Messages

1

AI War / Re: Too many ship types?

« on: November 26, 2010, 02:23:38 PM »

Wow, I never expected my post to generate this much response, and this much dev attention. Very nice changes x4000, it really does address a lot of my concerns with how system-attacks were going. Thanks for listening and finding some middle ground

2

AI War / Re: Too many ship types?

« on: November 23, 2010, 04:48:07 PM »

I'm still a bit confused by the concept of raiding guard posts... Whenever I enter a system, the entire system abandons their post to come attack me (which is likely caused by starships with my fleet), so I end up fighting them right there. And since systems reinforce constantly, the only choice is to either pop their home command station (and thus kill guardians as they trickle through the gate), or kill the fleet in a big battle right at the gate that you will usually loose due to them always reinforcing.

Actually, thinking of it, I've attacked with just fleet ships and the AI sends all the ships guarding every post at me. And in most cases the posts die to a single volley from ships good against it.

So, in summary, why am I raiding systems to take out guard posts, when it is better to pop their command station, run back through the gate, and kill them as they slowly trickle in to attack my system, then kill the guardposts afterwards? (and shields tend to just mean one detour with a transport and some bombers before killing the command post)

That doesn't really feel like "assessing and strategizing" to me. Just throwing a hammer and the problem and then cleaning up the pieces of glass that nick you painfully afterward.

3

AI War / Too many ship types?

« on: November 23, 2010, 04:36:58 PM »

With the new additions of guardians as AI unique ships, and the new ships added in light of the spire, I've noticed that the AI has an extraordinary number of ships.

One game last night I was playing with Draco18s, and we were about two hours in or so, at 130 AI progress, and I took a look at one of the AIs. He had 13 unique ships (not counting fighter/bomber/missile frigates), in addition to 10 different kinds of guardians present at a system. This isn't just hard to keep track of,  it is literally impossible. You just have to build a fleet that can kill anything regardless of bonuses/penalties. And that is just for one AI, the other one had another 12-13 ships of its own unlocked


There is no way a player can be reasonably expected to keep track of 30 different kinds of mobile ships that the AI fields. I thought the idea was that the AI unlocks 2 at the start each, and slowly gets a few more as the game goes on? What happened to that? Now they just field whatever they like at all times? And because of this, the fleet blob is the only viable tactic, just build a fleet with equal bonuses to every ship type since the AI is always going to be fielding armies of every ship type.

I miss the old AI war, where we actually could build around what the AI had unlocked, and try to actually focus research and tactical maneuvers based on that, rather than just building the same boring blob of ships and throwing them at the enemy...

4

AI War / Re: Autocannon Minipods in 4.0

« on: November 04, 2010, 09:04:23 AM »

How about changing the minipods to armor-reducers? Each shot inflicts a penalty to the unit's armor for a period of time. Have them continue to do not-much-damage, but with armor-reduction then it makes them really useful to synergize with other unit types, and help counter some of the super-high-armor units with less than super-strong units of your own.

5

Game Development / Re: Idea: Random scenario generation for tactical games.

« on: November 04, 2010, 08:52:22 AM »

Some of those ideas seem rather similar to CRUSH!
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/crushdeluxe/review.html

Basically, you have random start locations, and a random location on the board will provide you with the BALL. As the game progresses, each random location that doesn't provide the ball gets a higher chance of being the one with it. And one team wins if they manage to drag the ball into their scoring zone. It does fulfill a lot of random generation procedures (maps arn't random, but if the game was more modern then they certainly would have been), while still being entirely about tactical turn based gameplay and risk-reward analysis.

6

Off Topic / Re: Calling all dwarf metagods!

« on: November 01, 2010, 10:37:46 AM »

Also, remember, they're dwarves. Size = Quality. So you can make a giant dining room with a ton of awful quality tables, and they'll still think it is masterwork. Makes putting it up in a hurry easy if you just churn out a ton of chairs/tables.

7

Off Topic / Re: Calling all dwarf metagods!

« on: November 01, 2010, 08:33:56 AM »

Oh beloved tantrum-spiral...

So, funny thing about the tantrum-spiral. It is entirely avoidable if you embark with a proficient chef/brewer. The bonuses from having a legendary dining room to happiness stacks with both food and drink separately. If you have dwarves who eat in style, have perfect quality food, and perfect quality drink, they're un-tantrum-able. And if they eat one of the "legendary" meals your dwarf inevitably makes, you could kill off their entire extended family and they'll stay happy for as long as it stays on their list of recent events.

