Messages

976

AI War / Re: Defense Supply Mechanic

« on: March 27, 2012, 02:24:17 PM »

Another question is what should use Defensive Supply?  All offensive turrets obviously, but what about:

Fortress?
Counter-Dark Matter/Missile?
Tachyon Emitters?
Tractor Turrets?
Gravity Turrets?
Force Fields?
Mines?

Maybe Fortresses should actually supply a small amount of DS instead.  So they could support some turrets even if a Mobile Builder wasn't present.

For sanity sake I'm going to call it Defensive Control, as supply has an in-context meaning already, and will still apply for K-Raids and similar activities.  I already have enough problems differentiating between Bomber Fleet and Bomber SS and Spire Fleet Ship vs. Spirecraft in my AARs...

Mines should be control-less.  FFs and Counter turrets too, in my mind, for sanity's sake.  However, anything that 'defends' the system should be given a control value.  I like the idea of Fortresses (and perhaps MRS) being given additional control values, but I could break the mechanic like that by overwhelming a whipping boy with fortresses.  It could add in a pretty significant variable.  Personally I think that simply lacking a control value and needing supply will be enough to satisfy them for their price/power in this scenario.

Of course, the 'support turrets' to me for a fortress is ~20 snipers for anti-polycrystal work, which would be ~40 of any other turret in theory once balanced.

977

After Action Reports / Re: Following in the Footsteps of the Fallen.

« on: March 27, 2012, 02:05:35 PM »

In one games I managed to get 20,000 ship threat balls. Something about 8 cities 4 homeworld worth of a full spire fleet game with 10 Golems left running by mistake overnight can make some rather insane piles. There was more ships waiting to attack then there was in the whole Galaxy. Not even the EXO waves was enough to convince them to come knocking, and breaking though that many ships is not easy. Even my Spire fleet took 4 full cap waves to clean it up.

My gods.  Talk about the need to go to Low/Ultra-Low caps.  Though, left running overnight says pretty much everything. XD

978

AI War / Re: Defense Supply Mechanic

« on: March 27, 2012, 02:04:33 PM »

Oh, another option would be to give the different stations multipliers to control towers in their systems.  This would allow them to affect the diminishing returns builds as well and would probably be more 'tweakable'.

979

After Action Reports / Re: The AI 9 through 10 run

« on: March 27, 2012, 02:01:02 PM »

I already have a save up for the Maws issues on the bug tracker here: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=6779

Ah, thanks Lost.  Makes my life easier that.

Also, on the Dyson, I have noticed that in my own 10/10 game, it can't clean up it own system after a full 20 hours of trying to do so. Granted it only 3 hops away from the AI homeworld I have not gone near yet and I am now on the last city shard so the Exo waves might have something to do with that, but I think if you go and cap the limit of how far the Dyson can go, you likely fix it issues the most.

Odd that it can't clean its own system, but you're also pushing AIP a lot higher than I am so those reinforcements are a lot heavier in volume.  How would a cap of Dyson units help fix its issues?  That just means there's less of them, not more.

Say, Limit neutral to only the home Dyson System and Player friendly can only travel to Human Player supplied planets and the Dyson System itself. Then if you want the Dyson to clear the galaxy for you, you need to take the Galaxy first.

Sorry, have to heavily disagree with this idea for two reasons.
1) You've removed the threat of the Dyson Gatlings not being friendly.  Sure, you've made an insurmountable fortress of the place, but that's no good either, particularly since I can control spawn rate/volume simply by blowing up my own scouts.
2) I LIKE the Neutral Dyson antagonizing the neighborhood.  It's like the neighborhood bully who picks on everyone until you give him your candy bar.

980

AI War / Re: Defense Supply Mechanic

« on: March 27, 2012, 01:56:29 PM »

Initial thoughts: Could have merit, but I'd have to redesign my strategy.  That's not a bad thing though.  In general it sounds more fun, so +1 for that.  +2 for being able to deploy stronger and usable defenses on outliers in regards to satellite systems with Fact IVs, heavy Fabs, etc.  -1 for breaking my shieldwall.

