Messages

1

AI War / Re: AI War Official 7.0 Released!

« on: June 17, 2013, 10:15:22 AM »

Congratulations Keith and all, great work.

2

AI War / Re: Very Early Game Wave Starships not fun?

« on: June 15, 2013, 05:39:03 PM »

I also agree that it is misclassified. Maybe the frustration is also due to the lack of hard counters. You need to be extremely vicious in tactics because you are not going to outproduce starships against the starship commander.

3

Off Topic / Re: Hmmm... Cretaceous huh? :)

« on: June 15, 2013, 01:11:54 PM »

I'm in when there are dinosaurs involved. I would preferably like to be the dinosaur.

4

Off Topic / AI War dream I had last night

« on: June 15, 2013, 01:01:00 PM »

Kind of a mix between Space Rangers and AI War. My dream started at an overview of the AI War wormhole map where I could see all of these planets linked together. I could land on these planets, and it would switch to a first person perspective that involved some really incredible missions. The one I remember was rescuing some artifact, being chased by some rich aliens with laser weapons, until I made it to the ship. The view changed back to the wormhole map, except with one variation. There were actual ships drawn on the wormhole map showing them chasing me as I moved from planet to planet. I retreated to a defended node, and it had quasar cannons (tradewars anyone?).

On the overhead map, there was an animated icon of a comet that was rearranging the wormholes on the map. So instead of wormholes being connected, it would break the connection, and you could no longer warp there.

Fun and exciting. Thought I would share.

5

AI War / Need advice on Vengeance of the Machine purchasing

« on: June 15, 2013, 12:52:15 PM »

Longtime player, longtime customer. In order to avoid the steam debacle from last time, here's what I want to accomplish:

1) I want to be able to play the release version on day one. I'm assuming my beta copy will expire shortly, not to mention I would prefer to contribute to one of my favorite titles. Whatever gives the most profit to the company is fine with me as long as it meets my goals for numbers one and two.
2) I want it available on steam. I have to reformat my computer every now and then and it's a real pain in the ass to go around finding installers. Steam is where it's at for me.

Okay, given this, where and when do I purchase?

6

Off Topic / Re: Planetary Annihilation: Total Annihilation IN SPACE

« on: June 15, 2013, 12:46:27 PM »

I do think they shouldn't have put it in playable form on steam if they didn't want more players.  Just do a pre-order.

But it'd be worse to back it out now, most likely.

Definitely worse if they back down now. It's summer vacation which is generally the worst time for multiplayer gaming and events like this.

I will say this, it does look like a cash grab. In the case of kickstarter, it's clearly trying to encourage people to fund a grand venture for developers that do not have publishers. For a game that is already funded, to go on steam and try to lure people in for $90 seems off. They're not trying to raise money anymore, so now it's just who is willing to put out that kind of cash for a half-baked title. It's also a little condescending to the audience. Maybe younger gamers are emotionally infantile and unable to see the big picture, but it's also possible that they just aren't able to verbalize what's wrong when the scenario in front of them is bent.

They clearly spent their goodwill, and now what's going to be talked about on every review is their greed with this little incident.

7

AI War / Re: AI War Beta 6.048 "Release Candidate 1" Released!

« on: June 15, 2013, 09:22:17 AM »

Thanks for the new taunts!

8

Off Topic / Re: Hmmm... Cretaceous huh? :)

« on: June 11, 2013, 09:56:31 PM »

Just imagine if Skyward didn't do particularly well. We'd have an AI War expansion every month!

I would be just as happy with this. Although, best wishes and all that. I don't see any upcoming titles that can possibly compete with it. It's so complex, large, and full of content. Everything else looks smaller compared to it. Valley without wind was probably the most ambitious since then. I'm a little worried that all of these short release schedules- while good for business in the short term- are not going to bring those quality titles that we might expect when we play AI War. As such, the lifespan of those titles won't last very long.

9

AI War / Re: AI War: Vengeance of the Machine Headlines All-Arcen Indie Royale Bundle

« on: June 09, 2013, 02:40:47 PM »

Are you getting good numbers from the bundle? I hope so!

10

Off Topic / Re: Hmmm... Cretaceous huh? :)

« on: June 09, 2013, 02:35:59 PM »

I thought exodus was a better idea than skyward. Maybe with the tighter release schedules they can make money off that.

