Messages

1591

AI War / Re: Poll: Worst Unit Of The (time interval) Award (VII)

« on: July 24, 2012, 08:44:21 AM »

I wouldn't say they're all useless, but some of them have a niche that is so slim they're barely ever useful, and some of them are just underwhelming.

Deflector Drone < Shield Bearer
Electric Shuttle < Zenith Beam Frigate
Etherjet Tractor < Space Plane/Anti-Armor/Spider Bot
Grenade Launcher < Zenith Beam Frigate
Teleport Raider.. hm should try them again
Zenith Chameleon < Bomber/Space Tank
Zenith Electric Bomber <  Bomber/Space Tank
Zenith Mirror < Shield Bearer/*
Zenith Polarizers < Bomber/Space Tank

True, in terms of each of their gimmicks, these are mostly overshadowed by other things, but there is more to a ship than their gimmick. And even then, there are some things that some of their gimmicks provide that other things do not. Like Zenith mirrors will reflect damage (and after reviewing their stats, they actually have a pretty chunky range), where shield bearer's will not. Both grenade launchers and electric shuttles provide radial AOE, which in some cases can out perform the linear AOE of beam frigates.
Also, there are the stats to consider. Like the Z elec bomber has a much higher centralization of firepower than regular bombers, which can be advantages in some matchups. Also, I think both Z Chameleon's and Z Elec Bomber's don't have polycrystal armor, which means they can fair better against some anti-bomber units.

Now am I saying that these things don't need a buff. No; many of those could use a little more love. But things are not quite as clear cut as you put it. (I'm sure you are aware of that, but just wanted to point this out explicitly). Also, while these could use some love, I didn't feel like they needed it quite as much as many of the other things in this list.

1592

After Action Reports / Re: 10/10 The Core/Tech Raider

« on: July 23, 2012, 10:26:47 PM »

No I didn't use Transports. I only sent scouts. They only seemed to attack when the scouts were detected and destroyed.

I can corroborate that scouting, even with scouts only, will now release ships. I have not, however, yet seen it release guardians.

Hmm, that sounds like a bug. Mantis?

1593

AI War / Re: Poll: Aim the Nerfbat of Damocles: AI-side (I)

« on: July 23, 2012, 10:52:49 AM »

Ok, calling the results on this one; winners:

AI Eye (producing ships of planet's mark)
Spire Shield Guard Posts
Spire Stealth Battleship

The second one has already been nerfed since this poll was started (I normally try not to do that to stuff currently in a poll but it happened to be something I was working on) so I'll probably leave it as-is until there's been some more playtesting with it (I've yet to make the AAR rounds today to see if there is such).

The Core Spire Shield Guard Post was nerfed, but I didn't see anything about the normal Spire Shield Guard Posts in the release notes.

1594

After Action Reports / Re: 10/10 The Core/Tech Raider

« on: July 23, 2012, 10:25:43 AM »

AIP: 2

Wait, what?! What version are you playing? As of 5.046, the minimum AIP floor (and thus minimum AIP) has been bumped up to 10.

Most likely 5.045.
In 5.046 the AI seems to be harder and more aggressive. The Core and Spire Hammer both sent guardians and ships on my home planets when I scouted. I didn't attack or anything. I just started the game and scouted and dozens of ships and guardians attacked me.

Strange.
The ships I can understand, those were probably special forces ships (on high difficulties, special forces ships will not hesitate to enter your planets if the shortest distance to their next way-point takes them through it), but the guardians attacking so early seems odd. Neither guardians nor starships are eligible to be special forces ships.
Wait, did you use transports to carry your scouts? Right now, the AI typically treats transports like military ships, regardless of what is in them, and thus will free ships that the transport gets too close to.

1595

AI War / Re: The Cool and The Ugly

« on: July 23, 2012, 10:17:14 AM »

Just a wild guess, are the hue shifts being reduced appropriately in intensity when the nebula intensity goes down as well?

1596

After Action Reports / Re: 10/10 The Core/Tech Raider

« on: July 23, 2012, 07:22:24 AM »

Because I am insane.

