Messages

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AI War / Re: How does the AI choose ship unlocks?

« on: June 15, 2012, 12:04:10 AM »

Thanks for the thoughts — I guess this has been a case of the nefarious RNG. /furlscloak. Last game was a Spire Hammer & Special Forces Captain. I'll bet if I looked, many of the last games I've played  have had Spireling or Stealth Master.

I've always just gotten Military Orbital Command III since without stealth, they can't slowly build up large numbers by hanging at the edge of the gravity well on a player world — Which is what I find makes them rather unbalanced. It's when both AI's have them, and able to put 10 or 20, esp IIs, IIIs & IVs slowly hiding themselves at a world, then popping out at once on a random orbital command force fields in your backfield that is the problem. With 7.7 mil HP per ship just at mk IV (and ONLY 5.7 mil hp at mk III), if you get caps of 8 mk IVs and 8 mkIIIs cold chillin' somewhere around 5 planets deep, there is a really solid chance that the instant you look away, because you've got a wave elsewhere, or your tea is done steeping, or your cat is biting your foot,  they'll burn down a force field before your static defenses can churn through that massive HP pool (107.2 mil total for just the mk 3 & 4 units!) Which means always having to keep a real chunk of fleet behind to smack these jerks down.

That said, my question still stands — is the ARCEN wiki article correct that aside from initial bonus ships etc., the further unlocks are purely based on map seed?

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AI War / Re: How does the AI choose ship unlocks?

« on: June 14, 2012, 09:50:57 PM »

Tech — We're using a new random seed each time. It could just be bad RNG, but I was just curious to see if there were any mroe nefarious mechanics at play here.

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AI War / How does the AI choose ship unlocks?

« on: June 14, 2012, 05:55:55 PM »

Hi! In the midst of all the fun with the Spire Hammer CRE's, Brisebonbons and I realized we had a question about the what ships the AI gets. Based on the ARCEN wiki, it says:

"Which ships are unlocked here are based mainly off the map seed (with the added requirement that it not have already been unlocked by the AI team, of course), which again is the same as how the Advanced Research Stations work for the human team." (http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_AI_Techs#Bonus_Ship_Types_For_AI)

That said, we've found that that in the last 10+ games the AI always gets [and abuses] Spire Stealth Battleships. Which are my most hated unit at the moment.

Are the AI ship unlocks pure RNG as the wiki suggests, or since it's almost a year old, is there some underlying code mechanism for choosing "strong" ships?

Sorry if this an obvious question, but I'm still very new at the game and I'm trying to understand how the AI works. Thanks!

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AI War / Re: Who's Sadistic Idea of Fun... (Spire Hammer)

« on: June 14, 2012, 12:37:39 PM »

Not enough caffeine for my first posts/replies so I wanted to clarify a couple things. First, each raid engine spawns a single Dreadnought per tick, for a total of 2 per double-engine wave. (TBH we had 4 up on a large percentage of our attempts owing to the timing with killing the second engine).

Second, I didn't mean to say that a Dreadnought isn't still scary in it's own right. Ditto with 500+ core mark ships. Either of those would still be brutal to deal with, but comparatively to a combination of 2 Dreadnoughts and 1000+ core mark ships that caused the massive headache, they are "deal-able."

To keith, if you're interested how we dealt with the pair of core raid engines with the dreadnoughts, here's a quick rundown:

The layout was this: My Highly Defended World (the real world we want to fight them at) ---> Mk3 World (our bait) ---> Core Mk IV ---> Core Homeworld (With 2 Core Raid Engines).

I took the Mk 3 as a fake world for the raid engine waves to hit first. It had a Factory IV, but we had one elsewhere from way earlier. Perfect bait. Knowing the AI prioritizes targets like that, I put dozens of mines in a line between the wormholes from the mkIV and to my real world. Loads of sniper turrets at the ends. Not that these will do that much damage, but they were just to buy us some time between the spawn and having to fight the 'noughts.

Then we took a couple extra worlds with high mk spire asteroids. From these we built a couple dozen mk3 and mk4 rams, four mk 4 atritioners, and four mk4 martyrs. We hid those at a world adjacent to the world where we really wanted to fight.

From there I had Brisebonbons bring about 75% of his fleet over to the real battleground world.

I built a full cap of transports. Loaded 75% of my ships in those. 1200 mixed ships total. About 100 ships per transport with about 7-8 dummy transports that were empty. This sounds weird, but what we realized after a whole bunch of other failed attempts, the only way to beat this was to skip through the core mk4, into the Core Home, and straight to the first raid engine and get enough ships there to pop it (only 6 mil hp) and then have enough transports left to re-load 200-300 ships and cross the map to the other and pop it. Any ships that got stranded would just serve as a distraction to give the strike force space to frantically do it's thing.

This meant we had 4 minutes from crossing in to the core mk 4 to kill both. It was ugly, and I lost the full cap of transports and all 1200 ships but got the second engine with 15 seconds to spare. Couldn't have done it without abusing the transports, I think.