My favorite titles so far, AI War>tidalis>shattered Haven>Valley without wind>skyward

11

AI War / Re: **Spoiler-Heavy** Discussion of the Showdown Devices

« on: June 02, 2013, 05:26:37 PM »

laughing thesaurus, I'm not opposed to that idea, and I actually think we can get a little bit more clever about it. At least we agree that just having options on doesn't mean we should get flooded with 25,000 ships, many of them core level.

eternally lost, your experience sounds similar to mine, but I was playing on a grid map so I didn't have that chokepoint option available.

12

Off Topic / Re: Man up, fans of X-COM! [Xenonauts]

« on: June 02, 2013, 02:09:57 PM »

Why all the XCOM remake hate?

13

Mods & Modding / AI War macros

« on: June 02, 2013, 02:04:06 PM »

glovepie is my favorite macro software. Freepie is a decent competitor as well and only getting better.


Yes I realize that the former has a very eccentric author, but let's ignore that and just focus on the modding capability.


The problem we are trying to solve here is typing everything a million times is really annoying. Let's face it, 100,000 metal doesn't go very far these days, and who wants to type it over and over? So here is a script that will bind a cheat code to a single key. Great for beta testing and for folks who find this sort of thing amusing.

Keyboard.NumLock=swallow(keyboard.Apostrophe)
Keyboard.ScrollLock=swallow(keyboard.Semicolon)
Keyboard.ScrollLock=swallow(keyboard.o)


If keyboard.o
press(keyboard.Enter)
Release(keyboard.Enter)
press(keyboard.e)
Release(keyboard.e)
press(keyboard.n)
Release(keyboard.n)
press(keyboard.e)
Release(keyboard.e)
press(keyboard.r)
Release(keyboard.r)
press(keyboard.g)
Release(keyboard.g)
press(keyboard.i)
Release(keyboard.i)
press(keyboard.z)
Release(keyboard.z)
press(keyboard.e)
Release(keyboard.e)
press(keyboard.Enter)
Release(keyboard.Enter)
wait .5 seconds
end if


If keyboard.Apostrophe
press(keyboard.Enter)
Release(keyboard.Enter)
press(keyboard.m)
Release(keyboard.m)
press(keyboard.e)
Release(keyboard.e)
press(keyboard.t)
Release(keyboard.t)
press(keyboard.a)
Release(keyboard.a)
press(keyboard.l)
Release(keyboard.l)
press(keyboard.Space)
Release(keyboard.Space)
press(keyboard.h)
Release(keyboard.h)
press(keyboard.e)
Release(keyboard.e)
press(keyboard.a)
Release(keyboard.a)
press(keyboard.d)
Release(keyboard.d)
press(keyboard.Enter)
Release(keyboard.Enter)
wait .5 seconds
end if


If keyboard.Semicolon
press(keyboard.Enter)
Release(keyboard.Enter)
press(keyboard.o)
Release(keyboard.o)
press(keyboard.h)
Release(keyboard.h)
press(keyboard.m)
Release(keyboard.m)
press(keyboard.Enter)
Release(keyboard.Enter)
wait .5 seconds
end if

14

AI War / Re: **Spoiler-Heavy** Discussion of the Showdown Devices

« on: June 02, 2013, 01:49:54 PM »

I was getting waves of 24,000 units on tech level I

Was this with golems, spirecraft, fallen spire, and/or champions on? 

All of the above, but I'm not actually going for all of them. I like to turn everything on, and just go where the game takes me. I would rather have the multiplier be based upon the current firepower rather than the binary state of on or off of certain options.

And were you taking advantage of all of those that were on, or were some on just to keep the door open but you weren't using them (yet)?  FS contributes corresponding to city structures so it won't nail you just for having it on, but the golems and spirecraft cause the increase in SD response even if you don't have any.

Can we fix that?

Anyway, what would have been a reasonable wave size, given the circumstances?

Hard to remember before I wrote a macro to spawn hundreds of golems.    How about four times the current firepower, to start with? Or differentiate the waves a little bit better so they are each a different multiplier.

I spawned well over 700 artillery golems

Planet-cracker indeed.

