Topics

1

AI War / Ai planetary reinfocement speed

« on: October 29, 2012, 03:40:01 AM »

What kind is the formula for this?

Some observations :

At low AIP , the reinforcements are totally neglible. Even at highest difficulties, i don't think most people even notice them.

At high AIP they become pretty radical.

http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,11890.0.html in this game for example, aip is 500ish, 7 game. 7 something planets alerted. Single reinforcement pulse in single planet can spawn ~600 something fighters + some other ships. For comparision regular wave in the said game can be around 1000 tachyon mircofighters. So single reinforcement pulse equals about single wave?

I really think something is off when AIP jumps up, the most dangerous thing becomes previously completly ignoreable reinforcement building up constant Carrier spawn.

2

After Action Reports / How high can you go?

« on: October 19, 2012, 08:51:21 AM »

Settings:

120 planet . X  10/10 random AIs. Full visibility, reaveal random, no plots. 15min per aip   1 hw

Fallen spire 4
golems       4
dyson        4
resistance fighters 4
colony rebellions   4
traders
wardens    7
roaming enclaves 7


Plan : I'm going to put whipping boy on middle of X  with unfinished spire city . Then take every single planet in galaxy.

Attempt 1#

Bonus ship : spire corvette .
Enemy AI types : Golemite, The core

Uhoh, Haven't finished any games vs these 2 types. Golemite is minor nuisance, artillery golems might annoy shadow ship some but thats about it.

The core on the other hand.... I'm unsure how this works but in light of the recent ship mark cap changes i assume this will be exactly light vanilla ... just with mk V ships instead of II.

After quick look around its clear things are going to go badly . Core has tackle drone launchers as bonus ship. Special forces will be unaimaginable pain. It also has double CRE on its homeworld.  This might just be completly uniwnnable game from the get go

00:06 : 100 frigate MK Vs in  a wave. If these had been bombers it would've been game over already. This is going to be rough. So rough that 10minutes of playing is enough for now

3

After Action Reports / crosshatch 10/10

« on: September 07, 2012, 01:45:26 PM »

Settings :

10/10(hybrids/4) random revealed, scizo(neinzull viral /alarmist)

80 crosshatch

marauders
resistance fighters
traders
rebellions(3)
fallenspire
spirecraft(hard)

all at 4 apart from rebellions.

selfimposed rules : i must defend every planet i get to the last. No retreat, must do my utmost to keep them all going at all times.

This is 3rd attempt.  First one i got knocked out by spire hammer in 8mins or so. Should really remember to check the ai types and prepare accordingly. Second... had dark spire on and it genereated 45000 threat in first hour. Once those things got going they just spawned ships nonstop at least couple of versions back.

I decided to pick one of the new bonus ship types, and went with zenith medical frigates. Unfortunatenly that means that my homeworld is one hop away from middle of the map.  Well at least i get everywhere easily.

Plan is simple : Build fortress, docks, and some turrets on every planet and get a neinzull of some type as soon as possible. Unlocking harvester MK IIs and zenith medic mk II.

Brief scouting reveals 2 nebulae in first ring around my homeworld and 2 in next ring. Also 2ARS in second ring. 21/80 planets scouted in first 3 minutes. Maybe this in middle of cross thingie wasn't such a bad idea.

Champion immediately goes to work on nebulas while i build up my defenses in HW. First 2 nebulaes cleared in around 40mins , notable rewards : 15 dyson gatlings and neinzull modular fortress. 2 ARS's scouted, one has Spire Railcluster(new ship and pretty nice , one of the AIs has autobombs and acid sprayers, both close combat) and the other has grenade launcher/doomshroom/armor rotter. Change of plans,  not going to unlock fortresses, instead going to unlock mk 2 missile turrets and mk2 basics.

Fleet of nebulachips/dysons/zenith medics/leech&riot SS  go to hack & capture some doomshrooms while champion clears out the next 2 nebulaes. The fleet ravages things pretty badly. Medics keep stuff from dying pretty easily and dysons just mow stuff down. Hack ends without issues and i'm up 1 planet and some doomshroom. Champion still tied in nebulas, i build up some defenses and send the fleet to take down the railcluster ARS.

