounding this feature needs work. At first glance, the current orbit direction indicator looks more like a trail than a preview, and the inability to visualize the complete orbital path without a dev setting is awkward. The warning time for when a Phase Lane is about to disappear (or appear for that matter) is also quite short, and while they are predictable to a degree, this could still use improvement.

 

AI:

Its pretty dumb right now - although kinda smarter than I was expecting for an Early Access. It does the trick for us learning the basics of the game, but even the top difficulty didn't present much of a challenge to me once I had a rudimentary understanding of the game. This isn't too surprising given how early in development everything is though - not much point in even trying to refine it yet. I will note one particular element though - it seems to have a lot of trouble with acquiring new ship classes and (re)building its capital ships. Because it does eventually manage to do this quite well if the game goes long, I suspect the cause is poor prioritization of tech, leading it to only picking up critical unlocks very late in a match. It also doesn't appear to be doing any Excavation, and because its starting capship is often busy and ends up dead early, it isn't collecting loot either.

I'm sure I've missed a feature or two in this breakdown but there is a lot to talk about.

 

Balance:

Oh boy. I know this is all WIP and probably already improved internally, but balance is my specialty so I'm gonna do this anyway. Lets get stuck in.

 

Economy:

As I've stated already, I find the economy to be pretty well balanced in its current state, however, there are two exceptions to this:

1:- The Black Market. I have often found myself with a massive surplus of one resource in the mid-late game (usually metal) and a desire to sell it... Only to find that both markets are crashed into oblivion by the AI. Specifically, at the lowest possible value of a whopping 23 credits for 100 metal. At this going rate there isn't much point in selling anything. I've observed that the markets don't seem to trend towards center - I believe this is a problem. The nature of the economy in Sins means that a players surplus and deficit resources aren't likely to change over the course of the match - once you have a metal surplus you'll probably have that surplus all match. Meanwhile a deficit can only be solved by successful conquest, which may prove difficult without the resource in deficit. This is exacerbated by most ships having high requirements in both crystal and metal, mandating that a player must always have all three resources available and has only one mono-resource strategy: Cobalt Spam.

2:- Exotic Income Curve. Exotics are a great idea overall, but at the moment I find that acquiring them in usable values before I unlock the Exotic Refinery is prohibitively expensive and impractical. Because militia are present on all planets, hunting down a specific loot for exotics is fairly impractical (if they even spawn at all). My planet clearing path will largely remain the same no matter what... And Loot with Exotics in it usually has a pretty beefy guardian group anyway, necessitating I wait for a larger fleet lest my nigh irreplaceable first cap ship be destroyed. Excavation meanwhile, is extremely expensive to do in the early game, when every resource is at an absolute premium. Because excavation is a gamble, it is difficult to justify doing it early when it has both a high cost and a very low chance of finding exotics until its later levels. I have trialed it with its cost halved, and this has generated a much more pleasant stream of exotics in the early to mid game - to the point where I can consider building a second capital ship based on which exotics RNG gave me.

I am aware that this will be somewhat less severe of a problem once we have a full capital ship roster (and therefore more valid combinations of Exotics to construct a new capship), but even at that stage I feel excavation will still be too costly.

 

Garrisons:

Much has been said over the power of Garrisons on Discord, and in the beginning I too believed them to be fairly overpowered. However, I have since reconsidered, for a few reasons. Firstly - we are playing the faction for whom strong garrisons are a major feature, so if anything they should be kinda OP for this faction. Secondly, the ships they make may be free, but they still require a pretty significant investment in terms of idle shipyards, build time and the surface slots to maintain them. This also opens up potential to shut garrison spawning down with raids on shipyards. If I have any criticism, it is that the Garrison surface structure is stackable. While 200 free supply for a planet once fully upgraded seems fairly reasonable to me for the TEC Loyalists, a potential for 800 on a core world seems pretty absurd. It's possible I'll change my mind once we see what other faction special options are, but with only my current knowledge, I would suggest limiting the Garrison surface structure to one per planet, maybe two at a stretch.

 

Combat Pacing / Lethality:

Now for the big one. It's fairly simple at its core, but it's also a capital P Problem. Combat is over too fast. This could be described many ways, and it could also be blamed on specific OP units and combos, but that would be reductive and miss the point. I will attempt to cut to the cause of the problem as I see it, and I will also elaborate on first and second order impacts that it generates. I have derived these opinions first and foremost from personal experience in game, and then refined them with the application of math and spreadsheets.

 

The Cause: Is basically that Sins 1 stats have been mostly maintained, but without much accounting for the two main factors that set the pace of damage dealing in Sins 1: % based damage reduction from Shield Mitigation, and % based damage reduction (and sometimes bonuses) from the Damage / Armor Type modifiers. Despite their names, both of these impacted a ships entire pool of HP (hull and shields), in case anyone who didn't know is reading. For the record, I believe that removing these two mechanics was and is a good thing, as neither of them were particularly clear to the average player, with the damage / armor type system in particular being downright obtuse, arbitrary and entirely concealed save for some limited text prompts. However, these two systems were collectively responsible for reducing damage dealt by a factor of two to six on average, with some even more extreme multipliers easily possible. Accordingly, peak damage output has effectively been massively increased, and with it, lethality has gone up, particularly in the late game scenarios where old mitigation would be maxed out consistently.

Furthermore, several Sins 2 ships have had their rate of fire increased while having their DPS retained. In addition to improvements in base rate of fire, the TEC currently has access to some very potent rate of fire boosts, in the form of the Akkan's Inspiring Broadcast, the Kol's Fusilade and the Rapid Autoloader capital ship item. This means that even in situations where groups of ships overkill a target, they are punished less because they will reload fairly quickly and move to the next target. Couple this with the current lack of access to % damage reduction from abilities and damage rapidly outpaces defense.