So, to more details.

Instead of adjusting the existing command station, it might be more viable to create a reactor type unit that will allow supply.  Using the existing mechanics from the reactors, additional 'defensive control units' would be less efficient, perhaps at a debilitating rate of 50%.  You could even have two versions of this control tower, one for 'in supply', one for 'anywhere'.

This allows a few things:
1) Mobile Builders can construct the defensive control unit anywhere, allowing for beachheading and other off-world tactics.
2) If you REALLY want that 'extra edge' in a system, you can get it, but it can be prohibitive in cost and usage.
3) Cures the multiplayer problem by simply having both players build control towers.

Turret balance will include the new factor of control values.  Starting with a cost of 1 for all turrets, 2 for snipers, is probably a good start until more effective balance discussions occur.  It's not the implementation cost, just the discussion starter.

The Human Home command station providing infinite control could be avoided/dealt with by having it spawn with a non player buildable control tower, similar to Human Home Settlements.

Logistics/Military stations could simply add to the Control Tower values for the owning player for the system.

But, I LIKE the land of lightning!!!! Oh, alright.  You're right though, the shield wall is not as 'fun', and soaks up almost all of my defenses so I rarely have much left to defend satellites.   Turrets in general will need some buffing, though, I agree.

As to rebuilds, yes, that would be much handier than me having to make sure any of my edge worlds that get constant wave bombardments always have a cloaked transport one system over waiting to rebuild. 

981

After Action Reports / Re: The AI 9 through 10 run

« on: March 27, 2012, 01:44:07 PM »

*wonders if they simply didn't believe that "If folks want to talk about that at length probably a new thread is desirable" wasn't sarcasm

New topic here:
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,10143.0.html

This discussion will take *pages* of involvement, I fear.

982

AI War / Defense Supply Mechanic

« on: March 27, 2012, 01:43:10 PM »

The origination of this discussion:

I'm not really a fan of the beach-heading option, because my playstyle is dependent on the whipping boy being able to stand on its own without fleet intervention once it's up.  One beach-head would wreck me utterly, unless I didn't whipping boy a choke planet, which seems counter-optimal to me.

Yea, I've noticed that tendency of yours   And ultimately the single-defensive-path thing is fun as long as it doesn't encapsulate all challenges.  But I've been giving serious thought to an idea inspired by one of Hearteater's suggestions in the energy discussion.  Not actually involving energy at all, but:

1) Assign each command station type a "Provides Defense Control" value.
2) Assign each "defensive" unit (so all turrets, forcefields, fortresses, etc) a "Consumes Defense Control" value.
3) If the total defense control consumption on a planet exceeds the provided defense control on that planet, all units that consume defense control act as if out-of-supply.

And that's it for the basic idea; there's other things that would need addressing like:
- how to handle balance in multiplayer (probably a planet with X control can support X control worth of units per player, rather than X total, since the incoming attacks are generally scaled up to match the number of players)
- the interface has to show these values on tooltips and probably the totals on the planet in the alert window
- the construction interface needs to not let you place stuff that would go beyond local defense control
- this would put more pressure on to balance the turrets amongst themselves, relative to their control-cost, as otherwise the "less desirable" turrets quickly get a backseat rather than being obvious "sure, throw that one in too" (which has its own issues, but I think is better than totally ignoring a unit)
- need to give mobile builders and/or new variant(s) of mobile builder provides-defense-control values (but probably there would be no stacking, the planet just has the highest value provided)
-- and with this, we could actually remove the restriction on human turrets, fortresses, forcefields, etc that they can only be used while in supply; you wouldn't be able to drop a lot of them "in the field" as presumably a mobile builder doesn't have much control.

