Messages

1

AI War / Re: Am I stupid, or unlucky? (Can't find nebulas)

« on: August 30, 2012, 04:48:11 AM »

I'm not trying to argue that the unexplored wormholes thing doesn't work well, just that it's not that obvious for anyone who might be new to the game, and they could end up missing or getting frustrated by a significant part of the new expansion. Though I suppose that a note could be added to the initial journal text regarding the champion about using the unexplored wormholes setting in the galaxy map.

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AI War / Re: Am I stupid, or unlucky? (Can't find nebulas)

« on: August 29, 2012, 04:01:22 PM »

I found this thread really useful; thanks guys! I'd found a couple of nebulae really close to my homeworld, done a ton of scouting, but just couldn't see any more. It seems that the blue wormholes for the nebulae get drawn under anything that might be sitting on top of them, but they don't have a label until you get the champion to go through them, so they're hard to see.

This tip really helps, but perhaps the nebulae wormholes should be made more obvious in some way. I had a few ideas:
1. Make the wormhole graphic bigger, or flashing on top of all other graphics, at least until it's been explored.
2. Show the nebulae on the galaxy map before it's been explored.
3. A note in the top-left saying that there's an unexplored nebula on this planet.

Any thoughts? Or is this obvious enough for most people already?

3

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

« on: July 31, 2012, 03:56:06 PM »

Maybe, and I acknowledge that this could take some serious balancing, make economic command stations multiply the m+c income of the system they're on by an amount that rises with the mk level of the command station. This could be set such that the overall effect was roughly the same for an system with an average number of m+c, while still producing a certain fixed amount of resources. Harvester upgrades would then be even more beneficial with the multiplier from the economic command station.

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AI War / Re: Entire galaxy nuked

« on: May 08, 2012, 01:03:49 PM »

I think this is the first case of someone not being aware of the plot being caught by it

Yea, if it starts giving you alerts about the hybrids doing something special, the "ostrich algorithm" will not long avail.  On Advanced Hybrids, at least.

It was all going so well, I had a Spire city on the planet next to the sphere taking care of all the antagonized gatlings, and then...

I had found where the hybrids were up to this, but getting to it involved putting core worlds on alert so I decided to leave it for a bit. With hindsight, this was a really bad idea.

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AI War / Re: Entire galaxy nuked

« on: May 07, 2012, 01:48:32 PM »

Ah, I was wondering what they were up to with that thing they built. I probably have a save from quite some time ago so it looks like that's the only way. This is my first time with advanced hybrids, it probably shows. Thanks for the info.

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AI War / Very serious thing that happened (spoilers)

« on: May 07, 2012, 01:34:05 PM »

So I've been playing a long and involved LotS campaign. An exo wave was announced and reached the 100% point, then it said that 2500 points were on the way to my planets. Shortly afterwards, the 2500 points warning disappeared, and about a minute later everything in the galaxy got nuked, as if a MkIII nuclear warhead had been set off. All planets were gone, there was no supply anywhere, only MkV and other nuclear-immune stuff was left.

I'd not built any nukes at all, or indeed any other warheads. I've attached a save of just after this happening. I can try to find an earlier one if that helps, but it may be about 15m before the 'incident'. Looked all over the wiki, but couldn't see any enemies that could do this sort of damage.

Is there some sort of insane, extra-nasty hunter-killer type thing that is capable of doing this? AIP is pretty high, and the game is near the 13 hour mark with >5 Spire cities built. Any ideas, please let me know!

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AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Help defending against Zenith Bombards

« on: May 01, 2012, 04:01:34 PM »

Unfortunately the Bombards are immune to Mines. 

  OK, plan B: Riot Starships MkII with tazers (I know that Riots were mentioned in the OP, but not sure if the tazers were tried). Should give you a few seconds to take out a few. Anyone know if the Riot shields count as forcefields? I.e. are they immune to the Bombards' ammo?

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AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Help defending against Zenith Bombards

« on: May 01, 2012, 02:13:19 AM »

You could try EMP mines around the wormhole. I've not actually tried these myself though with bombards, so I don't know if the EMP effect would hit them before or after they've fired.

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AI War / Re: Details about fallen-spire endgame mechanics

« on: November 26, 2011, 05:19:46 PM »

5) If you do have spirecraft, I commend implosion artillery to you for HKs and anything else with an unsanitarily-high max hp.  Rams may also be good, haven't tried those much myself.

I've tried Spirecraft Rams, but never had any luck with them. They always got one-shotted by the HK before being able to collide. Maybe they'd be more likely to get through while waiting on top of a wormhole for the HK.

As you said, the Spire fleet is the best for taking out the HK, though admittedly, I've never faced six MkII HKs.    I tend to keep a few transports near the fleet so they can respond quickly if needed.

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AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: i am beyond horrible at this game

« on: November 16, 2011, 03:20:01 AM »

With the economic unlocks, I tend to wait until I've got 5 economic command stations before unlocking the MkII economic station, and wait until I've a further 5 before locking the MkIII. This maximizes the resource income benefit from spending the knowledge. Then I shuffle things around so that the MkIII stations are on the closer in worlds and less likely to get destroyed. At this point I start to think about upgrading the harvesters, upgrading whichever resource has the lowest income, as by this point there should be a fair few harvesters built and again the benefit of spending the knowledge is maximized.

