Author Topic: Dealing with AI Stealth Battleships?  (Read 3790 times)

Offline Lunaro

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Dealing with AI Stealth Battleships?
« on: February 26, 2011, 11:49:56 pm »
Ok I'm around 30 hours into my current game (7.8 difficulty) and I have the spire ships and minor faction activated and try to pursue the spire storyline.

However the AI uses Stealth battheships. They seem to be dubbed as fleet ships not starships. Thus the AI is attacking me in every incoming attack wave with 300+ AI Spire Stealth Battleships IV !

I can deal with them with suiciding 3 spire martyr III into the ongoing wave and cluster them in aiddition to haven a Fortress planet that holds off the attacks (every aviable fortress including MK V fortress, black hole generator, armor killer and armor booster, radar dampener all turrets aviable) and i still nearly get overrun and it wont be long until I'm totally overrun because those MK IV stealth battleships the ai drops in masses are as strong as a starship.... if i didn't have the black hole generator i would have been overrun totally already.

So what can you do, myself I'm able to produce 4 MK IV stealth battleships, altough for the Ai there seems to be absolutely no limit at all. Those ships are devastating. Can we please get a patch so the Ai cant deploy 300+ MK IV stealth battleships?

Also now I have "8567 ships massing for cross planet attack" in 10 minutes. This will probably be my last fight because the last corss planet attack hat 700 MK III Stealth battleships and i was only able to fend that off with mass martyr III sacrifice as well as loosing my whole 4000 ship fleet and all turrets/fortresses. Fortunately i had all those Tractor Turrets deployed so my command station and the black hole generator survived.

So any suggestions if there is any way how I could turn around my game I'm at shard 2, but shard 3 is far out and i simply dont have the ship power to defend against slaughtering waves of Ai stealth battleships and conquering my way to the planet where shard 3 is.

Any suggestions or can i simply quit my game and start a new one? For me currently it seems impossible to move forward, the only thing i do is produce martyr III and defend that one planet that keeps the enemy from advancing in my backyard but my xamphite supply is going dry soon.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Dealing with AI Stealth Battleships?
« Reply #1 on: February 27, 2011, 12:13:52 am »
Welcome to the forums :)

So what can you do, myself I'm able to produce 4 MK IV stealth battleships, altough for the Ai there seems to be absolutely no limit at all. Those ships are devastating. Can we please get a patch so the Ai cant deploy 300+ MK IV stealth battleships?
If there were absolutely no limit it all it would be using a LOT more than 300 :)

How many ships are in the other waves?  Stealth Battleships have a 0.03 multiplier, so in general the same circumstances that hit you with 300 SSB IVs could generate about 10,000 Bomber IVs.  Given the fact that your game is still going, I'm assuming you haven't been hit with 10,000 Bomber IVs :)

If you're concerned about wave sizes you're seeing, please turn on Advanced Logging (on the Advanced tab of the Settings window) and play the game until it announces a new wave with the problematic numbers, then get the "MainThreadWaveComputationLog.txt" and "AIThreadWaveComputationLog.txt" files in your AI War Installation's RuntimeData directory, and post those files here so I can look at the actual computations to see if anything is actually buggy.


But in general, if you're 30 hours into the game you may be in a situation that's not reasonably winnable.  There's almost always something you can do, but it sounds like you're already pulling out most of the stops as it is.  If you get far enough into the Fallen Spire stuff you could probably face down those SSBs without too much trouble (or at least kill them a whole lot faster) but it's possible that it's too late.

What's the AI Progress at in your game?  I'm imagining pretty high if you're facing MkIV waves.
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Offline Lunaro

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Re: Dealing with AI Stealth Battleships?
« Reply #2 on: February 27, 2011, 12:37:28 am »
Ill try to get that logfile. Meanwhile is there anything else I can do to keep the AI off of my lawn?

Currently Ai progress is at 1150 (+-20) on MK IV level
Normal attack waves consist of arond 1700 enemy units what troubles me is MK IV and MK V carriers amassing in at the enemies planets and then releasing it all at once against me while i try to get ground in the other direction to access the Spire shards.

