Topics

16

AI War / About the AI retreating on the attack

« on: December 12, 2012, 08:02:37 PM »

How the AI retreats on an "attack gone south" (from either waves or regular threat, in fact, they use the same logic IIRC) is rather odd.
Some observations:
-As already reported elsewhere, sometimes the AI retreats way too early, as little as 2 seconds in some cases
-Some shiptypes take "worse odds" to trigger a retreat than other types. In particular, starships, bombers, and carriers are more likely to hang around even when everything else on the planet is trying to get out of there
-The retreat logic isn't consistent even within a ship type. Sometimes, some of the, say, fighters will try to retreat, while others will continue to seek out stuff to attack.
-Sometimes, the retreat logic doesn't kick in when it clearly should. I have had cases where they would turn tail when they are out powered 3 to 1, but will try to stick around when they are out powered 10 to 1. (and yes, I am remembering to count turret firepower in these comparisons)
-Although the AI seems more likely to retreat to an allied (AI owned) planet, they will sometimes "retreat" to another hostile (human owned) planet. (IIRC, this one is intentional though)

I'll try to get some saves demonstrating some of these.
Anyone else observe some oddities or have saves demonstrating these or other oddities in AI retreat logic?

17

AI War / Engine Health at 0 proposal

« on: November 21, 2012, 09:59:01 AM »

Once long ago, engines damaged to 0 caused the ship to fall to 0 speed as well.
This was to changed to be 1 speed at 0 engine health to prevent too much stagnation when engine damagers entered the picture.
Now a new way to fight that has been introduced, engines now auto-repair after not taking any engine damage for a bit, which I feel targets the issue much better.
Because of this, I wonder if it would be good for engines at 0 to go back to 0 speed.

It would allow the "engines are out, flash red" logic to work as intended again. It would also allow tractor beams to refocus on ships that actually still have good movement capabilities, instead of, say, holding on to that missile frigate at 1 speed (due to 0 engine health) and ignoring the bomber with full engine health barreling down to the command station. If you have a good source of engine damage, you should be able to keep those ships at 0 engine health, and stop the "regen" which would otherwise throw this off from being a smart move by tractor turrets.

EDIT: The reason this is here instead of mantis is to gather feedback first.

EDIT2: Fixed a major omission in the intro blurb, basically changing its entire meaning to something different than I intended.

EDIT3:
It's on mantis now.

9983: Make ship speed 0 at engine health 0 again

18

AI War / Discussion: Player Economy

« on: November 16, 2012, 06:37:10 PM »

After reading through and participating in several threads, the clear impression I seem to be getting is that player economy is overpowered right now (short of handicaps of course). It is not just a problem of people playing on too low of AI difficulties, it seems to be an issue all the way up to about 9.


This includes energy and metal+crystal.
(for the purposes of this discussion, ignore the influence of champions and nebula reward imbalances, as that is a separate "can of worms" already pointed out)

The purpose of this thread is to hopefully centralize the discussion some.
As energy and metal+crystal are somewhat intertwined (or at least used to be before the new energy system), and they both deal with how much the player can afford to produce and maintain, I am making this thread for both.

For the metal+crystal, the predominant view seems to be that higher Mk. harvesters are still OP (not just in comparison to econ stations, but even overall). How to "nerf" them is still under discussion though.
Some popular ideas I have seen so far are:
-Remove Mk. II and Mk. III harvesters all together, and go back to the single Mk harvester system of old. Reblance the MK. I harvesters (now the only harvesters) accordingly.
-Remove the extra spots the HW gets, aka, bring the number of harvester spots on the HW from 8-12 to 4-6. (aka, half the number of spots), but increase the resource production of the pre-seeded buildings accordingly. This will nerf early game higher Mk. harvesters pretty hard
-Add an energy cost to the higher Mk. harvesters (which would imply energy balance would need to be dealt with for this to work)
-Add a cap to the higher Mk. harvesters
-Simply nerf the economic output of higher mark harvesters...again

For the energy, there is less of a consensus. However, it seems a popular view is that during 1 - 2 or 3 planets in a single player, single HW game, energy is about right, but beyond that, there is just too much energy. Also, that multi-HW and co-op completley throw off even this little bit of energy balance. As with the harvesters, how to "nerf" them is still under discussion.
As this one has not been discussed as much, I have only really seen one idea:
-Reduce the output of the energy collector (the one that costs no resources per second), but reduce the resource per second cost of the converters


Also, how these scale in co-op and multi-HW games is also up for discussion.


Thoughts? Comments? Ideas?

Keep in mind ideas are not exclusive, some elements of multiple ideas can be chosen.

19

AI War / Satillite Worlds and Special Forces

« on: November 07, 2012, 04:47:14 PM »

Copied from another thread:

Also, special forces are making setting up satellite worlds very difficult. Even if you take a planet for yourself, if the special forces was on route to that planet or even merely routing through that planet, they will still try to go to it instead of trying to re-route around it (or change target planets). Thus, when setting up a satellite world, you can easily get 2000 special forces ships popping in even after taking the planet, sometimes even when there was nothing on that planet that special forces would want to defend.