So that left us dealing with the wave. The bait world bought us about 2 minutes while the dreadnoughts and ships wandered around and evaporated anything there, with the mkV ships eating many many mines along the way.

At this point, I've managed to rebuild about 50% of my fleet at a nearby world and the light show starts: We use the attritioners, placed deep to the side in the backfield of the defended world to lure away the core ships, which are then, SURPRISE, all grabbed from behind by the martyrs that pop through the wormhole behind them. That kills about 600-700 of the ships. (Note: Brise kept his ships in transports until the AI fleet started moving.)

(This happened almost simultaneously with the atritioner/martyr trick:) Though in reality, we really just wanted the core mk death ball to move away from the Dreadnoughts — Pulling a move from the Zap Branagin playbook, we clog it's cannons with our ships to distract them. During the slaughter, I take 20+ spire rams and pop them through from the next world over and plow in to the Dreadnoughts with only seconds for them to react. Boom.

It was a giant mess, and we probably lost about 3000 mixed ships total, but hey, that was the hard part! And we only lost the one world we had planned to lose!

*Edit* I realized that many of you might be going, "Why no golems?" Well, because of course this is the game Brisebonbons and I were experimenting with game settings and have them completely turned off...  So golems weren't an option.

 

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AI War / Re: Who's Sadistic Idea of Fun... (Spire Hammer)

« on: June 14, 2012, 09:48:53 AM »

Thankfully my friend and I tend to play so as to keep our AIP quite low, so we hadn't even seen these until the two mkV raid engines at the home world started spawning them. For me, it wasn't the dreadnoughts (spire rams > dreadnoughts) nor even the core mk ships (martyrs can clean those up), nor was it having a raid engine at a home world, it was that there were two of the raid engines that was so much trouble lol.

Also, thanks keith We had to really dig in and put together a whole multi-world strategy for dealing with it (and lots of mines and Spire rams). And we died more than a few times on the first attempts, but it was as fun as it was aggravating!

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AI War / Who's Sadistic Idea of Fun... (Spire Hammer)

« on: June 14, 2012, 12:30:32 AM »

To continue my pain-train of thought, who's sadistic idea of fun was it to have the Spire Hammer's home world?:

1) Have such a thing as a core mark raid engine at all.
2) Have said raid engine spawn 500-550 mkV ships per tick.
3) Have it *additionally* spawn a spire DREADNOUGHT per tick.
4) Have said home world, with said engine, spawning said uber-nasty ships — and this is the key part — have 2, yes TWO, of these ******* raid engines on opposite sides of the same home world with an army's worth of gravity turrets, forcefields, a core fortress and the AI home command between them.

Which, in simple terms, means an aggressive wave that comes with 4 Dreadnoughts & 1100 core mark ships, spawning right next to you a mere 60 seconds after you enter the tech IV buffer world.

That QQ aside, Brisebonbons and I actually did manage to figure out how to survive and beat this mess. (The short answer: It's complicated.) We died and had to save scum a good number of times, but still, that was one of the more hair-pulling, face-desking, keyboard-throwing moments I've had in a video game in a LOOOOoooooonnngggg time.   

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After Action Reports / Re: there IS a learning curve from L5 to L6

« on: May 15, 2012, 09:27:31 PM »

I'll agree that those the AI types are going to be nasty.

I've got a Stealth master in my current game and it is a pain.

If you can spare the Knowledge, Command Military III will be very nice as it provides system-wide tachyon coverage but don't think that is required, I did not unlock any Command Stations in my game and I'm in a good position to win the game pretty quick.

I'll second this statement. Brise and I have had Stealth Masters in our last three games (thanks random) and they can be obnoxious. Though I will say, at least at diff 7, hang in there because that AI type moves from "ugh-dangerous" to "merely-annoying" as mid-game sets in.

Again, doubling up, but getting Mil Command II fast (and then III when it makes sense) is a must along with double or better FFs. I also like blocks of 10-20 Spider turrets and 10-20 sniper turrets at worlds I need to defend because the engine damage + unlimited range + Mil Command tele will clean up after hangers-on or random threat spill without any trouble when they pop out of cloak. 

The other way to deal with heavy stealth is to go with heavy reclamation — So many of the stealth units (except those horrible horrible Spire Stealth Battleships) have very little health and get reclaimed very fast to create fodder for your cap.

Good luck! 

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AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Crazy CPA

« on: May 07, 2012, 09:23:11 PM »

Thanks Wanderer Going to start another game up soon and we'll see how it goes.

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AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Crazy CPA

« on: May 07, 2012, 05:17:41 PM »

Thanks to everyone for the advice! While it was super-frustrating to lose that way, we've both learned a ton from the dialog we've had because of it. Next game I'm sure we'll have some other silly/dramatic death that we'll be asking about

I did have one further question about CPAs — does anyone know how the AI determines when it's going to launch one? Is it pure rng or is there some sort of calculation that affects it's timing? For instance, this CPA was the first in this game at hour 6 or 7 but I've had games where I already had two CPAs before hour 5. Thanks again!