The only viable form of counter against masses of ships I have seen are the Spire Martyrs, or is there any other form that is good at mass enemy controle?
I made the mistake of alerting 1 ai home planet, so I get also waves of MK 5 ships
So after some time the planet adjactant to my Fortress Planet has multiple carriers (5-6) with 1k MK IV units each in it as well as 4-5 carriers with 200 MK V units in it.

That then hits my planet, if I dont send in the Martyrs fast the whole planet gets overrun in a matter of 2-3 minutes. Usually i try to pile all enemy ships in one place with my martyrs and then explode 4-6 at once. .That usually deals with 2/3 of the enemy attack force and the rest of my fleet and fortresses is able to pick them off.

Those attacks happen in a fequency of around 2-3 hours inbetween amassing of those attacks. Is there a way to reduce the amount of enemy ships that get amassed and piled onto that planet?

If i go over to the adjactant planet where those carriers are rallying and try to shoot them down before they can hit my fotress the ships get ejected but then immediatly vanish and i get a message about a carrier having formed on one of the ai planets.

First I tought a nuke could help but that doesnt help at all against carriers.

One thing i gotta admint, its a total blast, I havent struggled in an Strategy game like this in a long time. Having to fight all the way till the end phases and from there it gets hell is awesome.


The Ai still has around 30 planets left and I havent found all the core generators so i could start taking out one core ai planet with my Spire Penetrators.

I'm curerntly advancing by using the Spire Penetrators to destroy the whole infrastructure of the planet and then moving in a small force of Spirecrafts to clear out the ai ships afterwards.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Dealing with AI Stealth Battleships?
« Reply #3 on: February 27, 2011, 12:51:34 am »
Ill try to get that logfile. Meanwhile is there anything else I can do to keep the AI off of my lawn?
At 1150 AIP on Diff 7.6?  Not really, it's trying to kill you :)  It's an accomplishment to be surviving at all at that point.  Victory may be beyond reasonable grasp.  I think you could probably pull it off if you can somehow progress the Fallen Spire storyline enough to get the... well, don't want to spoil it for you if you don't know ;)  But it could really tip the scales (both offensively and defensively), though it comes with its own insane dangers.  My guess is you could probably manage a shard run by brute force using enough EMPs, though if enough AI MkV stuff is around even that won't help, etc.

And it sounds like if you don't make progress on that soon a combination of rising AIP and diminishing resources-from-which-Martyrs-can-be-made will doom you.  But it's the hopeless conflicts that are the most interesting ;)

If I were in your situation I'd try to find a save from 5-10 hours before (or whenever the fortress-chokepoint was setup and firm) and go all-out trying to get the Fallen Spire stuff.  Basically I'd either win or I'd lose, but I probably wouldn't get ground slowly to dust.


On the piles of AI ships on the lawn:

At that high an AIP and that long into the game it's likely that a lot of the AI's backwater planets are so reinforced that new reinforcements are being freed by the border-aggression mechanic and coming up to the front to "stalk" your territory until it thinks it has enough strength to punch through.  That's what's causing them to set up the lawn chairs on the other sides of those wormholes.

When dealing with that I find EMPs very helpful to give a relatively low AIP way of letting my own ships do the actual damage.  But if they've carriers that only helps against the "loose" ships.

One thing you can do to keep the stalking piles from getting too huge is to periodically pull some large chunk of your strength off the planet they're stalking, and if you took enough off they'll come through and you can bring your forces back in and smash them.  But sometimes they'll just retreat so the timing is tricky.


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One thing i gotta admint, its a total blast, I havent struggled in an Strategy game like this in a long time. Having to fight all the way till the end phases and from there it gets hell is awesome.
Glad you're enjoying it :)  You're well outside the usual "envelope" in terms of how long the game has gone and AIP, so it's really not pulling punches.

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The Ai still has around 30 planets left
How many have you taken?

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I'm curerntly advancing by using the Spire Penetrators to destroy the whole infrastructure of the planet and then moving in a small force of Spirecrafts to clear out the ai ships afterwards.
I'm sure the AI is just so happy ;)
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Offline Lunaro

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Re: Dealing with AI Stealth Battleships?
« Reply #4 on: February 27, 2011, 01:46:09 am »
Oh I am used to insane dangers, earlier ini that game when I found my 2nd Spire Shard and I was escorting it back 4 hops (4 hops before my Fortress Planet) the Ai went nuts already sending in waves after waves of MK V ships and spire ships to get the shard, at the same time the AI decided to have an cross planet attack in 10 minutes ^^. The sheer adrenaline of praying that the Shard gets past my Fortress planet in time before that Storm hits, trying to defend the shard from the ongoing Ai frenzy that comes with retriving one and defending my Fotress was awesome.