 

But Echo! What about New Armor and New Shield Mit? Both of these mechanics are great, but neither of them are a solution on their own. Armor / AP is well suited to create counter interactions, but the very fact that AP exists implies that Armor is meant to be pierced at least partially, and so it is not a consistent method of reducing overall lethality by the degree it needs to be reduced. Shield Mitigation is a more interesting case - as a flat damage reduction mechanic, it is heavily reliant on breakpoint logic. That is to say, it will often go from having minimal impact to having a lot of impact within a few points of value. It is a mechanic ideally suited for protecting things from rapid firing low damage weapons in particular, and it can render these weapons nearly impotent should it equal or exceed their damage values. Either way, both Armor and Shield Mit are currently applied in such low values on everything except capital ships that they functionally have no effect, especially considering that damage increase techs are % based while increases to these two stats are flat and fairly low / nonexistent (at least for Mit on frigates and cruisers). The difference between 10, 20 and 25 armor is pretty meaningless when the AP of even light autocannons is 25 - you may still have some armor once you get a few armor techs in, but at a value low enough to have essentially no effect - surviving a fraction of a second longer is not typically noticeable.

Both of these mechanics have plenty of potential to create very interesting gameplay interactions, and we already see that partially realized with capital ships in the early game. A Kol will weather Cobalt fire with its armor reasonably well, while even a small number of Javelis pose a significant threat to it. Unfortunately, this is one of only a few cases where these systems heavily impact gameplay and moment to moment decision making at present.

 

First Order (Kylo Ren Approved) Effects: The most notable effect of very high combat lethality is that capital ships die very quickly in even mid sized late game combats. There is little to no time to issue a retreat order once a capital ship becomes the focus target, much less any time for that ship to move to a jump point - this is the case even with cobalt blobs, not just missiles. I am simply thankful the AI hasn't done this to my high level Kol yet. However, perhaps more deleterious to the tactical and strategic layers of combat, is that it provides very little time for maneuver or reinforcement once battle is joined - reinforcements will arrive only to find a fleet already wrecked and themselves soon to follow. Maneuvering to evade firing arcs against a fleet lacking turret coverage is difficult to impossible, as ships fail to weather incoming fire long enough to reach and exploit a superior position.

Such rapid combat resolution also has some notable effects on abilities, with area of effect damage suffering unless delivered in sizeable values (which the Kol currently does - my current record is killing 112 Cobalts simultaneously with a single cast of Finest Hour. Truly a very fine hour indeed). Meanwhile healing effects such as the repair droids of the Hoshiko simply cannot keep up with the sheer amount of DPS being thrown around even when there isn't any intentional focus fire happening, and so do not add much to a fleet inside combat. They serve only to keep ships healthy outside of combat. The Hoshikos EMP Droids also ends up having very limited utility, as there is no need to slow the enemy if you can easily just kill them instead. Death is the best debuff after all.

 

Second Order Effects: Then we get to some of the less obvious but no less important impacts of very high lethality. Here, the most important effect to understand is that when high rate of fire DPS and short time to kill is the norm, it degrades the value of counter mechanics and alpha strike tools (high damage, slow rate of fire). The most notable example of this is the difference between the Javelis and the Harcka when massed. A mass of Javelis can one shot a capital ship yes, and a group of Harcka may need two or even three salvos to kill the same capital ship... But they will kill that ship, and they will do it faster than the reload time of the Javelis. This will then allow them to move onto the next target (or targets) and begin to kill them as well, all the while before the equivalent Javelis group has even reloaded, much less before their missiles arrive on target. This isn't the Javelis being bad, the Javelis demonstrably performs its intended task with aplomb. It is simply because that task can be performed with brute force instead, with not a loss, but a gain in opportunity cost and versatility.

In short, when you do this much damage at once, AP doesn't matter, because your damage potential far outstrips the defenses arrayed against it. Its not just the Harcka that does this, early game Gardas do it too with their light autocannon upgrade and massed Cobalts do a decent job all game long as well, although Cobalts can struggle with asymmetric counters like corvettes at least.

Capital Ships suffer from a fair bit of devaluationin the late game as they become easily focus fired out of existence, leading to fleet composition favoring ever more DPS cruisers to the exception of most other options. In a world where brute force DPS is king, five Harcka look a lot more appealing than one Kol, especially if you cant hit level 6 with that Kol.

Another, more esoteric Second Order Impact of such high lethality is a loss of clarity for the player on what is actually happening in a fleet. Although it is true that people can learn to process a lot of combat information at once (just look at Starcraft pros), the average player does not have this capability, and it is mentally straining even for pro gamers. When combat becomes too fast, and therefore difficult to understand, it also becomes difficult to interact with. This applies both in the moment and during planning stages outside of combat. Difficulty in interaction leads to less opportunity for the feeling of turning the outcome of a combat based on direct interaction by the player during the combat. Difficulty in planning leads to more meta builds being followed blindly, and more mono-class spam fleets.

 

Now, I hate to end on a negative note, but its getting late for me and it turned out I had more to say about Sins 2 than I thought. So I'll pick up tomorrow with potential solutions, The Bugs, Typos, Goofs section (featuring lots of screenshots of borked firing arcs), the Requests section (featuring my modded values to fix the firing arcs), and... oh wait I can end on a positive note:

 

Crashes and Roadblocks:

None at all! The game runs buttery smooth, even when I have firefox on the side greedily munching on half my RAM. Most final releases I've played are less stable than this Early Access.