And face viral swarms. Oh 100 of these things ,no worries , they die in seconds. Only they don't, after seconds there are ~500 of them. Pause. Oh these things have 60x hp of what they used to have and still replicate with every hit  or so, uhoh, i'm never going to take these down. I retreat and soon the swarm is assaulting my HW which is only saved my home FF's gravity effect. In hindsight i should've just scrapped my medics as they were only unit not immune to fusion cutters.

After capturing the second ARS fleet goes around DC hunting /clearing paths while champion does the same on its own and clears some nebulaes. Scouting reveals group of 3 connected planets with 2ARS and 1 advanced factory. And another group with 3 nebulae and 3 DC.  Fleet goes to prepare the former to capture while champion begins to work in other cluster.

Game is progressin way faster than any of my previous 10/10 games. I have 2 pretty good fleets which have 0 expenses after initial building of nebulaes ships and 8 starships. Sure repairing might cost some but... its pretty neglible, they don't even take that much damage. Also because i have no need to refleet offensively or unlock anything there i have plenty of K and resources for defenses. At 20 something AIP the Neinzull fortress with MK II misiles/shields is able to pretty much hold the home CMD alone with 30ish turrents to help. Leaves lots of turrets and fleetships to help my 2 other planets.

Champ dies and goes off to fight threat it released couple of times but that doesn't really matter.  Fleet faces bit bigger problems... Neutering 2nd planet in group goes well untill i wake up the parasite eye.  BAM 4 seconds later i lose 2 marks of zenith medics. Uhoh , and what do i see here, freaking huge streams of special forces coming in... combined with the AI's new very powerful medic frigates i stand no chance and have to run away.

I come back with champion + fleet and clear & capture those 3 systems. A & B shields cleared , adv factory (no MK IIIs) space tank and space goats acquired. I need more defenses , unlocking missile turret mk III  and military cmd II. Also unlocking Harvester Exo shields , defense on every planet is focused on command station, harvesters get destroyed so often that these are absolutely neccessary. Resources capping every now and then and i build some spirecraft. Space tanks i havent really built at all, havent had any need for any kind of bombers.

~3hours in at 6 planets, 2 modular fortress (one HW, one advanced factory)  and my nebulae etc fleet has grown to 90 ships. 40 of them dyson gatlings. First CPA just gets announced , 2500ish ships . Well that is more than all the cpas combined in my last 2 games. I park my nebula fleet on advanced factory, it will defend it and 2 surrounding planets while rest of the fleet is split between remaining 3 planets. Champion is tied in nebula for the start of CPA and i also have around 1k threat hanging around, which is sitting on pretty tricky mk IV planet next to my factory.  I lose 2 planets, one due to inattention (the 1k threat took out a planet next to my factory) and one because of overwhelming power. Around 2k ships continue to my homeworld and i need some major defenses fast... so i scrap my champion. Godlike defense in few seconds. I don't think this should really be an option. Champion , mod fortress + shrooms make short work of 2k ships.


Next to capture last 3 planets for CSG s . 2 of my chosen targets are next to coreworlds, one has maw fab and another spire archive. I don't give crap about putting coreworlds on alert at this point, i'm ready for endgame and aip has been low all game. And power of my fleet is pretty awesome.

I jumpship champion to the last nebula which is in coreworld. After clearing the nebula the champion goes to clear some neinzull clusters in the coreworld... and then do same in homeworld + clears out the mass drivers. It clears 4 womrholes of stuff and clusters and mass driver. And the current build happened to be neinzull cruiser without any shields. Better ship could've probably neutered whole planet by itself, this one maybe could've as well if i had microed properly, it gets pretty huge regen from guardians. vampirism + 5x modifier versus medium armor tends to do that. It eventually dies but that was really just lack of skill/attention. HW had eye/cpa post, cpa is 1000 ships which sounds pretty tame.

Clearing & capturing last 3 systems goes pretty well, apart from releasing one one emp guardian with champion. But didn't really matter as champion spawns immediately so it got to intercept the threat by itself. First exo wave gets announced somewhere around here.