As mentioned before, grav and tractor turrets are great for buying time, as are riot starships (I usually stick to lasers on them for maximum range, keeps them out of trouble) for their engine damage abilities. I'll often mix light starships in with my missile frigates to give them the damage boost and provide some short-range defense in case anything gets through.

Not spending knowledge until you need to is also very good advice. I'll often wait for a difficult looking wave to be announced before unlocking a ship or turret (or both) to counter it.

We're talking Dwarf Fortress fun, right?

What other kind of fun is there!

Well, this may be controversial, but I sometimes find winning fun too

11

AI War / Re: Anti-starship arachnids

« on: October 11, 2011, 07:47:12 AM »

That doesn't make a ton of sense to have a ship that's anti-"sort of big but not too big stuff" though.  And they're kinda useless now, only time I'd take a planet because of that fabricator is if it was the best option for taking out that particular core shield type, so having the targeting restrictions of antimatter starships instead would be nice, yeah.

Yeah, I agree. I was getting the way that what they can target fits their name, rather than makes much sense overall. I seem to remember that these are quite old units, so were probably around before golems and other new big things. If they do get changed to have the targeting scope of antimatter starships then they should probably have a new name to reflect this, like Antimatter Fighter or something.

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AI War / Re: Anti-starship arachnids

« on: October 10, 2011, 04:36:49 PM »

It isn't quite literally that...Bomber Starship IV are targetable.  Use the reference tab and select them as main ship and make everything available in the other list.  Then sort by the damage they deal and you'll see they have about 8 valid targets.

They are extremely cheap and have about 80% of the firepower of a starship.  I'd say if they could target Guardians too they'd be fine, but I'd say they would need a firepower decrease then.

Useful tip that, thanks! I didn't realise how useful the reference tab was until I tried that. I tried having a look at this in the reference tab and counted 56 ships with the scope filter set to 'No Filter' that the arachnids did damage to, which was every starship that I could think of (including non-constructor ones) and other big ships like the Spire/Neinzul ships, but I've still not been able to get them to attack any of these. There were only 9 ships targetable if the scope filter was set to 'Ships I Can Build'.

Spirecraft and Golems were not included in the list though which I suppose is fair enough, as they're not really starships.

I'd love to know if anyone else is having this trouble getting the arachnids to attack things that they're supposed to be able to attack, or if it's just me. I'm starting to feel paranoid now, like the arachnids are part of a conspiracy against me.

13

AI War / Re: Spirecraft Attritioner

« on: October 10, 2011, 02:47:02 PM »

I so wanted to try the new Attritioners and Ion Blasters that I ended up starting a new game of AI War instead of playing the AVWW Beta. Both craft are now much improved.

The Attritioners are great for large waves of low-HP craft, especially if the Attritioners are well protected and tractor/gravity turrets are used around the wormhole; it's brilliant seeing vast numbers of ships all die at once (all the more so when they are those nasty Etherjets trying to steal my ships). Kind of a shame that gravity drills are buildable from the Zenith trader, as that would make for a fantastic defense. I've only used them defensively though, so I can't comment on their offensive uses. It's kind of difficult to judge how much difference the extra damage that they are now dealing back out when a ship dies is doing, but they certainly feel more powerful.

The Ion Blasters are good too and seem to work as intended in that they can still do useful damage against things that they can't insta-kill.

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AI War / Re: Anti-starship arachnids

« on: October 10, 2011, 02:25:11 PM »

They can basically attack ONLY starships.  In other words the units you can build from your Starship Constructor.  They have very little value really.  End game they are good for taking out the Zenith and Spire Starships that give huge attack bonuses.

Is this literally only things that could come from a Starship Constructor? I.e. they wouldn't be able to attack Mk IV Bomber Starships or Core Starships as they don't come from the constructor? That could explain some of the problems then as it was quite late on and I was trying to use them to defend against fairly high-level exo-waves.

Are these the ones with the silly-high attack power?  I'm trying to think if there's some reason I can't just give them the same targeting scope as the SiegeAntimatter starship.  Though I guess that's still not able to shoot at anything

Yes, I think the attack is 100,000. This sounds like a really good idea, pretty much making them into mini antimatter starship. It shouldn't really unbalance anything, and would make more sense for them to be able to shoot at other big ships.

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AI War / Anti-starship arachnids

« on: October 09, 2011, 04:04:44 PM »

In the last game I played, I captured an Anti-starship arachnid fab and build the full cap, but couldn't actually get them to attack anything. They never seem to fire on anything ever. I've tried manually targeting starships, leaving them without orders and free-roaming defender mode, but all to no avail. When manually targeting with them, it doesn't make the sound when something is targeted, so maybe something is stopping them from working.

Not sure if I'm missing something with these, it's been ages since I last used them. Anybody got any ideas?