Topics

16

AI War Strategy Discussion / Impossible situation?

« on: September 06, 2011, 12:57:56 AM »

Being the clever person I am, I started a 7/7 on 10-planet snake with myself at one end... figured I'd slowly bulldoze my way through. Get up to the first homeworld, and after a couple of hours of back-and-forth I'm ready to make my decisive strike... go in, and everything is invincible. It takes me a minute to realize that A- and B-shields are still active, up past that homeworld on other core worlds.

Do I just give up? Without being able to touch guardposts on the homeworld chokepoint, there's no way I can get sufficient forces through that mess to take a core world... and they've got invincible warhead interceptors on the homeworld and next core world, so I can't cheat my way through. I'm stuck.

17

AI War / What does x1, x2 etc. mean by the ship icons when you're picking a map?

« on: September 05, 2011, 08:15:38 PM »

Somehow I missed this.

18

AI War / Is Murdoch specifically programmed to be a pain in my ass in every last game?

« on: September 05, 2011, 04:31:19 PM »

That is all. 

19

AI War Strategy Discussion / Neutering AI homeworld

« on: September 05, 2011, 09:38:47 AM »

Seems like given the huge AIP hit, the best strat would usually be to neuter the first AI homeworld as much as possible, then only go back and finish it off once you're ready to take both. I'd think the drawback of the small continued spawn of MkV ships on that planet is more than offset by not having everywhere in the galaxy ramp up. Does anyone take this approach by default?

20

AI War Strategy Discussion / Wormhole battle mechanics?

« on: September 04, 2011, 04:19:45 AM »

I think it's just a quick question this time. When you go through a wormhole and come swarming out, is there any downtime while your units are positioning where the enemy has free shots on you, or is it treated as normal from the moment you're in-system, despite the pretty swirly graphics?

21

AI War / Try out my pickup-game site?

« on: September 04, 2011, 02:06:24 AM »

As is mentioned in another thread, I wish there were more (or fewer?) options for finding games with strangers. At any rate, I started on a very barebones one tonight, and if anyone feels so inclined, please give it a try:

http://mindloss.com/cgi-bin/aiwars.py

You give it your email address, tell it you're looking for a game and how many players you want, and when enough players sign up, it will email you all. That's pretty much all it does right now. But, the idea is if you have an afternoon or evening open, you log on there and don't have to worry about watching IRC or anything (don't get me wrong I love IRC) -- instead, it'll just ping you when you've got a group. The way it's set up now, it's also important to tell it when you're done looking for a game so it takes you off the list... otherwise you'll keep getting notifications that players are ready.

I have lots of ideas for improvements if there is any interest in this approach. (If not, no hard feelings; I got to learn some stuff about CGI and sendmail.)

22

AI War / Matchmaking ideas

« on: September 03, 2011, 07:10:17 PM »

I don't buy the notion that AI Wars is not really compatible with matchmaking systems. Yeah, it's great if you have a group of friends you know who all play, but for those of us who have to find teammates online, it's non-trivial. There's the subforum for it, the IRC channel, Hamachi, Steam... which only compounds the problem by fracturing the player pool into separate compartments. As for the objection about getting casual players that won't stick it out through a game, I don't think AI Wars attracts many people that would slog through the tutorial/solo games, find the forums, go to the trouble of joining a match and then bail: very much the exception instead of the rule is my guess.

A proper solution would probably be to build a lightweight matchmmaking system where you tell it what hours you're typically available to play, contact information, and game preferences, and it would email everybody when a good enough match was found and serve as an automated game organizer (preferably in-game, but on web would be just as good.) BUT, since I know that's not a high priority and would involve a fair amount of work, here's what I think is the best of my quick-fix alternatives.

Make a new subforum, or repurpose the existing one -- just a change in process. Right now it seems to be people posting with e.g. "Hi! I want to play! This is my Skype/email/whatever, I'm GMT-2" which I don't think translates frequently into actual games getting started. Instead, have the posts be info for a specific game startups, e.g.:

"I'll be running a game with all expansions, dual 8s, 60-star, Hard Spirecraft/[etc.], flexible on map type / AI types. We'll start [tonight/tomorrow/next Saturday/whatever] at 10pm GMT. Anyone who wants in please reply here, send email, or you can try just joining [IP] at 10. Expect the game to run 10-15 hours, we'll finish up next Fri/Sat night or two if we have to. Please don't join if you're not going to finish."

or even

"WANT TO PLAY ASAP. STARTING GAME IN 3 HOURS. DONT CARE ABOUT SETTINGS PLZ JOIN WRITE BACK HERE"

Ideally, you could put a sticky with a simple template that people could fill out with the pertinent info.

Anyway, I'm just throwing that idea out there... it would work for me, but does that appeal to anyone else?