At around 4:20ish i notice raid engine warning. At 5seconds remaining. What the .... I haven't even left my planets in last few minutes. I believe AI bought OS raid engine at border world. Well anyways, it ticks out and  i get kicked in the nuts 20-40seconds later, lose my planet and maw fab. I scave scum couple of times trying to figure out a way to save a planet in 20 seconds with no possible outside reinforcements. Take couple of takes but then i build 3 docks  and unlock doomshroom mk III s. with 3 docks and 7 engineers doomshrooms turn 15second rout to 2minute victory. And about 70ships reclaimed.

After this i'm ready for final asault. Extremely confident that this will be easy, 2cpa/1cpa-eye , HWs, extremely low AIP, etc.

Screenshot on HW defenses at the beginning of the end.  Now i know that this is pretty damn early to begin final assault and i have ridiculously low aip(partly due to extra DC's from alarmist and me leaving alarm posts alive on my planets, doesn't really matter if AI gets some extra warp gates if i'm defending everywhere anyway.) but those are still pretty damn lousy defenses. 217 fleetships. This ai had neinzull ship types, not sure if that affects the amount but jeesh, that is 2 caps worth of triangle ships.

4

AI War Strategy Discussion / What AI ships/types you find most/least difficult/annoying to deal with?

« on: August 14, 2012, 11:17:08 AM »

Guardians :
Most difficult :

 Gravity / starship dissambler (just because i use starships heavily)

Least difficult :

 Zombie. Probably just my offensive play style.

Bonus ship:

Most difficult:

  Any low cap ship (because there is just too many of them , 20-40 blade spawners per planet is just messed up). But if we ignore that then eyebots/space planes. Stealth ships are always real pain in the arse , but these 2 take the cake. FF immunity is just evil and planes have that radar dampening that allow them to attack while being dampened so they usually just laugh at automatic static defenses. Oh and gravity drains are often really painful.

Least difficult:

Any high cap ships (apart from space plane). There are just so few of them that they end up being nonissues every time. Hard to pick one.

AI type:
Most difficult:

Support corps, by a lot. Those decoy drones are just awful when wave sizes get big enough. Also they seed extra interplanetary munitions boosters. Getting 6+ of those in every game is painful.

Least difficult:

Most ai types that seed extra DC's but don't have buildings that you absolutely must destroy.  Also any ai type with non-obivious effect, bully or assasin are just ignorable.

5

AI War / interplanetary munitions booster

« on: July 28, 2012, 11:37:49 AM »

did the amount of these get upped recently? or do some ai types spawn them. I had 6+ of them in my last game. Map type was crosshatch so after finding the 6th one i kinda gave up. 4x damage boosted on one planet with 2 raid engines near it was kinda awesome though!

6

AI War / 10/10 difficulty

« on: July 19, 2012, 07:52:06 PM »

oohkay so as plenty of people have demonstrated lately  its just too easy.

From my experience there are 2 main things that make things easy, ease of AIP control and pathetic AI planetary defense.

If i want to play low aip game i can keep aip below 60 when taking out AI homeworlds. This makes for one easy game.

AI has exactly 2 planets that you can't stomp easily. And even those are mostly challenging because of the core raid engines.


Suggestions:

Start the AIP floor at 10.

Force some auto AIP. Homeworld spire civil leader like structure.

Seed some barracks at map generation . Further away from player homeworld for higher chance of one. Also if ai has High cap ships(any high cap fleet ships are near useless for AI) fill the barracks mostly with these. And seed some more barracks.

Could break the mold a bit. Don't play with hybrids on? Tough luck i'm doom ai and i do what i want. Like seed some extra structures from other AI types(neinzul clusters, superfortresses) or plots (hybrid buildings astro trains).

Or if that is too much just seed some  more regular buildings .... like Raid engines, bhgs munitions boosters.

7

AI War / Spirecarft

« on: July 14, 2012, 07:58:53 PM »

There has been some talk aobut tweaking spirecaft and especially making the rare higher tier (5/6) spirecraft power at least somewhat match their rarity. Here are my thoughts on the subject. Probably not a good time for this with new expansion and all.



Spirecraft Siege Tower:
Good as is. Probably most used spirecraft and most multipurpose.

Adamantite buff:  Lots of options here. Could use some spire modules, laser, railgun, maybe shield. Regeneration would also be good to augment its tanky feel, the kind that works under fire.