Also thinking:
- A human home command station would provide effectively infinite control, so that if you absolutely positively must have a single planet with all the firepower, you can.  It's just gotta be the one planet in the galaxy the AI wants to be on   Not that whipping-boy'ing the HW is non-viable (you've done it here to great effect), I just think it's probably a more interesting/tense situation than something safely separated.
- Logistics stations would have more control than Economic stations (econ stations may need a buff to energy production or something like that).
- Military stations would have more control than Logistics stations.
- With this, turrets could be buffed a bit (higher power, lower cost, etc).  The result likely being a total increase in how effective a human defense can be across multiple planets, but without being able to always stop nearly any AI attack in the same 25 square foot area
- As this would make planet-loss more common, it would be polite for me to provide some kind of ability to simply rebuild command stations without going through the manual process of building a colony ship, selecting the colony ship, ordering it to the target planet, waiting, selecting the colony ship, picking the station type, and placing the station.

Anyway, not dead-set on the idea, but it does seem like it would help keep things more dynamic and reduce complacency-in-defense (unless, of course, you have a Dyson Ball), as "complacent" is not typically a feeling associated by our players with "fun"

My followup opinions/etc to follow.

983

After Action Reports / Re: The AI 9 through 10 run

« on: March 27, 2012, 01:42:48 PM »

And if you wanted to exploit things a bit more you could plant a fortress on one of the neutered backworld AI planets next to yours.

I've thought about that but first I'd have to open them up.  K's at a bit of premium at the moment.

Yea, basically I just want the total m+c gain of spending 9000 K on harvesters to equal the m+c gain of spending 9000 K on econ stations at the number of resource spots one normally has at 13 planets.  Then you know that if you want a really-early game boost harvesters are best because of the homeworld, and if you want an early-mid game boost econ stations are the better bet (but take up the station slot) and if you plan to have more than 13 planets (or cherry-pick for resource-spots) harvesters are the better mid-late game choice.  I think the current numbers reflect a math error on my part when I switched down to the lower K-costs, and/or an error in computing average resource spot density.

At a guess it's in computing average resource spot density.  However, I understand and that's being hammered to death in other threads, no reason to dilute the discussion here.

The AI loves that roulette wheel.  I could tighten up the time range a bit, but it seems this gives a bit more variety.  The lower end of the timescale seems a little pointless on standard waves, though; it would make sense with cross-planet-waves because they'd probably just join a threatball instead of attacking, but that's just a lobby option off in a corner.

I may start turning that on but not during this iteration.  It does change the mechanism pretty heavily however.  It also makes wave gates useless, afaik, so that's an AIP saver.

You wouldn't believe how much bribe that stupid frigate demanded before it agreed to do that...

Snort, laugh...   Niiiiice.

Frustratingly my nearly empty maws wouldn't EAT anything!

Odd, if you have a save where that's reproducible, I can take a look.

2) The Blade Spawners are happy go lucky on FFs again.
3) When they're NOT happy for FFs, they're targetting powered down units, so the blades don't actually HIT anything, they just sit there, idling and dying.

Ack.  Save?

But not sure, if I fix the maw bug and the blade spawner bugs, how will the AI stand a chance? [/quote]
Unfortunately, in both cases, I neglected to pause and save as I was too busy mentally with other things.

Well, could you move around them and/or pick them off from maximum range?

Sure, with a Raid Engine coming in 1 minute and me wasting time goofing around with 80 ships or so, that should go well.

  Anyway, yea, I don't mind coming up with some other utility option for the light hardpoints.  Possibly single-target paralyze (for fun may just use the zenith paralyzer graphic or part thereof: just nailing them to the hull!)

I want to just nail paralyzers to the hull now and watch them spin in the slots.  That would amuse my inner evil child.

984

AI War / Re: Why you should always keep fighting

« on: March 27, 2012, 12:02:41 PM »

GUDare, my AIP was at 354 when this hit. I was just about to clear out the Coprocessors and last two data centers, too.  The reclaimers did well until they, and their reclaimed ships, were simply outnumbered. I know that I should have abandoned the Fabricators and focused on my homeworld defense, but it was so hard to give them up after having them for such a short time. It's not a rational or intelligent response, but I never claimed to be either.

LOL, luckily, I'm quite sure I'm not either.   The information about the Rebel Colony is correct, ti just goes back to being cloaked and hides again for a 2 hour timer.

