Topics

1

AI War Strategy Discussion / Is it worth focus-firing on Neinzul fireflies?

« on: November 23, 2012, 04:58:55 AM »

I just started a game and got a Neinzul Youngster, so I'm encountering fireflies for the first time since they were added.  I'm wondering if I ought to be focus-firing on them when they appear in the mixed waves the Youngster sends?  If I understand their mechanic correctly, the longer they stay around killing my ships the more strength their mini-martyr explosion gathers, but I'm not sure whether they're actually killing things fast enough for this to be a relevant factor.

I'm also mantis'ing a suggestion (http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=9939): It bugs me that there's no visual feedback about how much damage they do on death, so I'm suggesting that the range of fireflies' death explosion increase with along with the strength --- this would be interesting for their effectiveness, but more importantly it would let you gauge relatively easily how effectively you're using them/how much damage they're doing to you in the hands of the AI.  That said, five times their basic range would be a pretty significant area, so if they are regularly living long enough to approach max damage it might be necessary to balance this change somehow.

2

AI War / Discussion: AI hitting you when you're down

« on: November 13, 2012, 06:32:26 AM »

I thought this deserved a new thread; it's a cool idea and one that Keith is presumably open to (it being his), but it's buried like 17 pages deep in the "State of the Game" thread.

My current main thought on addressing this desire is to try out a new mechanic as an AI plot that gains strength based on human-player casualties, and tries to hit you while you're weak.  Of course, with that econ you don't spend much time weak, if any

Sounds quite cool to me, and evidently some other people.  Question, though: are you thinking this is going to be a meter that fills up a little with every casualty and then when it fills up out pops an exo/something similar?  Or is it more something along the lines of the AI saying to itself, "Well, if the humans just lost that many ships, they're probably pretty weak right now, let's take what I have and hit them hard"?

3

AI War / Armor rework?

« on: November 08, 2012, 03:33:50 AM »

Just curious, is the armor rework people were talking about a few months back still in the cards?  I think I remember Keith being fairly pro the idea.

4

AI War Strategy Discussion / settings for high AIP/time game?

« on: September 05, 2012, 02:34:52 PM »

I was thinking it might be fun to try a game with seriously high AIP/time --- I'm hoping it will force me to worry more about my economy and make refleets more costly. Of course I still want to have a hope of winning, so I was thinking of dropping difficulty down from my usual 7.6 or 8 to 6/6 or 7/7 and doing 15-20 AIP/hour. I'm imagining I'll want to take a Neinzul bonus ship and lean a lot more on fighters than usual --- or possibly unlock a lot of starships and make damn sure not to use them. I do plan to abuse the pause button pretty heavily, since I'm a slow thinker. Anyway, wondering if people who have experience with this kind of game might want to weigh in on what good settings might be?

5

AI War Strategy Discussion / Are special forces ever relevant?

« on: August 27, 2012, 02:21:13 PM »

I'm pretty sure the answer is no in the current game, but if I'm wrong I'd like to hear it.  They just come in too small quantities to make a difference, right?

6

AI War Strategy Discussion / Bonus ship recommendations for the golemite?

« on: August 01, 2012, 03:42:45 PM »

I feel like trying a much nastier game than I'm used to, and I'm thinking of doing 8/8 Youngster/Golemite, hoping not to use golems or spirecraft (I'm going to put them on medium so I can try using them when inevitably I wind up up against the ropes two hours in).  Anyway since I expect this to be much harder than my usual play (7.6 random moderate/7.3 easier, usually) I feel justified hand-picking a bonus ship and I'm wondering what people think might be helpful here?  I'm thinking munitions boosters might be a good pick since they'll help my turrets put down Neinzul swarms and help my bombers whittle away at the golems.

7

AI War / Do harvester upgrades now dominate econ command stations?

« on: July 30, 2012, 05:06:48 PM »

I'm not too good on the numbers side, but I'm starting to gather from forum posts that not many people are still unlocking econ command stations before higher-mark harvesters.  Is that true?  I'm still doing econ stations, but that's because I hadn't noticed til just now the quirk of logic that makes them more effective with very high numbers of planets as well as very low (you can use upgraded harvesters on your homeworlds but not command stations). 

So most importantly, am I right?  Are careful players still finding a reason to unlock econ stations before harvesters?

Anyway, if I'm right to suspect that the harvester upgrade route has become pretty much optimal, might it be worth changing things so that econ command stations can get back their early-game advantage?  I feel like "Option A will help you get started while Option B will help more later in the game" makes more sense as a tradeoff than "Option A will help you get started and in the late game while Option B will be better from your 4th to 12th econ planet."  This would be pretty easy --- we could put the same limit on harvesters, replacing normal ones on homeworlds with "Human Homeworld Harvesters" and forbidding the construction of other kinds.  These would probably want to be as or more effective than normal Mk III harvesters to prevent people complaining about not being able to replace them but of course we could reduce the number of resource points to keep starting income in the right range.

8

AI War Strategy Discussion / New starships!

« on: July 27, 2012, 06:38:05 AM »

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for the flagship line, so now that it's been broken into three types of starship I'm curious to hear some better players' takes on the new ships.  Are people finding any of them worth using?

9

AI War Strategy Discussion / Counters for Neinzul youngster waves

« on: July 12, 2012, 03:25:16 PM »

Just started a game and I'm facing a Neinzul Youngster AI for the first time.  Any advice on a mix of ships/turrets to counter their waves?  They include (if you don't recall) all the Neinzul ship types in every wave and the waves are very large, so I'm having trouble figuring out how to deal with them efficiently.  So far I've been relying mostly on gravity and long-range turrets, plus a bit of tractor, so they can attrition themselves down while I whittle away at the mob, but I'm still needing to use more of my fleet on defense than I'd like.