Titanite : N/A

Spirecraft Ion Blaster
Good as is. Likely second or first most used spirecraft.

Adamantite buff: Don't think it needs one. Maybe X5 shots instead of X4.

Titaniite buff: Don't think it needs one.

Spirecraft Scout
Not sure what the intention with these are. As they are now , generally you build one pysite worth of them and scout whole galaxy with them and then forget whole things. This releases some threat but nothing overly serious. If this is not intented use i would halve their speed and make them unrepailable, oneshot scout as much as you can  kinda thing. They kinda trivialise initial scouting , personally i'm fine with that as i find it to be tedious.

Adamantite/titanite : Building these is insane.

Spirecraft JumpShip
Same kind of problems as with scouts, couple of pysite ones should be enough for rest of the game.They are brokenly powerful for DC/assasinating anything . Only things that can stop them are BHG's or gravity drills on chokepoint worlds.  I have no clue if this is WAI in practice . Nor what to do with them if it isn't. Maybe get rid of teleportation and just make them fast perma invisible transports. Thatway you could still snipe stuff couple of planets away with pysite's, but if you need to do deepstrike for DC or something like that you would need jumpships of proper mark.

Adamantite/titanite: Building these currently is insane. If somekind of balancing is done so that these are even remotely viable i have some crazy ideas. Like when transport has some ships inside it will slowly replicate it , like reverse swallow. If it is finished with the process when it unloads it will also release duplicate, zombified version of ships inside. Yes, crazy ideas.

Spirecraft Ram
Great as is . Only problem is that higher tiers are kinda useless. Same damage with same hp with same M/C cost, you just use higher tier asteroid for them. No ideas how to fix that.

Adamantite/titanite: Again, bulding these is insane.

Spirecraft Martyr
Same problem as before, no reason to build higher tiers. These are hilariously OP but people seem to like that in them. Maybe xampite+ instead of pysite . OH and these probably should be treated as military ships instead of civilian ones, like brave starship scouts(selection is pain, trait shared with shield bearers and attritioners)

Adamantite: Currently building these is insane. Maybe add planetwide EMP to death effect. ~15seconds or something, this could make some hilarious blunders. Or make its death spawn handful of zombified/FDR'ed Spire Mini Rams, to mop up !

Spirecraft Implosion Artillery
These are kinda meh. Lower ranks are just pew pew guns. Higher ranks would do decent damage against high HP targets but... euh, better use for the asterooids.  If i'm not strugglin with energy , i usually take first 2 ranks of these just for their huge range . Not sure if they do anything, statistics don't show damage and kills are nil.  I'm fairly sure you find no fans of these things anywhere.  Suggestion: Have them do area of effect/flak damage based on damage done. With some kind of low hard cap, so shooting at exo-golem doesn't instantly kill everything around it.

Adamantite: Euh, more salvos? no clue.

Spirecraft Penetrator
My personal least used spirecraft , not fan of half an hour reload time. Still, it has it uses. Plagued by same problem as rest of the spirecraft: no reason to go higher than first tier. Not many things require more FP than the first tier. Ebonite builds 2 tiers and they end up having practically identical stats/cost. Suggestion: I don't know, make higher tiers reduce the reload time. By lets say 5minutes per tier, so xampite 30, ebonite 25/20, adamantite 15.

Adamantite: Euh no clue.

Titanite: Tachyon immunity, and rather higher de-cloack time if possible.  This is pretty op yes, but titanite frankly should be op. Its about 20times rare than golems.

Spirecraft Shield Bearer
Pretty good ship. Reptite/pysite/xampite are useful for these, after that its get bit iffy. These need to be treated as military ships.

Adamantite: Maybe damage boost(small, 10% maybe) for ships under its forcefield. Probably not too hard to accomplish.

Titanite: Planetwide Damage boost (like military station but usable offensively), shrinking forcefield, repairable (you really don't want to use only Titanite you see in 2 games on oneshot unit.

