Arcen Games

General Category => AI War Classic => AI War Classic - After Action Reports => : RockyBst April 05, 2014, 08:14:50 AM

: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 05, 2014, 08:14:50 AM
So, as I've temporarily put my 9/9 Heroic bouncer / Shield Ninny support corps game on hold until that whole '12 battleships per wave, every wave' issue is resolved somewhat, I felt like a bit of a palette cleanser. Thinking of what I haven't tried for a while, let's go for a 10 planet map. On diff 10. It should be pointed out I have practically no hope of accomplishing this, this is more of a log of my hilarious failures.

To even things up a bit, let's choose a smorgas board of easy AIs ... a Tank/Grav Driller and a Vanilla/Turtle. Kill most of the usual 'fun' options like the hunter plot, hybrid hives, trains and spire civvy leaders. And as a wildcard ... somewhere in this galaxy, there's a 6/10 Dyson sphere.

00.01: Time to science. Initial unlocks:


Fairly standard really. I whack a ton of extra forcefields around the home command station, line place some mines from the one wormhole exit and build half of all my turrets facing that one wormhole.

00.05: Initial scout reports coming in.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/5-scoutIntel.png)

So, looks like there's an AI homeworld 3 hops away that is blocking access to the other 5 planets on this map. That's going to be a problem, as I have core shield generators turned on. So I'll have to neuter the AI homeworld and hop over it to take out the shield gens. This is already sounding like an impossible task.

Anyway, let's take a look at the two planet of most immediate interest. Kuer, right next to me:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/kuer-missus.png)

Not bad for a first planet. That's a black widow golem, ARS, core missile turret controller and impulse emitter fab with just a couple of guard posts. Oh, and that yummy looking spire archive. 9,000 knowledge would be very handy at this point.

Next up, the Mk 3 planet Senow, up the top there.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/senow.png)

Mhmm, very nice for a hinterland planet. 2 (!) ARSes, a core needler turret controller, and a Neinzul youngling fab. The cherry on top here is floating around in an unassuming asteroid belt though ... 1 titanite, 1 adamantite and 5 ebonite. Oh, the spire ships we could build...

Finally, that pesky core plant Micvarape:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/micvarape.png)

Another cursed golem, a core sniper turret controller and a core railpod fab. Not quite as tasty as the other two, but that railpod fab is almost guaranteed to be handy at some point.

Initial thoughts then ... well, Kuer is obviously getting taken ASAP. That will leave a core planet on alert though, unless ... I unlock warp jamming command stations. Which, thanks to that handy 9,000 knowledge from the spire archive might just be possible. Use Kuer as a temporary chokepoint until I acquire Senow, then blast on to Micvarape and turn that into a real chokepoint right next to the AI homeworld.

This was a long post, so let's split the rest into another one.


: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 05, 2014, 08:48:10 AM
00.05: First wave is declared. 144 neinzul younglings. Now, if you look closely at that first scout screenshot up there you might notice a problem. That is, I'm currently running -23,000 metal a second. As per usual I've gone science -> build EVERYTHING, and hence none of my defences are actually in place yet other than the 150 mines leading from the wormhole to my command station.

Younglings are immune to mines.

00.06: Wave hits. Still no actually shooting defences in place. I do, however, have 12 missile frigates.

00.07: Thankfully, my defences start coming online about 30 seconds after the wave hits. One by one turrets pop up to start taking potshots. Takes about 2 minutes from the wave hitting to me clearing the planet. I think I was lucky it was younglings honestly, if it had been bombers or something with more anti-structure grunt I would definitely have lost at this point.

00.08: Second wave declared. 150 cloaked shops. All defences are now online.

00.09: Well, that was anti-climactic. Eyebots come, eyebots run into minefield, bye-bye eyebots.

00.10: Start building fleet ships. Including my secret weapon, the lightning missile frigate. I figure the more things for the AI to shoot at that aren't my ships, the better. It's at this point I realise that energy is going to be a serious issue in this game, as I only have about 30 of each built before I run out of power. Time to break out the matter converters.

00.13: Three matter converters up, enough to start building my starship fleet (2* flagships, 2* leech 1s, 2* leech 2s and a zenith starship for a grand total of 80,000 power) and build the rest of my fleet ships. While I'm waiting for stuff to build, I pop my head into Kuer with 50 bombers/fighters/frigates, figuring I could take out a guardpost or two. It's at this point I realise that the AI has tackle drone launchers, as my ships start flying backwards away from their escape wormhole...

00.20: Fleet is at full capacity, time to take the battle to them. 300 ships jump into Kuer, and start bashing on the MRLS guardpost under a force field. Focus shifts to wiping the tackle launching scum from the face of this planet, then back to the guard post. Then what I assume are the special forces show up, with more tackle drone launchers and some grav drains. Fighting continues in this vein for 10 minutes or so, with various feats of derring do as fighters annihalate the needler guard posts and bombers rip up forcefields and MRLS posts.

00.30: Kuer is mine. As I don't have warp jammers yet, I plonk down a Mil 1 command station next to the core missile turret controller and impulse fab. Both of which are rather far away from the actual main part of the planet. I slap two basic forcefields around the spire archive, a couple around the command station and look at my spoils. Sentinel frigates ... hell, yes. Infinite range snipers with pretty damaging attacks and relatively low energy costs, possibly one of the best ships I could have gotten.

00.35: Fleet rebuilding continues. A wave is announced for Kuer ... 734 fighters!?! I suddenly realise that I haven't actually built any defences. And if that spire archive goes down, I get +80 AIP. Cue panicked build of a hardened forcefield, along with 48 lovely Mk. 5 missile turrets. Which are still 80% built when the wave hits a minute and 30 seconds later.

TBC
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 05, 2014, 09:07:39 AM
Yea, nothing could go wrong here ;)  Losing that Spire Archive was entirely according to plan!

The 12-battleships-per-wave thing in your other game should be fixed sometime Monday morning.  TLF development is very busy right now, so I decided to forego any mid-week releases unless it was a general crash thing or whatever.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 05, 2014, 11:07:58 AM
Ah now, I never said that I lost the spire archive.

00.36: Wave hits. There was method to my madness in quick building a hardened forcefield generator - fighters aren't strong enough to do much damage to it. That just leaves the plasma, zenith and flagship starcraft to really worry about. As I have spare power from my new generator, I kill two of the matter converters to free up ~400 metal towards my missile turrets, and they slowly come online and start winnowing the fighter horde. The plasma starship ignores the archive and trundles off towards the command station in the distance, so I likewise ignore it and when about half of the missile turrets are online, tell them to focus fire the other two starships. There are about 200 fighters left when suddenly the power goes out...

00.38: That plasma siege starship? Yeah, he went and banged on my command station forcefields. And took out the power generator. Thankfully I noticed and paused the game about a second after it happened. -60,000 power ... well, bye bye starship fleet. Spire archive comes out of it with about 1/3rd health.

00.39: Finally mop up the last of the ships from this wave. The command station went down to the siege's pounding, so remains rebuilders get on the case. Luckily fabs are immune from siege splash. I was left with 87 ships in the end, and I'm fairly sure none of those were the ones I started the battle with.

00.49: Last ten minutes was spent fortifying my position and rebuilding the fleet. So Kuer now has every single turret I can build which wasn't already on the homeworld, so about 50 of each and 80 sniper turrets. Added a couple more temporary forcefields to the spire archive as well. Energy is still a major issue, so I build 3 more matter converters for a total of 4 @ 200,000 energy. First 5,000 knowledge from the spire archive is spent on a metal harvester upgrade, because I can already tell I'm gonna need one heck of an economy with so few planets to actually produce base metal from. Especially given the metal drain from matter converters and the -80 from the warp jamming command station.

00.50: Wave of 940 youngling tigers. This could get interesting.

00.51: Luckily, these guys don't seem to understand forcefields. Prioritise the starships, then the younglings just mill around attacking turrets. Which is painful, but not as painful as losing the archive could have been.

00.55: Spire archive dings 9,000 knowledge and finally disappears. I pop a warp jammer station on Kuer, then realise that there is no actual wave entry point to my empire anymore. In that case the AI just operates with cross-planet waves, right? Anyway, this leaves me with 1,000 knowledge to spare, which I think I'll store so I can buy Mk.3 (and therefore 4) lightning frigates after I cap Senow and Micvarape.

The problem with that plan, of course, is that the nearest advanced factory happens to be on the AI homeworld itself.

00.57: Also just noticed that the design backup on Senow is for tackle drone launchers, score. On balance, I think removing these from the AI's armoury is slightly more pressing that adding them to mine. Building another matter converter, to get me 2 Enclaves for defensive purposes, and a siege and a bomber starship for offence.

00.58: Wave announcement. 380 bombers to ???. Guess that answers that question. They end up as threat on Micvarape.

1.00: An hour in, one planet down, four waves defeated, one deferred. 30 AIP. Next up, neutering Senow so I can hack that design backup. At the moment I'm not building the black widow golem, as I think 15 AIP and 150,000 energy is too high a price to pay for it at this stage of the game (broken golems medium). I wouldn't mind one of the cursed golems for 10 AIP though...
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 05, 2014, 11:17:01 AM
Ah now, I never said that I lost the spire archive.
Not for lack of trying :)


when suddenly the power goes out...
Plasma Siege Starships can rarely be safely ignored.

Definitely one type that is considerably more dangerous to the human than to the AI.

Congrats on winning that fight anyway.


00.50: Wave of 940 youngling tigers. This could get interesting.

00.51: Luckily, these guys don't seem to understand forcefields. Prioritise the starships, then the younglings just mill around attacking turrets. Which is painful, but not as painful as losing the archive could have been.
Well that's disappointing ;)

If you have a save of them just milling around I'd like to take a look and figure out what's going on.  There's actually some fairly specific AI logic for "round up a bunch of anti-FF units and take out juicy stuff under forcefields", and tigers are about as anti-forcefield as they come.


The problem with that plan, of course, is that the nearest advanced factory happens to be on the AI homeworld itself.
Um, Mr.AI, I don't suppose you'd mind if I just borrowed this?


Hacking for mkIV capability on an intact AI HW would be pretty hardcore.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 05, 2014, 12:54:14 PM
Hacking for mkIV capability on an intact AI HW would be pretty hardcore.

Guess what the plan for hour 4 is ...

1.04: Start hit-and-run tactics on Senow, looking to take down guard posts. The one right next to the wormhole happens to be under a forcefield again, wonderful. I also meet my arch-nemesis, the disassembler guardian. Retreat having popped one guard post, lost 250 ships and had two starships swallowed.

1.06: Disassembler guardian finishes his snack. AI reprisal level 1 announced.

1.09: 208 bombers to ???. Might have to see if I can lure some of the 600+ threat off the core world.

1.11: Moved all my ships off Kuer. Operation rope-a-dope is in progress, I can see all 611 threat fleet ships moving from Micvarape to attack me.

1.12: Well, rope-a-dope was a success. From 611 threat to 2.5 million scrap in one easy move. Amazingly the black widow golem is still there too, albeit at 3% rather than its initial 25.

1.14: Barring a last couple of starships, my entire 470 ship fleet (+ the odd leeched mk. 2 bomber) is now ready to move out. Onwards, to Senow!

1.17: The usual kind of thing ensues. Bombers take on MRLSes, missile frigs to the cloaker post while the sentinal frigates provide long-range fire support against tackle drones and ion cannons. In the end, the AI is 5 guard posts down and I've lost 300 ships. There's also an ion cannon buried under a force field that I couldn't get to ... time to build a raid or two.

1.18: 343 missile frigate waves goes cross-planet. Not sure if this is a normal wave or reprisal

1.19: 296 grav drains as well. That's enough threat to be ... well, threatening. At least while I'm rebuilding the fleet.

1.20: Missile frigs and grav drains both spawn in to Senow. Then decide they don't like the look of the wormhole to Kuer after all. One way to reinforce a planet, I suppose. Time to rebuild the fleet a little then rope-a-dope again.

1.23: Dope roping complete, this time for a cool 3 million salvage. Shame that warp jammer command station is only 10% efficient.

1.29: I love raids. Ion cannon down. This current 'reinforce with a single starship and no fleet ships' bug is obviously in effect, by the way. Total units counts are crawling up but starships are all over the place.

1.35: Took out 2 MRLS, 1 laser and a shield guard post with type-appropriate units. Also had the lightning and sentinal frigates just hanging around doing their thing. Noticeable that the reinfocement spawn was a load of guardians, including implosions (ugh), and 3 spire / 1 raid starship. No fleet ships. Also triggered a reprisal wave or two, so there's 550 threat on Micvarape again.

1.40: Senow is now neutered. Hacking time! Man, hackers are expensive.

1.44: In the middle of the hacking, a wave of 600 armor ships is announced. That gives threat of about 1,200...

1.45: Oh, and a reprisal wave from my hacker defence ships!

1.48: And the hack is done. No longer will I have to deal with the scourge of tackle drone launchers. I quickly pop the command station, clean up residual zombies and move my fleet back to Kuer.

1.49: So, those armor ships showed up. 1,200 threat all pouring into Kuer right now, with another 300 bombers coming in from a reprisal wave in a minute or so.

1.52: Okay, so that was close. At one point I had 400 armored ships hitting the (9) forcefields around my Kuer's command station, with 150 eyebots coming in close behind. Just scraped through, although the forcefield edges were dangerously close to the core missile controller. I did lose the widow golem, but really that isn't a particularly bad thing as it allows me to refocus my defences next to the command station. That will leave a highway to my homeworld, but hey maybe I'll get better scrap efficiency that way?

1.55: Built a basic econ command station on Senow. Only going to bother with one force field, it's a proper hinterland planet that will probably get no enemy contact. So ... core needler turrets, nice. Mk. 5 youngling tigers from the fab, not shabby. And the 2 ARSes gave me ... teleport stations. Twice. Yeah, think that one's a bug.

1.57: 700 Missile frigates? Pfft, just go join the threat fleet like everyone else.

1.58: Ooh, right. I forgot about the change where the ARSes gave you 500 knowledge each. That should come in handy.

2:00: So, two hours in. Scores on the doors are 2 planets down, AIP at 50. I just spent my 5,000 accumulated knowledge for Mk.2 sentinals and lightning frigates, plus the tigers gives me a fleet of just under 700 ships. Running at about 80,000 energy, with 4 matter converters up and before building core needler turrets. Objectives for the next hour are to get the cursed golem up (that thing will be awesome anti-fleet-ship sitting at the edge of the grav well), and try to neuter Micvarape.

Bonus Kuer picture:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/2Hours.png)
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 05, 2014, 01:22:22 PM
Guess what the plan for hour 4 is ...
A contingency plan.  Specifically, "if main attempt to die failed, die harder" ;)


This current 'reinforce with a single starship and no fleet ships' bug is obviously in effect, by the way.
Yep, got that one on my list right next to the heroic ship costs.


That will leave a highway to my homeworld, but hey maybe I'll get better scrap efficiency that way?
An excellent plan!  What could possibly go wrong?


And the 2 ARSes gave me ... teleport stations. Twice. Yeah, think that one's a bug.
Ah, so that's what it is.  When there's actually 2 on the same planet.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 06, 2014, 06:52:42 AM
2.00: Start building Mk. 5 needlers on Kuer and the homeworld. Best defence is a good defence, and all that.

2.02: So, this is Micvarape:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/micvarape-actual.png)

Plenty of threat built up there, and obviously as a core world it'll get strategic reserve support. I pop the youngling tigers in to see what they can do, they don't last long but at least take out the tachyon. With strategic reserve, there's now 1,700 ships and one Mk. 3 fortress to take care of.

2.03: The threat fleet takes disposing of the last youngling as a trigger to attack Kuer. They also don't last particularly long.

A CPA declared. 2,710 ships, which is twice as many as my defences have coped with before. 10 engineers suddenly find themselves assigned to the cursed golem.

2.06: Aaand a wave of 700 armored ships to go with it.

2.08: Cursed golem comes online. It's costing me another two matter converters and 10 AIP, but I figure 160,000 attack * 20 every 2 seconds is worth it. This thing is essentially a mobile fortress, with more health, infinite range and without that pesky 0.01 to polycrystal hulls. It also has the advantage that it can be turned off to save me 100k energy, like for example if a plasma siege starship gets at Kuer again.

2.10: Fleet is at full capacity, including my shiny new lightning and sentinal Mk. 2s. 5 additional force fields built at Kuer, along with a couple of beam turrets I found lying around unused.

2.11: While waiting for the CPA to hit, let's take a look at that asteroid belt. One titanite, which I don't think I've ever actually found before. Lots of stuff that looks appealing there, from a Mk. 5 attritioner with 1,300 damage a sec to the 70 million damage penetrator. However what really catches my eye is the Mk. 5 jumpship ... transports 25 units, only attritions on AI homeworlds. Now, it costs almost a million metal and 30,000 energy, but it definitely has a place in my 'jump over the AI homeworld' plans.

Mhmm, decisions decisions. Well, for now let's get something to deal with any CPA troubles. 5 ebonite asteroids, one adamantite. Let's use one of the ebonites for a Mk.4 Martyr at a cost of 600,000 and 12,000 energy, while the adamantite goes on a Mk. 4 attritioner with 1,200 damage a second. Engys focus on the attritioner, as it's half the price of the martyr.

2.12: One minute to CPA. The attritioner is up and moving to Kuer. Now, it only does 1,200 damage per second. And even a mark 2 fighter has 330,000 health. Still, when you're facing off against 3,415 ships that 0.3% of total health lost every single second soon adds up. Oh, and I built a missile constructor on Kuer. There's now a lightning 2 warhead sitting under 13(!) forcefields, just in case that CPA is worse than I fear.

2.13: CPA hits, wave is a minute 30 behind. Looks like it uses the difficulty wave timings for that, rather than an actual 2 minute behind the CPA sync like I thought it did. Anyway, it's worse that I thought. Much worse.

707 Mark II ships
327 Mark III ships
321 Mark IV ships
and 1,355 Mark II from the strategic reserve. Looks like the AI just didn't have enough ships in the galaxy to give me a nice easy all Mk. 2 ride.

While I'm waiting, I send the youngling tigers through to Micvarape as a rude jesture to the AI. They take a missile guard post down to 40%, before getting caught by a tractor guardian. They'll rebuild soon enough.

2.14: I scrap the 8 remaining younglings that were about to get an all expenses paid trip to the AI homeworld, courtesy of the tractor guardian. Let's not pop our heads in there quite yet. 600 threat currently sitting on Micvarape. If it wasn't for the 5 ion cannons and single OMD currently on that world, I might be tempted to pre-emptively attack. Oh, and they have a core warhead interceptor, of course.

2.15: 2047 threat on Micvarape. It starts edging towards the wormhole. Time to fight.

2.15.09: When the carriers pop, I get a nasty suprise ... 67 tackle drone launchers. Half of them Mk.4. Well, I guess at least the AI can't make any more after this. Oh, and 260 zenith siege engines. Let's keep those away from the forcefields.

2.15.24: 2,100 attack with 700 threat left to come. Means I must have knocked off 600 ships in the first 15 seconds. Good old line-placed mines. Cursed golem was doing nicely, up until I sent it back through the wormhole to Zarpar because 300 bombers were angling in on it. Escaped at 65% health, I'll move it back into play in about 10 seconds once the ships have cleared away from the wormhole exit.

2.15.45: This is working nicely. Whenever I pop the golem through the wormhole, all the ships refocus on it and move away from the command station. I didn't think of using the golem as bomber bait before. Unfortunately, I also didn't notice the 10 million health, MK. 5 implosion guardian who's rapidly wiping health from it. Focus fire time.

2.16.01: Implosion guardian down. Cursed golem back on planet, with 42% health. 1,600 ships enemy ships on Kuer, my fleet has 400 still standing. Zenith siege engines are currently smacking on the forcefields and ... power goes out. As does the command station. -47,000 power, knew I should have built a couple of spare matter converters. Least useful current ships and defenses get scrapped, so bye-bye plasma siege and bomber starships, as well as a Mk. 2 forcefield and 5 heavy beam cannons on the homeworld.

