No Wave Warnings + Cross Planet Waves

[Lancefighter]

There are a scarce few of us brave enough to try out the world that exists without wave warnings. Even fewer of us who come back to it time and time again.
And then, there is an even smaller group of people that subscribe to the theory of cross-planet waves. A group so small, that not only is it never mentioned on the forums, that I myself am the only person known to go back to this pair of horrors time and time again.

And yet I refuse to back down. I will sit here and take this punishment time and time again.. Except.. Sometimes, I feel like I need a little bit of help. This is one of those times.

At the moment, I feel like there are a few mechanics that I currently absolutely CANT make use of. There are a lot of things I feel could be slightly better to help with it.

Lets begin with something fairly mundane - in the ctrl section, there is a setting "alert when x units on planet". This needs to do one of two things:
ALWAYS show up bright red with flashing etc (the same that happens when a command station is under attack)
Make noise. Maybe repeated noise. A great blaring klaxon. 
Provide an option for the above. Let us decide if the planet is important enough enough to have these warnings
The primary goal of these is to make it known IMMEDIATELY when an important something has enemies nearby. If there are raid starships near my home system, I want to be notified IMMEDIATELY, not when they start attacking my homeworld.

Second, something that I am not really sure about. I am thinking about an alert that is given immediately on an enemy wave hitting. At the moment, a wave starts at "9001 infiltrators and 3 raid starships going to Red Homeworld in 3:00", and counts down. The moment that wave hits.. Nothing.
I think we could potentially change this to a lasting alert that says "Wave of 9001 infiltrators and 3 raid starships spawned on Red Homeworld". Possibly until dismissible, or maybe even until 90% of the fleet is destroyed? Not really sure how the mechanics of this will work.

Even then though, this doesnt address some of my concerns. For instance, there is an entire ability "advanced warp detection" that is absolutely and completely useless to me. I believe it is completely useless to anyone with Crossplanet Waves. I would propose that an advanced warp sensor will provide a warning when and WHERE a crossplanet wave is spawned, up to 2-3 systems away from the sensor itself. I am not sure as to how the mechanics of this will work, but I feel they need to be more useful than what they are now.
They also could provide greater warnings of exo waves and their compositions (for instance, a adv warp detector might tell you if there are golems or spirecraft nearby). I am not really sure if this is good or not, but mostly I am just throwing out ideas. They need to do something, where currently they dont.

Anyway, I think that mostly covers my thoughts on the matter. I believe this is a very different way to play, and I encourage people to try it.

[mithrandi]

I don't play with wave warnings disabled, but I like the idea of getting a notification when a wave actually spawns (assuming there is warp detection coverage, of course, but all command centers provide warp detection) in addition to the advance warning.

[chemical_art]

Couple of things:

When a regular wave is spawned a soft but distinct sound is played. Could be made louder, but for me as it is it lets me know "wave spawned!". Even if you can't hear the sound, the "attack" number next to threat in the HUD tells you if you are under attack. If you see the attack number go red rather then green, you know trouble is about and pause and over it if you already don't know where the threat is.

The color of self alerts should be changed so they aren't green. If not red, at least orange or another warning color. A sound will be very very annoying unless there are different levels of noise, since I don't want an annoying sound blaring every 10 minutes because some threat has been released that is now on a border world. I don't want too many false sound alarms for that defeats the point of using sound over the visual signals already used, but also recognize the value of sound as well as visual cues.

Advanced warp detectors are meant to show you where a wave will hit a planet, but it does so because it knows precisely when the warp comes. It turns off the moment the wave is launched rather then waste memory waiting for the wave to to be toast, for the game doesn't treat waves as a unit like it does exo waves, so I am curious how it will do so with cross planet waves. In fact, I am curious to see how the game could cope with cope with cross planet wave logic, but if you don't know when a wave will hit to begin with, how would you know when or where to look unless you check your border planets manually every few minutes?

One of the main difficulties of cross planet waves is that you are not supposed to know where it spawns (as stated in the lobby tooltip.) No wave warnings are meant to prevent when you know. So you are telling ai wars with turning both off that you want no idea of when or where you want waves, then ask ai wars to activate more ways to tell you waves are coming that don't use these ideas?