Clearly. 

AIP: 2

Wait, what?! What version are you playing? As of 5.046, the minimum AIP floor (and thus minimum AIP) has been bumped up to 10.

1597

AI War / Re: 10/10 difficulty

« on: July 23, 2012, 07:19:54 AM »

As for the kiting problem, the riot starships have very weak DPS on their own, especially on the long range weapons. I'd suggest trying to tweak the logic of the AI units so they dont all chase the kiting units, but instead go for the command station and then either retreat, or go raiding other player systems.

I mean, an ideal smart player would quickly kill the CC, atteck the next system, leaving some units camping the wormhole in case the opponent sends his fleet to defend the system.
The most stupid thing you can do against units that can endlessly kite you is try to chase them.

In general, i believe the AI should be using more non-focused attacks, hitting the player from many sides, forcing either a fleet split, or loss of systems. Direct battles on player's most fortified planets is totally inefficient unless you can crush the defence.
Sure, in case thats the only place you can send waves to, you have no other options. But the ships marked as threat could get smarter about when and what to attack.

Among other things, this would require the AI to reevaluate turret power so that it doesnt send pointless agression towards well-defended systems.
So yeah, thats what i suggest. I know you guys are proud of your AI, but apparently there are still many things where it messes up or doesnt work at full efficiecy. And we do want the 10/10 to be as smart as possible, right?

If your command station or other valuable structure is exposed (like if there is no forcefield), there is a high chance that the AI will start focusing on that. However, it would be good if they could start focusing their attack a bit earlier than that. In particular, on the offense, the AI should be wary about sending a ship with ship type A that is slower than a ship with ship type B if B's speed >> A's speed (making sure to take gravity and engine damage into account as well)


Threat ships, when choosing a planet, do spread out and pick rather randomly which wormhole to stalk, or at least they are supposed to. In game, they seem to be far more likely to just stalk the planet they are closest too. Not sure if this a bug in their planet selection logic, or what.


Agreed on the AI is undervaluing turret firepower thing

1598

AI War / Re: Poll: Worst Unit Of The (time interval) Award (VII)

« on: July 22, 2012, 10:40:11 PM »

I wish I could revote :/

I was wrong, darn it!

You should be able to. Click "remove vote", and then your votes will be cleared, and you can place your votes again.

1599

AI War / Re: Poll: Worst Unit Of The (time interval) Award (VII)

« on: July 22, 2012, 06:59:12 PM »

If the Spire archive does make it into the top 3 (and it looks like it will), will you buff it by changing around its seeding logic any? I am asking before I get very far into my current game, because I don't want to have to restart again to take advantage of the changes.

1600

AI War / Re: Exercise in futility

« on: July 22, 2012, 02:28:32 PM »

Carriers are very annoying. It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have to manually target each one.
39 million power? Way to much. I don't think I could even use it all with full caps of everything.

There is an option to turn on auto-targeting of carriers.
It would be even more firepower if the ships inside them were all spawned outside the carrier. (unless they are filled with things like laser gattlings or minipods, by in the average case, it should be about 1/3 of the firepower of the contained ships)

Wardens and Enclaves spawn ships with no caps it seems.  The one game I had them on I could make absolutely no progress because of their numbers.

They don't have caps? That should be looked at.

Spire Civilian Leaders might need to be looked at.  Currently it takes 3 freed leaders to start seeing the benefit, and several hours to actually see the progress start to go down...

It's a tricky balance trying to make them something you want to take but no make the AIP management trivial once you do have it.

Building a strong defense stops the AI from attacking all together. This has been around forever, but is there a tipping point to where the AI will actually send the ships it has camping my wormholes?

They will enter when they feel like they have enough to win (or on 9+, when they feel like they have 2x the amount they think they need to win)

I made a suggestion on mantis to reduce these ratios some, though. (http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=7016)

1601

AI War / Re: Poll: Aim the Nerfbat of Damocles: AI-side (I)

« on: July 21, 2012, 10:28:24 PM »

I also haven't gotten to the point of dealing with the smarter AI levels, so it's possibly more exciting to deal with later.