2.16.05: Lightning warhead is still sitting under the forcefields, but the zenith sieges are going to kill it by pounding on it anyway. Time to see how many I can take with it.

2.16.09: Oh man, that was mishandled. Ships started moving away from the ex-command station to target the golem which just jumped in. So the lightning warhead went out, got caught in one of the grav drains fields and ended up only getting maybe 100 ships. What a waste of 2 AIP.

2.16.24: Arrgh, eyebots. Apparantly they're not attracted to the golem, so 40 of them start smacking on my fabs. Angling the fleet to take them out.

2.16.28: Too close. The core missile turret controller has 3% health as the last of the eyebots go down.

2.17.00: Cursed golem re-enters orbit around Kuer, 1,500 remaining threat ships stop smacking on the forcefields and take the long journey to the Zarpar wormhole.

2.17.21: Exeunt Cursed golem. 1,223 enemy ships remaining on Kuer, 227 fleet ships. Only emplaced defences left are 17 flak turrets, 19 lightning turrets and 76 snipers. Everything else has been wiped. The only thing keeping those fabs alive is this golem cheese and a steady stream of new younglings / core triangle ships from Senow and Zarpar.

2.17.45: Last of the threat jumps in. There are now 1,384 enemy ships remaining of the 3,415 that we started with. Cursed golem is still just out of the red at 35% health.

2.18.00: Exeunt Cursed golem, at 26% health. This is getting hairy.

2.18.30: I give the enemy 30 seconds to smack on the forcefields before sending Lyudmila back into the fray. They're actually holding up pretty well, the golem cheese has stopped them from going under 80% health so far. I'm still more worried about sneaky ships shooting under them than anything. Oh yeah, and the cursed golem is now named Lyudmila.

2.23: Things continue in this vein for a while. Lyudmila jumps in, fleet stops attacking the force fields to go after her, a few hundred ships die, Lyudmila jumps out. Eventually there are just 230 ships are left, Lyudmila is at 11% health, and nobody moves to attack her when she warps in. Instead everyone stays macking on forcefields, presumably because they know they can't kill the sniper. The remaining zenith siege engines are a real problem, one that needs to be solved quickly.

2.24: 95 ships including 27 tackle drone launchers and 8 starships are now all that's left on the planet. However all the forcefields are, at best, 15% health. A contingent of engineers is jumped in in the vague hope of keeping one up, while the lowest health ships are prioritised and focus fired.

2.24.07: Engineers are tackle droned to oblivion. So much for that idea. Oh, for Mk. 3 teleporting engies.

2.24.37: They're retreating! Oh thank the lord, they're retreating!

2.25: And they're gone. In the end, the AI left with just 30 ships still in the threat fleet, which I think was something like a zenith, 2 spire and 2 leech starships along with a solitary tackle drone launcher. Kuer currently looks like this.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/ouch.png)

Specifically, this:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/ouch-2.png)

Looks like the attritioner got taken out sometime in the last 2-3 minutes of the action. Which is a shame, because it was going for a good 10 minutes. 1,200 damage per second * 600 is a solid 780,000 damage for any ship which was there the whole time. It is, of course, Lyudmila who is the real star of the show. She ended up with 6% health and the support of just 122 ships, mostly brand spanking new missile frigates and younglings. A notable mention also for the sentinel frigates, who sat at the edge of the gravity well and poured constant fire into the attacking hordes whether Lyudmila was on the scene or not.

So, 2 hours 25 minutes in game time. 4 hours 38 minutes in persisted time. Now time to get a heck of a lot of rebuilding done.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 06, 2014, 08:16:21 AM
2.25: Rebuilders and engineers en-route to Kuer. Lyudmila is switched off a sent to Zarpar for a well earned vacation, leaving me with 300,000 energy. Yeah, I should probably kill some of those matter converters temporarily.

2.26: Command station is back up. Constructors are paused to get the defences back in place, matter converters are down freeing up -1000 metal a second, and the space vacuums start hoovering up the 6.5 million scrap.

2.27: A wave of 1,422 Mk 2 fighters is announced. Come on, it's like they're trying to kill me!

2.28: 90% of the turrets are back online, constructors unpausing. The martyr, which I forgot I was building on Senow, is at 58%.   

2.29: Wave hits Micvarape. They decide not to attack.

2.31: Well, something changed their mind. 1,400 fighters vs. the 350 ships I'd managed to rebuild.

2.32: Oh heck, another wave hits in 30 seconds. This time 1,624 fighers. Combined, this is essentially another CPA composed purely of fighters less than 10 minutes after I wiped the last one. Lyudmila is bought back from her holidays, as the defences around Kuer's forcefields take on the 9 starships from the original wave.

2.33: Lyudmila didn't get much time to unwind, and she's still at 5% health. However the fighers flee as she warps into orbit. 600 threat on Micvarape to add to the next wave.

2.37: The 1,600 threat wave from Micvarape finally attacks. By this point though, my entire fleet bar a couple of lightning 2s and 40 impulses have been rebuilt. Then I realise I don't have enough power left to turn Lyudmila on. Time to rebuild those matter converters!

2.38: Or, y'know, just wait for the fleet to die under 2,100 fighters and their supporting starships. Lyudmila warps in, and starts focus firing the plasma sieges. She's at 3% health at this point.

2.39: Oooh, 10 of my sentinal frigates have been leeched. That's bad. However thanks to Lyudmila we now have 1,500 fighters left but just the one leech starship. She herself has just 600,000 of her 60 million health left, and so gracefully retreats to Zarpar. All my docks have now been re purposed to pouring out missile frigates or teleport battle stations ASAP.

Oh, I also noticed that my martyr finally came online. Don't think I need to waste it on a bunch of fighters though.

2.41: Leech starship is down, as are all the leeched sentinal frigates. I now have 15 lightning torpedo frigs sitting under the forcefield spamming missiles at the remaining 1,000 fighters. Who seem pre-occupied with sitting next to the Senow wormhole killing the youngling tigers that are coming through.

2.43: The remaining 649 fighters decide they've had enough, and make a run for it. Time to rebuild. Again. Literally 5 seconds after they start moving for the exit, the human resistance show up. Thanks guys.

2.44: Human resistance promptly go to Micvarape and get themselves slaughtered for no good reason. Not like I could have used 40 resistance bombers and fighters on defence or anything.

2.48: Time for some defensive realignment. With the exception of the Mk. 5 needlers and missiles, I scrap all the turrets on the homeworld and move them to Kuer. Just in time to get notification of a 900 ship missile frigate wave. Kuer now has 500 turrets, excluding tractors, with 250 of those being focussed around the Micvarape wormhole exit along with pretty much a full cap of tractor turrets. There's also 100 assorted turrets in front of the 15 forcefields around the command station, and another 70 flak/lightning turrets under the forcefields themselves.

2.49: Oh joy. A wave of 746 bombers too. I get the impression this AI really doesn't like me.

2.51: 2,200 threat. But I don't know where it is. The only things on Micvarape are 600-odd fighters.

2.52: Spoke too soon, missile frigate wave just appeared. Missiles + fighters are now attacking with a strength of 1,500 ships. Bombers must be close behind. Newly emplaced defences are still building, but at least they'll provide cannon fodder. I hope.

2.53: No real sweat, these guys are going down easy enough. Although the starships are more durable that I'd really like.

2.54: Aaand the bombers just showed up. And are beelining for my forcefields right through the debris strewn field that used to be my turrets. I might pop Lyudmila in without turning her on, see if I can distract them away.

2.55: Yup, no worries. Another 2,200 ships killed and more salvage for me.

2.57: That salvage handily paid to rebuild all those turrets. Now to just rebuild the fleet back up from 150 ships. Again. I still haven't managed to rebuild any starships since the CPA.

3.00: So, 3 hours in. The goal for this hour was to neuter Micvarape. I managed to take out one tachyon and get a single guardpost down to 40% health. And actually, it looks like that has now self healed back up to 78%. On the positive side I have annihilated the best part of 9,000 AI ships, met Lyudmila and now have a ridiculous amount of turrets on Kuer, with a Mk. 4 Martyr sitting under the forcefields just in case.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 06, 2014, 10:19:15 AM
3.01: Youngling tigers start dying because I forgot to rebuild a regen chamber. Sent them to take out the core warhead interceptor, as they're kicking the bucket anyway. Still think it's wierd that regen chambers don't auto-rebuild like everything else.

3.07: Fleet is back up to capacity, the leech and flagship crew is slowly being rebuilt and Lyudmila is getting a well earned spa treatment from a bunch on engineers. Seeing as that tachyon is down, I also queue up a cloaker starship and turn one of my ebonite asteroids into 4 ram Mk. 3s, with 120 million attack each. Should handle that Mk. 3 fortress nicely. Oh, and more matter converts. Always more matter converters. Back up to 6 of the things now.

3.08: While waiting for the chunkier things to build, the younglings go after that missile post again. With pretty much the same results. Also, a 1050 ship missile frigate wave is announced.

3.13: Two leech Mk.2 and 2 enclave starships down; a bomber, 2 leech 1s, 2 flagships, a plasma siege and a zenith to go. Also might be an idea to make myself some raids, go take down those 5 ion cannons. Missiles frigs are slowly trundling in to Micvarape, but not really doing anything.

3.14: Lyudmila's spa treatment is done, and she's back on top of her game. 1,100 ship fighter wave announced.

3.18: Fighters hit Micvarape, all 2,100 threat fleet ships move out to attack. Should be able to soak these easily enough with Lyudmila's help. Of course, due to building starships I don't actually have the power to turn her on. MORE MATTER CONVERTERS!

3.18.30: Ouch, an implosion guardian came along for the ride. Lyudmila beats a hasty retreat with 30% of her health missing. Did I mention how much I hate those things?

3.20: No real sweat, after I killed the implosion they went down easy enough. Although 250 ships, including 8 leeches, did retreat in the direction of Senow, where I have no defences. Just sent the fleet after them though.

3.23: To show my displeasure, I send the younglings after the missile post again. They finally kill it, almost an hour and a half after the first attack. Now to just wait for the fleet rebuild.

2.25: Younglings engage in operation 'fling yourself at those ion cannons', taking out one before falling prey to a tractor guardian who promptly pulls them into the the 500 Mk. 5 strategic reserve ships which spawn whenever they enter orbit.

3.26: Rams are done. Just need a cloaker starship, then it's party time.

3.29: Two spire rams against a Mk. 3 fortress, no sweat. That leaves me two to play with as well, although I'm not sure what to use them on. The 1,400 youngling tiger wave that's coming in a minute's time though ... that makes me sweat.

3.30: Younglings vs. OMD, younglings win. Then the tractor guardians wins. Again. Also a nice wave of 350 cloaked ships incoming, probably eyebots. On reflection, I'm thinking the younglings are probably going to self-attrition a fair bit before they're in a position to attack me.

3.31: Ehhh, kinda. They lost 25% health. Which is better than nothing I suppose. Tractor turrets and their short range kept them from doing any particular damage though.

3.33: Two scout starships are coming out for tachyon patrol duties.

3.34: Just in time. First starship caught 200 eyebots about 20 seconds out from the forcefields. Also, this wave has 10 bomber starships in it. Didn't know the AI could spend the entire starship budget on just one type?

3.38: 20 tigers and a cloaker starship make a fairly effective anti-ion-cannon force. Now to take out the one under the spire forcefield guard post with a couple of raids.

3.39: Yeaaaah, 2 raids can't stand up to 500+ Mk 5 ships while they're reloading for the second salvo. Shame I didn't leech any eyebots.

3.40: On the plus side, I just wondered what those leeches were up to. Getting me 40 Mk.3 missile frigate, apparently. Shame that Micvarape has 2k ships when the special forces and strategic reserve both show up. This might be a beach-head situation.

3.47: The last ion cannon finally goes down. I start building Razor class riot starships (1 tractor, 1 shield, 2 lasers 2 machine guns) and 2 plasma sieges, or in other words every starship bar raids. Finish building the fleet, get 100k excess energy for Lyudmila then in about 5 minutes time it'll be time to take the fight to Micvarape.

3.48: 600 bombers. Shouldn't be an issue.

3.50: Okay, here's the plan. There's 2x external invulnerability on Micvarape. One counter attack post, on command station shield. Seeing as how Lyudmila has 3 million attack every 2 seconds, I'm going to pop her in with fleet support to blow those two. Leave, defend against the counter then when we come back just pop the command station.

Oh, and a wave of 1,000 fighters. I swear these are getting smaller.

3.51: Yeah, so my matter converters weren't finished. Not enough power for Lyudmila to work. Aaand there are 11 implosion guardians, so she now has 15% health. Let's not do that again.

3.53: Oh, and extra joy that triggered a reprisal wave. 300 more eyebots, by the looks of it.

3.56: Ouch, so that wave came with 6 zenith ships and 8 raids. Command station and power were down before I knew it, ended up scrapping all the forcefields around the home command system to get stuff back online. Beat them off in the end though.

3.58: Oh joy of joys, the marauders have come out to play. 80 of them.

4.00: Well, that's the four hour mark. Can't say it was a particularly productive hour, but at least the fort and all the ion cannons are down now.

4.02: Send the younglings to take on a needler guard post. They fail miserably.

4.05: Okay, I'm tired of mucking around and there's no way I can kill 2k ships. Send in the rams to take out the counter attack and shield posts, regardless of their low health.

4.06: Just as I say that, both a wave and a CPA are announced. 5,421 ships + 800 missile frigates. This, I believe, is the point where I lose.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 06, 2014, 10:42:27 AM
Impressive work getting this far, particularly with that first CPA. 

Btw, the 90-second-after-the-CPA timing for the wave is constant rather than diff-based, or at least the code tries for that.  Possibly it doesn't work that way in practice.

Clever with the Golem Bait.  I'm probably going to change the AI to not do that sort of "immediate priority target switch" more often than, say, 30 seconds (or 60, not sure) on a specific planet.

And yea, one of the recent changes to wave composition was giving it a random chance of going "non-schizo" on its starship picks.  The idea being to let it gradually work through all its options to see if any of them can get through.


4.06: Just as I say that, both a wave and a CPA are announced. 5,421 ships + 800 missile frigates. This, I believe, is the point where I lose.
It does sound like some serious Limburger would be necessary to survive.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 06, 2014, 12:45:38 PM
Never doubt the power of warheads.

4.13.29: 1 second before the CPA hits. All 16 lightning torpedo frigates are beneath the forcefields surrounding Kuer's command station. 38 sentinal frigates are at the very edge of the planet's gravity well, while 570 mixed fleet ships and starships wait on FRD in the middle of the map. Scout starships are carefully positioned to provide vital tachyon coverage. Lyudmila has 95% health, and is ready to jump in and assist. And under 2 cloaker starships, flanking the wormhole to Micvarape, sit 3 lightning Mk. 2 missiles and one Mk. 4 martyr.

I'm as ready as I can be. I'm going to die.

4.13.30:

Talk about everything and the kitchen sink. Oh and add in the 800 missile frigates and 1,200 fighters that are also on their way, combine with existing threat for a grand total of ... 6,800 ships.

4.16.20: 3,500 ships on Micvarape. Here comes the first wave.

4.16.43: 2,993 attack. Martyr is vectoring in on the wormhole opening, let's hope we can take a lot of them with us.

4.16.44: That heroic Martyr just took out 2,500 ships. Two thousand, five hundred ships. Unfortunately an 800 ship carrier which hadn't dumped its cargo then did so, and we're back up to 1,415 attack with 3,497 threat. The fleet is told to prioritise the zenith siege engines, while Lyudmila prepares to warp in.

4.16.48: I've spotted a clump of 800 ships. First lightning missile away.

4.16.49: Flipping grav drains again. Luckily this time I've managed to keep the missiles cloaked.

4.16.52: First lightning missile is detonated. 700 ships go down, including all the grav drains. 600 ships remaining on planet.

4.17.00: After the initial devestation, Lyudmila warps in to help clean up the remaining 600 ships.

4.17.14: Which of course includes 9(!) implosion guardians, so she's down to 33% health in a matter of seconds and retreats.

4.17.24: 280 attack. 3,200 threat. Lyudmila health: 8%

4.18.02: Initial wave has been beaten back. Not one enemy ship remains on the planet, while we still have a fleet of 500. The rest of the threat hasn't yet reached Micvarape from whatever planet it started off on, so we've got a bit of a breather to rebuild defences. Constructors are rapidly paused and 10 new rebuilders recruited to add to the normal contingent of 5.

4.18.26: Scouts report 780 threat entering Micvarape orbit. I don't think they'll attack yet.

4.18.49: I was wrong. Carrier pops, fleet starts popping back.

4.19.05: 1,246 attack. Time for another missile.

4.19.15: Grav drains slow me enough that I can't get a clean shot on the group. I'm not going to pop another 2 AIP for nothing, so leave it cloaked and tell the fleet to focus fire on the 241 Zenith sieges. No implosion guardians left, so Lyudmila is coming back for an encore.

4.19.45: Dammit, a lightning warhead just popped. Cloaker must have wandered away from it. One left. 564 attack, 1763 threat.

4.19.51: Command station goes down. I'm going to assume a combination of plasma splash and eyebots, as there are 7 left on the planet.

4.20.19: 190 enemy ships left on the planet. All angling in on Lyudmila, who's at 10% health, so she legs it. At least we wiped all the sieges.

4.20.40: 1,820 threat, but it's all sitting on Micvarape. Vectoring in rebuilders and engineers from the home planet.

4.20.44: Spoke too soon. 600 missile frigs and 200 assorted other ships jump in. No use pointing a warhead at missile frigates.

4.20.47: And there's the other 1,000 units. Kuer now has 377 ships to hold off the final wave of 1,800. All the central defences are down, but at least we still have turrets up near the command station. And every single sniper turret is up ... if only they were spiders!

4.20.53: Wait, 1,200 of these are fighters. These must be the waves hitting. Final missile flies, 1000+ fighters die.

4.21.30: 6 plasma sieges approaching the station. Fleet vectors in on them. Only 640 ships left.

4.21.40: Power goes out. Only -6,000 this time though, so just scrap a mini-fort. Lyudmila pops her head back in to help with the mopup.

4.22.10: 540 threat flees. Time to send the rebuilder fleet back in to deal with the 365 remains.

4.23: Turns out that the power outage wasn't from Kuer. Some AI ship had snuck into Senow, but luckily the younglings spawning from the docks had taken him before he did any other damage. I should really get around to building some defences there.

4.25: Rebuilding is under way. Amazingly, I actually managed to survive that. Although I was hoping I wouldn't have to use all the missiles, as 6 AIP is a major issue on diff 10. Also a shame that I managed to get Lyudmila crippled again, and especially that I lost a missile for no good reason. Turns out I had brave cloaker starships on, which means when you give an order to all ships on the planet to attack something they just go and sit next to your target.

Oh, and a wave incoming. 800 bombers.

4.27: Wave just hangs around with the escaped CPA ships on Micvarape. Not that I'm complaining, as my defences are still rebuilding.

4.32: Defences are all back online. I'm also building 15 Mk. 5 missile turrets on Senow to prevent a repeat of that little power incident. Not a bad investment for 3,000 energy.

4.34: Fleet rebuilding underway. This might take a while. Especially seeing as the only starships which survived were 3 leeches and for some reason both plasma sieges. Presumably because they were too slow to get themselves into danger.

4.36: The rams are back in town. I send them after the command station shield and counter-attack post. Unfortunately I forgot that they don't have a very good bonus against command grade, so the one sent against the command station shield was kind of a waste.

The counter-attack is 650 cloaked ships to the homeworld. Looks like it's time to build some more scout starships. Kinda tempted by a tachyon warhead, but the 1 AIP isn't worth it.

4.38: Oh, and just to make my day brighter 1,478 missile frigates in a wave. So 2,500 ships when combined with the threat currently sitting on Micvarape.

4.41: Missile frigate wave still hasn't arrived on Micvarape. Gonna have to rope-a-dope the existing threat, the counter will hit in 4 minutes time.

4.43: Well, the rope-a-dope worked. Then turned into a full attack, when the 1,400 missile frigates showed up. 2 minutes 'til counter attack.