Currently I'm holding 40 planets (80 planet hub map) with 20 left for the ai and 20 unoccupied but neuted.

I havent used Nukes so far but maybe that might get me somewhere faster than clearing out the remaining planets. I understand once I nuke a planet everything on it and the resources are destroyed, am i still able to build a command station to get a spire shard? And can I load the nukes into Transports in order to move them faster and safer around?

(could i succeed in totally nuking the remaining planets on one side of my fortress so i can retrive the shards in relative safety and only have to worry against one side?


                   x
                   |
                   |
               H--F-----B

x attack vecort the Ai always sends the hell waves trough that link
F fortress with the black hole generator
H my backyard with my planets
B mostly unoccupied planets and 90% of the remaining ai's planets as well as some frontier outposts with 1-2 fortresses and currently the bigger part of my fleet to advance

Oh did I mention that the Advanced Research gave me 2x Neinzul units? How I had wished for Zenith bombers or something stronger than the Neinzul, or am I just using them in a wrong way and they are strong somehow?

my fortress for anyone interested

http://img143.imageshack.us/g/2011022700003c.jpg/
« Last Edit: February 27, 2011, 02:01:31 am by Lunaro »

Offline fiorenzospa

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Re: Dealing with AI Stealth Battleships?
« Reply #5 on: February 27, 2011, 06:53:22 am »
I love this game, it is genial...
but I found that very late game are in a way a bit imbalanced. I'm speaking about 25+ hours games with MK4 waves, CPAs and especially CARRIERS. Once the AI filled up all the systems it becomes hell with all those carriers. But maybe it's just because I'm still a noob.
Keep practicing  ;)

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Dealing with AI Stealth Battleships?
« Reply #6 on: February 27, 2011, 08:13:17 pm »
The sheer adrenaline of praying that the Shard gets past my Fortress planet in time before that Storm hits, trying to defend the shard from the ongoing Ai frenzy that comes with retriving one and defending my Fotress was awesome.
I'm glad you enjoyed that; the FS stuff can be quite intense on its own, adding on all the other stuff probably felt like getting hit with a hurricane ;)

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Currently I'm holding 40 planets (80 planet hub map) with 20 left for the ai and 20 unoccupied but neuted.
Wow, I'm very surprised you've survived.  That explains the AIP ;)  In an 80 planet game I'd say destroying the AI command station on 20 planets would be well on the high end of what's wise.  40 is really, really asking for it.  And if by those 20 "unoccupied but neutered" you mean you've destroyed the command station (instead of just the guard posts), then that would mean 60 planets' worth of AIP.  But even 40 is way, way past what you're supposed to do, and it basically makes the AI kill you.  If you can pull this off then, hey, you won ;)  But if you wind up losing I very much suggest going for fewer planets in future games.  Or a somewhat lower difficulty if you want to play take-on-the-galaxy.  Of course, if you do the Fallen-Spire stuff you get to the point where you have a much better chance at a frontal-attack mentality.  Assuming you don't get smashed before you get there ;)

And nukes are really last-ditch and risky, if you're going to go the warhead route I suggest EMPs for stunning stuff and using your normal attack ships to take stuff down.

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(could i succeed in totally nuking the remaining planets on one side of my fortress so i can retrive the shards in relative safety and only have to worry against one side?
I don't think that would be a good idea.  If you're talking about nuking 18 planets that's another 900 AIP which would put you in the 2000 AIP range, meaning that instead of 300ish Spire Stealth Battleships in a wave you'd be dealing with about 550-650.

On the other hand, if you really nuke _every_ AI planet except the AI homeworlds (and the planets bordering them, iirc), I think the shard spawning algorithm actually defaults to just spawning the shards on your homeworld, because it can't find an eligible AI planet (only the very last shard is allowed to spawn on an AI homeworld or core planet).  That would make those recoveries trivial.  But it'd be very much a race against time to get your FS stuff built and capable of dealing with those massive waves and the FS-related dangers.  If you had an insane enough metal+crystal output you might just be able to pull it off.

