AI War Beta 5.005, "The Balancer," Released!

[Red Spot]

All I will add to the discussion is you should have had a merc factory trickling out merc fighters so when you eventually get a massive incursion on your home command station you can just sic them on the offending bastages and waste them. Too many players seem to completely forget about the merc factory and its wonderful always available mk 4 ships.

Not sure how their cost relation is, but they are at least 4* as expensive as their regular mk4 counterparts, which makes them 16*(at least!) as expensive as regular mk1 fleetship .. in other words, merc-fleetship are not worth their resources unless your resources are already wasted (overflowing).

Spamming mk1 fighters on AI worlds works better than spamming "regular" mk4 fighters, dont think I need to mention the tactic using merc-ship

If you start pumping out merc-ship when you arent ready for it, you can pretty much expect they will reach your homeplanet

[Sunshine!]

Anyhow, I am currently on my second game, the first game with all expansions turned on. Is it normal or okay to want to do all of one's fleetship manufacturing from Enclave Starships?

Anything's okay so long as it works for you.  I've personally never heard of someone doing that since factories are free when it comes to knowledge (10k to unlock up to mk3 enclave, 20k for mk4 enclave), allow rally points, are cheaper to build, and can have more built.  They certainly have their uses on occasion.  Do you use enclaves to reinforce your units in the field?

Also, merc ships are just way too expensive for the early game - as others have said, I rarely have the kind of resource flows where I can throw away 480 metal/crystal per second, but that's probably more because I'm constantly having to rebuild my normal fleet early game, and later game I'm trying to maintain a couple golems, a spirecraft fleet, and my defense infrastructure.

[Red Spot]

I have found the enclaves very usefull in 1 game. Both mk4 fabs on the other end of the universe on a map where I simply didn't want to take too many planets. Which was just for the mk4s and made it pain in the royal rear to micro them.
(I tend to set up factories to 1 planet and redirect that planet to where the fighting is, having all fabs/warpgates in the fleets control-group. When you cant use this form of automation in large games the micro can be quite painfull.)

For the sake of 'ease of moving the 2nd line of defence' I may unlock the mk1 enclaves and put them center-planet just behind the/a frontline planet keeping a mk1-fleet at full strength. Usually it doesnt happen untill I am rather confident the AI wont hit that planet and am constantly moving that front though.

[Bugsydor]

Thanks for the advice on the Enclaves. My plan had been to unlock the MK IV version so I wouldn't need to worry about keeping advanced factories alive whilst keeping my fleet generation at the front lines. Ah well, everyone starts out as a newb, anyhow. On a related note, I just had an idea for a ship! Would a ship that functioned as a mobile warpgate that can go through wormholes to stay with the ship be to OP? I am going to go bug Mantis about it now. Sorry for derailing the thread!

[x4000]

Yep, that would be OP, by the way.

[Zeba]

All I will add to the discussion is you should have had a merc factory trickling out merc fighters so when you eventually get a massive incursion on your home command station you can just sic them on the offending bastages and waste them. Too many players seem to completely forget about the merc factory and its wonderful always available mk 4 ships.

Not sure how their cost relation is, but they are at least 4* as expensive as their regular mk4 counterparts, which makes them 16*(at least!) as expensive as regular mk1 fleetship .. in other words, merc-fleetship are not worth their resources unless your resources are already wasted (overflowing).

Spamming mk1 fighters on AI worlds works better than spamming "regular" mk4 fighters, dont think I need to mention the tactic using merc-ship

If you start pumping out merc-ship when you arent ready for it, you can pretty much expect they will reach your homeplanet

Merc fighters and bombers are your reserve defensive force you build up over time. All you need is a single mkI engie to assist a merc factory which will have minimal impact on your economy and by the time your aip gets to the point the really nasty stuff is coming at you then you should have a full cap of them which will be quite handy for stopping counterattacks or nailing leakers or those dratted raid ships.

[superking]

on lower than 100 AIP, all you really need for gate raiding/neutering gaurdposts is 2x zenith starship & a bunch of transports.

2x zenith starships kill almost anything in 2-3 volleys, while being almost invincible. when you get to higher AIPs, add in the Spire starships and even more transports and job is a good un', leave everything else on the defence.

[Shrugging Khan]

A transport full of bombers is really all I usually need for raids. Or a flotilla of Stealth Battleships (finally figured out how to micro cloaking  ).

[Sunshine!]

A single mk1 engineer on a merc space dock would be over 720 metal/crystal per second! (does mk1 engineer halve production time or reduce it by some other fraction?  I don't know, in the above it's assuming the mk1 engineer speeds production by 50%).  I know my economy certainly can't take that early game.  Heck, I'd need four or five planets to even hit that possibility.

[Shrugging Khan]

I'm no fan of mercs either. They eat energy. Not much, individually, but when you have a few thousand of them...!

[BobTheJanitor]

I rarely have much use for mercs, except in FS games where I'm taking tons of planets and am drowning in resources already. I do dribble out a few from time to time when my M/C get capped out. I guess maybe putting the merc dock on a side planet somewhere that doesn't have an engineer to assist it and loop building from there might be OK. Usually I just manage it with lots of pausing/unpausing as my resources get capped and then drained over and over.

[Shrugging Khan]

Why do we even have resource caps? I, for one, only ever operate at 999k or at 0...couldn't we have some "resource storage inefficiency" system that causes inflation when you breach the cap, but still lets you brute-force acquire more resources at reduced rates?

[x4000]

Why do we even have resource caps? I, for one, only ever operate at 999k or at 0...couldn't we have some "resource storage inefficiency" system that causes inflation when you breach the cap, but still lets you brute-force acquire more resources at reduced rates?

Because when people operate at that level, they would wind up with insane amounts of metal and crystal meaning that even if they lost all their planets they could operate for hours.  If you lose all your planets, that 999k dries up pretty quick if you don't take them back.

[x4000]

New version: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,8469.0.html

[Red Spot]

You also cant build much of a high mark fleet from 1 cap of Rs, 100 mk4 fighter would already cost 800k.
If you raise caps/allow storage, you allow people to effectivly have 2 or more fleets (build-time is hardly ever an issue).