985

After Action Reports / Re: The AI 9 through 10 run

« on: March 27, 2012, 05:12:28 AM »

By 12:40 I'd made it back down to Tau with the fleet and we cleaned that up, and I pushed through to Three Kings briefly to pop the Tach post and whittle down some buildup while I was there.  Threat got a little hairy so the fleet headed home while the Rebel Fleet flew for the Macross Cutoff.  Realizing the threat from Earth was building on the Llama Wormhole I FRD'd my minor rebuilt fleet into the Confederation system and set the space dock to continue doing that.  The entire point was simply to buy time with harassers.

The main fleet got to Confederation about 30 seconds ahead of the Rebels, mostly because the Rebels stopped off to deal with some Blade Spawners and other assorted nasties near Sox that they'd awoken.

At 12:45 I setup a 3 Transport runner to head for Earth, loaded up with 167 Armor Ships and 10 Blade Spawners.  Because the system is exactly four out, I don't have to worry about unloads.  When the Transports Self destruct everyone will be good to go.

This doesn't go exactly as planned.  Oh, everyone arrives on time, and I setup the Armor ships as a screening force.  The problems are:
1) A Bomber IV I can't get to leave the system utterly wrecks the Blade Spawners.
2) The Blade Spawners are happy go lucky on FFs again.
3) When they're NOT happy for FFs, they're targetting powered down units, so the blades don't actually HIT anything, they just sit there, idling and dying.

The armor ships meet the raid that spawns in system and promptly die.

My fleets out in Confederation waiting for the Raid to hit.  I think I've done literally all I can for the moment against Earth.  It's time to take out the CSGs and get my hands on the galaxy.  Off to Pai Gow!!!... after I rebuild a bit...

986

After Action Reports / Re: The AI 9 through 10 run

« on: March 27, 2012, 04:48:40 AM »

By 12:30 I've rebuilt and done another run against Earth, emptying it of anything not under glass.  My Blade Spawners will help with that.  There's 4 heavy beam posts on the planet that just tore through my Rebel Ships.  They did, however, take down the two Ion Cannons, the Orbital Mass driver, and most of the warhead stopper.

The armor ships in front as fodder worked quite well, as did 'buzzing the tower' with the rebel ships to free up all sorts of ugly MK V nastiness.  The fleet 3 systems out at the choke catching the 'swarm' worked quite nicely with them spread out.

While the Rebels were rebuilding, however, the fleet's been busy.  First it went down and we cleaned up Krupp of its dual Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Driver, which was pounding my little Raid I SSs to pieces.  That took out a good half the fleet as we pounded our way through, partially because I was lazy and FRD'd them after the Ions and then let them finish the work.

Dual waves are averaging about 600 ships right now.  I should be prepped for the CSG hunt and to go get my ARSs shortly.

987

After Action Reports / Re: The AI 9 through 10 run

« on: March 27, 2012, 04:19:38 AM »

So by 12:00 in I've managed to pop the Raid Engine on Tau and clear out a chunk of the inbound run.  I've also whacked Earth one with the Rebel Fleet.  Next time I think I'll send them in with the armor fleet as cover.  The rest of the fleet is parked in Confederation (AI Planet, doesn't check to wormhole threat) to eat the inbound raid engine, which is ~270 ships at AIP 53.

The Rebel Ships are able to dent, but not wreck, Earth.  I'm timing things so that right after Confederation gets its 2x reinforcements, I head in for Earth.  That gives me ~3 minutes to work on Earth before it'll get another reinforcement.  Rebel Ships take time to rebuild but dang they're powerful.  They performed the run against the Tau Raid Engine solo, taking out a few other choice items on the way, like the tachyon guardian so I could get scouts in.

I'm also using the Rebels as my response force when Shawshank gets reinforcements.  Since they're so fast I just send whatever's left of the Rebels back to Janeway to pick up reinforcements, so they scour my neighbors for me on their way through.  At one point they were running like mad BACK to Sox because as they passed through they woke up a few Blade Spawners and the minor turrets on Sox couldn't handle it.  Was rather funny.