4.44: Oh and as a follow up, 800 armor ships in 1 1/2 minutes! I'm feeling the love, guys.

4.45: Best part of 700 missile frigates just ran off. Suppose that's lucky, in the circumstances. Counter hits in 18 seconds, time to get those scout starships spread out properly.

4.45.25: They're heeeeeere. 6 Mk. 5 plasma sieges show up on the edge of the gravity well. Scout starships immediately go out on that vector to decloak the eyebots.

4.46.15: I haven't found a single cloaked ship yet. I'm getting rather worried.

4.46.49: Here they are. Bad news, I entirely missed their approach and they're in range of the command station. Good news, they're shooting at the forcefields themselves. Y'know, rather than the chewy Cryo pods or anything.

4.47: Four forcefields dead, 500 eyebots left.

You Have Lost

Well, that was somewhat stupid. Both for popping the counter-attack post while still rebuilding the fleet, and not managing to tachyon the eyebots in time. Luckily I have this magical time rewinding button called 'A save taken 18 seconds before the counter-attack wave hit'...
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 06, 2014, 01:21:21 PM
And the AI shakes its fist "waaarrrrrrrheaaaaads!".  An impressive defense, though the AIP cost is ominous.

And then it shakes the other fist "saaaaaaave gaaaaames!"


Eyebots and plasma sieges in a counter-wave straight to the HW is remarkably mean.  There's nothing specifically inclining wave composition in that direction, so I think it's just a token of the RNG's esteem.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 06, 2014, 05:58:56 PM
4.45:10: Time magically rewinds itself. A rush order goes to the missile silo on Kuer ... get us a tachyon warhead, stat.

4.45.16: Tachyon warhead is completed. Those engies work fast.

4.45.21: Wave hits again. This time it's coming in from a different vector, one which aligns it with the Mk. 5 needler turrets better. Already things are looking up. Scout starships go out to meet it.

4.45.45: Scouts decloak the first 200 eyebots. Milliseconds later, the tachyon warhead arrives on the scene. New order - charge straight for centre mass.

4.45.53: Tachyon warhead hits home. It is extremely ineffective. 50,000 damage to a single eyebot, and 2/3rds of them are still cloaked due to cloaking super boost. In fact, it's so ineffective that I seriously considered save scumming at this point to claw back that 1 AIP.

4.46.10: Eyebots run straight into the Mk. 5 needler turrets and the odd few tractors that I didn't put on Kuer. Things are looking up.

4.46.56: Last of the eyebots is shredded. But not before they get off some shots at the home command station - home command is now at 27% health. And there's still 5 Mk. 5 plasma sieges left. Oh yeah, and to add to the fun there are currently 1,200 mixed ships attacking Kuer.

4.47.17: Last of the plasma sieges are killed. All ships are immediately redirected to Kuer, where most of the 1,200 ships are still stuck in the tractor fields.

4.47.40: As the fleet warps in, a group of 700 armored ships breaks away from the tractors and heads towards the home command station. 250 ships plunge desperately after them, with Lyudmila providing fire support from the wormhole exit.

4.47.42: Oh, and at this point I'm get +20k metal a second from the 4+ million salvage at Zarpar. Much nicer than the usual 10% efficiency, given how normally my economy is bottomed out.

4.48.05: 500 armored ships are the only things left on the planet. Forcefields are averaging ~ 60%.

4.48.43: Last enemy ship goes down. Forcefields took a beating, but 15 of them can hold off quite a lot of fire. My bank balance is currently at 1.5 million, which is the highest I think it's ever been in this game. Time to rebuild.

4.49: Scrap one scout starship, one was killed which leaves me with three for 6k energy. Two to provide tachyon support on Kuer, and I'll leave one on the homeworld in case something slips through. As for the homeworld, every single production facility got blown up. Presumably by the plasma sieges. So rebuild 3 space docks and a starship constructor. Of course, they didn't take the matter converters off my hands.

4.52: Refleeting is rapidly chewing through my capital. On the plus side however, the Martyr Mk. IV I started building on Senow after the last attack is up. Let's start another one, leaving us with one Titanite and one ebonite asteroid.

5.00: 5 hours in. Refleeting is complete, including every combat capable starship. And I also have two Mk. 4 Martyrs sitting on Kuer in anticipation of the next CPA, and 800k in the bank that I'm not quite sure what to do with. Next step I believe is to wipe that last external invulnerability provider off Micvarape.

5.01: 500 cloaked ships and a 739 bomber wave declared simultaneously. Not too worried about this, I've got sufficient tachyon coverage.

5.02: Operation 'Sneaky Blighter' is in effect. 40 hand-picked ships, comprising 2 bomber starships, two plasma sieges, 1 flagship, 3 raids, 22 ordinary bombers and 9 leeched zenith siege engines are put into low power mode and quietly make their way to Micvarape under cover of two cloaker starships.

5.02.40: Carefully avoiding the two remaining tachyon sentinels, even the one stuck in the middle of nowhere (probably for a nebula) the ships are ready to strike the command station shield command post.

1,400 threat in the form of 2 waves warps into the Micvarape system behind them.

5.02.59: The command station shield guard post goes down. 1,000+ enemy ships are in range of them. The task force goes dark.

5.03.12: By the time the cloaking kicks back in, there is only one survivor. A badly damaged raid starship limps home under cover of both cloakers, escaping 2,600 ships.

5.03.50: On the way home, the cloakers mistakenly pass too close to the Mk. 5 tachyon sentinal guarding the way to the AI homeworld. There are no survivors.

5.04: We now have one AI command station, 3 million health with a command grade hull, sitting under both a Mk. 3 and core (Mk 5) forcefield. Considering that we've already seen that 2,600 or so ships can be called in for defence, taking this down may require some thought.

5.05: I have 49 HaP. But do I really want to waste 12 of them on taking down 2 forcefields - especially given that later worlds are going to be even more heavily defended. Now, apparently spirecraft penetrators are immune to forcefields - but I don't think that means they can shoot through them.

5.06: Aw hell, let's test that theory. The last ebonite goes not on one, but two penetrators. Primarily because the cost of a single Mk. 3 is an astronomical 780,000 metal and 18k energy.

5.07: Penetrators comes online, and with that and healing Lyudmila my bank balance is wiped out again. There's still 1,400 theat on Micvarape, so I send the younglings in to see if I can stir them up. They don't take the bait.

5.08 Rope-a-doping

5.09: Man these guys are predicatable. Whatever happened to taking into account strength on adjacent planets in their attack calculations, or was that just for when they attack? Anyway, 1,400 threat truncated. The eyebots gave me some concerns, but scout starships and riots with tractors are a good combo.

5.10: Uh, somehow I ended up with 200 ships more than I started with. Good job leeches? Anyway, penetrator number 1 to Micvarape.

5.10.10: Get in there and shoot that command station. Escape plan? Well, you could try running very fast.

5.10.11: He didn't run fast enough. Command station down though, at the cost of 25 (!) AIP. Dual warp gates, nasty. But at least this should stop the strategic reserve spawning in.

5.11: The fleet go to commiserate with the AI about their loss. Then the special forces arrive, and suddenly 300 ships are missing. At least I killed 2 guard posts in exchange.

5.12: So, no guard posts near the wormhole exit. No strategic reserve to worry about, just threat and special forces. Sounds to me like it's beach-heading time.

5.15: 1 partially reconstructed fleet of 650 ships. 1 mobile builder. 30 engineers and 10 remains rebuilders. 270k in the bank. Party time!

5.15.55: Fleet jumps in to Micvarape. Mobile builder immediately starts constructing 48 Mk. 5 missile turrets. Only 100 ships on the planet at the moment.

5.16.17: All 48 missile turrets are up. Next up would be 48 needlers, but my engineers and mobile builders appear to have been wiped out. 68 ships on planet.

5.16.28: Hastily constructed mobile builder # 2 flies out of the wormhole, along with the engineering posse. Needler turrets going up.

5.17.02: Needler turrets online, two mini-forts coming up for repair purposes. Engies are dead again. The sentinal frigates, neinzul drones and lightning torpedoes are having a significant long-range impact on guard posts and guardians though. 37 ships on planet.

5.18.39: Huh, maybe the special forces aren't coming. That's anti-climactic, I made them all these turrets and everything. 21 ships on planet, all under 2 remaining forcefields. Starting to split the fleet for type-specific guard post search and destroy.

5.23: 1,400 space tanks to ???. I'm scared.

5.24: Colony ship jumps in to Micvarape. Now, I could put this command station next to the fabs at the edge of the gravity well. But, honestly, plain chokepointing is more important to me than a core sniper controller and a railpod fab. So, warp jammer command station goes up right next to the wormhole to Kuer.

5.24.30: Warp jammer command station goes up, last guard post goes down. Micvarape is now mine. ARSes from Kuer and Senow warp in to start gathering that sweet, sweet knowledge, while I scrap 13 of the 15 forcefields around Kuer's command station and replace it with an econ 1.

5.25: 10 forcefields go up around Micvarape's command center, including 3 Mk. 2s. I also spare one of each to put around the fabs.

5.25.30: Core shield generator, network C goes down. All ship production gets redirect to Micvarape. Mines implode, and Martyrs move.

5.26: 1,500 ship wave of fighters. Combined with those 1,400 armor ships that are presumably currently hanging out on the AI homeworld, this could be a problem.

5.27: First forcefields start coming online. 300 mines are line-placed between the exit from the AI homeworld to the warp jammer command station. Neinzul regen chamber goes up.

5.29: The 17 scouts which have been sitting on Micvarape for the past 3 hours move to the AI homeworld. They are near instantly killed, but provide invaluable intel. Only 1,400 threat there at the moment. ARSes finish their knowlege gathering. Not sure what to spend it on yet, although to be honest area mines are sounding good right now.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/Desenan.png)

5.30: All forcefields are online. The ad-hoc placed needler turrets turn out to be well positioned, but the missiles are all under the forcefields. Need to shift those and the mini-forts. The armor ships and fighters arrive, for 2,000 attack against a planet with minimal emplaced defences. The minefield, however, is fully online.

5.30.16: It's a waste, but I think I need one of the Martrys for this. One steps up.

5.30.19: 1,100 attackers die.

5.31.15: Command station goes down, presumably to plasma spam.

5.31.37: The second cursed golem goes down. I wasn't planning to revive it anyway, as another 10 AIP is excessive, but it still limits options.

5.32.10: Lyudmila warps in. Enough fleet ships have died that I can afford the energy to run her, despite losing the new collector.

5.32.25: 2 plasmas, 3 spire starships and 7 zentiths are going after the fabs. Lyudmila and the remaining 220 fleet ships try to stop them.

5.33: All attacker eliminated. Command station is coming back online in 40 seconds. We're safe ... for now.

So, 2 1/2 hours after originally planned Micvarape is finally mine. Plans for the next hour: shift all defensive emplacements from Kuer to here, stick them right between the AI homeworld wormhole and the line to my other planets. Scout past the AI homeworld, probably using a jumpship to get scouts across. Build Mk5 sniper turrets on Kuer and the homeworld, so that even if the controller goes down  I'll still have defence in depth.

As for that AI homeworld ... whoo boy. You may notice, if you carefully inspect the scout info up there, that it has three (!) grav reactors on it. Three. Grav. Reactors. Thankfully, unlike most of the rest of the core guard posts they can be taken down without taking out the shield networks. Oh yeah, and the normal 4 ions + OMD, although the rest don't really concern me overly much. I haven't managed to find any AI progress reducers yet, so the +30 AIP floor shouldn't affect me too much. I'm not liking the thought of a diff 10 CPA at 94 AIP though...
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: TechSY730 April 06, 2014, 07:06:51 PM
Just as a heads up. Earlier you mentioned having to scrap stuff because you were at -6000 energy. IIRC, that is not enough to shut off forcefields and stuff. It would just to stop you from building more. Only after the power goes below some negative value (around -50000 power I think, but I don't remember the exact amount, only that is was < -10000 (that is, absolute value of it is > 10000)) will you get a real brownout and your forcefields go down.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 06, 2014, 08:05:11 PM
4.47.42: Oh, and at this point I'm get +20k metal a second from the 4+ million salvage at Zarpar. Much nicer than the usual 10% efficiency, given how normally my economy is bottomed out.
I hadn't anticipated the interaction, but with the tendency of counterposts to counterwave your HW, there's now striking resemblance between "Counterattack Guard Post" and "Distribution Node" ;)

"Push this button to make a hostile deposit into your bank account"


More generally, the salvage mechanic seems to be serving you in very good stead in terms of being able to rebuild between attacks.  I daresay without it you may have died already simply from metal deprivation and repeated attacks.

5.09: Man these guys are predicatable. Whatever happened to taking into account strength on adjacent planets in their attack calculations, or was that just for when they attack?
There's not really any such logic right now... but I'm working on it ;)

Three. Grav. Reactors.
What did you do to offend the RNG?

Well, at least there's no Wrath Lances.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: TechSY730 April 06, 2014, 08:34:24 PM
More generally, the salvage mechanic seems to be serving you in very good stead in terms of being able to rebuild between attacks.  I daresay without it you may have died already simply from metal deprivation and repeated attacks.

Well, technically he did already die...

However, I guess since it was a short term, tactical mistake rather than a more pervasive, strategic mistake (aka, he wasn't in a spot where he couldn't of survived), I guess that sort of doesn't count "as much". ;)
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 06, 2014, 09:22:05 PM
More generally, the salvage mechanic seems to be serving you in very good stead in terms of being able to rebuild between attacks.  I daresay without it you may have died already simply from metal deprivation and repeated attacks.

Well, technically he did already die...

However, I guess since it was a short term, tactical mistake rather than a more pervasive, strategic mistake (aka, he wasn't in a spot where he couldn't of survived), I guess that sort of doesn't count "as much". ;)
I meant before that :)  But yea.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 07, 2014, 02:12:41 PM
5.34: Command station back up. Now time for operation 'Turrets, lots of turrets'.

Given that waves are currently on the order of 1,500 ships, and I dread the next CPA which will probably be declaring in the next hour, let's go with primarily defensive unlocks from that 3k knowledge. So, area mines and grav turrets. Hmm, and a spire starship to make up the other 500 knowledge.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/turrets-lotsofturrets.png)

5.40: So, the defences are building. You might notice that this is pretty much every Mk. 1 turret, ever. With the exception of 15 or so grav turrets which are on the path to my homeworld. Hopefully the mother of all minefields will thin the ranks a touch, especially given all the gravity turrets hidden in the field. Near the end of the minefield, but juust out of firing range of the command station (for most ships) a line of 80-odd tractor turrets await. And the vast majority of turrets there (obviously excluding lightnings and flaks) are covering both the wormhole exit and command station at all times. Not seen: The 48 Mk. 5 missiles turrets just off the bottom of the screen, and the 48 Mk. 5 snipers at the edge of the gravity well. It's a much shorter walk than I would like for defensive purposes, but they'll fly through a wall of lead to get anywhere.

A paltry wave of 900 bombers is announced.

5.42: You may have noticed up there that I'm running at -45,000 metal a second. Possibly because I decided to build Mk. 5 snipers on Kuer and the homeworld. I'm sure the AI will leave me alone for 10 minutes while everything comes online, right? Especially as constructors are currently paused, and I still need to refleet.

5.43: While we're waiting, let's talk grav reactors. These things are seriously evil. And I have to deal with three, one of which is sitting under a Mk. 5 forcefield. Now my normal reaction here would be 'go make some spire rams, flashbang the AI homeworld'. Problem is, I just used my last ebonite on a Martyr and Titanite can't be used for rams. No problem, I'll just make that long awaited pair of Mk. 5 jumpships and go looking for another asteroid field. Oh. Jumpships aren't blackhole immune.

F*@#

5.43.30: So, my new toys. A core railpod fab. Just a smidge under 9 million damage per cap, twice that if they survive for another 2 seconds. They could be a nice anti grav reactor weapon. Oh, sniper immune you say?

F*@#

5.44: My left-over penetrator has only 28 million damage per shot. It won't be able to take out a 60 million health grav reactor. Maybe I can use that Titanite to build a Mk. 5 penetrator though, at the astronomical cost of 1.5 million metal. Could at least deal with the one under the forcefield. Oh, wait. Planetery tachyon coverage. No tachyon immunity.

F*@#

5.44.30: Oh, and they're immune to nukes and EMPs too. Just to add to the fun. Also I suppose an EMP warhead could at least take out the forcefield.

5.44.40: Mk. 5 Forcefields are EMP immune.

F*@#

5.45: The only blackhole immune ships I have are raids. In desperation, I even check the mercenary space dock. Nothing. Looks like my best option at the point is to just spam youngling tigers and bombers at the immensely powerful guard posts with radar dampening and slowing drones. One of which is sitting on the opposite side of the gravity well, and another of which is under 264 million HPs worth of Mk. 5 forcefield.

5.46: Another 900 bombers. Will the defences come online in time to deal with the double-strength wave? The tension is overwhelming.

5.48: I remember I have 74 HaP. Core guard-posts are immune to sabotage hacks.

F*@#

5.49.20: Last turret finishes building. Looks like the 1,800 bombers decided they had better things to do than attack me. I momentarily rejoice at my positive metal flow, before turning all constructors back on and watching it crash back down to -7,000/s. And I'm not even building starships yet.

5.50: As expected, the first scout 2 off the production line and straight into the maw of the AI homeworld finds all 1,900 bombers there. They don't look inclined to move. On the plus side it also confirms that the core electric post is not in range of the wormhole exit, which I was afraid of.

5.51: At 20,000 energy and 80,000 metal for a full cap, railpods should at least provide some nice defensive alpha strike. Especially given x6 against polycrystal. No attrition too, so bonus there.

5.53: 1,400 missile frigates. That's got to be enough to trigger an attack, surely.

5.53.31: 96 youngling tigers, 192 railpods and 1 rather lonely scout jump in to the AI homeworld.

5.53.36: Railpods are amazing. Amazing. 3 ion cannons and one OMD down in 5 seconds. Which leaves the other ion cannon under a Mk. 5 forcefield, so they start taking potshots at the bombers.

5.53.45: All of the tigers die before getting more than 1/6th of the way to the grav reactor. Somehow though I only have slightly more threat than when I jumped in, so I estimate that railpods must have taken down a good 100 bombers in between shots on ion cannons.

5.56.20: Roughly 2/3rds of the fleet is rebuilt. 3,400 ships in the threat fleet, missile frigates must be on the homeworld by now. I send in a full cap of younglings and railpods again, aiming to distract the bombers. I also take down the tachyon guardian while I'm there, for the feel good factor if no actual benefit against planetary tachyon coverage. Core warhead interceptor also goes down, but no other targets of opportunity present themselves.

5.56.36: Threat fleet, which you may remember comprises three normal waves, attacks. I'm not sure whether this is better or worse than just having the AI homeworld on alert all the time, to be honest.

5.56.54: Area mines - good buy, or best buy? 1,400 ships down. I think the rest of the threat is having second thoughts about coming in.

5.57.15: Oh wait, it's just missile frigates being slow coaches.

5.58.18: 3,400 ships annihilated. 8+ million scrap. And honestly, I don't think they even touched me. The grand total of my losses was 1 grav turret, and maybe a couple of hundred fleet ships which were quickly rebuilt. Gonna have to give the constantly building railpod railcannons some credit for that one, as well as the area mines. It wasn't until about 30 seconds before the end of the attack that I realised Lyudmila was sitting, switched off, at the edge of the gravity well and a signficant number of ships were angling in on her instead of the home command, which means the mines were actually even less effective that they could potentially have been. Making sure she sits on a line between the command station and wormhole, next time.

6.00: 6 hours in. 12 hours 20 minutes in elapsed time. I now own 4/10 planets, within the next few minutes my fleet will be back at full capacity thanks to the AI's generous donation of scrap metal, and I have a defensive chokepoint that I'm fairly sure can hold off the next CPA. Especially given that I still have a Martyr in reserve.

On the negative side...