But I'd advise against nuking all that stuff unless the shard recoveries become simply impossible.

Oh, and have you gotten the knowledge off all the non-AI planets?  Every bit helps there, and you also need something like 40k to fully exploit the high-end Fallen Spire stuff.

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                  x
                   |
                   |
               H--F-----B

x attack vecort the Ai always sends the hell waves trough that link
F fortress with the black hole generator
H my backyard with my planets
B mostly unoccupied planets and 90% of the remaining ai's planets as well as some frontier outposts with 1-2 fortresses and currently the bigger part of my fleet to advance
That is a very good position.  One thing you can use nukes for is "wiping" the "x" planet of anything lower than mkV, though it's probably better to use EMPs+normal-attacks.  You could also use an EMP to split up an attack that has both emp-immune and non-emp-immune ships, etc.

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Oh did I mention that the Advanced Research gave me 2x Neinzul units? How I had wished for Zenith bombers or something stronger than the Neinzul, or am I just using them in a wrong way and they are strong somehow?
Well, Zenith bombers come in very small numbers, so the actual dps you can get out of a cap of neinzul can actually be higher, it depends.  And which neinzul ships are we talking about?  Nanoswarms, properly used, can immobilze and generally frustrate the daylights out of an enemy force.  Tigers pack a significant punch against a lot of important targets and make wonderful guard-post-assassins (the sheer speed and expendability lets them just ignore the defenders and kill whatever it is, if they're not piled on too heavily).  Commandos also have respectable dps but against other types.  Weasels and Vultures are somewhat less useful in the pure damage role, though vultures can be quite effective against the last half of a forcefield, iirc, and that kind of thing.  They should all be able to contribute decent damage in a general engagement.  One key is making sure your space yards are churning out replacements as fast as they die in battle.  Keeping a standing force of them is more complicated, but you can put them in low power mode to stop the decay, then reactivate them when you need them to fight.
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Offline Lunaro

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Re: Dealing with AI Stealth Battleships?
« Reply #7 on: February 27, 2011, 10:45:31 pm »
I took your advice, rolled the game back 4-5 hours and expedited the clearing of the B side. Also found one last AI Co processor, so i was able to keep my AIP at 1020 at the moment with 3 shards in my territory. Going for the 4th shard now and I'm back at 29 hours played.

Looks good so far, the crazies was a total attack force of 15k units (around 7k MK III 4k MK IV and 2k MK V) took 5 Martyrs there and took out 10k units with one blast, I'm good for probably 3-4 more of those crazy waves until I'm out of supply for the Xamphite and hoping it will be enough time to build the more advanced Spire ships.

Yeah I know that I'm a bit on the crazy side, made my first few games in diff 7 without too much stuff, with that game i went for a higher difficulty and wanted to see how far i can bring it including shizo Ai all of the spire and zenith stuff (oh joy of zenith enclaves together with a wave or shortly after)

Is there any special rule on which planets the Ai spawns the pursuit force for the Spire shard so i could possibly eliminate some entrance ways in order to ferry the next one in safer?

I'm not going to give this game up, just got hit by a 15k Wave (10k on my main fotress 5k on my secondary forward base towards B) that was a real slaughter, glad i decided to use some ebonite to get Martyr IV's those saved my live, one took out 4k units at once after the penetrators sniped the carriers so everythign would be clustered for the Martyrs.

Seriously you guys at Acren are awesome I'm really looking forward to the next expansion for Ai wars.

oh and I do have those Neinzul Youngling Nanomists, they are not bad, is it possible they can disable enemy fleet ships because at some point enemy ships turned red and wouldnt move anymore.

Also could a Mod please move this over to the after action report section. I think I got most of my questions answered but this topic might give a little AAR :)
« Last Edit: February 28, 2011, 02:02:17 am by Lunaro »

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Dealing with AI Stealth Battleships?
« Reply #8 on: February 28, 2011, 08:43:11 am »
Yea, this is more of an AAR now ;)

Is there any special rule on which planets the Ai spawns the pursuit force for the Spire shard so i could possibly eliminate some entrance ways in order to ferry the next one in safer?
They can only spawn from something with "Warp Gate - Wave" or "Warp Gate - Full" (doesn't count if it only has "Warp Gate - Reinforce").  That means a warp gate, AI Eye, exogalactic wormhole, and perhaps a few other things (I forget, honestly).