Spirecraft  Attritioner
Uhoh ... where to begin. People don't appreciate this ship much, although it is probably most ridiculously OP thing in the game. Moreso than botnet golem.  My last whipping boy consisted of 3 first rank of these, logistic command station, artillery golem and some assorted anti starship defense. No turrets, no fleet, no fortress, and every wave died without firing single shot. These need nerf, some media sexy buff and be treated as military ship instead of civilian one. I would half all the attrition damage from these and have planetary cap of maximum attrition damage per second. Maybe around idontknow 3k.  Then the buff, umm... Either give them long range attack with sub-average damage or some kind of buffing/debuffing ability. Smaaaall speed boost like experimental speed boosters?

Adamantium: Act as planetary armor inhibitator. Maybe throw speed penalty for enemies with that.

Titanite: Same as above, also planetwide attack... deboost. like reverse military command station.


Regardless of any other changes, anything made from adamantium should have stats of one level higher and anything made of titanium two levels higher.
IE Siege Tower 5 is made of adamantium. It has 200K(40x5) damage and 20M(4x5) hp. ----> 240k  --> 24m
if there were titanium siege tower its stats would then be --> 320k  and 32M
YEah i'm not making this any clearer.

8

AI War / Which ships are immune to translocation?

« on: June 10, 2012, 07:23:29 AM »

Also which ships are considered big enough for bomber starship.

9

AI War / reclaimation

« on: June 10, 2012, 04:19:57 AM »

I had the bright idea of running around with regenerator golem and bunch of space planes and ran into cluster of guardians and couple of starships lurking behind wormhole. And one mk III leech starship. One. And this happened -look at the screenshot now, i don't know how to insert them in mid post-.

Did some math and one shot from mk III leech starship is enough to reclaim  587 spaceplanes. This is fine in hands of AI. Rare and avoidable if you don't blunder.

Did some more math. One volley from cap of MK III leech starships is enough to reclaim 72 mk II bombers. In practice you can fully reclaim any reclaimable wave sent at you. This is not okay.

Conclusion: Reclaimation MK difference bonuses combined with on death excess reclaimation splash cause a mess.

Suggestion : Cap the reclaim spalsh to something arbitrary. Like 2x reclaimed ship's max hp. Tone down the reclaimation damage bonuses. To maybe half the current values. On even MK fight this would mean you would need to do 25% of the damage to a ship as reclaimation damage to reclaim it.

10

After Action Reports / Easy 10/10

« on: May 16, 2012, 07:26:51 AM »

10/10 game(s) where i used the settings to make the game bit easier.

settings:

Resistance fighters 9
Colony rebellions 7  (euh, probably too much)
Golems  hard 1
Spirecraft hard 1
Fallen spire 1
dyson- got dropped from the settings after i heard about 2 gatling bug

Scitzophrenic
reveal random
0 aip increase (the most important thing)

10/10 random -non technologist. no plots. Random all got dropped when i just couldn't deal with the first wave.

Map :
100 planets
crosshatch (probably easiest map for low-aip game. i'm serial here!)


I picked any stealth ship from border world, and after failure generated new seed until i could pick such a homeworld again.

The "easy" part didn't affect the game at all for first 30 or so games. I died. Fast. Usually in the first wave. Some of the ai types are pretty tough, spirehammer sending spire destroyer in the first wave probably could've destroyed my whole fleet alone. And sometimes the ai bonus ships just demoralized me. 50 maws in every single planet after the buffer zone? Thats equivelant to 1000 Bombers.... Extremly low cap bonus ships on AI hands will just mess you up.  But i got to actually playing around quite a few times. I picked the cloaked ships because i figured (after reading some of the wanderer's aars) that i should not hurry with taking of the planets and rather pick value targets , scout and neuter stuff. A lot of the cloaked stuff weren't really that good at this stuff in 10/10settings.  Space planes and Stealth battle ships performed the best by far. Planes would've been superior but with 3-5 ion cannons per world, they get eaten up pretty nasty.

So for the first game that actually got past 1 hour mark:
Bonus ship : stealth battle ship SBS
feeding parasite(vampire claw+ space plane+ cutlass) / attritioner(gravity drain + spider ).   

Pretty easy types. It did turn out that attritioner does something like double , triple sized waves compared to parasite but still, not bad.

Bonus ships aren't easiest possible, 2 of the more dangerous stealth types,  and hugely annoying gravity drain + spider combo. But no  ultra low cap ships so i count myself blessed. With this many bonus ships they aren't all going to be laser gatlings anyway.