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/thedebil.png)

I need to go noodle around on the guitar or something for an hour while I try to work out exactly how to take these blighters down. Any suggestions would be really, really gratefully received. Really.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 07, 2014, 03:04:52 PM
Ah yes, railpods.  The true conversion of metal to damage.  I suspect they may have the highest effective dps (in good conditions) of all bonus ship types.


Any suggestions would be really, really gratefully received. Really.
Build all the space docks and all the engineers you can right on top of your outgoing wormhole and sustain absolute maximum-rate railpod bombardment until only the sniper-immune remains.

That might require a few more digits of metal than you have, of course.


Railpods are also probably fairly nice for shooting down incoming grav drones, which might allow something like a conventional fleet attack on key targets (of course, any outcome short of complete victory means any such fleet is a 100% loss due to the black hole effect).  I'm not sure if their autotargeting will cooperate with you there, though.  Railclusters are also great for anti-drone point-defense, but that's not in your toolbox right now.


Sabotage Hacking may help with some things, like forts or forcefields.


I forget, can you still build turrets on AI planets that are in supply?
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: TechSY730 April 07, 2014, 03:34:56 PM
So, are you saying that grav reactors are evil but appropriately so, or overpowered even by AI HW brutal pick standards?

I still feel like the planetary tachyon coverage (as opposed to say, a long range one) provided by the AI Home Command Station is, well, cheap in a bad way, as it is effectively like a "free" "brutal pick", or at least it is like one in severity of effect to the battlefield.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 07, 2014, 03:41:32 PM
Long experience has taught us that AI HWs without planetary tachyon + Spirecraft = Penetrators trivialize it :)
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: Draco18s April 07, 2014, 04:47:44 PM
And then it shakes the other fist "saaaaaaave gaaaaames!"

I can't find it, but the imp in Eador: Master of a Broken World tells you that the various masters all have powers over various elements, like fire.
It's pretty obvious you don't have these kinds of powers.
So you ask the imp what your power is.  "Why, you have the power to go back in time and redo your mistakes!"
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 07, 2014, 05:14:30 PM
6.0.01: Special Forces command posts on Kuer, Senow and Micvarape all mysteriously explode. When asked what happened, the sub-commanders shiftily eye the Mk. 5 snipers and say 'It's cathartic, innit'.

6.01: With three of the ion cannons down, 20 Mk. 2 scouts decide to take a jaunt through the AI homeworld to Murdoch. They almost make it.

6.02.30: The three scout starships are pulled from their current tachyon duties. 33 brave souls make the jump through the Desenan wormhole, hoping for sight of a land previously unknown.

6.02.52: The core heavy beam guard post sitting next to the wormhole to Murdoch annihilates them all.

6.05: Five transports are created. The reincarnated scouts, along with all 5 scout starships, split into two groups. Each enters a transport.

6.06.06: A full cap of railpods and younglings jumps into the Desenan system, with orders to raise hell.

6.08.08: The transports slip in right behind them, and make a dash for Murdoch.

6.06.20: Grav drones catch four of the transports. One, however, with 18 scouts aboard, is nearly at the Murdoch wormhole. It explodes, taking the first hit from the core beam guard post. 6 seconds before it reloads.

6.06.24: Desperately struggling amid rapidly failing cloaking superboost, the scouts reach the Murdoch wormhole. One solitary starship makes it through. The other transports are wiped out, with no survivors. A reprisal wave is announced. But if we have more, new, vital information about the AI then their sacrifice cannot have been for nothing.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh.png)

OH COME ON!

I just ... seriously ... I left the game paused, and had to just walk away for a few minutes. The RNG has been kicking me in the teeth the whole time, but is really taking the piss.

When I came back, to stare blankly at that solitary remaining scout starship, I at least noticed this.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/infoLeak.png)

So, at least I know there's an ARS and an armored golem. Although them showing up by hovering over the cloaked ship list is probably a bug.

6.07.36: 10 spacedocks. 20 Mk. 2 engineers. Railpod (and tiger!) rail cannon is online. Everyone jumps into the AI homeworld.

6.07.47: Scouts report 2,800 ships on planet. Including the entire strategic reserve. Let's see if we can't run this salvage up to reprisal level 2.

6.08.04: I don't think the tigers are even getting a shot off before getting wiped, so I pause them. Just the railpods this time!

6.08.50: 461 cloaked ship reprisal. Scout starships are rapidly repurchased for tachyon support duties.

6.09: Aaand 978 armor ships incoming.

6.09.25: 8,177 ship CPA announced. Well, at least it isn't syncing with the other two waves I guess. At this point I'm fairly sure this CPA has got to be the vast majority of AI ships remaining in the galaxy. On the plus side, I'd rather have the strategic reserve come to me rather than have to fight it on the homeworld.

6.10: Operation railpod is suspended to build up metal reserves as much as possible. Docks are rebuilt at the edge of the grav well, where they can be used defensively. Scout reports from Desenan indicate there are now 200 more ships there than when we started. I'd estimate 2,300 or so are strategic reserve, so draining some of that strength would be welcome.

6.11: 698 cloaked ship wave to sync with the CPA.

6.13: Literally every possible regular ship has been built. Even the three raids, which are likely to be only marginally useful on the defensive. 5 lightning warheads are arrayed near the command station, just in case, and the Martyr stands sentry at wormhole waiting to wipe the first few thousand ships. 1,556 threat. 8,862 incoming wave.

6.14: Railpods are harassing the threat. Merc docks are online and set to build etherjet tractors once metal goes over 500,000. Every little helps.

6.15.03: Half hearted attempt at a rope-a-dope. Surprisingly, the AI takes the bait.

6.15.27: 24 seconds, 1,500 threat removed. With just 4 minutes before the CPA hits too, plenty of time to rebuild. I notice that the attack still isn't beelining for the command station - I realise that the off-centre placement of the mini-forts and rally post is drawing them off to one side. Moving those.

6.17: 2 minutes to CPA. Minefield and some force fields still rebuilding, but should be back up in time. Mini-forts and main fleet are now positioned behind the command station, in a line with the wormhole exit. Lightnings and enclaves under the command station shields. Lyudmila and the sentinal frigates are at the edge of the grav well, also in line. If things go badly here there'll be no escape for her this time.

6.18.59: All defences are back online. A fleet of 950 ships, every single one I can build bar super expensive mercs, waits to take on a force of 8,800. 175,000 excess power from matter converters, although 100k of that will go straight to Lyudmila. I expect fleet losses to have levelled that out by the time the energy collector on Micvarape goes down though.

6.19.00:

This will be bad. I'm expecting to lose the command station early on, I'm just hoping I can keep them away from the railpod fab.

6.19.14: Hang on. There's only 6,415 threat. The CPA was declared for 8,177. I was right, the AI is quite literally sending EVERY SINGLE SHIP IN THE GALAXY after me.

9.19.45: 5 mercenary etherjet tractors sit quietly in the middle of my fleet. I don't think they quite know what they've signed on for.

6.20: A scout moves towards Desenan to scope the situation. Every single dock in the galaxy is paused, except for the 10 on Micvarape building railpods. 20 engineers stand by next to them, under the forcefields surrounding the core sniper turret controller and railpod fab.

6.20.21: The teleport battlestation space dock comes back on. I like teleport battleships, both for their super fast reinforcement speed and their AoE minor electric attacks. Just a shame those 2 ARSes only gave me the one set of ships.

6.20.30. Wave hits. 650 odd eyebots, for 7,100 total threat.

6.20.37: Scouts report only 1,500 of it on Desenan so far. Railpods go to disrupt the carriers. I've got the cash to rebuild them.

6.21.06: Threat is now at 7,101. That was not as effective as I'd hoped.

6.21.20: 16 seconds to rebuild all 192 core railpods. 16 seconds for 18 million damage. Let's just hope the money supply holds out.

6.22.26: Scouts report 2,800 threat on Desenan. It looks like it's moving towards the wormhole.

6.222.39: Contact. By the time all the carriers pop and the initial mines and railpods blow, 1,000 ships are missing within a second. I think I can save the Martyr for now.

6.22.52: 470 attack. 5,272 threat. Not bad for 13 seconds. 20 remains rebuilders start constructing - I should have had these guys ready to repair the minefields.

6.23: 1,000 attack. 391 of which are zenith sieges. This is worth a Martyr.

6.23.10: 670 attack. Cancel that. I'll hold it back for now. I do, however, edge it and the lightning missile the cloaker also hides closer to the wormhole.

6.23.13: Another carrier pops. 1,600 attack, 1,400 of it next to the wormhole. Martyr approaches again.

6.23.17: Oh hell. 4 carriers come in. Combined they have over 3,000 ships. 4,393 attack. 684 threat. Okay, plan. In a couple of seconds, the Martyr will pop. That'll wipe 1,500 ships. The lightning is then there for a follow up if I feel the situation warrants.

6.23.18: Martyr pops. 1,300 kills. Not as many as I would have liked.

6.23.21: My fleet is down to 500 ships. I suddenly realise Lyudmila has been sitting at the edge of the gravity well, switched off. Don't know how I could forget about her.

6.23.37: 2,000 attack. I wave the lightning missiles off. I don't care if the command station goes down, so long as the fabs are okay.

6.23.43: Attack hits the tractor turret wall. And semi-stalls. Unfortunately carriers aren't affected, so stroll past and start disgorging units on the other side.

6.24.02: 1,200 attack on planet. A poll of my forcefields shows an average of 80% on the ones around the home command. A wave announcement - 1,487 missiles frigates in a minute and a half.

6.24.19: Eyebots. 600 eyebots. That was the remaining threat. Luckily all 5 scout starships and 2 decloaker drones are positioned to catch them as they come in.

6.24.50: It's done. The last attackers on Micvarape are down. So why does it still say 198 attack?

6.24.51: Oh hell. 127 eyebots on Kuer, the rest on Senow. Scout starships to the rescue.

6.24.58: Looks like they're all heading for Senow, scouts catch most of them along that path.

6.25.34: 300 fleet ships on Senow, plus all 5 scouts. 83 eyebots. I've got a scout next to the command station, one sitting on the wormhole and the other three desperately scouring the gravity well. Where on earth are they.

6.25.51: They make a run for Kuer. Half get decloaked and die. Everyone lunges after the escapees.

6.26.18: 5 make it to Zarpar. My home planet.

6.26.27: Caught by the 7 remaining tractor turrets on my homeworld, more than one apiece, I laugh as they die. 3,000 scrap metal drifting through the void.

6.27: You'd hardly know I just stopped 7,000 ships. Starship wise I only lost one raid, one enclave and 3 riots, and defences are back at 75% capacity already. Just time to turn the docks back on now to rebuild the triangle ships. Command station forcefields never went below 50%, no power loss and no command station loss.

6.29: Lyudmila is immune to blackholes. Lyudmila fires energy bursts, which I don't think are officially classes as sniper rounds. How did I not see this before.

6.30: A cloaker starship warily leads the 4 unused lightning warheads to the edge of the gravity field. 192 railpods prepare to warp into the AI homeworld, to see just how atrophied the strategic reserve are.

6.30.06: Bar 40-odd guardians and starships, the only things on Desenan are the 1,500 missile frigates from earlier. The strategic reserve don't even twitch. Seems like the perfect time to attack.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 07, 2014, 06:47:26 PM
6.0.01: Special Forces command posts on Kuer, Senow and Micvarape all mysteriously explode. When asked what happened, the sub-commanders shiftily eye the Mk. 5 snipers and say 'It's cathartic, innit'.
The Mysterious Massacre of April 7th.  Thousands of Special Forces Guard Posts have simultaneous and very, very final accidents.


OH COME ON!
Surely you must have said something untoward about the RNG's algorithms?  I've seldom seen it in such form.


And I see you've accidentally _ another CPA plus waves, and now the AI's backfield should be about completely empty (one advantage of the 10-planet cage match working in your favor, there).  And even the SR is temporarily depleted.  Something tells me that if you can't take that HW now you can't take it at all.


You'd hardly know I just stopped 7,000 ships.
Four words: Railpods and Area Mines.  A true horror to AI offensives.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 07, 2014, 07:17:23 PM
Something tells me that if you can't take that HW now you can't take it at all.

Sadly, I think you may be right. I've tried about another hour and a half of play from this point, even save scumming back to it twice. My very best effort came from replacing the warp command station with a military to get my first actual wave in 4 hours. Them being on the planet, and my fleet elsewhere, was enough to get the 1,500 missile frigates to attack me and leave me an entirely ship free AI homeworld.

I jumped my entire 950 ship fleet in. I managed to get the first grav reactor down to 89% before they got wiped. This is the best possible outcome that I had. The ship slowing and grav drones from three different grav posts are just quite simply far too much to overcome. One on its own would be a nightmare, 3 is impossible.

Things that could have worked, but didn't:



So yeah, I think I'll have to gracefully retire this one at the 6 hour point.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 07, 2014, 07:22:50 PM
If you have a save I can take a look at why the penetrator wouldn't fire on the grav reactor (you were targeting a grav reactor, I assume; you said something about a station).

Making MkV (and maybe MkIV) Jumpships blackhole immune would be reasonable.  I think they were all previously so but I changed it to not be that way, as otherwise they tended to trivialize BHMs.

Anyway, your blood pressure may thank you for retiring this one, whatever changes might come :)
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 07, 2014, 08:00:10 PM
Hmm, well this is wierd. Have the attached save anyway. Sometimes the penetrator can fire, sometimes it doesn't seem to. Possibly some strange interaction with the radar dampening, maybe it jitters just out of attack range? Both golem and scouts are on planet, so it should have vision. I also just realised that the cursed golem probably can fire too, it's just not radar dampening immune so it needs to get within 5,500 range.

Anyway, off the back of this save I can easily wipe that first grav reactor and escape with the golem intact. Lose the entire rest of the fleet, and then the special forces show up to buffet people with their shields (seriously, 30 odd riots with shields have an interesting knock-back effect). So having me try this again may just have restored my faith in this game...
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 07, 2014, 09:25:45 PM
Just tested with the penetrator: I have to get it within radar dampening range (and it won't close there normally on an attack order, it seems, and that's a bug), but when I do and give the order it happily fires a large bolt of unguardpostium.

Though I daresay in that particular attack, it was quite superfluous.  That golem is to be feared.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: TechSY730 April 08, 2014, 02:03:49 AM
And this is the risk of 10 planet maps.

You get less on offense due to the fact players have so few planets they can take, but the AI's defenses are just as strong.

Then again, the game does warn you that <=30 planets can have...weird balance complications. ;)
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 08, 2014, 03:30:26 AM
As an experiment I just tried warping in the golem and a cap of fleet ships, without any starships, in to the AI homeworld. The golem made it all the way across the gravity well and took out the unshielded grav reactor on the far side. Unfortunately though doing so took it down to 40%, and when the special forces showed up it rapidly died.

So as long as I let the golem close within radar damapening range, and so long as I'm okay with this being a suicide mission, I can take down the two unshielded grav reactors. That just leaves the one sitting under the Mk. 5 forcefield. That Titanite can get me a penetrator - if I run it quietly under two cloaker starships superboosts while the fleet ships perform distraction duties I may just be able to manually navigate it to within firing range.

There's a plan then. But at what cost...
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: Aklyon April 08, 2014, 11:03:30 AM
I think its the CSGs that are making things harder than they need to be. Theres not enough space in this map to really find them before the homeworlds.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 08, 2014, 12:39:38 PM
I think its the CSGs that are making things harder than they need to be. Theres not enough space in this map to really find them before the homeworlds.

Oh, undoubtedly. That's part of the !!fun!! of playing on 10 planet maps, an AI homeworld almost always cuts the graph and forces you to hop across it to get the CSGs on the other side. I just count myself lucky that one of those grav reactors wasn't replaced by a core raid engine...

I've managed this on diff 8 before, but never diff 10. Actually, I don't think I've even tried diff 10 since back in the 4.x something days. 9 is my sweet spot.

On reflection, suiciding the golem and using that Titanite on a penetrator would leave me in too bad of a position. I need the capability to shuttle ships across the rest of the AI worlds quickly and easily, which means I need a jumpship. As such this AAR is going on temporary hiatus until 7.019 'Help me cheese the grav reactors' gets released.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 08, 2014, 12:50:45 PM
As such this AAR is going on temporary hiatus until 7.019 'Help me cheese the grav reactors' gets released.
The MkV-jumpship's immunity to blackholes is already in for 7.019 :)  If there's some big crash thing that comes up I'll fix that and do a mid-week release.  Otherwise I'm planning on next Monday, as TLF's schedule isn't really amenable to me doing multiple AIW releases per week during this stage.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 11, 2014, 07:56:31 PM
6.36.21: Everybody's favourite surfer dude says 'Whoa, deja vu'. Something has changed in the Matrix.

6.38: Railpod bombardment of the AI homeworld begins again - if we're going to have any chance of wiping the first grav reactor, we need to get rid of those pesky starships first. And I'd rather not throw away the entire fleet - including star ships - to do it. I believe the only reason I was able to get Lyudmila to take down the reactors before is that the AI were bugged, and hence not prioritising her.

6.41.13: Jumpships are up. Just look at these little beauties:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/howHigh.png)

25 ship capacity, and only attrition on AI homeworlds. That means I can sit them on a core world indefinitely, if I wanted. They do, however, cost an extortionate 30,000 energy each.

6.41.15: Jumpships arrive on Micvarape. One eager bomber starship and 24 scouts board the first one.

6.41.36: Jumpship arrives on Murdoch. It appears to have taken no attrition damage at all on its trip over the homeworld - maybe because it was there less than a second. This is better than I hoped.

6.41.38: Cloaker explodes. Scouts, minus the bomber, hop back into the jumpship. Let's see what we really have here:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/Murdoch.png)

ARS and armored golem, as we already knew, plus a railcluster fab and a core lightning turret controller. Nice enough place, I suppose. Onwards!

6.41.42: Jumpship arrives on Rakalurn. Scouts pop out to take in the evening air.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/Rakalurn.png)

Holy. Mother. Lode. Batman. This is by far the tastiest planet I've ever seen. Let's count this up. 2 (!) artillery golems. One black widow golem. The obligatory ARS. 2 backup servers, a core flak turret controller, a core MRLS controller. Five different fabs - Plasma starship, leech starship, decoy, maws and zenith re-processors. An advanced factory. A spire archive. A selection of tasty asteroids. And a cuddly toy...

Sorry, make that 'and the first AIP reducing structure I've encountered to date'.

Decoys, fantastic for obvious reasons. The re-processors, well I do have a major economy problem. The archive is vital with the limited number of planets. And the artillery golems. Hang on a second...

6.41.43: Yup, grav reactors are immune to artillery ammo.

F@*#

Also, that Data centre is currently under the combined forcefields of the 53 special forces riot control ships.

6.41.46: Scouts pack up, and we move on to Roadlinl. Huh, that's strange. My jumpship is now moving at a snails pace...

6.41.52: Oh hey, remember that 'Grav Driller' sub-type on the first AI? Looks like I just met my first one. And it disables teleportation. Right then, let's see how juicy this place is:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/Roadlinl.png)

Hive golem, core laser controller, 3 fabs this time (engineer, grav ripper and protector starship). No ARS, and a dire guardian lair. Ah. Not as nice as the last place then, that guardian lair in particular could cause some serious issues.

6.41.55: Rather than crawl across the entire system at 28 speed, let's back-track through Murdoch.

6.42.06: Well whaddya know. Another grav driller on Zupreape. Joy. This one also has a translocator command station, which just seems mean.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/Zupreape.png)

On the plus side, a regen golem (as if I'm ever gonna be able to afford the 250,000 energy for that), core spider turret controller, starship fab and zenith siege engine fab. This one gets low priority, I think.

6.42.37: I run into another problem. The jumpships aren't immune to forcefields, and there's one covering the wormhole entrance to the last AI homeworld. Backtracking time.

6.43.05: Oh for the love of pete. There's also a spire shield guardpost covering the exit back to Murdoch. I'm stuck. The jumpship starts wending its slow way to the extremities of the grav well.

6.43.34: In protest of the cruel and unusual punishment meted out to its exploring brother, the second jumpship loads 2 raid starships and goes to take out the only data centre in the entire universe.