Anyone else observe similar behavior?
Please make sure to differentiate special forces from threat fleet. I would expect threat fleet to do this sort of thing (attacking new, remote worlds), as they are geared for offense, not defense.
Generally, you can tell between the two by watching what happens after the command station is destroyed. If they leave, it is likely it is special forces. If they stick around, it is likely it is threat fleet.
You can tell for sure by checking debug mode though. (Bound to F3 by default, which among other things will add various debugging info when you hover over a ship, like their current AI "subroutine")

20

AI War / AI Reinforcments with lots of alerted worlds and/or as AIP goes up

« on: November 07, 2012, 04:44:05 PM »

Copied from another thread:

I have a similar problem (meaning I always get my butt kicked by carrier waves later in game).

I understand the approach to keep AIP low, but I find it difficult to stick to it - especially as taking an Advanced Factory, Advanced Research Facility, etc. not only requires you to take the respective planet, but also to provide a supply line leading to the system to be able to take it...

I beginning to think that the bonus that the AI gets to reinforcements over AIP and/or per alerted planets, and/or the cutoff to border aggression to start happening needs to be toned down some.

In my game, at a "mere" 220 AIP, just four more planets being alerted (previously, it was only 3, then it became 7 when I tried to start setting up a satellite world) caused a near non-stop stream of freed defenders (due to border aggression and excess defenders going into carriers). Something seems off about that.

Anyone else have similar experiences or opinions?

21

Off Topic / 3000 Posts

« on: November 01, 2012, 02:44:28 PM »

Wow, this is my 3000th post. 

How did this happen? I even managed to overtake RCIX.

Anyways, I would post tons of silly gifs with silly dances or silly parties, but I don't really have many silly gifs hanging around at the moment. Plus, this is a rather silly thing to note...

22

AI War / Refactor Low Cap Fleetships to Bonus Starship Logic?

« on: October 16, 2012, 10:08:01 AM »

Now that we have bonus starship logic, do you think that maybe some of the "I can't believe I'm not a starship" fleetship types (fleetships with a cap of <= 5) can be refactored to use them. I think this would have many benefits, not the least of which making much harder for the AI to accumulate large numbers of them, as they would have to follow starship spawning rules (which have rather harsh caps compared to fleet ship spawning rules). It would also give a strong hint to the AI to manage them better (imagine a planetary roaming maw or stealth battleship , though the spire blade spawners should probably use a different "idle behavior" logic).
It would also group them with what their roles in fleet combat tends to be; it is more a starship like role than a fleet ship type role.

This may require some additional tweaking to get right (in particular, we may want to get their stats in line with starships, higher cap HP target, but lower cap DPS target, or maybe not, that is something up for discussion).
Also, I don't expect this to get done before 6.0, but I would like to gather feedback before I dump it on mantis.

EDIT: Renamed the topic

23

AI War / AI Shared Ship Type Unlocks

« on: October 07, 2012, 11:36:22 PM »

Anyone else noticing the two AIs getting the same unlocks on game seed very frequently? I'm not talking about the unlocks get through the course of the game, nor the AI type specific unlocks, but rather the random unlock they get?
For me, both of them seem to be getting whatever AI player 1 unlocks, and only AI player 2 gets their own unlock confined to them. (Note, this implies that, in effect, the second AI gets TWO random unlocks.) I will need to test further to be sure, but seeing this sort of "one type is shared between both of them" type behavior over the last 3 games I started recently seems odd.
Anyone else have any observations about this? Either for or against some sort of oddity with their initial picks going on?


On a related topic, for the unlocks they get through the course of the game, they seem to be the same as well (they unlock the same ones at every unlock point). I understand why this was, it mirrors how human players all get the same unlocks from ARSs. However, now that human players can now get different unlocks (through hacking), could it be made such that there is a chance that the AIs will pick different unlocks?

24

AI War / Mixed mark reinformcements?

« on: September 17, 2012, 12:09:36 PM »

Anyone else noticing that the AI is getting mixed mark reinforcements?
This seems a bit odd, as Keith has said that the new mixed mark stuff is supposed to only impact waves.


Sadly, I did not have reinforcement logging turned on at the time, so there is no log for me to post.

25

AI War / No Alternate Mechanic for Forcefields

« on: September 06, 2012, 03:36:01 PM »

Something interesting I remembered when reading Dazio's AAR: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,11393.0.html
This post is copied from: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,11393.msg119741.html#msg119741

Yes, but infiltrators are FF immune.

That is something that has been bugging me a while.
There is no (general purpose) alternate mechanic to do what forcefields do.