With some armor ships to help cover and the Rebels able to pound some damage into Earth, I should be able to 'wake it up' here shortly, getting it to dump most of its troops.  I already got it to free ~100 ships, so it's down to 259.  My ZPG is also nearly done, woot woot.  Traders came through on Llama so the 4-pack is sitting there waiting for building.  Probably overkill with the Dyson Support Brigade so maybe I'll start building up a Merc Force instead on homeworld.

Anyway, with the game in theory at ~8 hours, I'm about on schedule.

988

After Action Reports / Re: The AI 9 through 10 run

« on: March 27, 2012, 03:04:19 AM »

Around 10:00 I have to deal with a mini-CPA of around 400 ships.  No big deal, it was easily dealt with.  It did drain some MK Vs from somewhere but I'm not sure where yet, I think it was the Riker area.

By 10:15 (and one savescum later because I popped the Shawshank Warp Gate waaaay too early) I control Llama, 4 Ions, and have taken Janeway and its Rebel Colony.  I setup a bit different on Llama, making a mining run from the Batman to Blackstone run and a pile of mines on the wormhole, and a token amount of tractors.  Just off of that I drop a FF with the AoE turrets and a Grav/Tach Turret.  I setup a small web of gravs heading out to the SW towards all of my Ions, and I built my Econ III on top of the Ion II/IV.  All Ions get one FF each.

I proceed to clear out all but 20 of the single-shot turrets and all my AoE turrets from Sushi and drop them on Llama.  While the Dyson Ball is fun I won't abuse it again for the moment.

A couple of things have started to occur.  Earth got itself a reinforcement, as did Kirk, during all this.  Dyson no longer scours Davion, the rearward system that it was keeping clean along with Llama.  I'll have to manually head up and set that off now and then.  I've left it with all guard posts for a higher pop cap, but it's got an AI Eye and a few ions on it.  Not entirely sure how I plan to do that yet.  With 9 posts + cmd center, maybe I'll just let it sit and get fat.  I dare it to annoy Dyson.

It took a bit to dig through the AI Eye /Spire Shield on Batman.  I eventually just suicided my entire Fleet Bomber I/II and Bomber Starships into it, with the maws dropping in briefly to collect up some threat, leaving once the bombers arrived at the spire shield.  That got it to 20% and I fled with three bomber SS left.  After repairs I simply sent in the bombers + Raid SS guys and they finished cleaning up.  That meant I still needed to clean up HotStar, the next system down, which has two forts, about 10 posts, and another AI Eye.  Greaaaat.

Well, my Raids were just going nowhere fast in there.  I send in the Blade Spawners.  I realize they're going to antagonize an Emp III Guardian I was ignoring, so I plop the rest of the fleet against the Batman wormhole in Llama.

The Blade Spawners do their thing, annoying a FLOCK of guardians.  Perfect, run away with 8 left.  They're obliterating the guardposts nicely so this will work fine.  EMP hits Batman, my fleet pours in immediately following the announcement, and the fleet heads down to deal with the inbounds while the Blade Spawners head for home for repairs.

Pick up replacement spawners and send the 10 spawners back into HotStar, with Raid support to go play hunt the Ion Cannon for later.  The Blade Spawners chew up all the guard posts easily now and we're out of there, AI Eye dead.  Took a bit to get here though, it's 10:53 now.

I blew up the nearly complete (86%) Radar Jammer II on Sushi for the resources along the way here, I needed it for the turret ball build.  I have gotten a hair done on the ZPG but my econ's a lot stronger now with the additional generators and Econ IIIs.  I'm 1350/s roughly gained, maintenance costs me ~320/s of that.  When the ZPG comes online that'll drop further.  The Rebel Fleet is nearly done building in the back and I'll bring them forward shortly.  Once I do, I'm going hunting Earth again.  Then to the west.


That wasn't one of my better plans.  I got the stealth guardpost and a bunch of mines, but I got hammered to pieces by the Raid Wave I tried to ignore.  Frustratingly my nearly empty maws wouldn't EAT anything!  That pretty much fried me.  I did use my shiny new 6000 K in research for Bomber IIIs though, and those had come with me.