6.43.38: One raid survives, which is better than I expected. Back down to 84 AIP.

6.45.47: Apparently the scouts were still de-cloaked from their earlier tachyon encounter. Luckily they recloak quickly enough for two to survive the Ion cannon bombardment, otherwise the trapped jumpship would have been left cold and alone, in the dark, on the edge of a hostile AI system.

6.47: The railpod bombardment has attracted the special forces, but not really done much else. It may actually be easier to just sacrifice the entire fleet to take out that first grav reactor.

6.48: 1,300 bombers to Micvarape. Moving all mobile ships elsewhere, in the hopes it might encourage the now-threat starships to join the attack once it hits.

6.49: Just noticed that the AI is alerted on the planet the jumpship is on. Which means the second AI homeworld is alerted.

F@*#

6.50: Starship threat on Desenan didn't take the bait unfortunately. Still, 5 million salvage is better than a kick in the teeth I suppose. Swapping the military station back out with the warp jammer to take the homeworld off alert.

So in conclusion, I still can't take any of the grav reactors out yet but at least I can teleport 25 ships at a time right up next to them. I can also shuttle 25 ships at a time across to the newly scouted planets. That would be 50, except for aggravating shield positioning. Rakalurn looks immensely tempting, and what I'm probably going to do is take that next. It also won't put the AI homeworlds on alert (any more than the one already is), so I can use it to attract waves. Plus it has a ridiculous number of goodies on it.

I'm a little disappointed that the Dyson sphere appears to have gone MIA, I was kinda hoping the gatlings might be helpful. Unless it's on the AI homeworld, of course...

State of the union:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/union.png)


EDIT:

OOoohh, did you know that hackers are transportable? And that as I've only done a single hack so far, to remove those pesky tackle drone launchers, I'm still on hacking response 10 (very low)? Looks like it's time to do a stealthy hacker insertion to get 2 of those data backups at once, seeing as the AI won't start dropping tachyon explosions on me for a while yet.

Might give me a potential solution to the force field issue too ... are spire shield guard posts a valid target for sabotage hacks, and if not why not ;)
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 11, 2014, 08:21:22 PM
ARS and armored golem, as we already knew, plus a railcluster fab and a core lightning turret controller. Nice enough place, I suppose. Onwards!
Railclusters are insanely good combatants (kind of like a starship that focused on dps rather than tankiness), and are excellent at killing fast-moving drones (like the grav drones) fairly far out from the group, diminishing the aoe effect.

2 (!) artillery golems. One black widow golem. The obligatory ARS. 2 backup servers, a core flak turret controller, a core MRLS controller. Five different fabs - Plasma starship, leech starship, decoy, maws and zenith re-processors. An advanced factory. A spire archive. A selection of tasty asteroids. And a cuddly toy...
And a partridge in a pear tree.

Hive golem, core laser controller, 3 fabs this time (engineer, grav ripper and protector starship).
Protector Starships are one of those "ok, I know these are overpowered to a borderline-absurd degree, but I haven't the heart to nerf them" units.  They won't kill much for you, but if you can get your hands on some I guaruntee you'll be pleased with what they do for fleet survivability.  Especially if you can keep your fleet from getting too badly swarmed.  Of course, with grav reactors and a massive SF blob that may not be avoidable.  Still, I think they could make the difference between successfully getting the majority of your fleet into range of a grav reactor and having a "dude, where's my fleet?" moment.


6.42.37: I run into another problem. The jumpships aren't immune to forcefields, and there's one covering the wormhole entrance to the last AI homeworld. Backtracking time.

6.43.05: Oh for the love of pete. There's also a spire shield guardpost covering the exit back to Murdoch. I'm stuck. The jumpship starts wending its slow way to the extremities of the grav well.
Man, that RNG's playing for keeps... literally.


I'm a little disappointed that the Dyson sphere appears to have gone MIA, I was kinda hoping the gatlings might be helpful. Unless it's on the AI homeworld, of course...
Oh, sorry, I should have noticed and mentioned it: the dyson doesn't happen on maps that small.  Same with some of the other factions, just because there's not enough room to keep them from being right next to a homeworld or something crazy like that.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 12, 2014, 07:03:32 AM
6.53: Operation hack the planet is go. Jumpship takes a hacker to the extremities of Rakalurn's grav well, if all goes to plan in roughly 5 minutes time I'll be up a set of armor ships and a set of grav drains.

6.54: 25 youngling tigers are teleported to Murdoch and told to get rid of the counter-spy - it doesn't work, as they need 10 seconds to reload after getting out of the transport.

6.56: The pair of heavy bomber starships get wiped too. Maybe I should have gone after that OMD first.

6.57: I make what should have been the obvious choice all along. 25 railpods to the edge of the grav well. Counter-spy is down, now I can get scout coverage up on murdoch. I'll repeat this trick for the ion cannons and OMDs.

6.58: Plenty of zombies milling about on Murdoch thanks to the hacking. I'm sure they'll throw themselves at my defences soon enough. All ion cannons on Rakalurn down, and all but one (covered by a FF) on Murdoch. Both now have scout coverage.

6.59: So, let's start considering options for Rakalurn. It has a threatening eye, which is nasty. 3 MRLS posts, 3 needlers, 2 cloakers, 1 missile and 1 command station shield. Even with the best multipliers in the world, all of those are going to require a fair bit of micro to take down. Having said that everything except the MRLS there is weak to my zenith starship, so let's see what an attack squad of 24 railpods and that baby can do.

7.00: Despite the 1,900 ships currently milling around on Rakalurn, 2 cloaker and 1 needler post are down. The zenith starship did get eaten along the way though ... DISASSEMBLERRRR! *shakes fist*

Also, my hacks finished. -51 HaP, but I have grav drains and armor ships now. Neither are particularly essential, but bulking up the fleet is always good. The anti-light on the armors might be handy too for guard post cleanup duties.

7.01: 708 cloaked ship wave - scout starships are in a position to tachyon it. But then it's going into threat anyway, as I put up a warp command station again.

7.03: All needlers are down, but the missile is under a Mk. 3 forcefield. MRLSes are not susceptible to railpods and the station shield is command grade, so no luck there.

7.04: A cloaker starship, plasma siege starship and 19 bombers walk into a bar. The command station shield generator explodes. That's one way to get around the out-of-transport reload times.  Although the 64 riot control ships buffeting everyone with shields makes for an interesting experience, especially given they also have an extremely aggravating habit of flying over the guardpost just as the bombers are about to fire.

7.06: Mk. 1 bombers aren't going to do it for the MRLS posts, not enough firepower. Time to bring out the cloaked Mk. 5 Youngling Tigers.

7.11: It takes roughly 3 trips per MRLS, but 2 go down soon enough. The last is slap-bang next to a tachyon, so that tactic won't work. Jumpships really do inspire super-micro.

7.12: Say, so here's an interesting tactic you may not have encountered before. Jump a spirecraft builder, a cloaker starship and 19 Mk. 2 engineers next to an asteroid field deep in enemy space. Jump 25 grav drains into orbit at the exact opposite extremity of the grav well, to absorb sniper alpha and draw off all ~2,000 ships on the planet (including special forces). While they're distracted, start speed building Mk. 3 rams on an ebonite asteroid - this will take about 8 seconds. Of course rams aren't transportable, but still...

7.13: Missile guard post under the shield explodes. Tachyon protected MRLS guard post explodes. Just the command station left. Oh hey, what d'you know, with the help of some friendly younglings that explodes too. Rakalurn status: Cleansed.

7.14: Just before the command station explodes, reprisal level one. Which then disappears, as I've boosted AIP by 20. Considering I just completely annihilated every fixed structure on a planet while the entire special forces fleet was sitting on it, I'm suprised it took this long.

7.17: Let's give things a few minutes to settle down. Looks like the special forces have left, so that's taken a huge chunk of ships off planet. Scouts indicate they've gone to Zupreape. Unfortunately we've still got 800-odd ships milling about on Rakalurn, presumably the remaining two rams count as threat enough to keep them there.

7.18: Railpods undertake a tachyon extermination mission across the known universe. Murdoch and Rakalurn are quickly divested of any sentinels, although I leave the AI homeworlds and Zupreape alone, for obvious reasons. 1,300 missile frigate wave announced.

7.19: Railpods go to take tachyons out on Roadlinl. Oh lord. Oh dear lord. 2 core raid engine attacks are announced. 2,800 combined Mk. 4 ships.

Well, now I know what the brutal picks for the second AI homeworld are ... why, why couldn't it be a Core CPA post! Damn you RNG!

Even worse, my supposedly perma-cloaked jumpship takes damage on the way out. It's now down to 21% health. Maybe a beam winged it?

7.20: Under cover of friendly cloaker starship, the rams move to Murdoch. Hopefully that should get the remaining ships on Rakalurn to move on.

So, scores on the doors:

AIP: 104
Threat: 5,200. Half of this is Mk. 4.
Time: 7.20
Elapsed Time: 16.55

There's enough threat now for them to make an attack on the chokepoint at Micvarape, so I'm expecting that in the next 10 minutes or so. After that I should be able to jump a colony ship over to Rakalurn and get my hands on 6(!) new types of ship, an advanced factory and 2 new types of core turrets. Where I'm going to get the energy to run all these from, of course, is another question.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 12, 2014, 03:36:12 PM
7.04: A cloaker starship, plasma siege starship and 19 bombers walk into a bar.
*Thunk*


7.12: Say, so here's an interesting tactic you may not have encountered before. Jump a spirecraft builder, a cloaker starship and 19 Mk. 2 engineers next to an asteroid field deep in enemy space. Jump 25 grav drains into orbit at the exact opposite extremity of the grav well, to absorb sniper alpha and draw off all ~2,000 ships on the planet (including special forces). While they're distracted, start speed building Mk. 3 rams on an ebonite asteroid - this will take about 8 seconds. Of course rams aren't transportable, but still...
That deserves theme music of some kind.


2 core raid engine attacks are announced. 2,800 combined Mk. 4 ships.
Putting military ships on a core world without first scouting the homeworld.  On 10/10.  Now THAT is a recipe for surprise pain ;)


Well, now I know what the brutal picks for the second AI homeworld are ... why, why couldn't it be a Core CPA post! Damn you RNG!
You know what 2 of them are.  And you know what 1 of them isn't (core raid or core CPA).  That last pick still has potential.  And the RNG truly is in rare form here.


Even worse, my supposedly perma-cloaked jumpship takes damage on the way out. It's now down to 21% health. Maybe a beam winged it?
Probably from banging its head on the desk after finding out what the RNG did this time.


There's enough threat now for them to make an attack on the chokepoint at Micvarape, so I'm expecting that in the next 10 minutes or so. After that I should be able to jump a colony ship over to Rakalurn and get my hands on 6(!) new types of ship, an advanced factory and 2 new types of core turrets. Where I'm going to get the energy to run all these from, of course, is another question.
I honestly don't know how you're going to keep all those juicy irreplaceables on Rakalurn alive, unless it's to put a normal command station back up on your main chokepoint and put a warp jammer on Rak.  Even then, whatever free threat it does manage to accumulate...
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 13, 2014, 09:19:32 AM
7.20: The AI decides that even with my new friends, I might be getting a bit lonely. And sends 2,150 bombers ships to comfort me. Threat is now bigger than the third CPA, and with considerably more Mk. 4 ships.

7.20.30: Well, I don't have anything else to spend my money on while waiting except mercs. Did I mention I currently have 9 matter converters, only 45,000 energy and a total economy of 4,500 metal/s - almost half of which is going towards matter converters? I'm sure I turned the trader on in this game, where's my zenith power generator!

7.21.40: 200-odd youngling tigers warp in to Micvarape. Must have come from the raid engines.

7.22.02: 7,397 threat.

7.22.11: First serious threat warps in. Around 3,000. Scouts indicate ~1,500 is still on Murdoch though, everything else is off the radar which means at Desenan. 61 mercenary etherjet tractors and 6 parasistes stand with my forces - I literally don't have the energy for any more.

7.22.30: Here come the missile frigates. 1,000 of them pop out of a carrier, and are immune to my minefield.

7.22.50: Command station goes down. 5,300 threat left. I'm going to lose Micvarape.

7.23: All forces ordered to retreat to Kuer. The turrets, mines and engineers desperately cranking out railpods will be left behind.

7.23.35: Raids take out the core sniper turret controller.

7.23.43: Mk. 5 railpod fab goes down.

7.24.30: 3,000 threat. 2,000 of that on Micvarape.

7.25.35: Last of the turrets go down. 2,762 threat remaining. 30 Mk. 2 engineers are desperately building defences on Kuer, while refleeting in still in progress.

7.25.45: Constructors are paused, with only 340 fleet ships remaining / rebuilt on Kuer.

7.26.20: They attack faster than I though they would. The defences aren't in place yet, minefields only half built and most of the new turrets are only 90% complete. The engineer blob is manually ordered to quick-build individual turrets, while Lyudmila is sent to the opposite side of the grav well in hope of drawing off some of the attack.

7.26.52: A single lightning warhead is used to decimate the Zenith siege engines - roughly 500 casualties, although a lot of them are bombers. I can't many of those closing on the command station forcefields at once, especially given the massive amounts of starships in this attack.

7.27.31: The human resistance show up, just in the nick of time. 160(!) ships are likely to make a big difference at this stage.

7.27.17: 296 attack. 636 threat remaining. Fighting is desperately clustered around the command station on Kuer, but I've broken the back of this.

7.27.54: Command station goes down. 170 ships enemy ships remaining on the planet, a large proportion of them starships. Hopefully they'll go start chasing Lyudmila around the grav well rather than focus on the irreplacables.

7.28.30: Last of the command station attackers are down. 8 zenith starships are still chasing after Lyudmila, who has now made two entire laps of the gravity well.

7.29.52: Last of the Mk. 4 Zenith starships goes down. Man those things are tough. I swap Kuer for a warp jammer command station, purely to take better advantage of the 11 million scrap still sitting on the planet. Time to recoup, and rebuild.

The loss of the sniper turrets and the railpods was a big blow. On the kinda bright side though, it means I now have an irreplacable free planet to act as a wave stopper. Even if it means sitting right next to the AI homeworld without a warp jammer command station.

I seriously wouldn't have been able to keep the core missile controller and impulse reactor fab on Kuer up without the human resistance showing up when they did ... maybe the RNG is mellowing out?
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 13, 2014, 12:02:02 PM
7.23.35: Raids take out the core sniper turret controller.

7.23.43: Mk. 5 railpod fab goes down.
Oh man.  That's painful.

Still, good job bending without breaking.  With the goodies on the other side of the homeworld you may still be able to stay in the game.

But Railpods are hard to live without once you get used to them, I think.


I seriously wouldn't have been able to keep the core missile controller and impulse reactor fab on Kuer up without the human resistance showing up when they did ... maybe the RNG is mellowing out?
Maybe it likes to make the AI headdesk sometimes too ;)

It is very satisfying when an ally faction bails you out.  I've seen the Roaming Enclaves pull off some pretty incredible saves.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 13, 2014, 01:16:17 PM
7.31: Rebuilding is going well. Between Micvarape and Kuer there is roughly 25 million scrap, which is a cool 2.5 mil retrievable @ 10% warp jammer efficiency. Moving all the defences back to Micvarape - except, obviously, the remaining core snipers on Kuer and the homeworld.

7.32: Scouts sent to Desenan indicate there's still 300-odd threat there - including far too many starships for me to get through to that grav reactor. The human resistance are, obviously, throwing their lives away uselessly at this point by filtering into the AI homeworld in ones and twos.

7.33: I just realised that while I was waiting for the raid engine threat blob I could have snuck one of those two rams onto Zupreape and taken down the spire shield guardpost trapping the second jumpship. Too late now though, the raids will have recharged. Interestingly, there are 2,100 ships on Murdoch at the moment all clustered around my rams. Including, gulp, tachyon micro-fighters.

7.35: 941 bombers to Micvarape. 941 ... seems a bit anaemic for a wave. However, my defences are still rebuilding.

7.37: Half the area mines were up by the time they came in - not a problem. The 13 bomber starships was a bit rude though.

7.38: So, Rakalurn. This place still has 800 odd ship milling around it, and it's well out of supply so I can't beach head. I send in 25 younglings as part of Operation Jumpernickle, to see if I can't persuade them to leave. The younglings die, at they are wont to do, but the ships don't want to budge. Why they're hanging around there I don't know, but it looks like I'll need a fleet to clear them out.

7.41: 1,250 bombers to Micvarape. That's more like it.

7.43: Bombers and area mines go together like Caesium and water. I.e, things explode violently.

7.44.30: Operation Jumpernickle resumes. First 23 sentinel frigates and 2 scout starships (for counter-sniper coverage) are jumped as far away from any enemy ships as possible. 3 seconds later 16 lightning torpedo frigates join them, along with more sentinels. 3 seconds later, 2 enclave, 4 leeches, 2 bombers, 1 spire, 1 zenith and 2 flagship starships join them along with a few grav drains. 3 seconds later, 25 more grav drains. Then the youngling tigers start coming ... you get the picture.

7.45: 30 seconds later, 200 enemy ships are down and a fleet of 260 is on the planet. Admittedly, about 100 of those are drones and missiles. It's the 41 riot control starships that are the real issue here, so bombers and younglings are the highest shipment priority. With a few missile frigs to take out the fighters that have just started arriving from the centre of the planet.

7.46: 381 friendly ships on planet. 150 remaining enemy ships. Jumpernickle is a roaring success.

7.47.21: The last enemy sniper guardian goes down. The 600 fleet ships on the planet are told to FRD next to the spire archive, we'll wait it out a minute or two to see if any more ships want to trickle through from other planets. In the mean time, they get to work taking out the special forces guard post.

7.50: My economy is still in the dumps, and I don't really want to start on that spire archive until I know I can defend it. However getting this command station up ASAP will mean more metal and the ability to warp ships in directly using gates, so I might just do it in the next minute or two.

In the meantime, the spire jumpship pops by with an old science station. Which indicates the ARS will give me either space planes, MRLSes or protector starships. Man, I hope it's protector starships.

7.51: Okay, warp jammer command station going up next to the advanced factory and 7 (!) irreplaceables at the bottom of the grav well. Constructors are paused so defences can be speed built.

7.51.07: Space planes. Why did it have to be space planes. On the plus side though ... very cheap, in energy cost and metal. Fast. Bonus against heavy hulls, and they have radar dampening themselves. I may just have to try throwing a cap of these at the grav reactor and see what happens.

7.51.30: 4 forcefields surrounding my home command explode. They're better used on Rakalurn. 10 total shields go up, including 2 Mk. 2s. That means 10 on Rakalurn, 9 on Micvarape, 3 on Kuer, 1 on Senow and 4 on my homeworld.

7.53: Time to think about turrets. With the sad loss of the sniper controller, but the gain of two news ones, I now have Mk. 5 needlers, MRLSes, missiles and flak. A full cap of each goes up on Micvarape and Rakalurn. I think Kuer also warrants a full cap, as my second line defence. However due to energy constraints I think I'm going to have to blow up all the turrets on the homeworld, save the now irreplacable sniper mk. 5s and maybe a dozen missile turrets. Of the remaining Mk. 1 turrets, snipers, beams, tractors and gravs are split equally between Micvarape and Rakalurn. Everything else, like lasers and lightnings, stays on Micvarape.

7.56: First 4,000 knowledge from the spire archive. After careful consideration I think it's going on Mil 2 command stations. 20,000 tachyon range will go well with the eyebots. 144 metal is more than econ 1 stations give me, and when you take the foldout into account 3 stations will mean +250 metal/s. 8% salvage, which is close to the 10% from warp jammers. And a 50% attack boost - which, given the last attack, is now vital.

7.57: Minefields are re-aligned to adjust for the fact that Micvarape no longer has irreplacables, and half move to Rakalurn. They all go around the Roadlinl wormhole - after careful consideration, Murdoch is my next target. Primarily because I don't want to piss off the raid engines.