The game already warns you the composition somewhat of exo waves in telling you massive ships are approaching. If you have scouting up and watching the threat gauge you can already tell where the exo waves are when you see the threat count spike in firepower due to the wave.

[Lancefighter]

Well yes - I mostly am just trying to find some way to give advanced warp detection meaning on the difficulty in which I play. I understand that it is by design that how I play is as hard as it is, I am just trying to make this item that does absolutely nothing some purpose.

[Kraiz]

I thought I was the only one who played with CPAs only and no wave warnings....

A FRIEND!!!

Actually, early-game, it's fairly easy.  Most of the smaller waves won't charge your system immediately, bu tinstead sit on an adjacent wormhole.  You can periodically go through the adjacent wormholes and clear them off.  With good intel, you can get a good idea of where they're heading, too.

And for the "Alert on ships" thing, this is something I expected from the beginning.  Sometimes (Like in FS, Champions, etc), or when viewing an enemy planet with scouts on it, there are a great number of green lines of text.  Mistaking one or overlooking one is easy to do.  Make the alert notifications more obtrusive... obnoxious... whatever you like.

[Lancefighter]

Early game waves dont really matter at all until you go up in difficulty at lot, or get technologist ais..

Even at 8, they arent too hard. I mostly end up failing to exo-waves that coincide with normal waves that coincide with hybrid attacks.. that coincide with counterwaves.

Would you believe that in my current game, one of my planets has TWO counterwave posts? I was pretty sure that wasnt possible on one planet, unless you were against a counterwave ai.. I shudder to think of what a counterwave ai has.

[Varone]

When against cross planet waves i make sure i unlock lots of scouts so i can put one scout on most of the nearby enemy systems. This way i can see which planet has had the number of ships shoot up when a wave should have arrived. Also destroying the warp gates of planets will stop the waves spawning at that planet so you can roughly control where the waves will spawn but it can be very costly in AIP.

[Lancefighter]

I think I've finally accepted that the difficulty at which I play at is actually just too high. This makes me sad. Its not so much that I feel I am playing poorly.. Just plainly not winning the game sub optimally, at needlessly difficult settings. I am sad.

Maybe 7.6 will be low enough for a compromise.

[TechSY730]

I think I've finally accepted that the difficulty at which I play at is actually just too high. This makes me sad. Its not so much that I feel I am playing poorly.. Just plainly not winning the game sub optimally, at needlessly difficult settings. I am sad.

Maybe 7.6 will be low enough for a compromise.

Yea, over the last year or so, difficulty has scaled up. This is mostly a good thing. However, it does feel a little discouraging when you used to be able to handle, say, 9 just fine, but now you find yourself having to go to 8.

However, the AI is still having difficulty adjusting to hyper minimalist, quick "rushdown" type games, which the guys who are embarrassing 10/10 can attest to.

[Lancefighter]

Funny thing. I dont actually make a habit of winning games.
I think I've won maybe a handful of games at most, with the only real one I can remember at the moment the one with the dysons..

Since then, I make it a habit of turning up the difficulty to the point of almost not expecting to win. I force myself into these ridiculous situations (i refuse to include most fleet ships in my fleets.. Almost to the point of never unlocking any of them), I force myself to rely a lot on static defenses..

[chemical_art]

Ultra-low aip games are certainly in this season.

Right now I'm in a game where a third of my total aip has been gained from special forces posts on my 9 difficulty game, yet with a completely unintentional yet nice map I have cleared 7 nebulas with 30 aip on the board.

This game just highlights the reason why I say the champion can't be tied to aip alone.

[zoutzakje]

heh just make use of the tools you got ^^ they're given to you for a reason you know
I have personally never played with NWW or CPW on, though I plan to try out NWW soon. but I think it's just too brutal. if you're worried about not finding a challenge in the game without these 2 settings, try increasing the difficulty or enabling more (and high scaled) minor factions. Plenty of options to make the game just as difficult without NWW and CPW.
and well, I can't really think of something to make the AWS useful with these 2 settings. It's like decloackers and tachyon drones being useless when you turn off cloacked ships. Just inevitable really.