Over the long run, is there an effective way to counter all of the Neinzul, except slowing them down?  That wouldn't be so bad, I guess; once I have a whipping boy I can whack in groups of lightning, tractor, and gravity turrets under forcefields and let them waste their fire on that while medium-range turrets get their numbers down.  Plus Riot IIs, I guess.  I do also have maws and sniper bonus ships, which seems like a pretty great pair to use with gravity.

One more question --- are maws effective under forcefields?

10

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Long-term plans: "Subplots"?

« on: May 01, 2012, 08:07:51 PM »

This is certainly not something I imagine happening any time soon, but I'm curious to ask X about his long-term vision for the game --- is there much likelihood of seeing other "stories" to work on besides beating overlords?  So far there are a number of different ways to get there, but the only really overarching plot the game has is killing overlords and moving on to new continents.  I was just looking at some of the old design goals posts, and wondering if we're ever going to see other big goals like that; I imagine carving a safe zone out of the wilderness and things like that would be main ones.  But it would be very cool if we had two or three main goals whose completion kind of rules each other out, so you can wash up on the shore of a new continent and think, "Well, what kind of a continent am I going to make this?"

11

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / What's with the hate on the visuals?

« on: May 01, 2012, 05:14:57 PM »

I just saw RPS's rather negative review, and I have to say I'm really baffled by why that website's writers and forum members are so eager to go after AVWW's visuals.  They aren't Rembrant, but especially for an Indie game I can't see how you could find them much worse than serviceable.  I quite like them, myself --- I think they suit the game and they're certainly a relief after looking at a lot of the SNES knockoff stuff worse-funded Indies often wind up with.

12

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Why is there an "equip new spell menu"?

« on: March 03, 2012, 12:06:44 AM »

You can equip every unlocked spell you have and there are no disadvantages to this, right?  Is it just to save clutter in your inventory?

13

AI War / More "plot" for the Dyson?

« on: February 28, 2012, 03:25:33 PM »

This is bugging me a little, and I wonder if anyone else has the same sense?  It seems to me that the Dyson is currently a bit too simple to deal with --- it's basically human resistance fighters++.  I think it's supposed to be challenging to free because of the neutral gatlings, but in practice I find that whenever I encounter one it and the AI have basically kept each other in check, so all I need to do is send a cap of Raid starships in to pop the command station, wait a few minutes for the Dyson to clear the world out, and then send in a small fleet for the remaining cleanup.  It does have a small cost in lost resources/AIP/possibly not being able to hold fabs, but these tend to be trivial.  Maybe I've just had good luck so far, though, so I'd appreciate someone telling me if I'm wrong.

I certainly don't think the Dyson should nerfed --- as Keith said about botnet golems, it's cool to have these powerful things floating around that can change up how the game works.  But I think it could be made more of an issue to free the Dyson.

I'd like it to be a bit more complex, something on the order of a human colony rebellion, which gives you a bonus of similar importance but can also force you to take and hold an inconvenient world.  The advanced hybrids plot seems to provide one form of this --- but I suspect that only a relatively small minority of players are good enough to deal with that option (I'm not).

I have three ideas.  I think the best one is this:

1. Make the Dyson more dangerous during the process of freeing the world.  Upon "noticing" the player --- i.e., when the player first brings a non-scout ship onto its world --- the Dyson creates a small army of anti-player gatlings.  It continues to spawn these as part of its normal routine, perhaps in a ratio of 1 anti-player to 1 anti-AI to 1 neutral until the player has removed not only the command station but all of the guard posts from its world.  Or it could spawn anti-player gatlings faster but only as long as there are player military ships on-world (it's important to balance this so accidentally setting a Dyson off doesn't end the game for a new player).  This would make taking a Dyson a lot harder and more of a strategic choice, but leave its advantages entirely intact.

The other two would require a lot more coding and would be more confusing, but they are just in case someone likes them:

2. Require the player to use a countdown-timer "diplomatic ship" to persuade the Dyson of their benign intent.  Survey ship could perhaps do double duty.

3. Have the AI take the Dyson seriously as a threat, heavily reinforcing the planet or spawning exo-waves targeting the Dyson.  The Dyson would probably want to be destructible but have enough health and armor to last hours against the AI.  Thus, the player would wander into a pitched battle rather than a mostly-empty world upon finding the Dyson.

14

AI War / What options do the devs play with?

« on: February 21, 2012, 03:42:03 PM »

I'm curious to ask, partly so I can get a sense of where you're coming from on game balance and difficulty.  Chris always says the game is balanced around difficulty 7, but 80-world diff 7 with the safe options I tend to take (pretty vanilla lobby choices, usually not much expansion stuff, generally one easy and one medium AI type) is about right for me and thus I figure clearly way too easy for an experienced player.

15

AI War Strategy Discussion / Basic hybrid strategy

« on: February 20, 2012, 06:35:15 PM »

I'm just dealing with hybrids seriously for the first time, and I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on an efficient way to take them down.  Especially because of their modular nature, I'm not sure whether I put a lot of stock in the reference guide's estimates.

So two questions, basically --- one, if you want to engage a few hybrids with a small force, what are good ships to do it?  And two, do the drones mentioned in the Wiki description of them actually exist?  I'm not sure if I've seen them.  Any other hybrid tips appreciated, of course.