7.58: Golems. This one's easy, I'm not going to bother with them. +15 AIP isn't worth it for the artillery, which I can't use on the AI homeworlds anyway. The black widow is tempting, but essentially not worth a planet's AIP on its own. If it were 10, I might consider it.

7.59: Let's talk fabs.

Decoy drones - nice, these will be really useful for survivability.

Leech Starship Mk. 5 - <3 reclamation. Especially as starship energy costs don't scale, so this costs me the same as a Mk. 1.

Plasma Starship Mk. 5 - 4 million attack, this could be a handy little anti-guardpost ship.

Spire Maw Mk.5 - Can swallow up to 250 ships. And I have 5 of them, so these little beauties can essentially swallow an entire wave on their own. These will be fantastic on defence.

Core Zenith Reprocessors - 224,000 attack. 10 million health. Massive bonuses to starship hulls (8x!). Even better, they give you money for killing stuff! Again, these will be fantastic on defence. Heck, I'm almost tempted to jumpship them next to the grav reactors and have them take a bite out of that - 8 core reprocessors, that's 2 million damage. x8 for the hull type, that's 16. 4 second reload time, the grav reactor goes down in 4 shots or 16 seconds.

8.00: 8 hours in. I've got some very juicy new toys - I didn't realise quite what a difference some of those fabs could make. My economy is still in the toilet, and will be for a while, so the next 15-20 minutes will be building defences then starting to bring the fleet up. The remaining 5,500 knowledge will probably go on lightning torpedo frigate 3s, to make use of my advanced factory. That'll leave me 1,500 - not sure what to spent it on. Might save it, then get Mk. 3 sentinels later.

Strategic goals - Now that I have taken Rakalurn, I've just realised that the A network shield generators have blown up. Only Murdoch has an ARS left. Zupreape has the last remaining core shield generator (network B), but I need to go through Murdoch to get to it anyway. And I can't just jump through it, as my second jumpship is still stuck behing the blasted shield guardpost. Of course, that means I need to work out some way of taking down the core raid engines...

Oh, and I'm sure I'm due for another CPA sometime soon. Here's Rakalurn:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/Rakalurn-mine.png)
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 13, 2014, 04:14:36 PM
An excellent and daring colony hop, and you're more than back in the game :) 

Though I do not envy you the task of holding Rak in the midst of that next CPA.

Though I also wonder just how many ships the AI will even be able to muster for it.  Even the Strategic Reserve has a bottom, as iirc you found last time.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 13, 2014, 05:25:38 PM
As you predicted, the CPA budget wasn't the largest. Still a touch hairy though. Turns out Mk. 4 lightning frigates are even more awesome than I expected.

8.02: Dire guardian spawning in 10 minutes on Roadlinl. Oh yeah, I forgot about that guy. And 2,792 tachyon micro-fighters to Micvarape, which could be interesting depending on whether the mines finish building.

8.04: Mines aren't up. Tachyons pretty much wipe my fleet, then 1,000 run away to join the threat fleet. On the plus side, 4 million salvage nicely speeds up my defence building on Rakalurn.

8.06.30: Thanks to that generous scrap donation, defences are now up again. Time to refleet. As I'm expecting Rakalurn to bear the brunt of any CPA, warp gates go up there to receive all the fleet ships. Maw, reprocessor and decoy drone fabs are started up.

8.15: 2,512 missile frigates to Micvarape. All fleet ships, bar 2 maws and the Mk.3 and 4 lightning are up. Jumpship starts the bus service to get the heavy hitter back to take on the wave.

8.18: No problem, the maws did a bang-up job of eating everyone. Fun fact: You can transport maws who are transporting ships. Second fun fact: ARSes are immune to transport. Did someone once hatch a cunning plan involving maws stealing all the ARSes in the galaxy?

8.19: Out of energy again, and I haven't even built any of my fancy new starships yet. 2 more matter converters please, Jeeves!

8.21: Wow Mk. 4 lightning torpedo frigates take a long time to build.

8.22: 11,110 ships for a CPA. 11,110 ships. Here's hoping that the AI doesn't actually have close to that many ships to free up. Plasma siege and leech Mk. 5 starships begin building, and I'll use one of the remaining ebonites on a Martyr I think.

8.23: About time I moved those rams off Murdoch and took it off alert, huh?

8.25: 172 space planes go low power and pop their heads in to Murdoch, then start moving towards the Desenan wormhole.

8.25.15: Yeah, they made it about 1/10th of the way to the grav reactor. Well, at least they were cheap.

8.30: I notice two cloaker guardposts on Murdoch. The jumpship puts 1 reprocessor next to each. The guardposts die in a single shot - right before the reprocessor gets sniped.

8.31: CPA hits. As I suspected, the AI doesn't actually have enough ships to make good on it's threat.


Huh, apparently there still aren't any mark V ships left in the entire galaxy, despite it being 2 hours since the last CPA. Combined with accumulated threat, this is 6,435 ships. So, considerably less dangerous than the attack that wiped out Micvarape.

Oh and I just found the dire guardian who disappeared. Dire sniper on Murdoch, that explains why the reprocessors popped so easy.

8.31.28: Well, that was kinda dumb. 400 ships on murdoch obviously assess the strength of the threat on the planets next to them, and hop into Rakalurn. Including the dire sniper.

8.31.57: The sniper dies.

8.32.30: 1,000 attack on Rakalurn. Over 500 lightning torpedos are in the air. 4,600 threat not yet committed.

8.32.45: The last of the broken golems dies. At least they distracted them a bit, I suppose.

8.32.50: Oh joy, 78 marauders just showed up to join in the fun. And of course, they spawn right behind my command station.

8.34: The maws eat some grav drains. I like these guys. 3,130 threat on Murdoch - I'm expecting the second wave in the next minute or so. 11 million scrap on Rakalurn, and I've already got a million in the bank. 20 new Mk. 2 engineers are created to help speed build the leech Mk. 5, and they still can't keep up with the positive income rate.

8.35.02: 1,000 attack on Micvarape - looks like the remaining threat is beelining to the homeworld. Jumpship starts shipping lightning torpedo frigates, starships, maws, reprocessors etc.

8.36: 3,000 attack on Micvarape - this place is going down again.

8.36.42: Decoy drones, that's what we need.

8.36.47: Oh come on. 3,566(!) ship fighter frigate wave announced for Micvarape. That's ... excessive. Warps gates are paused, production on that side of the homeworld is redirected to Kuer. Of course that doesn't really help if you haven't lost many ships.

8.36.48: Oh hey, Lyudmila is on Micvarape. Better turn her on.

8.37.05: 1,000 attack left. All ships told to retreat to the edge of the grav well - no point in getting the lightning frigates blown up.

8.37.14: Command station pops. Energy brownout. Lyudmila goes offline to compensate.

8.38: Only threat left on Micvarape is 100-odd eyebots. Scout starships start to search and destroy. Command station can be rebuilt in 17 seconds.

8.37.17: Wave hits. Rebuilders from Kuer are en-route to put the command station back up.

8.37.26: Military command back up. 20 rebuilders and 25 engineers are told to FRD those turrets.

8.38.41: Command station goes down again. The lightning torpedoes, though, are doing a real number on the fighters.

8.40: It's over. And I have So. Much. Money. 542 threat remaining in the Galaxy that decided not to join in.

8.43: 1,700 bombers to Micvarape. I think I can let the mines and turrets catch these.

8.44: So, 8 zenith reprocessors leave a Mk. 5 MRLS guard post with just 600,000 health. The four on Murdoch are going down pretty soon then. Although on reflection, younglings are probably cheaper.

8.45: Caesium, mines, bombers. I reckon that took about 8 seconds.

8.55: MRLSes down. That leaves us with two command station shield, 4 missiles, 1 needler and 2 spire command station shields to take down before the threatening eye disappears. Gotta love core worlds.

8.56: Hmm, space planes have a bonus against light. Turns out they can do about 20% damage per volley to a Mk. 5 missile turret. It'll take a few caps of them to actually take a missile guard post down, but hey they're cheap. Only 50,000 metal for a cap. The fact the AI loves leeching them, on the other hand, is a tad more worrying.

Oh, I forgot about the Mk. 3 fortress. A pair of rams to the face takes care of that, and I might as well get 4 more from another ebonite asteroid.

8.57: Oh, I forgot rams are expensive. Reprisal level 1. Wait, 1,000 fighters? Really? That ain't much of a reprisal.

9.00: Well, that wasn't too bad. CPA was dealt with handily, and I now have a full fleet of new toys. Guard posts are starting to explode on Murdoch, and I reckon within 20 minutes I'll cap it. That'll net me an ARS, Railcluster fab and enough knowledge for Mk 3 and 4 sentinal frigates. The planet itself, I'm not sure whether to just slap a mil 2 on it and get used to the idea of waves taking it out, or put another warp jammer on.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 13, 2014, 06:55:17 PM
Yea, the AI just doesn't have the population for that kind of CPA anymore. and at only ~100 AIP even a 10/10 strategic reserve can't account for 10k ships.  Higher AIP would change that, of course.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 13, 2014, 07:44:53 PM
9.01: Rams take out a missile guard post under a forcefield, and smack up the two shield posts. Unfortunately, both are left with 20 million health. I think I'll hold on to the last ram in case of a particularly nasty dire guardian or something.

9.03: Reprocessors screened by decoy drones take out the two shield posts. Interestingly enough, I don't think a cloaked decoy actually acts as a decoy.

9.06: 1,600 bombers. Ignorable.

9.09: 1 missile left, planes will get that in the next few minutes. 2 command station shields - command grade, sounds like it's time to get the bombers out. Although one is under a forcefield, which is a bit of a pain. Might use that last ram to take the shield out. Other than that, planet is clean. No OMDs, no ions.

9.10: Oh hey, I just remembered those Mk. 5 plasma siege starships. Just the ticket.

9.19: The AI sure does love its bomber waves.

9.20: The last guard post on Murdoch goes down. Now, how to take out the command station under the dual forcefields...

Y'know, this would be a good job for that penetrator, if it wasn't sitting on the other side of the AI homeworld.

9.21: Blow it. Only 1,600 ships on the planet, and the special forces next door of course. Time for some fleet-on-fleet action.

9.22: Reprisal level one. I lost ~400 ships there, too many for the 500ish I managed to kill.

9.26: 3 raid starships makes a 10% dent - that's not going to be good enough.

9.27: Oh, what the heck. One of the adamantite asteroids goes on a penentrator IV. Command station is close enough to the wormhole exit that I should be able to shoot from there and run, so I'll screen it with younglings and other disposable ships.

9.31: Command station pops. +25 AIP, seeing as it has dual warp gates as per all core worlds. The penentrator escapes intact. Problem is, I'm not really sure that's incited any of the ships on the planet to move. At least the special forces shouldn't be interested any more.

Dire guardian spawning in 10 minutes.

9.34: 1,450 ships on the planet. I jump 25 grav drains in at the top, to draw all of them away from their initial positions. Then the beach heading crew rolls into town with missile turrets and MRLSes.

9.37: By the time the fleet retreated (with 400 ships left) only 200 enemies were left. Time to refleet a little, let the maws chew their food, then come back and take over.

9.38: 3,400 fighters. Might ship the lightning torpedo frigates back.

9.40: No problem. Even leeched 200 of them.

9.41: Another dire sniper guardian. Nasty, but not the worst.

9.43: Fleet back up to 900 ships. Extermination time. With the tractor guardians trying to pull my ship through into core raid engine territory obviously being the priority.

9.46: And done. No trace of artificial life remains on Murdoch. Warp jammer command station goes up next to the Core lightning controller and railcluster fab. The main point of this assult though was to open up the road to Zupreape - where both my trapped jumpship and the last shield generator reside.

9.47: ARS gives us ... attractor drones. Not bad, very cheap energy cost. And anything that diverts lasers work well for me.

9.48: 3,000 missile frigates hit Micvarape. Uh, I don't remember seeing the wave declaration. Anyway, I think my defences will hold. Just. Lyudmila spamming from the distance is, as always, very helpful.

9.53: Attack dealt with. 4,000 knowledge spent on Mk. 3 sentinal frigates, the useful little snipers. That leaves me 1,000, which I think will go to Mk. 2 flagships for the attack boost. A full cap of core turrets is going up on Murdoch, and Mk. 5 lightnings are being incorporated into the defences elsewhere.

9.55: 24 hardy scouts travel through Roadlinl and finally show me what's on the last AI homeworld. It is, unsurprisingly, a grav reactor.

So, it looks like the core raids can't be taken down before the shield generators. When the shield generator is on a planet right next to the AI homeworld ... that becomes a problem. I'm going to have to trigger a wave, do as much damage as possible within 4 minutes, then retreat rapidly before the second spawn.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/Samuockash.png)

10.00: Defences are online. New toys are building. Now comes the truly hard part - taking down a planet with both a grav drill and a translocator command station, while under constant bombardment by two core raid engines. Zupreape may well be my doom.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/doom.png)
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 13, 2014, 08:02:37 PM
9.55: 24 hardy scouts travel through Roadlinl and finally show me what's on the last AI homeworld. It is, unsurprisingly, a grav reactor.
I'd been hoping for a Wrath Lance, but maybe the RNG got a 4-for-3 deal.

10.00: Defences are online. New toys are building. Now comes the truly hard part - taking down a planet with both a grav drill and a translocator command station, while under constant bombardment by two core raid engines. Zupreape may well be my doom.
2 CRE's, with 25 more AIP behind them now.  And to take down that CSG you're not only going to have to assault that core world, you're going to have to take it.  Meaning 25 more AIP, and almost certainly at least one more CRE spawn after the taking of it.  Though I guess you might possibly bring along enough sheer power to punch straight through and knock out one or both CREs before they reload.

I assume you're certain it's the only CSG of its letter in the galaxy?
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: Draco18s April 13, 2014, 10:04:18 PM
In the meantime, the spire jumpship pops by with an old science station. Which indicates the ARS will give me either space planes, MRLSes or protector starships. Man, I hope it's protector starships.

7.51.07: Space planes. Why did it have to be space planes. On the plus side though ... very cheap, in energy cost and metal. Fast. Bonus against heavy hulls, and they have radar dampening themselves. I may just have to try throwing a cap of these at the grav reactor and see what happens.

You do know that they're listed in order, right?  The one at the far left is ALWAYS what you'll get if you don't hack.  They were random at one point, but it was derandomized to save on the save scumming (and even then it was simply a randomized ordering: the ship you got was fixed at mapgen).
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 14, 2014, 03:33:42 AM
Unfortunately it's quite hard for a core shield generator to hide on a 10 planet map where you already own 6 of the planets ;)

The plan for this evening currently looks like this:



Anything there that sounds obviously off?
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 14, 2014, 10:53:05 AM
Start a sabotage hack to take out the grav drill, and hope like hell that the AI decides to send a wave or something rather than tachyon blasting the planet. Uh, grav drills are susceptible to sabotage hacking right?
Just checked the code, and indeed it has the can-be-sabotaged flag :)

Anything there that sounds obviously off?
I'm not sure you'll survive the CRE response, and I'm sure there are other various forms of cheese that could be employed in the midst of it, but I think this is as sound a plan as is available to you.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 14, 2014, 05:33:32 PM
Warning: This the best part of 4 hours play.

10.00: Okay, after careful consideration I think I'm going to move the defensive lines again. Murdoch is now essentially cutting the graph, with threat from 3/4 AI worlds having to cross over it to get to Micvarape. It is also right in the path of any anticipated CRE strikes. So a warp jammer goes up on Micvarape, mil 2 on Murdoch. 1/2 of Micvarape's minefield and half of the one on Rakalurn are moved to Murdoch, along with any non-Mk. 5 turrets. This leaves 5 caps of Mk. 5 turrets on Micvarape, along with 4 forcefields - probably enough to hold off 1,000-2,000 ships in threat spawns from the AI homeworld next door.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/Murdoch-mine.png)

Here are the defences on Murdoch. Not the greatest as the mines now need to spread across 2 wormholes, with the Zupreape one getting the priority. Not worth popping the warp gates on the AI homeworld though - even if I could get to them.

A couple of heavy beamers and half the gravs / tractors / snipers are still on Rakalurn.

10.05: 2,889 missile frigates to Murdoch. The defences are, of course, still building. Eh, at least maybe I can leech some of them.

10.07: 28 bombers starships. Kinda mean. Ah well, lightning turrets don't discriminate.

10.08: Done. Lost a few hundred fleet ships, but the 4 million scrap will kick start the defences and building my Mk. 3 & 4 sentinal frigates.

10.10: Man, getting a full fleet up is gonna take a while. I'm expecting the next CPA to hit before I'm done. Oh, did I mention that there's also 1,600 threat sitting somewhere and I don't know where? Well, it's got to be on one of the two homeworlds...

10.11: Scouts say it's all on Desenan. And is composed primarily of missile frigates. Hmm, wonder if I can move Lyudmila back to the homeworld and draw the threat in.

10.13: Apparently not. I wonder if the fleet on Murdoch is also counting for 'within three hops' strength, despite being on the far side of the AI homeworld.

10.17: 1,777 bombers. Shouldn't be an issue, and I could use the scrap to churn out the flagship 2s, railclusters and sentinels.

10.19: I do like those Mk. 5 leeches. I now have 200 more bombers than I started with. And Mk.2/3 at that - I never unlocked those. Surprisingly the broken armored golem hasn't died yet.

10.21.12: Let's ask a theoretical question while we're waiting for the fleet to finish building / a CPA to declare. What happens when you take 4 Mk 1/2 flagships, 2 Mk. 5 plasma starships, 8 zenith reprocessors and a couple of decoy drones and have a jumpship park them next to a grav reactor?

10.21.23: Answer - 11 seconds later, it explodes. In order to stop the spirecraft from attritioning I sent it back to Murdoch, time for an exfil.

10.21.27: Full disclosure - My jumpship got blown up. It was only a few seconds later that I realised there was a core Sentinel guard post firing 200,000 damage beams at my 18% of 100,000 health jumpship. At this point I save scummed, because that jumpship is vital to my future plans and I'd rather take 3 million metal worth of losses in starships than lose it.

10.21.57: Turns out you can do the same thing with one less Mk. 5 plasma - just. Even with the best part of 3,000 strategic reserve ships charging down on you. That saved me a cool 770,000 at least. +1 AIP, +10 floor (which is meaningless, as I only ever found 1 -10AIP progress reducer), and a 500 ship exo to presumably Micvarape.

10.22.30: Nope, apparently they come from Zupreape to hit Murdoch. I thought these were supposed to spawn on the same planet now?

10.27: A fleet of 1,600 ships sits on Murdoch. The sentinals and lightnings can probably eat the CRE on their own. Only things outstanding are flagships and that Mk. 5 plasma.

10.28: Flagships are built. Ding ding, round 2.

Also, the expected CPA just declared. 13,954 ships. I'm betting on less than half that showing up.

10.28.47: The second grav reactor goes down. The crowd goes wild. Strategically, was popping them right now the best move? Probably not, but damn if it wasn't cathartic. And I'd rather have them taken out now than possibly lose the plasma 5 fab later. Unfortunately the remaining 2 grav reactors have core shields around them, so this tactic won't work on them. However the one unshielded core raid engine @ only 6 million (1/10th) of the health...

AIP: 132
HaP: Still -2, unfortunately. Still gonna need to pop that warp gate.

10.29: Exo hits Micvarape this time. Lyudmila and the turrets handle it.

10.33: Okay, let's think about spirecraft and raid engines. One is easy to pop; 6 million unshielded health, just get a plasma or a few reprocessors in there. The other is covered with a core shield. So, penentrator time for that guy. One of the two remaining ebonite goes towards making two more Mk. II penentrators - they'll be useful when attacking Zupreape too. The last will go on 4 more Mk. 3 rams. You can never have enough rams.

7.36.30: 2 minutes to CPA. The entire fleet gets moved to Rakalurn - hopefully that'll make Murdoch a juicier target.

7.38.30: CPA hits.

72 Mk II ships,
398 Mk IV ships,
and 4,225 ships from the strategic reserve.

I'm fairly sure I've had waves larger than this. Heck, I'm fairly sure they'll be so frightened they won't even attack me.

