Messages

16

AI War / Re: Nominations for Worst Ship Ever (III)

« on: February 24, 2012, 09:27:55 AM »

Space Planes, if an ememy fighter pops its head in a system they are in, half of them seem to die of fright!

Oh god yes. I had space planes once because I thought hey these look cool.

They basically deal no damage whatsoever. That is to say, their damage per shot is so low it just gets eaten by any armor. (See, armor can be useful.)

17

AI War / Re: Poll: Worst Ship Of The (time interval) Award (II)

« on: February 21, 2012, 05:34:39 AM »

I voted Sentinel Frigate because it sounds like it's a ship that should be particularly awesome but isn't.

18

AI War / Re: Economy efficiency report: harvesters vs. command stations

« on: January 24, 2012, 04:10:31 AM »

I agree that upgrading Harvesters costs slightly too much knowledge for the benefit it gives you. I don't agree that this is highly unbalanced. 1500/3000 with the current benefits should definitely be fine, maybe even 2000/3000. Don't make them so good that getting them becomes mandatory, that would be boring.

Currently they are worthwhile, but only in games where you have a massive number of planets.

19

AI War / Re: Economy efficiency report: harvesters vs. command stations

« on: January 23, 2012, 10:11:07 AM »

I think it's currently fine, and the command station slot is important like Keith says, so the Econs should be better than the Harvesters. I use Logistics stations mostly. Vastly increased wave response time, reduced travel time and teleport interdiction are just too important for me.

The big Econs only come in during the mid game on large maps when I'm running out of Logistics stations to place and I need resources more than I need knowledge (read: building tons of spire fleet craft). Then they go in the lazy safe zone. Frontier systems get Mk3 Logistics, 'highway systems' get Mk2 Logistics. Econs usually come in before the harvesters do, though.

20

AI War / Re: Spirecraft Rams and Raid starships: OP?

« on: October 25, 2011, 03:12:30 AM »

Keep your mitts of my freakin' Raid Starships!

For their cost, they are absolute garbage in a fleet battle, so blowing stuff up far away is about the only thing they're good at. Well, that and hunting down lone ships that somehow got through your defenses. Such as, well, enemy Raid Starships. Meh. I think they're fine, if only because losing one is pretty expensive, and by their nature you're always putting them at risk.

Dunno about the rams, haven't used them much, but I wasn't impressed with them when I did. They seemed very, very inefficient, but then I wasn't using them against stuff like Motherships. Maybe I should have. 

21

AI War / Re: Zenith Bombardment Ships Overpowered?

« on: October 14, 2011, 02:06:38 AM »

They are fine imo, even though their immunity to sniper shots is very annoying and I wouldn't mind seeing that go.

A spire fleet with railguns will clear out any stragglers from an annihalated system really quick EXCEPT THESE GUYS. Waste of time, to be honest.

22

AI War / Re: Spire Stealth battleship

« on: October 10, 2011, 10:18:00 AM »

If you want a more diluted ship, there are plenty of others to choose from, imo. Focused ships like this one are pretty rare and changing that would make them even more rare for people who actually like them.

You can actually see the ship cap when you select your planet in the map seed. You're suggesting to change something because you missed that or because you "don't really like it like this". I find this extremely silly.

23

AI War / Re: Context Menu

« on: October 10, 2011, 12:06:59 AM »

I don't mind alt-rightclick at all to be honest. It's a bit annoying that you can't deselect units while in the galaxy view, though.

For instance, I still have some units selected, I'm looking at the galaxy view and I want to give my ally some resources. I can only do this with the context menu while having no units selected, so I have to go back in planet view, deselect my units, and then alt-rightclick to access the resource trading menu.

24

AI War / Re: Spirecraft Attritioner

« on: October 10, 2011, 12:06:45 AM »

I like them plenty. They're only really good en masse on defense, far away from the wormhole, but that's fine. Although the latest change made individual units a bit more useful, as well as attacking with them.

25

AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Exo-waves on difficulty 8

« on: October 07, 2011, 05:22:51 AM »

FYI, the H/K's are what triggered my initial complaint about speed reductions as well. You just have no time to kill them before they reach a wormhole, and they'll tear down any FF in their way, unless you have the majority of your Spire fleet present or similarly ridiculous firepower. In my case, that was 3 fully equipped Dreadnoughts, 6 Battleships, 12 Cruisers, 20 Destroyers and around 30 Frigates. (Oh, and my entire non-spire fleet.)

26

AI War / Re: Are fortresses now a grind?

« on: October 07, 2011, 05:14:38 AM »

Please don't let fortresses kill my bombers as well as everything else.

I can't use anything other than bombers in their range, they take a while to remove, that's fine. What they effectively do is create a no-fly zone for your bombers' escorts.