Highly amusingly my riot I mgs (Tractor/shield as center modules) engine killed a bunch of ships before they went down, so there's a fleet of ~80 ships floating at me at speed 1.  If they ever get off Kirk I'll be surprised.  Just firepower sitting there waiting for me to come back.  One of the reasons I just don't like generic ED.  It messes me up more than it helps.  If I remember I'll put in a mantis request for a Riot SS gun that doesn't ED.

989

After Action Reports / Re: The AI 9 through 10 run

« on: March 27, 2012, 12:40:30 AM »

At 9:25 or so I had started to work my way into the SW to get the Datacenters when I was getting stuffed in Solar Moon and needed to cloak the raid ships in.   Problem was the Raid SSs couldn't take down anything in there, including the tachyon guardian.  Sending my entire fleet in cleared that up plenty enough but royally woke the local AI Eye up and started massing threat in volume.  I also sent it down to PaiGow to clear the way to Argyle for the cloakers, and massive more threat occurred.  Great.  I send the fleet back and leave the bomber starships local to pop the remaining tach posts in Pai Gow.  once they're done they're trapped on the wrong side of a grav guardian so I blow them.

About a minute later I realize *1* missile frigate missed the command to head for home and has been continuing the deepstrike.  Joy.  A minute of deepstrike threat, for those who haven't fought it much, is a LARGE volume of ships.

Well, at 9:30 my fleet heads back into the Cyborg-Macross run and starts chewing on ships enmasse, but they were too late getting themselves into the choke run.  Ships had already slipped into Sox and were heavy enough to overwhelm the light turreting that's there.

Remember a while ago I mentioned EVERY one of my planets is currently running double reactors to power my fleet?  Yeah, brownouts galore.  Luckily, my fleet made it to Macross and was able to hold the line there while my short-guard turrets were able to just barely stop the rest of the line-slippers who got to Sushi (about 50, including ~15 Blade Spawners).  Go go grav turrets.

My Raids were barely able to slip into Green Lantern with 2 left due to a Fortress/tach post on the GL wormhole in Solar moon.  They pop the DC there and pound a few Ion Cannons out of spite.  Then they die.  I'm still at -88k in power or so.

Once the fleet's been positioned for semi-macro usage, I build off a quickie colony in Sushi and ship it to Sox to rebuild after Sushi finishes off the remaining attackers.  I send 5 engi Is over to help with the process, knowing my planet settings will rebuild Sushi back to 20 Engi Is for ship construction.  I head to Macross and finish helping to clean up inbounds with concentrated fire on starships and maw micro.

Once the Econ III is back up on Sox, I build off five rebuilders to help get my power problems back online.   About this time the threat drift is done except for a decent volume of Eye Zombies still patrolling the general Solar Moon sector.  They'll drift in eventually and die in small volume, so no biggie.  The fleet pulls back to Sushi for refills.

At 9:40 the fleet's semi-operational and I've got my 3 Raid SSs again.  Power them down and attach them to a cloaking starship and ship them out to Argyle for the last of the Data Centers.  They're enroute in deepstrike now.  The fleet's moving back to Macross to deal with inbounds.

Busy dang 20 minutes, lemme tell ya.

990

AI War / Re: Why you should always keep fighting

« on: March 27, 2012, 12:28:41 AM »

So, lesson learned: don't forget defense and consolidate your empire. You would think I wouldn't need to learn any more, but...  Still, this was the most fun I have had with the game in a long time. It turns out I was playing a Zenith Descendant (big surprise) and a Tank. I think the next time I pick parasites as a bonus ship, I might choose Zenith Descendant and Spireling opponents. Maybe I'll get lucky again...

I'm STILL learning...

That volume of CPA is due to not keeping better AIP control.  I'd have figured your reclaimers would have fared better turning the CPA on itself, but I guess not.

When you have something like that coming in at you, you have to basically do what your body does for frostbite control, abandon the extremities.  If you can mass your force at a choke or two and eat heavily into the CPA, you've got a shot, but otherwise you'll usually lose all your fabs and whatnot to a CPA of any intensity.