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AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Crazy CPA

« on: May 07, 2012, 11:59:26 AM »

Ok, doing the math, assuming the 7.0 difficulty is the first AI, I get: (220 AIP) * (7.0 difficulty) * 0.8 * (1.33 player count)  = 1638 ships.  You listed 2100 ships.  What was your threat at before the CPA hit?  Because extra threat will join the party, so letting that get too high just increases the effective size of the next CPA.

Given your difficulty that should have been a Mark I CPA, which means it starts releasing Mark I ships, then Mark II, and so on until to release to threat a total of 1638 ships (or every AI ship in the galaxy is released).  It won't create extra ships.  So for 1100 Mark IV and V ships to be released, you had to have purged all but 538 Mark I-III ships from the entire galaxy.  You wouldn't be the first player to have learned that clearing out the galaxy, especially of low mark units, is a bad idea.  Are you by chance playing on a smaller map (less than 60 planets)?  It can be pretty easy to make that mistake on those.

Aside from a bug (which we had a few weird ones in this game) lack of low tier units to fill out the CPA was our working suspicion. Considering we were on an 80 planet map and only held about 20 worlds and we had only neutered a handful more (maybe 8-ish?) we weren't paying too much attention to having this happen. 

Also, good to know about the threat — we were getting so many crazy fast waves in this game (occasionally were we'd get up to three reps of double-waves hitting 30 seconds apart at the same world) that I'll bet 10 to 1 our floating threat was super high, probably pushing over 300. Also, the starship commander and spireling were both relying on really rough units like stealth battleships and mini-rams,. A mk V spire stealth battleship is obviously way more obnoxious than a mk V deflector drone.

Would there be a way to manage this issue in future games, such as deliberately alerting a bunch of low tech planets? I'd love to know a way to avoid this, considering how even though we were playing safe and steady it feels like we just got insta-killed by rng.  The last time I felt like I got my butt kicked this bad in a game was when jumped in to a Team Fortress 2 match and half the American nationals team jumped in on the other side lol.

[Also, this game we were experimenting with having golems off. If I had had a hive golem, who knows what the outcome might have been.]

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AI War Strategy Discussion / Crazy CPA

« on: May 07, 2012, 12:25:05 AM »

My friend and I were playing a game against a 7 and 7.3 (starship commander and spireling decedent). We're pretty new to the game, but have beat 7/7's before. We had a bit of a slog for the first few hours, since we had lots of dug-in worlds near our homes and constant harassment by the computers (often getting 3-4 waves only a minute or two apart at the same worlds). But got our caps up, expanded and started to get some momentum.We did a pretty decent job keeping the AIP low and digging in hard and deep at all our worlds. We were just about to settle in to the transition from mid game to late game  when we got a CPA. We doubled down on defenses, filled our caps with ships (we each had 3 or 4 tech IV ships and fortresses at every planet etc). Our AIP was about 210 to 220 here (previously was about 180-190 for the last couple hours). Then the CPA hit. 600 Mark V ships. 500 mark IV ships... and another 1000 mixed starships and other ships. Yes. you're reading that right. 600 core tech and 500 IV's unit at 6 hours in. Wow. GG. They nuked everything we had in a couple of minutes without even stopping. Anything we could have done to weather this? Is this a bug?

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AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: One-Way Doormaster and AIP

« on: March 24, 2012, 06:34:01 PM »

Thanks for the replies! From what it sounds like, I just got rather unlucky with *where* AIP reducers got spawned, so I should just plug along and weather a few of these bigger front-end waves. Then once I've got access to more of  the [unfortunately spawning] map  I should be able to find what I need to keep AIP in check. As for the suggestion for using the BHGs against the AI, I've certainly been playing along those lines. Particularly, I've teched to Military Command III, and been putting those at the worlds with one [or more] BHGs creating really nasty choke points.  Thanks for the info — so much still to learn!

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AI War Strategy Discussion / One-Way Doormaster and AIP

« on: March 24, 2012, 02:59:11 PM »

Hi! I'm a new player and this is my first post here. My friends and I recently picked up AI Wars and have been really enjoying learning the game despite/because we're being beaten fairly evenly by the AI.  However, in a recent 80 planet, realistic, 7 game I've been working on I randomly got the One-Way Doormaster as one of the AI's (Tank as the other) . When I was learning at lower difficulty levels, Black Hole Generators normally weren't even a concern, but now that I'm getting a feel for how AIP works I'm stumped as to how to win this game in an efficient fashion.

My main concern is the mounting AIP from +10 AIP from killing a BHG. I've scouted about 5 jumps out (as far as I can get with Scout IIIs owing to a bazillion Tachyon IVs and Ion IVs) and I would say about 80%+ of those worlds around my home have one. I've seen a few that even have 2 BHGs each. There is a single data center within 5 jumps, no factory IVs, no Dyson Sphere, and no Fabs.  My guess, based on the map, is that the home worlds are each about 15 jumps in different directions away from my home.

Any advice on how to beat this without it turning in to a high AIP fleet-ball grind fest? Or is that pretty much how games against a One-Way Doormaster roll?