Messages

1576

AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Exos have become insane

« on: August 04, 2012, 02:17:12 PM »

You know how exos due to Golems (hard) have an increased chance of choosing centralized "loadouts" for their exo wave? Well, why not give the exos due to Botnet (hard) an increased chance of choosing decentralized "loadouts" for their exos? This would, on average, increase the number of fleet ships the AI puts in their Botnet (hard) exo waves, as they are more likely to choose lots of smaller ships for this minor faction.

1577

AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Various things

« on: August 04, 2012, 01:03:42 PM »

Is there a way to set a system as "dangerous" on the galaxy map, so my ships use another way to get into a system i command them to warp to ?

Sadly, no. But that would make a wonderful feature request. I'd vote it up.

1578

AI War / Re: Energy Collector Health

« on: August 03, 2012, 10:47:59 PM »

Hmm, the current triangle ship "balance layout" I believe is the second version of it. The 3.0 and before days had a different distribution of bonuses, stats, and roles.

Hmm, do you think it is time to start brainstorming a third version? (Like nailing down concrete ideas to implement the general ideas of new balance goals)

If so, that would be an intense enough subject to deserve its own thread.

1579

AI War / Re: Energy Collector Health

« on: August 03, 2012, 09:47:59 PM »

This may need to go in its own thread, but here are my thoughts on the whole "bombers and the like are disproportionally more dangerous on the offense" thing.
There are two major things that are skewing the usefulness of bombers, and neither of which are really due to the bomber unit itself.

First off, there is the disproportionally high number of units with heavy or ultra heavy armor. Sadly, this one will not be easy to fix.

The second thing is that there is only one mechanic that can protect structures (except for harvesters and their exo-shield thing), forcefields. Guess what, all the forcefield units have a hull type that bombers have a bonus against!
This seems a bit easier to fix, or at least "band-aid".

Here is my idea:
-Give one of the standard forcefields (the regular or the hardened, I'm not sure which yet, though I am leaning towards armored) a new hull type that the bomber does NOT get a bonus to. (I'm thinking a hull type that the standard fighter gets a bonus against, as if you have it a hull type that missile frigates have a bonus against, you can make your forcefield stupidly durable when combining it with a counter-missile turret)
-Let the AI get their own version of the armored forcefield (which also gives the nice side affect of making humans care about armor more, and buffs the polarizer in human hands)

This should make players fear mixed waves a bit more, and give us humans more reason to use mixed fleets too.

Any thoughts? Does this need to go in its own thread?


EDIT1: A better "fix" would to be to introduce a new protecting mechanic that is not countered by bombers. (That exo-forcefield for command stations has been proposed before, that might work), but that would be a new unit, and thus would be more work.

EDIT2: It may also be helpful to give one of the bonuses of the bomber to some other triangle ship, though that would require some serious analysis of balance repercussions.

1580

AI War / Re: Low ship cap ships' ship cap is only low for the player

« on: August 03, 2012, 12:46:33 PM »

Question about
Does the "StrengthBudget" used in buying AI ships carry over from one reinforce into the next reinforce cycle?  (Both AI's start at 0 in the logs, but I think this is the very first reinforce cycle for this game)

Every overall reinforcement (each AI player only gets one every reinforcement interval) starts at zero.  So if the AI has a tiny budget left over at the end and it buys some low-cap ship it will come out slightly ahead but the actual averaged effect is not significant enough to really worry about.

This is for the overall, galactic reinforcement "pulse" right? The per guard post/per planet while figuring out what to "buy" during the "galactic pulse" properly accounts overspending, right?

1581

AI War / Re: Low ship cap ships' ship cap is only low for the player

« on: August 03, 2012, 12:40:55 PM »

I don't have the logs from the game where I took that screenshot but I made a new game with the same seed, starting position etc. Now the GravDriller had "only" ~35 SSBs.

Also.. could it be possible the SSBs were there since the beginning? They were there already when I started the game? (not reinforcements)

Here are the logs

Yea, there are 17 SSBs total in those reinforcements (for all reinforced planets), so as you found with the scouting, they were there from the beginning.

It's possible the AI isn't paying normal price during that initial seeding since it's almost certainly a different code path that I've never actually looked directly at, but at least you don't have to worry about it replenishing at that kind of rate

Question about
Does the "StrengthBudget" used in buying AI ships carry over from one reinforce into the next reinforce cycle?  (Both AI's start at 0 in the logs, but I think this is the very first reinforce cycle for this game)

Looking at it here, the problem is with the planet Varg:  It has 15 guard posts, so each reinforce should be 15 points, plus the command station pulse.
Both AI players do two reinforcements on Varg, for a total of 4*15 + 10 (3+3 from Player 9, 2+2 from Player = 70 strength points.
However, because of the massive negative budgeting allowed by the purchase process, the AIs end up spending a total of 134.72 strength points reinforcing the planet - Almost twice the strength it should have received.