Like any 10 game i completly focus on defense for 15minutes, i don't even send scouts out. After that is done i find ARS 2 hops away and Factory on the planet after it, great . Chamelon Yng tiger , Yng vulture. Tigers would be great but chamelons are pretty good enough. ATt1:00 i feel confident enough to take the planet. After some prancing around i pop the command with sbs. And uh, fail to notice EMP guardian... savescum.

This time i take the planet bit better (same as last time but killing emp guardian first. I try to use SBS's and raid ships as much as possible for taking planets, so i can take the ion cannons intact. They are big big big help when every planet is a battlefield). And when i do ,150 resistance fighters spawn. OH yeah. I get overly excited and decide to connect , taking one extra planet. AIP jumps to 50 and effects are drastic. Biggest waves are around 1000 ships . Wave sizes vary a lot.  Although i can easily beat the waves its obivious i shouldn't be taking any more planets for a while. So i scout around for DC untill 2:00 .  I also unlock MK III SBS(MK II , Harvesters MKI and heavy FF MKI were unlocked earlier).

Then i rememeber that i'm horrible at scouting and i've lost 30 SBS clearing tacchyon guardians. I've also lost all my resistance fighters. They wen't after threat and died. Neutered couple of systems . They got replaced pretty soon so no problems. Time for spire scouts. 2 first level spire scouts scout out alot and 3 things happen.

1) I realise that the map is all mark III/IV worlds. OH 10/10 does this too, neat.

2) I find my next target, cluster of 3 datacenters and Botnet. Yay, i've rarely gotten botnet so this should be nice. 4hops away ... Well close enough.

3) The scouts gather about 600 threat. OH right, spirecraft scouts aren't regular scouts, got it.

Resistance fighters die clearing threat again. But this time... There are no replacements. Ever. Or at least hasn't been since then, almost 6 hours later. Maybe i used up my quota already ,no idea why they aren't spawning.

For next 3 hours i spent getting the botnet and clearing the DCs. AIP drops to 14 and waves to ... below 100 usually. Hah. At 4:40 i get the botnet. And instead of cloaking it back to my home , i just let it sit there like there for hours.


Next up is fallen spire part. First shard was ridiculously easy. I had pretty big army and it was one hop away from friendly territory.  After getting the shard i get my first CPA. I eagerly await and am greeted by 200ish MK II ship. Heh, 14aip.  Afterwards i build some more spire scouts and some spire jumpshis. I load some raid starships in the jumpships and go around popping datacenters around the world. Black hole generators were the only thing that managed to destroy these raiding parties. AIP reductions is 40 below floor. Jumpshiping DC's was pretty easy & profitable. And if i manage to stay in the game for long , that is the only reason. I also find super terminal 3 jumps from botnet... with another botnet on it.

So now i can easily afford to take couple of planets more. Which is good because human colony rebellion just popped up right next to my HW. Nice. I'm not entirely sure how the rebellions work , but i decide to put off capturing this for a while and concentrate on fallen spire. The colony is in the way for the second shard so i'll go pick that up. No problems getting it back home.

And that brings us up to speed. Botnet golem wins sitting around for 3hours award.
Next i need to decide wheter to connect or not. Zombie defense (and resistance fighters if they ever decide to show up again) would be nice but on the otherhand AIP progress makes some brutal changes.

11

After Action Reports / Playing around with new toys

« on: May 09, 2012, 06:40:30 AM »

I decided to play some games where the challenge would come from the new minor faction options rather than ai level.

Settings:

120 planet X map , every shiptype enabled.

Minor factions:

Marauders : 7
Resistance fighters :4
Colony rebellions : 6
Zenith traders
Zenith miners : 6
Dysons sphere : 4
Broken golems(medium)
Rocketry corps : 6
Wardens : 10
Roaming enclaves : 9
Fallen spire : 7
Spirecraft (hard): 7

Scizophrenic, reveal random ai types

7/7 random AIs
Hybrids at 10 all across the board, love the little buggers.