Nah, its not. Same on any difficulty: clean up rest of the system, then sit there for a few minutes watching your bombers slowly take down the fortress.

Yea, I made a suggestion to adjust fortress damage and damage properties to make the optimal strategy against them not so "boring".

1602

AI War / Re: Poll: Aim the Nerfbat of Damocles: AI-side (I)

« on: July 21, 2012, 01:09:49 PM »

My experience with them is that as soon as they get out of range of something like the decloaker or anything with tachyon, it disappears very quickly.

That seems like a straight up bug.
IIRC, it is supposed to be 8 seconds after it last fired a weapon or 8 seconds after it left the tachyon detection range of something with tachyons (assuming the decloaker was able to decloak it, which may not be true for certain forms of cloak boosting), whichever comes last.

1603

AI War / Re: Ye Ol' Armor Debate

« on: July 21, 2012, 12:01:31 PM »

FYI, I'm probably going to hold off on implementing this for at least a few more days; I want the difficulty balance changes in 5.046 to have a bit of time to pan out, etc.

Probably a good idea, that way if the game turns out too hard or too easy, we know what to look at, rather than questioning whether we buffed the AI too much or too little, or are the new armor values too out of wack? When turning multiple "knobs" at once, it is hard to tell which knobs contributed to which parts of the new result.

1604

AI War / Re: Poll: Aim the Nerfbat of Damocles: AI-side (I)

« on: July 21, 2012, 11:42:02 AM »

And stealth battleships need only a minor tweak to make them legit. I don't want any big changes here, just something that when they are revealed, they stay revealed for some small amount of time, or maybe if they get damaged below a certain amount, or just slow them down a little bit.

You mean keep them revealed for longer than usual after being tachyon'd?  I can't recall off the top of my head: when a ship fires it doesn't recloak for like 8 seconds after its last shot, is that true when it is tachyon'd?

Unless it is the super cloaker AI with the planetary "ultra cloak boosting" (can keep ships that are actively firing cloaked, which not even super cloak boosting can do), I don't think there are any bugs with the decloaked time, even if the initial decloaking source (eg, a tachyon) and the subsequent causes of decloaking (eg, firing) were different, the firing will still properly reset the 8 second cloaking "cooldown" that the tachyon initially set. There may be some bugs there, but I haven't noticed any.

However, part of the problem is that in large waves, some of the SSBs will still slip through, and the AI plays smart with their cloaked ships and tries to keep them cloaked by keeping them from firing (like with stand-down mode) until they reach their target or they are decloaked. This makes SSBs really obnoxious if any slip through your wormhole defenses.

Again, I would suggest nerfing their radar dampening, making them more manageable once they do get revealed. It wouldn't hurt human uses of them too much, but it would make "feel" fairer when the AI uses it.
And my other, more extreme suggestion of giving them a <1 AI usefulness in waves multiplier (thus reducing their numbers in waves) if that wouldn't be enough.

1605

Off Topic / Re: I Wanna Be The Guy, Too!

« on: July 21, 2012, 11:35:51 AM »

I've tried playing this a bit. Pretty dang insane. Made it to the "tetris" room a few times, but could never get past that.

I'll have to look into I Wanna Be the Guy: Gaiden at some point (maybe also I Wanna Be the Fangame, or whatever the fangame spinoff was called)


I saw a TAS of this game (the original) once, pretty insane. A prominent glitch used was if you managed to stand on two falling platforms at once, when you land (or was it when those landed on you?), you will start to zip in some crazy fashion, allowing them to skip whole rooms easily, and in one case, get to a glitched "room change border" allowing them to skip a decent chunk of one of the three paths.
Oh yea, and the "spawn where you where when you hit the save" mechanic was abused quite a bit too, including a trick where if you did it right in some cases, the room wasn't completely reset to the state it was at when you hit the save, allowing you to repeatedly die, reload, and slowly "eek" through the room even though you are continuously reloading.