If the StrengthBudget carries over from cycle to cycle, then obviously this is no problem because the AI pays back the debt by getting nothing in later reinforcements.  But if the budget resets, then in a few minutes when the next cycle comes, the AI will have magically gained 37.72 strength it didn't pay for.

Yep, one of the changes Kieth put in earlier is that negative StrengthBudgets are carried over to the next "phase" of reinforcements. So thankfully, if they overspent to get the low cap ship, they will have to give up how much they overspent later (possibly meaning no reinforcements for several additional posts)

However, this is only for reinforcement. As Kieth mentioned, the initial game seeding logic might not be considering this.

1582

AI War / Re: Energy Collector Health

« on: August 03, 2012, 12:38:52 PM »

Actually, um, ow.

I just did the math from patch 5.036. On diff 10 a wave at AIP 30 is just over 3 times the size of a wave at AIP 10.

And then because I play single HW, it gets the "attacking a chokepoint" bonus against me aswell.

Ow ow ow.

I apparently need to enable wave logging next game and take a look, have not gone into detail on it like others have.

D.

Thankfully, the "attacking a chokepoint" bonus is "phased in" over the course of an hour or two. For the first wave, it shouldn't get any bonus based on the number of "in points"

1583

AI War / Re: Energy Collector Health

« on: August 03, 2012, 10:04:28 AM »

When suggested a nerf, I didn't have a huge nerf in mind. Something like bringing it down from 150k energy to 110k or 125k energy, or something of that magnitude. Still enough to be noticeable, but not enough to "cripple" certain playstyles.

1584

After Action Reports / Re: Thematic Play-Vengeance of the Spire

« on: August 03, 2012, 10:02:05 AM »

You can try putting Advanced hybrids on level 1. They will still get the super hybrids and the higher Mk. hybrid modules and escorts, but at level 1, the "Dyson plot" will be disabled.

1585

AI War / Re: When did advanced warp detection become so difficult to see?

« on: August 03, 2012, 09:28:23 AM »

Why not a hybrid of the two colors? A red-yellow? Ideally, it should still be yellow enough so that they still look different to normal wormholes to those with red-green colorblindness, but still be red enough to look different to those who don't have it.l

This would be on top of an additional visual cue (like concentric circles or a "halo" or something)

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AI War / Re: Energy Collector Health

« on: August 03, 2012, 09:26:21 AM »

The new energy collectors could probably do with a bit of a nerf. Not costing resources is more valuable than just the savings on resources alone. After that, I say it would be fine to give them an HP buff.
Not sure about the matter converters. They do have a high m+c/s cost after all, though maybe not enough to imitate the cost of "squeezing" additional energy out of a planet of the old system. Though if the collectors get an HP buff, so should the converters.

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AI War / Re: Low ship cap ships' ship cap is only low for the player

« on: August 03, 2012, 07:49:45 AM »

What is supposed to happen is if a ship type A has, say .1x the cap of ship type B, then if the AI chose to reinforce with ship type A, it would only get only .1x the number of them as they would of gotten if they chose ship type B. So what could of happened is that the AI may have chosen SSB for each of it's reinforcement cycles, thus, even though they don't get many (often times, only 1, or less if it had to spread the "reinforcement points" around) per reinforcement "pulse" to that planet, over time, that could add up. If they had chosen, say, missile frigates for all those times, you would of seen that 700 or so missile frigates on that planet.

However, there have been bugs and oversights in the past that let the AI violate this tradeoff of numbers.
Even if the logic is working properly, it may be that the cap per planet and/or the cap per guard post for certain ship types needs to come back, to prevent alerted planet to just "sidestep" the max defending ships total (across all ship types) per planet rules by just always choosing the low ship cap ships.

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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?

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After Action Reports / Re: Testing out the power of the "Defensive" AI types

« on: August 02, 2012, 10:40:20 AM »

The turtle and defensive oriented AIs actually do pretty decently at their job. To me, its the "normal", "balanced" AI types that seem underwhelming on defense. (The offensive AI types being underwhelming on defense is fine, and indeed makes sense)

1590

AI War / Re: When did advanced warp detection become so difficult to see?

« on: August 01, 2012, 02:14:08 PM »

Well, you can bring up the planetary map overlay (hold T in the default key mapping), and the wormhole flagged will be blinking.

On this issue, when the fix to make the flagged wormholes yellow instead of red (to help those with red-green colorblindness), only the close zoom sprites got changed to yellow while flagged. The far zoom wormhole sprites are still red, that should probably be fixed.