Xsotan Scaling Problems

[Hammelpilaw]

Xsotan Scaling

It is great that Koon listened to us and thought about how to increase difficulty in endgame. Thank you  :) Xsotans now scale depending on the players strength wich makes it much more difficulty inside core at all.

 

For those who do not know about it let me quote changelogs for 0.18.0:

Xsotan ships inside of the barrier remember the player's strength and send ships with higher firepower

 

But at all I have to say it does not work very well yet. I've done some tests with this feature and found some problems. Also I do not like scaling of enemies related to the player at all, but that should not be the point of this topic. How does the community think about that kind of upscaling? It may be a great solution at all if the community likes it.

 

The problems

The unscaled Wormhole Guardian got a damage of 125000 omicron (highest difficulty). Spawning it while having a ship that got 225000 HP and no weapon makes it scale up to 285000 omicron. When I add weapons to my ship and have 370000 Omicron, the Guardian scales up to 525000 Omicron. I scaled up my ship more and more, added more weapons and so on, but the Guardian is always stronger. The relation will never change when the player gets stronger. So it does not matter how strong my ship is, the Guardian scales more then I my ship (even tried to cheat: player ship with 33mio hull, 20mio omicron made the Guardian have 240mio omicron). The issue is, that the scaling must not only watch the player and throw out any number that makes the enemy stronger, it should compare the enemy entity and the player.

 

Comparing the entities would lead to the next problem: The Wormhole Guardian is stronger, so it does not scale up that much, but small other Xsotan ships does, so they would deal almost same damage then the Guardian in the end. But the Guardian itself should be the boss with huge damage, not the small ships. This must not happen.

 

In the tests I focused on the Guardian, but if there will be other bosses in future it will be the same for them. Also I got similar problems with my mod Xsotan Dreadnought when trying to add the upscaling to it. It is almost impossible to balance it very well. Don't wanna talk about mods here, just wanna say it happens to all bosses.

 

Also to me it seems wrong that only Xsotan scale. When Im in the sector of a npc faction and Xsotan spawn, they can easily whipe out the faction cause they are upscaled. So the upscaling should happen to all ships, not just to Xsotans. But that can't work, because then there may spawn a lot of very strong factions, and a player with a smaller ship can't even join these sectors anymore cause there are only overpowered (compared to smaller ships) factions left. As far as I can see this can't work, but also I can not see any other way to balance Xsotans compared to all other factions.

 

 

The upscaling function should be moved from the generator scripts (xsotan.lua) into galaxy.lua to be a global balancing function. Well if only Xsotans scale it does not hurt, but at least when other factions would also scale it has to be a global one. Also it would be much better for modding.

 

Conclusion and my oppinion

What I want to say is, that there are currently huge balancing issues with the new upscaling. This should be imrpoved.

 

I may be wrong, but to me it seems that it would be easier and better to enhance the overall difficulty instead of upscaling just some ships related to the player ship.

 

Thanks for reading and have a nice day  :)

[Devious]

This should definately get more attention, as it not only affects the player upon who they are spawned, but an unsurprising explorer who jumps in afterwards aswell.

 

When updating our server to beta we got a couple reports instantly of end game players being one-shot, while they already had serious ships due to our own increased scaling.

After nerfing the new upscaling it seems to be better but so far it seems it does more wrong that it should do good balancing wise.

[Kamo]

I wonder what happen when several ships jump to fight the Guardian. Maybe the key is coming with several ships (with at least one) having 10 million + hull ?

 

But Guardian DPS, if linked to player ship HP and DPS, should have a certain minimum (to destroy weak and unprepared player ships) but never exceed 1/60 of the player HP by scaling (so the player wouldn't get helplessly atomized in less than 60 seconds against a lone guardian however big his ship is). It'd be better to have Guardian HP scaling up more as the player HP and DPS go up.

And mook omicron count should not exceed 0,5% of the players' by upscaling (so three of them would need more than a minute to kill the player ship, causing the Guardian and three mooks to need more than half a minute...).

Right now it seems the DPS is scaled to get up to ten times the player's omicron, multiplied by the amount of ships escorting the Guardian.

Even if the player atomizes the boss first, it's not very cool because it won't ever be a true, drawn-out boss fight :(.

 

NPC factions should upscale too, as their remnants are a "resistance" that is well, trying and half-succeeding to resist to the Xsotan ::).

[Sir Charles]

First I want to say that I love the idea of scaling Xsotan in the core.

If I try to look at it from an outside of the galaxy perspective i get to the following points:

• In an Avorion galaxy, factions get stronger the closer to the core they are which makes perfect sense because there are better materials there
  
• at some point, there hast to be a „strongest ship of the galaxy“ (i hope for some faction war minibosses/Events etc in the future) and if the player builds  a stronger ship then that he has simply gone beyond all the factions in the galaxy
  
• Xsotan however are not  a Part of the avorion galaxy and seem to have infinite Supplies - which is quite possible given the fact that they brought Avorion (the material) into the galaxy in the first place - a BIG Story Update is needed to confirm that tho
   
  From this perspective I see the following points in need to be changed:
  
  • a big overpowered ship is a big overpowered ship —> give the scaling a smooth cap by the use of an exponential function-the cap should be at a pretty high point where the player is WAY stronger than a whole faction sector
    
  • make factions react to the players strength—> when I have a huge ship that attracts overpowered Xsotan, make factions angry against me when the Xsotan wrek havoc in their sectors since I attracted them with my strong ship! Give me the Option to make factions  fear me and run away when i oneshot their cruiser
    

   

  I think that would make a better solution than just upscaling of anything  ;)

   

  BUT all of this is totally story dependant because for my suggestions I assume that the Xsotan dont want to take over the galaxy but just want to keep some kind of „balance“

[Hammelpilaw]

Hi, did not read your whole post cause Im very busy currently. The Scaling of Xsotans got highly improved in Avorion 0.19, these issues are all fixed now  :)

[Sir Charles]

Lol I was not looking on the dates XD