7.38.40: Uh ... there's only 2,600 threat. And I started off with 1,400 or so. 

Someone please take a look at this and tell me what I'm missing, as this looks like a normal CPA spawn to me:

*Computing MaxStrategicReserve for player 8
baseStrengthFactor = 19.8
specialDifficultyFactor = Game.Instance.Options.TotalSpecialDifficultyModifier (based on difficulty, homeworld count, handicap) = 6
aiTypeFactor = 1
effectiveAIP = (since Lazy-AI is not on, this is always 200; if you don't like that take it up with chemical_art) = 200
maxStrategicReserve = baseStrengthFactor * difficultyFactor * aiTypeFactor * effectiveAIP = 23759.77
*Computing MaxStrategicReserve for player 9
baseStrengthFactor = 19.8
specialDifficultyFactor = Game.Instance.Options.TotalSpecialDifficultyModifier (based on difficulty, homeworld count, handicap) = 6
aiTypeFactor = 1
effectiveAIP = (since Lazy-AI is not on, this is always 200; if you don't like that take it up with chemical_art) = 200
maxStrategicReserve = baseStrengthFactor * difficultyFactor * aiTypeFactor * effectiveAIP = 23759.77
**Doing Strategic Reserve Deployment to (Post-filling CPA)
maxAllowedReserveDeploymentPercent = 1
playerMaxStrategicReserve = 47519.53
playerCurrentStoredReserve = 23753.98 (49.99%)
existingStrategicReservesStrengthOnPlanet = 0
strengthToSpawn = Min(playerCurrentStoredReserve,( playerMaxStrategicReserve * maxAllowedReserveDeploymentPercent ) - existingStrategicReservesStrengthOnPlanet) = 23753.98
maxTargetPopulation = 11750
currentPopulation = 0
allocating 0.02 out of 1 (533.54 strength) for role: None , eligible types:MissileShipII, ArmorShipII, EyeBotII
allocating 0.03 out of 1 (800.3 strength) for role: AntiBomber , eligible types:FighterII, MicroFighterII
allocating 0 out of 1 (0 strength) for role: LongRange , eligible types:
allocating 0 out of 1 (0 strength) for role: CopperPlatedBastard , eligible types:
allocating 0 out of 1 (0 strength) for role: Tractor , eligible types:
allocating 0.03 out of 1 (800.3 strength) for role: Gravity , eligible types:SpireGravityDrainII
allocating 0 out of 1 (0 strength) for role: Reclamator , eligible types:
allocating 0.91 out of 1 (21608.24 strength) for role: DefenseCracker , eligible types:BomberII, SpaceTankII, ZenithSiegeEngineII
allocating 0 out of 1 (0 strength) for role: RiotControl , eligible types:
actually bought:
51 ArmorShipII @ 4.36 each, so total for line = 222.53
58 EyeBotII @ 8 each, so total for line = 464
55 MissileShipII @ 4 each, so total for line = 220
213 FighterII @ 4 each, so total for line = 852
190 MicroFighterII @ 2.67 each, so total for line = 506.54
171 SpireGravityDrainII @ 8 each, so total for line = 1368
1172 BomberII @ 4 each, so total for line = 4688
1136 ZenithSiegeEngineII @ 24 each, so total for line = 27264
1179 SpaceTankII @ 4 each, so total for line = 4716
Grand total: 4225 ships, 40301.07 strength
Remaining reserve: 0 out of 47519.53 (0%)

Also: effectiveAIP = (since Lazy-AI is not on, this is always 200; if you don't like that take it up with chemical_art) = 200

10.39: 2,776 bombers to Murdoch. Yep, that's more than the CPA.

10.41.40: Wave handled, now the threat is attacking Rakalurn. Fleet to the rescue.

Oh, hey dire sniper guardian. I forgot about you.

10.43: Well, that was quite possibly the most ineffective CPA ever. I'm now overflowing with money, literally, and I need to add three more matter converters to deal with the amount of ships I leech. At least the spire rams build quickly.

10.43.30: Oh there's still 1,800 threat out there. But it's pretty much just sitting on Desenan like it has been for the last half hour or so. Okay, while I have 600 more ships more than normal and a massive +9,000 metal per second over my cap, time to throw their lives away uselessly. Everyone who's not a starship, maw, lightning torpedo frigate or sentinal moves to attack Zupreape.

10.43.42: 1,588 ships warp in. Objective: Take out the spire shield guardpost and tachyons around the wormhole exit, and any other unshielded guardposts you can get your hands on.

10.43.46: CREs fire. 2,100 ships each coming onto the planet in a minute's time.

10.44.02: Spire shield is down. The four tractor / widow guardposts are doing a number on the fleet though.

10.44.10: 3 penetrators come in and take down a guardpost each. Unfortunately the widows are out of range from the wormhole exit - I may have to ram those later.

10.44.14: 768 remaining fleet ships are told to retreat. Not sure how many of them can.

10.44.20: Reprisal level 1. 2,100 threat. 4,200 wave. 2 million in the bank to refleet with. 4 guardposts, a tachyon and an ion down. Worth it.

10.44.29: Last of the fleet goes down. I don't think any survived the widow posts. I'm waiting 30 seconds to let the ships move away from the exit, them bringing in a jumpship with a raid to take down one of the warp gates and exfiltrating the other jumpship.

10.44.38: CRE hits Zupreape. 6,174 threat. Oh, and the special forces of course.

10.44.43: Murdoch is under attack. Time for those lightning torpedo frigates to shine.

10.44.47: 2,304 space tanks to Murdoch. Now THAT's a reprisal. Martyr is uprooted from Rakalurn and moves to Murdoch.

10.44.57: 4,150 attack on Murdoch. The threat on Desenan has finally showed its hand. Spire jumpship is half way to the warp gates, and 4 rams stand by the hop into Zupreape under cover of cloakers to deal with the widow posts.

10.45.12: The broken armored golem goes down. Finally.

10.45.40: 4,488 attack. 750 outstanding threat and 2,300 wave. Martyr arrives on the scene. Rams jump into Zupreape.

10.45.45: The Martyr came out of the wormhole right behind the main body of the attack. It 'only' took 1,300 with it though, unfortunately, after getting shredded by carriers. The assault is not even halfway to the command station yet, so most of the turrets haven't engaged.

10.46.16: Rams start hitting home. One Mk. 5 tractor, one Mk. 5 widow go down.

10.46.20: Tanks hit Murdoch. 4,930 attack. I'm going to lose the fabs, but that wasn't exactly an unexpected outcome. Especially with 345 zenith siege engines pounding on the forcefield. Executive decision: All 448 mobile ships on the planet retreat to Rakalurn.

Currently 15 million scrap on Murdoch, by the way.

10.46.28: Command station goes down, ooks like I'll be picking up that scrap later. Just hope I didn't leave retreating the lightning frigates too late. 39 Mk. 2 engineers are build on Rakalurn to build ships ASAP, and the warp gates are in full swing.

10.46.39: 2 more widow guardposts go down to the rams. I'm getting worried about the slow pace of the jumpship - I need that warp gate killed and the raid off-planet before the 4 minutes are up.

10.46.46: The original, long trapped spirecraft jump ship escapes. Hugs and tears all round.

10.46.51: 1,088 cloaked ships to ???. Always nice to have more threat.

10.47.07: Area mine fields, beam turrets, snipers, lasers and grav turrets start going up Rakalurn. I still have 1.8 million in the bank, so hopefully they'll get built in time this time. Sadly only 13 lightning torpedo frigates and 18 sentinal frigates escaped, that's going to hurt.

10.47.36: Close defence turrets around the command station are up. Mines, not so much. The attack starts.

10.47.38: Warp jammer command gets swapped out for a Mil 2. Attack boost and tachyon coverage is essential at this point.

10.47.41: Command station is finished. Amazing what 39 engineers can do.

10.47.50: All 39 engineers feed themselves to the attack while trying to build mines. Come on, guys...

10.48.12: Dammit, forgot about the raid. Too late now, he'll have to sit there otherwise another wave will spawn.

10.48.48: 2,000 attack. 2,887 threat. 1,000 wave. Fleet ships focus fire the zenith siege engines.

10.49.01: Oh hell. MICVARAPE command station goes down. Yeah, turns out that 1,400 of that threat wasn't beelining for Rakalurn. Lyudmila makes for the exit with all available speed.

10.49.10: Human resistance show up again on Rakalurn. Hey guys, is this your vacation spot or something? Only 900 attack left there.

10.49.42: Warp gates are disabled. We need a fleet to go help Micvarape. 3,000 threat outstanding, 1,000 of it on Murdoch.

10.49.45: Last attacker on Rakalurn dies. 900 fleet ships still on the planet.

10.50.01: 600 attack on Kuer. I quickly move the lightning missiles out of the way. Lyudmila is on duty, we should be okay here.

10.50.05: Penentrator on Kuer takes a shot at a Mk. 5 core starship. First useful thing its done in about 6 hours.

10.50.25: Rescued jumpship start shipping starships and snipers to Kuer. There are a lot of starships as part of this attack.

10.50.37: 8 reprocessors you say? Yes, I think that'll help with the bomber / warbird starships smacking on the Kuer forcefields.

10.50.54: 59 ships remaining. The forcefield around the impulse fab / core missile controller is at 10%.

10.51: Last bombers starship goes down. Fabs are exposed to open air.

10.51.13: Command station pops, just as a few engineers come online and start repairing the forcefields. 27 attack left, all of it starships. Luckily half of it off chasing Lyudmila around the grav well again.

10.51.27: Forcefield pops. Lyudmila at 32%.

10.52.20: Last ship on Kuer goes down. Lyudmila is at 9%. That was desperately close. There's still 2,200 threat somewhere out there, but for now it's time to start rebuilding Micvarape.

10.56: 800 ships warp into Mudoch to take care of the 300 or so threat there.

11.00: So, that was intense. The loss of the lightning turret controller and railcluster fab is a blow, but not a massive one. Once I get the two command stations back up I estimate I'll have access to a combined 30-40 million salvage, which should ease the rebuilding pain somewhat. I'm going to have to eat another two CREs before I can access the AI homeworld - there's one tractor, one widow, 4 spire shield and one needler guardpost left on Zupreape. So one more fleet wipe to get them, then the sabotage hack, then penentrate the translocator station followed up by a super-quick command station build out and a jumpship / penentrator run to remove the raid engines.

Should be fun.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 14, 2014, 05:40:17 PM
I haven't read the latest post just yet, but I noticed that the place you were hosting the pictures has apparently hired the TF2 Heavy to persuade you to find another provider ;)

You're welcome to attach them to the forum post, if you like; after you put the post up you can:
1) click the image in the attachment area to bring the image (rather than just a thumbnail) up
2) copy that url
3) edit your post to include the image's url via an img tag

That may not be the exact procedure, didn't try it just now, but should work.  Alternatively there's IMGUR or whatever.


Edit: nevermind, it appears the TF2 Heavy has suffered a mischief.  Not that you would have had anything to do with that.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 14, 2014, 07:42:24 PM
Wow, you just put one of the AI HWs (with all core posts intact, initially at least) inside your defensive perimeter.  I don't think I've ever seen that before.


Neat trick jumping the jumpship back through time to save it ;)


10.22.30: Nope, apparently they come from Zupreape to hit Murdoch. I thought these were supposed to spawn on the same planet now?
Whoops.  Evidently it had other ideas.  Do you have a save?


Odd on that CPA strategic reserve spawn being so low.  And that was only half of the reserve (the first half is launched earlier in the CPA, if that's what's necessary to make up half of it), so it probably should have pumped out Over 9,000 ships just from the reserve.  A save would be helpful here too :)


10.46.46: The original, long trapped spirecraft jump ship escapes. Hugs and tears all round.
I suspect that two teleporting things trying to hug are likely to look like a transporter accident.  But I suppose they're used to that.


And those CRE's certainly took you for a wild ride.  Congratulations surviving that with controllable losses.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 15, 2014, 03:19:37 AM
Ah yeah, the hotlink protection stuff I set up about 8 years ago. Of course there are probably 100 times as many images in the 'hotlink' folder by now than anywhere else on that domain. Triggered back in 2006, with a considerably more rude image, after someone hotlinked a photo and pulled down close to 200GB of traffic.

Forums were a tad flaky last night, so here's another hour of not-very-much-happening. There'll be another CPA soon, so if I see the same behaviour again I'll upload a save to you.

11.01: Oh, another dire guardian you say? Joyous.

11.03: Both command stations back up. Turret rebuilding is well outpacing the +15,000 metal/s from the scrap.

11.07: All static defences are back online, including a cap of Mk. 1 lightnings on Murdoch. After the attack I'm left with just 517 fleet ships (thankfully including almost all the lightning frigates), and the scrap has run out. This will be a long rebuilding process.

11.09: 1,300 bombers? Kinda anaemic. I'd rather have more for scrap purposes.

11.11: 4,100 tachyon micro-fighters. Now that's more like it.

11.14: Penentrators are armed again. I can't take a CRE wave yet though.

11.36: Yup, still fleet rebuilding. Even at +10 speed it takes a while when you have Mk. 5 maws, and leeches, and expensive sentinel frigates. And an economy of only 4,600 metal/s.

11.38: Done, or close enough. Now to throw all those lives away again!

3,334 fighters ... just after I could have really used the scrap.

11.39: And 1,000 cloaked ships. At least I know these won't declare in the middle of the CRE now.

11.40: Fighters vs. area mines. They don't even last long enough for me to leech any.

11.41: And I can say pretty much the same for eyebots.

11.43: Alrighty then. 1,300 fleet ship and starships. Zupreape has only 900 on planet, about 50 of which are riots. Sounds like it's time for the blob of doom.

11.44.39: Fleet jumps in - including starships and lightnings this time. Again, about 4,200 ships from the CREs hitting in one minute.

11.44.47: Raid takes down the warp gate. +3 HaP.

11.44.57: Tractor guardpost goes down to a penetrator.

11.45.11: All ships retreating. Special forces are murdering me.

11.45.17: Last widow guard post goes down to a penetrator. Which is rapidly squashed itself. I think I lost both of them.

11.45.22: Only 400-odd ships escape. At least none were eaten.

11.45.40: CREs hit. 5,907 threat.

11.45.55: Make that 4,246 attack.

11.46.57: 2,500 attack. Command station is going down again. This time though a jumpship is in position to ferry away the lightning frigates, if required.

11.47.33: Command station pops. Not a problem. Lightning torpedos and sentinals are circling the grav well firing inwards.

11.50.50: Well whaddya know, circle strafing with lightning torpedos and sentinals is extremely effective. By the time they've done a full circle and exited through the Rakalurn wormhole there's only 500 enemy ships on the planet. Unfortunately a fair number of those are spire starships, which prevents me from rescuing my remaining starship screeners for fear of the jumpship getting beamed to death.

11.52: Micvarape command station goes down. Raider guardians. Doesn't seem to the prelude to anything more than a couple of dozen starships though.

11.53: 1,100 fleet ships rebuilt on Rakalurn. Time to take back Murdoch.

11.53.28: Oh right, dire sniper guardian again. Keep forgetting about that guy.

11.56: Sniper down. Murdoch command back up. I can see this becoming a bit of a pattern.

11.58: Yeah, you know what that last Adamantite is going on rams. I can't brute force 4 Mk. 5 spire shield guard posts with the special forces breathing down my neck. Of course, that leaves me no asteroids for the homeworld assaults...

12.00: Okay, well that wasn't the most productive hour ever. However I took care of all the particularly nasty guard posts and my fleet is closing on full capacity again. And I'm fairly sure I can withstand the CRE attacks now, albeit losing Murdoch each time. So, tactics...

Right now a hacker is making its way to the bottom of Zupreape's grav well. Time to knock out that grav drill. After that, several things will happen in quick succession.

1.) A single ram will take out the spire shield guardpost over the wormhole to the AI homeworld. I'm going to ignore the other three.
2.) Another ram will take cloaker cover and remove the translocator command station.
3.) A jumpship with 24 engineers are one colony ship will jump to the edge of the grav well and power build a Mil 2 command station.
4.) In the millisecond before the core spider turret controller is wiped out, I'll build caps across all the worlds.
5.) Fleet warps in and takes out the core shield generator sitting next to the wormhole.
6.) Second jumpship takes a bunch of reprocessors to take out the first raid engine
7.) That last raid engine under a Mk. 5 forcefield, well. The last remaining penetrator, the Mk IV, will make a suicide play to take it out, supported by a load of chaff ships and a cloaker to superboosting it. Hopefully.

And all of this has to happen within four minutes, 'cos I can't deal with two CREs at once.

Why yes, this plan does involve colonising a core world while both the special forces and 4,000 Mk. IV ships are present. What's your point?
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: Draco18s April 15, 2014, 10:57:30 AM
Ah yeah, the hotlink protection stuff I set up about 8 years ago.

Aww, I missed it.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 15, 2014, 05:02:20 PM
Just for you Draco: http://www.shock-therapy.org/artWork/hotlink.jpg

With a file-size of just 6KB it's considerably easier on the bandwidth cap than a 1-2MB image. It doesn't garner quite the same disgusted / horrified reactions as the initial anti-hotlinking image, though. Ahh, the web in simpler times. When you're still a teenager and not quite so professional.

Now, for the most intense two and a half minutes of AI war I've ever played.


12.01: Sabotage hacking commences.

12.02: Anti-climactic success. Grav drill goes down, for the cost of just 200 odd zombies. I was kind of hoping for a wave to give me more scrap.

12.02.11: Jumpship hops into the Zupreape system and joyously hops around the edges of the grav well - no more 28 speed crawls for me!

12.06: Just waiting for starships to rebuild. Did I mention that leech Mk. 5s are expensive? The fact that I'm still running 10 matter converters, so -2000 metal/s, really doesn't help matters. Oh, for a single zenith power generator...

12.11: 1,300 grav drains? Thanks for the cash infusion.

12.13: 6 million scrap. Tasty, even if 200 of them (including leech starships) did escape because I kept the fleet to one side and let the defences deal with them. Just a smidge under 2,000 threat now.

Aand 1,500 eyebots. With 51 starships. Fleet retreats to Rakalurn, let's see if we can get that threat to attack. I doubt it will though.

12.15: 51 raid starships. Well, I suppose that would fry any normal defences, yes.

12.16: Yeah, threat isn't taking the bait. Oh well, fleet back in to deal with the 500 remaining eyebots.

12.17: Rams are up.

12.28: Note to self, next time exfiltrate starships rather more quickly.

So, fleet is back up. I suppose I should really wait for the next CPA before making my attack.

Nah

There is one slight hitch to the plan though. I forgot that command stations are, believe it or not, command grade. So I'm going to have to penetrate the translocator command station and attempt to use the rams on the raid engine.

12.29: Colony crew are safely stowed. 8 reprocessors nestled in the belly of a jumpship. All non-essential ships (so everything except lightnings, sentinels, maws and starships) are mustered next to the Zupreape wormhole. Rams and penetrator are on standby.

Let's do this thing.

12.29.26: Cloakers enter Zupreape.

12.29.27: Ram and penetrator join them. CREs fire - 4,500 combined ships.

12.29.41: Special forces arrive. 2,500 ships on planet and another 1,500 in carriers. And a huge number of grav drains / gravity guardians are making a mockery of my haste.

12.29.47: Jumpship carrying the reprocessors is rapidly re-purposed - 24 grav drains to the edge of the grav well to draw forces away from the wormhole to the AI homeworld.

12.29:51: Command station - penetrated. +20 AIP. There's no way I'm getting this guy out of here intact, so he gets sent to the grav drains to help them distract from the AI homeworld exit.

12.29.55: Ram is holding just beyond tachyon range of the sentinel next to the Samuockash wormhole. Steady, steady...

10.30.02: I've waited as long as I dare. CRE is hitting Zupreape in 30 seconds, and I need to be gone before it does. 1,076 ships are ordered to warp in to Zupreape.

12.30.05: Second jumpship enters the planet and drops off the colony crew. Mil 2 command station starts building. Fleet ships are ordered to distract the ships around the wormhole exit so that even when the taychon decloaks the ram it will probably survive to take out the shield.