And about early fortress deaths due to invasion: I find a pit spanned by a pair of max-length bridges, linked to a lever that retracts the bridge can serve quite well to contain any invading armies. Just funnel some water into the pit once you get around to it, let them drown, and drain the pit again later. Good old dwarf engineering.

8

Off Topic / Re: Dungeon Keeper reborn

« on: October 29, 2010, 08:39:26 AM »

And in other related good news, its being developed by the same people who did the tropico 3 game, which was fairly faithful to tropico 2 while still bringing improvements to the genre. I couldn't think of a developer with a better track record for remakes to be doing this game.

9

AI War / Re: Rock Paper Shotgun

« on: October 27, 2010, 11:43:37 AM »

They also tend to react pretty positively when developers post in response to their stories/reader comments *hint hint nudge nudge*

10

AI War / Rock Paper Shotgun

« on: October 27, 2010, 11:32:45 AM »

Rock Paper Shotgun, the blog that did a few articles on AIWar before (and in fact a fairly long writeup of their experiences playing it), has posted a big article about the new version of AIWar
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/10/27/the-a-i-war-update-to-end-all-updates/

Just a small little unknown blog, its only the largest PC games blog on the net 

11

AI War / Re: Balancing for 4.0

« on: October 22, 2010, 03:53:41 PM »

Honestly, while I like the change from shields to armor, I think armor right now is a bit wonky.


You absolutely need every single fleet to be equally damaging to all types, and any world with mark 4 guardians near your start is a death sentence. They can spawn mk4 or mk5 flak guardians that can kill entire fleets in seconds, and have armor values so high nothing can hurt them.

And since the AI uses all types of guardians (who have all types of armor) you can't really "focus" on any one strategy, other than "build everything and hope you covered all your multipliers". Because if you have a hole, then your entire army is going to die to whatever you lack the bonus to.

12

Off Topic / Re: Rogue AIs

« on: October 21, 2010, 09:09:04 AM »

Seriously, why are people continuing to talk about that random tangent. Make your own thread if you want to bash avatar with the same repetitive comments made on every forum that has ever had a sci-fi theme, seriously.

13

AI War / Re: Math behind armor?

« on: October 20, 2010, 02:12:34 PM »

Honestly, armor means that mk1 fighters do nearly nothing to any starship, while mk3s are actually extremely powerful.

Consider a ship that does 600/1200/1800 damage vs armor 1000 (generally the lowest found on any guardian ship) with no ship-type-bonuses
This means mk1s do 30 per shot, mk2s do 200 per shot, mk3s do 800 per shot.
This means one mk2 is worth 6.66 mark 1s, and one mk3 is worth 26.666 mk1s

Now lets look at it with a 4x bonus vs that ship type

damage becomes
1400/3800/6200

Thus a mk2 is worth only 2.7 mark 1s, and a mk3 is worth 4.4 mark 1s. The huge spread disappears into smoke and the balance comes back into it.

So, really, what I'm saying is that with the current implementation of armor, higher marks are always ->vastly<- more beneficial, to the exclusion of the lower marks even being worth building. To the point where once you get mark3s, ignore building mk1s and 2s, they're simply a waste.

14

Off Topic / Re: Rogue AIs

« on: October 19, 2010, 01:36:23 PM »

Good point, shows how long its been since I read that. Though in light of that, I think Mirage would still have to be a candiate for the "not-the-AI" category, since it is pretty limited in scope and ability, and doesn't actually react in such a way that would wipe out humanity (it doesn't even perceive the real world, not even when viewing cameras, and clearly isn't written to cope with it).

So, any other AIs to suggest people?

15

Off Topic / Re: Rogue AIs

« on: October 19, 2010, 10:38:09 AM »

As much as I absolutely love the Psychotrope book (and really, how many novels out there take place in the space of exactly 12 minutes?) Psychotrope isn't really a "lone" AI, it is a collective, as portrayed in the book. A number of linked subroutines that were all programmed as psychotropic black intrusion countermeasures, which were intended to be triggered on programmers who hack their systems.

But anyway, back on topic. Another one to add to this list of insane AIs is the "TechnoCore" (Hyperion, and Fall of Hyperion), a collective AI that plans to implant all of humanity with symbionts to keep them alive so it can use their brains as processors for itself.