Destroying those is a good way to increase the time between the spawning of the attack and that attack catching up to you, though it won't really decrease the overall size of what hits you.

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Seriously you guys at Acren are awesome I'm really looking forward to the next expansion for Ai wars.
Glad you're having fun :)  The next expansion won't be until the end of the year or possibly early next year as we're focused on A Valley Without Wind right now and that's a relatively long-term project.  But we're looking forward to making the next expansion too :)

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oh and I do have those Neinzul Youngling Nanomists, they are not bad, is it possible they can disable enemy fleet ships because at some point enemy ships turned red and wouldnt move anymore.
Oh yea, they do crazy things, that's what I was referring to.  They:
- Apply reclamator damage, basically like parasites.
- Do engine damage, which causes permanent speed reduction (to as little as one, but not zero).
- Cause brief paralysis, that's the temporary flashing-red-not-doing-anything condition.
- Do armor damage, which reduces the amount of damage the enemy armor subtracts from incoming fire.  In a big 10k+ swarm attack that's probably not a big deal but if you're going up against single big targets then stripping the armor off them can really increase the effective dps of your relatively-low-damage-per-shot ships.

One thing you can do if you have a big pile of stalking threat AI ships on the other side of the wormhole leading to your fortress planet is:
- Plop a couple space docks down near your side of the wormhole.  They don't have to be close, but it helps.
- Give both space docks an FRD (V+Right-click) move order to the planet with the stalking threat.
- Set both space docks to loop-build nanoswarms.
- Mushroom Machine Gun! ;D

In general the AI ships won't let that kind of tomfoolery provoke them into actually attacking you (unless it somehow majorly changes the balance of power), but over time you could engine-cripple a large portion of the enemy fleet.  It'll even destroy some of them.

A similar tactic can be used with Zenith Autobombs, which are much more damage-oriented.
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Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Dealing with AI Stealth Battleships?
« Reply #9 on: February 28, 2011, 09:09:37 am »
Oh, and if you've done that many shard recoveries I assume you have a city hub now.  I should've mentioned that it's best to plant those over a wormhole you want to keep the enemy from going through.  Specifically, the wormhole on your fortress planet that leads towards your homeworld.

Sounds like your fortress world is already doing its job so it's not a huge deal either way, but figured I'd mention it ;)
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Offline Lunaro

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Re: Dealing with AI Stealth Battleships?
« Reply #10 on: February 28, 2011, 02:46:40 pm »
Its done, the Ai has crumbled before the power of my Spire Penetrators :)

That was one long fight, after 34 hours finally the last of the 2 Ai Core Command station are both gone and victory is mine.

Seriously the last waves the Ai threw at me were totally crazy, 17k ships most of them MK IV and MK V had 1450 AIP at the end.

After recovering the last City Shard and building the Capitol (and some sneak Knowledge theft on enemy AI planets to not tip over the MK III-IV treshhold) the 2 Spire BS and the DN improved my defence system. After that I had my Penetrators do a quick commando action on the 2nd AI homeplanet because there was a core Raid engine... yay I got hit with 3 waves of 4k MK IV and MKV ships before i could take it out. After that it was over really fast. Once the Penetrators were on the Coreworlds of the AI with a scout they strategically disassembled the whole AI world while my fleet of 6k ships and dozens of Spire warships held my Fotress planet.

Did I mention black hole generators are awesome? ;)

I think I've never spent that much time on one single game of any RTS ever played.

And I did manage to deplete every ounce of Xamphite, Repite, Physite and Ebonite I had access to in order to create more Martyrs to keep the Ai at bay at my Fotress planet.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Dealing with AI Stealth Battleships?
« Reply #11 on: February 28, 2011, 02:50:17 pm »
Congratulations! :)

I bet the AI was getting very frustrated at your fortress planet, penetrators, and martyrs ;)  Good thing it can't submit imbalance reports on mantis, it'd be whining up a storm.
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