(For the record, the other quicky solutions that came to mind were tossing up a public google spreadsheet where you could list your info and see everyone else's, and... I'll be damned, I forgot the other one.  )

23

AI War / Enemies between force fields - bug or feature?

« on: September 02, 2011, 07:28:45 PM »

I created a Mk1 FF around a hostile wormhole, and then later a Mk2 encompassing it. I've found that enemies sometimes or always (haven't watched that closely) appear to emerge on the border of the inner Mk1 FF after they come in through the wormhole (and I think just sit there, not moving... again, haven't watched closely). This a mantis?

24

After Action Reports / One-planet challenge

« on: September 01, 2011, 06:00:56 PM »

I love the one city challenge in Civ 4/5, so I figured I'd try playing only one planet. I suck, and I had no idea how hard it would be or not, so I set myself on a 16-star map against two 2s.

I won, but it was a grind. I didn't realize that by setting myself at the end of a corridor with only one wormhole, I'd be limiting my knowledge raiding options to that one adjacent system (since you need supply to raid, and I wasn't letting myself take any more systems.) So, that's the one of the two big challenges; you basically get a fixed knowledge cap of 13500 points, period... better spend it wisely. The other one is the total lack of an economy, but that's more an issue with patience, at least at that difficulty level.

I spent my ubervaluable knowledge points on... I think it was Mk2 Bombers, Mk2/3 Bomber Starship and a couple of odds and ends that fit in the rest. I neutered the first AI's homeworld completely except for his actual command center, and then made sure I destroyed both of them within a few minutes of each other... so the net effect is that my AIP was 4 to 6 for the whole game.   (Would have been negative, but that was the floor.) I don't know if it was the super easy level, or the total lack of AIP (or both, probably), but there was absolutely nothing so far as forces went. He never amassed an army larger than 60 ships anywhere. His waves were consistently something like 13 tech 1 fighters. He had a few counterattacks after failed attempts of mine to win which actually tested my turret system a bit, but that was the closest he came to scary.

Anyway, it's a different way to play. I recommend giving it a try once if you like that sort of thing. Once is probably all you'll need.

25

AI War Strategy Discussion / What does killing one AI accomplish?

« on: September 01, 2011, 06:11:34 AM »

Supposedly they cooperate to an extent, and the game is set up so that their position is similar to human team players'... one dies, they're both still in the game. You take that massive AIP hit when you knock out the first AI, so what does it get you? Is that AI no longer able to issue reinforcements?

26

AI War / Auto kiting feature

« on: September 01, 2011, 05:02:55 AM »

As per the option in CTRLS. Anyone experiment with it? I have a little... sometimes it does exactly what I think my ships should be doing lots more of, and other times it looks like they're trying to give some sort of spastic chase. Thoughts?

27

AI War / What does the cloaking booster on scouts do?

« on: September 01, 2011, 04:11:11 AM »

I thought they were always cloaked anyway, unless tagged by tachyons, in which case they were visible for a short while. What does grouping them together accomplish?

28

AI War / Is there a benefit to captive human settlements?

« on: August 31, 2011, 09:50:10 PM »

Yeah, I read on the tooltip that they give you 25 or 45 M/C or whatever, but that's obviously just a trifle. And if you do capture a planet with one, it'll cause the AI to hit that planet harder, and if you lose the settlement you go up, what was it, 80 AIP?

I've been avoiding planets with these like the plague. Are they just an option to make things more colorful/difficult, or did I miss something?

29

AI War Strategy Discussion / How does AI reinforcement work?

« on: August 31, 2011, 02:30:41 AM »

I have read http://www.arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_AI_Reinforcements and other bits here and there, but I still don't grok it. To make things simpler, I'll break my confusion down into easier questions:

1) Does the AI receive a certain number of reinforcement points per cycle which it then converts to ships somewhere?

2) If so, is there any way to lower that number (other than lowering AIP, which I assume affects it)?

3) Specifically, does killing regular non-wormhole guardposts in a system lower overall galactic ship reinforcement? Does it even lower reinforcement for that system?

4) Does taking out a command center and everything else in a system lower it?

30

AI War / AI difficulty settings

« on: August 31, 2011, 02:07:23 AM »

This game's a bit unique in that you're always facing two computer opponents. That also makes it tricky for me to figure out what equates to what. I know it's not an exact science, but does anyone have an opinion on how, say, a game against 1/7 AIs compares to a game against 3/4 AIs? If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say a ballpark answer would be "weighted largely towards whatever the better player is."

Also, for the easier vs. moderate vs. hard personality types... does anyone care to try putting that into change in difficulty rating? I know I know, it all depends and it's not exact... I'm just interested in people's feel for this stuff.