Game 1:

Random AIS were Spireling and Special forces captain... Game over in 6minutes. Spireling is very tough AI type, thats my only excuse, having 4-7 bladespawners,sbs, maws and platfoorms on your home planet after 2and half minutes makes life hard !

Game 2:

Attritioner/zenith descendant

I delay capturing the first planet untill the first waves have hit, i usually do this on higher difficulties and i decided to treat this the same. I'm on an arm in the X map, on a chokepoint between 1/4th of the map and the rest. I decide to clear the 1/4th from the hybrid factories before doing anything else. 30mins i have 2 planets and go around clearing the hybrid factories. I'm encountering pretty stiff hybrid resistance, 5 on one planet, 15 on another. Some of the higher end planets have up to 17 hybrid facilities. At around 40minutes i notice that planet next to my homeworld has 3400 ships. 190 hybrids at this point. uhoh. 15 minutes later the the numbers are 5000 and 400 hybrids, roughly. And rising. This seems like a good time to try using some warheads. Unfortunately i've never used them before and although i manage to kill quite a bit off them, the rest just rolfstomp me in retaliation.

Ooohkay i'll drop the hybrids a bit for the next game 10/10 for the first AI and 0 for the second.

Game 3:

One way doormaster/ Neinzul youngster
Bonuship: Raider

Pretty easy AI types, One way doormaster might make taking out those facilities bit harder but we'll see.

12

After Action Reports / Crosshatch 9/9

« on: May 01, 2012, 08:01:00 AM »

crosshatch 80planets  9/9 random-non technologist

Human colony rebellions
resistance fighters
dyson
roaming enclaves
preservation warders
spirecraft - hard
broken golems - medium

schizoprenic
auto AIP at 20 per 240minutes -  I tend to find early game a lot harder than end game, figured this would even it out a bit.

First AI
9 avenger , astro trains. Counter spy. Has vampire claws unlocked.

Second AI
9 avenger, hybrid hives. Neinzul viral enthusiast. Has gravity drains and stealth battleships unlocked.

Personal behaviour rules: Pick first seed where you can pick a corner homeworld and no savescumming.



Couple of things i haven't played around with before in this game. Never seen either AI type, astro trains or used my bonus ship, space plane. Absolutely no idea what N viral clusters do, ignoring them.

I get MK3 version of space plane from the start and send them take out nearby planets and they do this incredibly efficiently, i barely lose a ship taking out first system.  I pop out a distribution node and start rapidly producing leech starships for first wave while space planes go on rampage on systems bordering my home . I have 3 leech starships and 2 raid starships ready for the first wave and uh.. i almost die because vampire claws kill my reactors. After first 2 waves are done i realise i have suprisingly very easy start.

1) I have 4 systems and 5 caps worth of ships in 20ish minutes into the game , usually it takes me ~2hours to get here, fastest start ever.

2) First 2 rings of ai planets around my home are all from AI 2 and all but one of them are level 1 planets.

None of the border planets are worth taking and i still don't even know what the second AI type is so i scout the 3ring of planets around my homeplanet and find a planet with ARS and artillery golem. The 2nd Ai type turning out to be Counter spy is bit annoying because of my already budding spaceplane addiction. But as i remember some of the other ai types i think i got extremly lucky.

Next hour or so i shall use taking out data centers and hybrid factories while saving up enough resources to raise that golem up as soon as i take Voicino system.

13

AI War / Sentinel frigates refuse to target some ships

« on: March 06, 2012, 05:35:27 AM »

Sentinel frigates can't shoot at  Starships(guardians are fair game). They also can't shoot at guard posts(any other ai structure is fair game, and for some reason special force guard posts are shootable ).

I can  see why they shouldn't be able to attack guard posts with infinite range, but it should be consistant(can kill forts and commandcenters and stuff just fine) and menitoned somewhere.

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AI War / Plasma siege ship and bomber starship oddities.

« on: March 01, 2012, 03:55:33 PM »

Plasma siege description says its great vs forcefields, yet it does 0 damage vs them.

Bomber ships can't attack smallcrafts at all. Description should say this at least.  These seem kinda bad at the moment, they kinda share a role with raid starships but are worse at everything. Besides attacking fortresses. Or maybe as anti-starship defense.

Plasma siege name is bit misleading, as it is probably best defensive starship.