Someday. Your showdown plot was close to what I was thinking in some respects. Now I'm going to have to think of something else. Maybe for the winter edition.

I still lost because the GCS has infinite range and smacks your home command station through your force fields.

It does have infinite range but it's not supposed to be immune to forcefields (nor do I see that flag in the code).  A while ago it was possible to hit something through a stack of ffs with a dense enough uber-salvo that the object lost the one currently tanking for it and didn't get to check for more ffs before the rest of the salvo came in, but I thought that was fixed a while ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxbrAG00NmE&feature=youtu.be

For your amusement. Please note that I have 200+ artillery golems and 15 force fields, and that monstrosity just shoots across the map and blows it all to smithereens. I tried this with 400+ golems, and while it goes down, the nuclear explosion destroys the planet anyway, and you still lose. If the GCS is not meant to be an instant win, I think it's time to entertain nuclear explosion immunity on the home planet, some kind of bomb shelter unit, and/or changing some of the targeting. You can't defend 720 million damage every four seconds that auto targets your command station. Potential fixes would be   decreasing the range and/or fiddling with radar dampening solutions.

you should probably be able to kill a GSC in an ambush or three

Of course, assuming that you have enough units left and can rebuild after the set of waves, you can take it down. I would also suggest lowering the speed of that ship to 35 or something. All this will do is give a little bit more time in case of serious damage and/or your fleet scattered everywhere. It has infinite range anyway, so it's not like the speed on the planet itself is a huge deal. It's only about the time until it lands in your galactic kingdom.

The point was for it to be both challenging and possible (in favorable conditions) both without superweapons and with them, though the "everything on" case is supposed to be pretty nasty because then you've got all those toys to kill it with.

Yeah, I get it, it just doesn't reflect the situation of the player if you're just going by the binary state of on or off. There needs to be more fine-tuned assessment.

I could add journals for charging-started, charging-finished, and GCSs-destroyed, but in the past the journals have had a pretty minor impact on player enjoyment (from what I can tell) compared to the time it takes to write and incorporate them, so I've been trying to focus that time on coding the new stuff and fixing bugs that were annoying people instead.

...I like them. And some of them are very informative. Sometimes I feel like the game could do a better job of communicating the rules without big bold lettering "and here are the rules, here are the wave sizes and multipliers…" You don't need to get scientific, just an overview. Losing is fun, losing because the game knows the rules and you don't can feel cheesy.

If the GCS is intended to be an instant win if it lands on your home command station, that should probably be in the journal entry as a clue.

That's a good point.  It shouldn't be an instant win, depending on how many ffs you've got on the station, but a GCS being on your HW would be a "this game is going to be over one way or the other in about 10 seconds tops" situation.

To summarize, suggested fixes:

• nuclear immunity (from the AI only, not the player if that's possible) on the home command station
• radar dampening/range adjustment to prevent infinite range 720 million damage every four seconds.
• Speed to 35 for the GCS
• multipliers need to be fine-tuned for toys that are on but not being used

15

AI War / Re: **Spoiler-Heavy** Discussion of the Showdown Devices

« on: June 01, 2013, 03:30:41 PM »

Well that was interesting.

I tried two separate games. My second game, 7/7 (grid layout), I was getting waves of 24,000 units on tech level I, going up against Mark five ships mixed in. Four separate planets need to be defended simultaneously, and they better be contiguous because it's a mad dash between all four.

I ended up enabling cheats, I spawned well over 700 artillery golems, and I still lost because the GCS has infinite range and smacks your home command station through your force fields. There's no stopping it. If you do stop it, you have to do it on a separate planet because of the explosion.

And I tried to see if going through all that effort actually paid off, but from what I can tell, it's only turning off strategic reserves at first which is the biggest help.

I found completing the showdown to be anti-climactic in the sense of, no journal entry and no fanfare for surviving that multipronged onslaught. And then comes the GCS, and it's all over anyways.

I propose toning down the waves and making them proportional to your tech level. If the GCS is intended to be an instant win if it lands on your home command station, that should probably be in the journal entry as a clue.



This feels too difficult for the reward (you'd be better off attacking a command station). Any reinforcements you might have stopped are more than compensated by a gigantic set of waves that come staggered every few minutes.