Messages

1

AI War / Re: This AI is awesome.

« on: September 21, 2010, 11:49:18 PM »

well, a mk1 ion cannon wouldnt be quite the same

the question would have to become a mk5 ion cannon that costs you nothing to destroy*

*im talking opportunity cost here - as in, you could not capture it or reclaim it for resources*

Yes, but the AI treats a mark 1 ion the same as a mark 5.  Even if it is attacking with mark 4 ships, it will go for the mark I ion cannon first, before anything else.  Which is silly for it to do.  If it was attacking with ships that the ion cannon could destroy, I could see it making sense that it targets the ion cannon first.

2

AI War / Re: This AI is awesome.

« on: September 19, 2010, 09:08:07 PM »

ok lets put it the other way.

You are a giant galactic empire ruler who currently has a thorn in his side. You decide to attack x planet of this rebel insurgency.

It has a giant gun that kills each of your units with one shot. Destroying this gun will make the planet considerably easy to retake.
It has a bunch of resources, that will do minor indirect damage to the insurgency. They do not decrease defenses, nor anything of import.
It has a command station, which probably is the only thing in the system to provide scout intel, but thats more or less the only thing it does.


Which target do you choose?

Well, if I'm attacking with mark III or IV ships, and their giant gun is a mark I ion cannon, I think I would ignore it.  But the AI doesn't....

3

Off Topic / Re: New Baby has arrived! Christopher J. Park

« on: September 13, 2010, 02:10:13 AM »

Congratulations!!!  Make sure you don't spend too much time working on AI War, and spend tons of time with your son!

4

AI War / Re: Are the AI stations immune to blade attacks?

« on: August 31, 2010, 01:06:51 AM »

I have found that flak turrets actually work far far better when combined with gravity turrets.  I had a few vampires (3-4) attacking the command station of one of my back water systems, so I sent some engineers, and insta-built a set of five flak turrets.  Around 30 seconds later the vampires were still at pretty high health, and showing no signs of dying before the command station.  So I thought "well, it looks like the flak is missing the vampires, lets slow them down" so I built a grav turret, and Presto! The vampires were all dead in around 5 seconds.  This happened a few other times too, so I'm pretty sure it's consistent.

While grav turrets effecting the hit effectiveness of flak turrets might be a bug, it is currently happening, so I would just add in grav turrets with flak, and you will have no problems with melee ships.

5

AI War / Re: how to export spreadsheet of unit bonuses?

« on: August 26, 2010, 12:07:56 AM »

Oh, heh, for some reason my computer is set to open up xml files with my text editor, and I didn't even realize it, so I just thought it was a text file....  Even though I have extensions shown....  Oh well...

Opening it up in Open Office Calc doesn't work though....  Know of any free spreadsheet programs that might do the trick?


As far as the link to why showing just the multiplier numbers is bad, I do agree with that.  But at the same time, the part about them being misleading in some cases, specificly:
"How the ships perform if the player uses any tactics other than just running the two groups at one another. "
Is why I would love to have a way to see the bonus damage in game, because I do like to use tactics, and to tell my ships to attack stuff, and I DON'T want to select the entire group and tell them to attack the raid starships, when most of them do low damage.  Knowing that fighters do bonus damage means that I can select just them, and tell them to attack.  Since starships pretty much don't have a useful strong versus week, that is the most useful place where being able to see bonus damage would be handy.  But other things...

For example, if I have fortresses, and Bombards together, and a bunch of ships are heading wards me, if I start to micro, the bombards are listed as having a high percentage to frigates, but they actually do half damage, while they do full damage to bombers, and have a lower percentage.  So it's better for me to have my fort's shooting the frigs and the bombards shooting the bombers.  Someone that doesn't micro isn't going to care about that, but someone that does.....  Well, personally, I think that seeing the damage bonuses is mainly a micro thing...  And while I know you don't like micro, it's sometimes fun to micro battles, so as to feel like you are actually commanding the fleet and stuff.

*shrug*

All in all, I realize that it's not all that important, but it would be cool....  Or some other way to micro so you can tell your ships "this is an important target, if you have a high bonus, shoot it, if not, don't".  Being able to see bonus numbers and then have the player do that seems the easiest way to me, but I would be perfectly happy if I could "select" a hostile unit type from the scout bar, and then see a listing of all the types I have in system, and how well they will do against that type, compared against each other, rather then compared against what they are shooting at.  Then we could just select the top few, or maybe some in the middle if the top few are already shooting more important stuff, and set the "high priority targets" kind of like if you right click on a target that type becomes important.....