I guess if the complaint is that they take too long to kill, just cut their health by factor X and multiply the polycrystal multiplier by the same factor X. So... what Nethris said, but I wouldn't put any armor piercing in.

27

AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Exo-waves on difficulty 8

« on: October 05, 2011, 02:30:37 AM »

Tangentially related, I rather dislike how exo waves 'cheat' their way through speed reducing effects. I know you can shoot the lead ship and slow them down like that, but it's pretty unintuitive and generates the feeling that "your defenses don't work because we say so, hah!".

Why were they designed like this? What is the reasoning here?

28

AI War / Re: Some remarks after Fallen Spire campaign

« on: October 03, 2011, 03:34:28 PM »

That huge wave had like 27 HK's and a mothership in it, and was the only thing that ever put a dent in our defenses. I lost over half my spire frigates (59?) in that one, along with a bunch of other spire ships, all my turrets, all ships stationed there, including full SC Implosion caps. My economy and half my defense was out of commission for almost an hour after that, but we didn't lose any systems.

So yes, recovering from that was a bit of a challenge.

The other exo waves were not a big challenge so long as a 'main force' was there to deal with them, which wasn't very hard. The only thing we had to keep doing was shuffle our own strikeforces around to match the incoming ones. Incidentally, I really love jumpships.

29

AI War / Re: Some remarks after Fallen Spire campaign

« on: October 03, 2011, 03:21:09 AM »

On the other hand, was your Spirecraft minor faction the hard variant?  Spirecraft exos get harder as AIP gets higher.

SC was on medium, so no troubles there; I was just surprised there was no Super Terminal anywhere. In the end, the regular waves didn't really give us much trouble despite the AIP. The only warp gate 'receptacle' system had an armor inhibitor, armor booster, black hole machine, MkII Radar Jammer, full caps of lightning turrets MkI-III, electric shuttles MkI-IV, SC attritioners MkI-III, two thirds of my entire non-spire fleet, two fortresses and about 250 other assorted turrets. Everything that entered instantly melted and took my framerate with it.

Heh, no, not intentional actually.  Remind me, though: it gave you a foldout for the refugee outpost and each of the shipyards so you could build your own capital ships to a separate "cap", right?  But it doesn't give you foldout-likes for the hab centers or reactors (which would be a significant boost to the number of defense modules for a city as well as a boost to your income from the hab center).  The latter I tend to waffle on a bit but code-wise it would be problematic to have modular foldouts, etc.

Yes, fold-outs for shipyards and refugee outpost only, with my own cap of spire ships, determined by the total number of shipyards no matter who owns them (as intended I believe). However, I was able to build my shipyards and hab centers without any of my own reactors because the reactors of my ally allowed me to do so, even though he had 'saturated' his reactors already. In the end, he had 14 reactors and 14 ship yards, while I had 0 reactors and 10 shipyards.

You don't have to take the planet to get the shard, just bring your spire flee-oh. Homeworld-defense exo, right?  Yea, pretty rough   Anyway, assuming you can deal with the defensive exo you can just park your spire fleet with your survey ship in the middle and when the shard shows up have your fleet group move with the shard back home.  Don't even have to blow up any of the guard posts (except perhaps the neinzul translocator ones, those can be pretty troublesome).

Huh. Did not know that, interesting. In the end we just bulldozed our way there only to find out we had to kill another Core Shield gen somewhere else, come back later, and then kill everything. I guess we were just following spire fleet SOP.

30

AI War / Some remarks after Fallen Spire campaign

« on: October 02, 2011, 03:00:14 AM »

A friend and I finished a 32 hour Fallen Spire game yesterday. 80 planet map, two 7.3 AI's, ZR and LotS expansions enabled. During the final defense, we were hovering around 1126 AIP, which was the mark IV tech level. The exo waves after the capitol contained a bunch of hunter-killers, some up to mark IV. Spire Implosion Artillery inside Spire City shields is definitely the way to deal with those. Everything else just got vaporized by spire fleet beam weapons. =)

Some things that I'm not sure should (or should not) have happened:

• There was no Super Terminal anywhere, which rather made the whole game unexpectedly more difficult (we had Spire Civilians on as well). Was that because the AI's were 7.3 instead of 7?
• The first five Spire Cities and Capitol were built by my ally. By the time we got to colony ships, he had 12 reactors and 12 shipyards in total. When I built my first city, I didn't need to build any reactors; the reactors of my ally were able to support my shipyards and hab centers as well. He still needed to build more reactors to expand himself, though. This means that a reactor supports one shipyard and one habitation center for each player. I'm not sure whether that's intentional.
• The very last shard was on an AI homeworld, though there were still other valid spawn planets available (though not that many). Kinda defeated the purpose of the alternate win condition.