If you want to hamper the movement of something, you have engine damage, tractor beams, and gravity. Each one of those is a different mechanic, but they all have the same purpose, make it harder for something to get somewhere. This prevents any one of those mechanics and any one of the immunities to those mechanics from being overpowered.
Similarly, for armor, you have two ways of countering it, armor peircing, and armor rotting.

However, there is no such alternate mechanic for forcefields. Because there is no such general purpose alternate mechanic for "I'll take the damage for you", this inflates the value (and danger) of force field immunity to crazy levels.

Yes, I know there are some alternate mechanics for this stuff, decoy/shot attraction, and exo-shields. But the shot attraction mechanic is only available from the rare experimental unit or only works for certain ammo types, and exo-shields can only be applied to one type of thing currently, harvesters. Thus, they fail the general purpose condition.

26

AI War / "Hidden" Cheats

« on: September 02, 2012, 09:58:57 PM »

You guys have some interesting stuff tucked into the game.

I was looking through the language file to find the "copy current game setting into the lobby" command, and found some cheats I didn't remember.
Well, like any good engine "abuser" I had to try them out. So far, I have only tried base game stuff. I may search through the other expansions to see if you got any other fun stuff hidden away.

Here are some undocumented cheats/commands I tried so far:
ilostit: Based on the name of this string entry (Cheat_SpawnSpecificFGType), it seems that this is designed to spawn a specific foreground object (which includes one very important class of stuff, units), but I can't seem to get it to do so. It is recognizing it as a cheat, but it isn't doing anything. Maybe I'm not passing in the right number of parameters. (I was trying ilostit internal_fg_obj_type_name). Maybe you guys disable it when some debugging flag is turned off. I don't know.

EDIT: I typed it into the forums wrong, it is ilostit (I spelled it with an a previously)

cmd:log static variables: Does exactly what the name seems to suggest. Makes the game output a new log file called StaticVariableValues.txt that just seems to be a list of various static variable values and other stuff that seems to relate to current state of the game. Interesting if you want to gain insight into the "guts" of the game, but doesn't give you any sort of impact in game.

omni: This one is very interesting. It basically unlocks a large amount of stuff, gives you a bunch of bonus ships (as if you unlocked them from and ARS), gives you a new tab on command stations (or units with similar "I can build this" sets) called omni (letting you place all kinds of fun stuff, like core starships, some Mk. V fleet ships, and some of the other stuff you can build elsewhere, but in one big screen), and finally, changes how mobile units are produced, it make mobile units, instead of "queued" and sent out, makes them placed like structures. Very strange. Even stranger is the name of this string entry, Cheat_Arena. A testing relic of a long, canceled feature? Who can say? (Well, Chris and maybe Keith can...)

27

Off Topic / New Computer

« on: August 27, 2012, 09:00:37 PM »

Finally, after long last, my new computer is here!
You can expect me to start playing AI War seriously again in not too much longer.

28

AI War / List of Moderately to Very Simple Issues that have been bugging me

« on: August 24, 2012, 09:44:00 AM »

Just to raise awareness (read, make Keith aware of), here is a list of issues that has been bugging me but seems like they should be no more than moderatley difficult to deal with, and some VERY simple to deal with.
Also, I am not including unit balance suggestions here.

AI Behaviour:
3843: AI Engineers should go into FRD (Seems like it should be trivial to add)
7494: Freed AI Melee Units that are waiting at a wormhole don't always attack
5001: AI Undervalues Turret Firepower (Adjusting how much the AI "downgrades" its consideration of the firepower of turrets is easy. Finding a good value to adjust it to without throwing off pacing of the game severely may be tricky)

Gameplay bugs:
3844: Ships in FRD not always regathering at FRD point (Thanks to its transient nature, may be difficult to pin down)
8819: Ships sometimes autotarget wormhole guard posts (Thanks to its transient nature, may be difficult to pin down)

UI:
9041: The New Assist Lines look weird (Reopened)
9129: Left <=> Right Mouse button switch hotkey does not work in the lobby

29

AI War / New Worst and OP Ship polls coming soon?

« on: August 18, 2012, 09:01:06 PM »

THIS IS NOT A THREAD TO START POSTING NOMINATIONS! Wait for the official nomination threads please.

Kieth, planning on starting the next round of nominations for the worst and "OP to the point of needing a nerf" poll soon?

Not trying to pressure you, especially with all of this new expansion content coming out. Not sure how you are planning on budgeting your time with all this stuff. Just wanted to see if this is in the near future or not.

30

AI War Technical Support / Updated Mac Installer

« on: August 02, 2012, 09:50:27 PM »

Well, until my new computer arrives, I'm going to be installing AI war on one of the old Mac computers. However, I remember reading that the published Mac installer/app bundle/whatever for AI War has a pretty permissions bug inside of its "bundle" (or whatever it is called), causing beta updates to sometimes not work.
I think I saw somewhere a link for a installer with the bug fixed.
Does anyone have that link?