6

AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Dealing with a botnet-golem golemite AI

« on: August 24, 2010, 06:53:01 PM »

Hummm, that is odd, I would think they would have a bonus against golems....  Maybe it's something to be updated in future patches...

7

AI War / Re: how to export spreadsheet of unit bonuses?

« on: August 24, 2010, 06:51:44 PM »

Ahhh, but that is just a text file, not a spreadsheet.....

On a related note, do you think there is any chance that you could put something in game, like a setting, or a hold-down key, that would change the win/loss percentage numbers into showing the raw damage multipliers?

8

AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Spider Nests... So Much Hate

« on: August 24, 2010, 01:00:51 AM »

Transports and scout starships, throw in an MRS or two, and you should be fine....

9

AI War / Re: Missle Frigate - Area Damage Immunity -> Serious Balance Problem

« on: August 24, 2010, 12:46:07 AM »

I would like to comment about how prior to this patch, HBC were one of only two turrets that actually got positive bonuses towards shooting at raid starships.  The other was laser turrets, and their damage isn't very much when compared to HBC.  A beam cannon with the previous 1.5x multiplier would do 75,000 damage per shot to a raid starship pre-patch.  That was very significant.  Laser turrets can't even hope to come close that that level of damage.  Perhaps raising the multiplier on laser turrets would be a good idea?

10

AI War / Re: How to deal with 450+ core Z bombardment ships?

« on: August 22, 2010, 10:05:22 PM »

If you kill everything with that has the text "warp gate" as part of it's description (command stations, spec forces posts, barracks, likely other things) then the guard posts will stop spawning reinforcements.

And if you kill the guard posts, the ships they have will attack you.  So you could try that....

11

AI War / Re: Neinzul viral cluster craziness

« on: August 22, 2010, 02:50:39 PM »

Holy cow, I'm playin on a grid map, and there's a number of planets with 10-12 of these things on them.  They're like mega-ultra snipers.  The fragile slowpoke seige starships don't stand a chance against these.

Just a slightly off topic comment, but would it be unbalanced to increase the range of the siege starships a bit?  They are currently so fragile, that range is the only thing that keeps them alive, and there are quite a few things in the base games that can out range them, and kill them before they have a chance to fire.  For example:
Fortresses: Siege are supposed to be good at killing them, but a fort will kill a siege before the siege can fire on it.
Bombards: While siege can't shoot at these, if the AI has them, they will fire on the siege before the siege gets within range of it's target.  It's so slow, even a few could kill one before it gets within range.
Also now I'm hearing about things in CoN that have huge range.... 

*shrug*

12

AI War / Re: Your favorite defence and why?

« on: August 22, 2010, 02:45:19 PM »

Personally, I like fortresses, and spider turrets.  I use beam cannons for anti-raid-starship use, otherwise, I don't generally use turrets much.  Oh, and grav turrets = win. :-)

13

AI War / Re: Community DLC Suggestion Poll Nominations: Week of 8/15/10

« on: August 22, 2010, 02:30:00 PM »

Well, they sort of do sometimes.....  But player ships don't always pop out in all directions either.  It depends if the ships have another destination to go to already queued up (such as the command station, or a rally point), or if they are getting clustered too much.  If you have grav turrets, I have seen some of my mines on the back sides of wormholes getting destroyed...

14

AI War Technical Support / Re: Unknown crash (no error report generated)

« on: August 21, 2010, 08:16:16 PM »

Ahhh, yes, that is it.  The event log shows:
 .NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.4952 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (6CEA851A) (80131506)

15

AI War Technical Support / Unknown crash (no error report generated)

« on: August 21, 2010, 07:13:26 PM »

I was playing today, trying out the new build, 3.1.8.8, and for no apparent reason, the game suddenly crashed.  No error report, no nothing, just a window message saying "this program has crashed".  I was expecting AI War to generate a crash report, so I just closed the windows box, but it wasn't a very useful box anyway.

I realize this isn't very helpful, but I figured I should let you know.  I'll see if it happens again...

I attached the save game my friend made when he saved after I crashed.  So it might not be useful, since it's made after the crash, so to speak.... but yeah...