12.30.08: Mil 2 command station up. All capturables on planet are now mine - including 2 ion cannons, an OMD and a regenerator golem. I give the first two 5 seconds to live, the regen should buy me a 20 second or so delay in the CREs hitting Murdoch.

The core spider turret controller and zenith siege engine fab are sitting right next to a Mk. 3 fort at the top of the grav well. As fantastic as core zenith sieges would be for the homeworld assault, they'll only live as long as it takes the fortress to load its guns to live. As such a cap of spider turrets goes up on Kuer, Micvarape, Murdoch, Rakalurn and my home planet Zarpar. A full cap is also put into place around the command station on Zupreape - if I can engine damage the CRE assault that'll be utterly fantastic.

State of play:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/assaulting.png)

Problem: Each cap of turrets costs me 17,200 energy and 206,000 metal. I only have 350,000 metal and 77,000 energy in reserve at the moment. A mini-fort explodes on my homeworld, leaving me with 6 caps of turrets and only 188(!) energy. Still, that energy will be retrieved shortly once ships start dying everywhere.

12.30.21: Ram takes down the spire shield generator - the road to the AI homeworld is clear. My entire metal reserve has been wiped out. Shockingly the fabs are still alive - the fortress apparently can't fire on them. The same cannot be said for the special forces guard post, which is currently chewing away at the advanced starship constructor. In fact, most of the AI ships seem to be going after the advanced starship constructor. I take a risky decision - one of the cloakers peels off from the remaining 3 rams and is sent after the penetrator at the edge of the grav well.

10.30.24: 882 fleet ships remaining. They're all told to make the jump into the AI homeworld. CRE hits in 8 seconds.

10.30.28: Reprocessors are sitting next to the first CRE. Wait, external invulnerability x1? Oh god, what did I miss.

Oh. I didn't kill the core shield generator on the way over here. I do have a habit of doing that, jumping in to AI homeworlds while the shield generators are still up.

**Time rewinds by 18 seconds**

12.30.11: Fleet annihilates the core shield generator. Homeworld, here we come.

12.30.13: When moving the ram in to attack the spire shield guard post I discover something. It's vanished. In fact, all of them have vanished. Apparently when loading the save the game took one look, said 'what are all these Mk. 5 shield guardposts doing on a player world' and exploded them. Gonna call that one a bug.

To be 'fair' to the AI, I symbolically scrap the ram I would have otherwise used on the guard post.

This is only spire shield guardposts by the way, the remaining needler guard post and forcefields weren't affected.

12.30.30: Slightly behind schedule, the fleet jumps into the AI homeworld. Priority: Tachyon sentinel.

12.30.32: 2 seconds later the three remaining rams and a single cloaker follow them, after just enough time for every enemy ship to have acquired a target. Everyone is sent after the shielded CRE.

The cloaker is vital - despite the planetary tachyon coverage it can still super-boost the rams into invisibility. Sent on a parallell path to rest of the ships, they should stay cloaked for as long as physically possible.

12.30.33: CRE hits. 8,231 attack (a fair portion of that special forces on Zupreape, of course). 2,126 threat otherwise. The first spider turrets on Zupreape start to come online.

12.30.40: Ions cannons, OMD, starship constuctor and fabs are long since dead. Broken regen golem is, somewhat surprisingly, untouched. Jumpship is loaded with 8 reprocessors and ready to ride.

10.30.58: Jumpship delivery system works perfectly. First raid engine goes down in a hail of reprocessor fire.

The jumpship dies. Farewell, dear friend.

Rams are about halfway to the second CRE. Half the remaining 320 fleet ships are told to hold position to cover the ram's rear and engage the strategic reserve spawning in from behind. The rest move forward to absorb incoming fire. Rams are at 67%, 45% and 13% respectively.

12.31.10: Zupreape command goes down. The penetrator appears to be immune to the cloaker starship sitting next to it and is still getting hit (bug or intentional? I'm assuming intentional). 43 Mk. 5 spider turrets remaining, doing 1,000 engine damage to a CRE ship every 8 seconds. 211 ships remaining on the AI homeworld.

12.31.15: Cloaker goes down. The ram's cloaking super boost is going to rapidly run out.

12.31.21: First ram dies. The other two are almost touching the edge of the Mk. 5 forcefield covering the raid engine, so about 5/6s of the way there. 30 ships remaining on the AI homeworld.

12.31.24: Second ram dies. Remaining ram has 32% health, and is well inside the forcefield circumference. Blast that grav reactor for slowing everything down!

12.31.26: The last ram has 7% health as it impacts the core raid engine. It dies. I'm free.

12.31.30: Thanks to some fancy shift-clicking, the penetrator has circled that main body of the enemy threat and escaped through the Murdoch wormhole. With 14% health. It may yet live to fight another day. Save the final spirecraft jumpship, no other ship has survived this assault.

Oh, and yes it did just take an entire minute to move the probably 30,000 distance from wormhole exit to command station. Gotta love grav reactors.

7,951 threat.
10 spider turrets remaining on Zupreape. Those on Murdoch ~80% constructed. All others paused.
AIP: 160
153 ships on Murdoch. All sentinal frigates, lightning torpedos, maws or starships. 200 ships on Rakalurn, and more pouring from the warp gates. Economy is flatlined.
Reprisal level 3.
   
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 15, 2014, 05:33:01 PM
Why yes, this plan does involve colonising a core world while both the special forces and 4,000 Mk. IV ships are present. What's your point?
Business as usual.


Now, for the most intense two and a half minutes of AI war I've ever played.
Given various points of this game thus far, that's saying something :)

Noted on the spire-guard-post disappearing-on-load thing.  Probably some overzealous "cleanup" code.

Unsure what the intention is about the penetrator and the super-cloaker.  There's a lot of history with the penetrator and unusual cloaking rules.


A truly epic moment with the last of those three Rams just barely nailing the second CRE, to cap an epic assault overall.  It's amazing what kinds of emergent pain arise from a bunch of circumstances picked (mostly) randomly and (mostly) independent of one another.


Reprisal level 3.
This could get... interesting.  If it puts the right amount of strength in, at least.  Some of the earlier reprisals seemed strangely low.  Though not all of them.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 15, 2014, 05:51:10 PM
Oh, that reprisal brought the pain alright.

Next time, on insane AI War strategies...

12.31.52: 12,076 younglings tiger to Murdoch. Allow me to repeat that. 12,076 youngling tigers.

...

16,094 attack on Murdoch.

...

Oh lord. CPA declared. Hitting in 10 minutes, with (supposedly) 16,709 ships. Combined total threat and CPA: 31,000 ships.

: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 15, 2014, 06:04:54 PM
Hahaha.  You may have been saved by the RNG on that one: just gotta keep those tigers occupied for 4 minutes and they'll die naturally.

And a save before the actual launch of that CPA would be great for debugging the Strategic Reserve's contribution, if that's possible to get :)
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 15, 2014, 06:07:12 PM
Not a problem on the save.

Note: Tigers in carriers DO NOT ATTRITION.

: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 15, 2014, 06:08:16 PM
Note: Tigers in carriers DO NOT ATTRITION.
... how did you say it?

&%#@!
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 15, 2014, 06:23:51 PM
Don't worry, I found some ultimate Limburger to keep the threat off my back, as I'm sure you'll see in the attached save.

Looks like this one spawned in the regular amount of strategic reserve ships for me, so not quite sure what went wrong with the other one.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: Draco18s April 15, 2014, 06:55:15 PM
12.31.10: Zupreape command goes down. The penetrator appears to be immune to the cloaker starship sitting next to it and is still getting hit (bug or intentional? I'm assuming intentional).

Intentional I believe.  After firing a penetrator is immune to cloaking, cloaking boosts, and cloaking superboosts.

See http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=2751
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: Aklyon April 15, 2014, 07:20:11 PM
Don't worry, I found some ultimate Limburger to keep the threat off my back, as I'm sure you'll see in the attached save.
Does it involve warheads?
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 15, 2014, 07:38:22 PM
Well, the CPA did involve some warheads. But that is not the master cheese...


12.31.33: I can see the very instant when all the 4,625 ships on Zupreape all realign themselves on the Murdoch wormhole. Dear lord I hope those carriers aren't coming along for the long as well.

12.31.52: 12,076 younglings tiger to Murdoch. Allow me to repeat that. 12,076 youngling tigers. Forget Murdoch going down, that's more than enough to terminate Rakalurn too. I'm going to lose those fabs.

12.32: 300 attack on Murdoch. And plenty more coming. Luckily it seems like the special forces are now retreating to the AI homeworld.

12.32.13: Make that 3,000 attack. With another 1,000 in carriers.

12.32.17. Okay, at this point I need to prioritise. Firstly, the Mk. 5 plasma sieges are getting ferried back to my homeworld. If I lose the fabs, I can't rebuild them. Mk. 5 leeches can stay where they are for the time being, but I'll try to pull them out before they pop. The same with the maws, try to retreat them before they go.

Now, as for lightning torpedo frigates ... I think 25 of them are going to play a little game of keep away with the AI. When the command station looks like its going down, load them into the jumpship and send them to the other side of the grav well. I'm praying this keeps the youngling tigers occupied for long enough for them to atrophy, assuming they don't just go straight through the wormhole to Rakalurn.

12.32.20. Missile silo going up on Rakalurn. 3 Mk. 2 lightnings queued up. At this point I have little to fear from AIP increases beyond slightly larger waves.

12.32.40: Plasma 5s rescued. The only leeches left are the Mk. 5s, and they're at 70% health. Time to evac them. Scrap level is enough to start spider construction on Rakalurn. 4,162 attack on Murdoch.

12.33.01: Oh lord. CPA declared. Hitting in 10 minutes, so (supposedly) 16,709 ships. Spire jumpship is now retreating all remaining starships to Rakalurn.

12.33.22: The tigers are here. 16,094 attack on Murdoch. That's just completely absurd. Lightnings and sentinals are doing their circle strafing thing again, everyone else has been evacced.

12.33.27: Murdoch command goes down. Jumpship is evacuating sentinal frigates.

12.33.32: Oh man, nasty thought. Do younglings in carriers attrition?

12.34: No. No they don't.

12.34.29: 15,216 threat. Jumpship is busy hopping lightning frigates from one side of the grav well to another. The 17 remaining sentinal frigates which haven't been evacuated are told to fire on some of the remaining carriers to get them to disgorge more younglings.

12.34.30: Defences are going up on Rakalurn. Beams, lasers, mines etc. Plus all the 'spare' forcefields no longer needed on Murdoch.

12.35.30: There's a raid starship on Zarpar killing Mk. 5 snipers turrets. Zarpar, as in my homeworld. Sniper turrets, as in the ones I turned off accidentally along with the spiders when I wanted them not to crash my economy by building 6 caps at once.

Thanks goodness he didn't decide to go for the completely unshielded lightning missiles instead.

12.36: This strategy of jumping ships to remote corners of the grav well is working insanely well. Limburger supreme. I think I can keep the entirety of the threat locked down here for as long as I need.

Current threat: 9,226. How much of that decrease is due to chipper shredding ... I wouldn't like to hazard a guess. Strength on Murdoch: 130,000. A.k.a around the size of the special forces fleet that I nuked in that 9/9 heroic game. And if it wasn't for the fact so many are Mk. 5, I might just do the same here.

12.36.01: A nuke starts building on Rakalurn. Y'know, just in case.

12.37.23: Oh god. There's a neinzul regeneration chamber on Zupreape. I wondered where all those pesky little almost dead younglings were going.

12.37.26: Jumpship swings by Rakalurn to pick up one of the rescued Mk. 5 plasma starships.

10.37.37: Regen chamber explodes.

12.37.46: Blast, the brief sojourn on the jumpship allowed them to get in range to take out one of the snipers.

12.38.13: 2,200 bomber wave to nowhere. I should probably have put a Mil 2 up on Rackalurn. Doing that now.

12.39.28: 122,000 strength on Murdoch. The cheese stops them from doing much, but it ain't exactly killing stuff quickly.

12.41: 3,300 bombers to Rakalurn. Salvage time!

Oh, and these two waves are syncing with the CPA.

12.43: CPA hits.


So, not quite the 16,000 you promised then.

Still, I remove all but one of the lightning torpedo frigates from murdoch - I think chasing around just that one guy is enough to keep the threat over there occupied.

12.44: Attack on Rakalurn, couple of hundred. And just after defences finished building, too, it's like the AI wants to feed me salvage.

12.44.31: Bombers waves hit. 3,500 attack. 13,300 threat.

12.44.43: 5,700 attack. Time for the first lightning missile I think.

12.44.55: Eh, took out 1,500 or so. Good enough.

12.45.10: Second missile pops 500 zenith siege engines. 2,700 attack. I think I can manage the rest without another missile, but there is one in reserve just in case.

12.46: Actually, I could probably have done it without the second missile too. Oh well. Both human resistance and marauders show up again - the marauders once again from behind the command station. They go after the still-not-cloaked penetrator.

12.47: Last ship on Rakalurn dies, ignoring of course the 400 or so the maws are still digesting. 20 million or so scrap gives the economy the boost it's been needing for for a while. That single lightning ship over on Murdoch has done an admirable job of keeping that 115,000 strength threat locked down.

12.47.35: Human resistance pop in to help with Murdoch. As there's only about 20 of them, they die rather rapidly.

12.49: While waiting for the now much-faster refleet, I decide that Murdoch could use some beach heading. 24 engineers, one mobile builder. Mil 2 command and 48 missile turrets are up in a jiffy. I'd send in rebuilders, but they they'd just start trying to rebuild mines and stuff that have moved to Rakalurn.

12.50: Full cap of needlers, missiles and MRLS Mk. 5 go up. They'll go down again soon enough, but at least it gives the poor threat something to chase other than that lightning frigate.

12.51: Wow. Those turrets lasted essentially no time at all and took out all of 2,000 strength. Yeah, without the jumpship cheesing I'd definitely be dead right now.

12.52: The lightning torpedo frigate reports that he's lonely. So 31 of his friends, and 70-odd sentinel frigates, warp in to join him. My one regret is that I can't get Lyudmila over there to join in the fish-in-a-barrel.

12.53: Docks report a full refleet on Rakalurn. Now time for starships.

1,000 bombers? That is tiny baby wave.

12.55: This threat clearing is going much faster now that I'm jumping 100 ships around the planet. Last of the current crop of disassembler guardians dies. Man, I hate those things. Fast, and eat starships for breakfast. Snipers retarget the remaining ships based on fastest speed guardians/starships first. 96,000 strength remaining.

12.56: Two dire guardians spawning soon. Ignorable.

12.57: While I'm waiting, 4 regular transports go up on Rakalurn.

12.59: 800 ships quietly load into transports and file through Murdoch to Zupreape. The threat is still intent on the snipers.

13.03: The 500 remaining ships on Zupreape are terminated, along with the needler guard post. That still leaves the Mk. 3 fort at the top, but I'm going to ignore that for now as it's safely out of the way. The jumpship takes a brief break from the sniper ferrying duties and brings over a colony ship and a few engineers. Warp jammer and a full cap of turrets for Zupreape, please.

AIP: 164
Enemy strength on Murdoch: 62,000

I have to say, this is absolutely the most broken strategy I've ever devised. It not so much the killing power of the sentinels and lightnings, although that's fairly significant for a full cap (~5,000 strength per minute), more the fact that the AI just never gets a shot off. Those threat ships have been on planet for over half an hour now, I'm half expecting them to nip off to join the threat fleet somewhere else soon.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: Aklyon April 15, 2014, 07:47:17 PM
That is one jumpship whose has certainly paid for itself, even at spirecraft costs.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 15, 2014, 08:30:33 PM
Well, the CPA did involve some warheads. But that is not the master cheese...
No, no it wasn't.  The Jumpship Cheese is... masterful, indeed. 

The game bows (and breaks) before your sheer combination of audacity and lack-of-decency ;)  I daresay that you may be able to hold off an arbitrarily large force of normal threat (or threatfleet, probably) by such means.  There may be specific AI units that could counter it, but in their absence... 

An exo would also counter it implicitly by not caring about what shoots at it while it's enroute.  In theory I could add a new threat behavior that tasks a clump of threat with exo-like behavior, but I'm not sure that's really a general solution here (and detecting when to do so, and when not to do so, would be tricky indeed).

Anyway, well done.  Cheese of the Month award.  Possibly of the Year, we'll see.  But you know I have to nerf that now ;)

The question is: how to do so, without unduly harming the Jumpship's other utility?


Thanks goodness he didn't decide to go for the completely unshielded lightning missiles instead.
Oh, definitely.  Wouldn't it be a shame if he were taught to do that?


12.36.01: A nuke starts building on Rakalurn. Y'know, just in case.
It's the only way to be sure.


12.37.23: Oh god. There's a neinzul regeneration chamber on Zupreape. I wondered where all those pesky little almost dead younglings were going.
You mean one of those chambers was actually being useful?  To the AI?  I'm not sure I've ever seen it work before.


1,000 bombers? That is tiny baby wave.
I don't know what's up with that.  Maybe the intervals are just that different sometimes.  I'll see if that save generates any explanatory wave loggery.


Anyway, looks like the AI may as well call gg on this one, but perhaps it has bit more dastardliness left.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: Draco18s April 15, 2014, 09:51:09 PM
Anyway, well done.  Cheese of the Month award.  Possibly of the Year, we'll see.  But you know I have to nerf that now ;)

The question is: how to do so, without unduly harming the Jumpship's other utility?

I don't know if you can.  Self-attrition on friendly worlds (regardless of other conditions) is just uncalled for.  Revoking teleporting under the same just feels like a kick to the family jewels.

I don't think any other penalty would matter.  Paralysis?  Nope.  Just slows down how quickly you can unload the units.  Full weapon cooldown on unloaded ships?  Nope, the AI units would still retarget (not to mention most drone spawners have very short reload times).  Paralysis on unloaded units?  Would undermine one's ability to hop in close to something and smash it to bits (they'd get blown apart first).
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 15, 2014, 10:22:52 PM
Maybe: units getting out of a jumpship may not enter another transport for, say, 20 seconds.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: Draco18s April 15, 2014, 11:01:29 PM
I'm not sure that would actually mean any thing except in hostile territory.  It doesn't counter the cheese here (though I admit I have no idea how rapidly he needed to switch sides on the gravity well).
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: TechSY730 April 16, 2014, 12:50:29 AM
I think teaching the AI when it is no longer worth chasing down the "small stuff" (or at least not with the full attacking force) compared to moving onto the next planet is the only real "counter", even though that is probably the trickiest to code...
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 16, 2014, 03:04:10 AM
Give me a jumpship, a single chokepoint on an X map, and a single ship with radar dampening, and I reckon I could could hold off the CPAs from the showdown devices. Yep. 

The suggestion I would have is to cap the time threat fleet spends engaging attackers. So, if all irreplacables on their current planet are gone, and they've been under attack for > 10 minutes, do the normal calculation of where to go next ignoring the currently engaging forces.

Please, please do not nerf the jumpship itself - that single Titanite asteroid I found has given me incredible, amazing amounts of utility. I wouldn't have gotten close to hour 6 without it, and I'd say probably 3/4 guardposts removals since then have been due to it. But realistically, how often to people even find a Titanite asteroid? It, along with the first ARS having sentinels and the railpod/reprocessor fabs, was one of the few strokes of luck the RNG gave me.

Also, this 'keep threat locked down' cheese can be done in a similar manner by just throwing a stream of cheap ships (younglings, for example) through a wormhole.

EDIT: As for the wave itself, here's your answer. The wave interval multiplier is normally around 5/6.

4/15/2014 10:59:41 PM (7.020)
-----------------------------------
Determining Next Wave Interval; Current Game Time: 12:38:11
baseInterval = floor( ( 14 - this.AIDifficulty ) * 3 * 60 ) = 720
unmodifiedRandomLow = 2
unmodifiedRandomHigh = 12
Because Diff >= 7 and entry_points = 0, modifiedRandomLow is 2 and modifiedRandomHigh is 9
Because game time > 2 hours, using modified range.
randomRoll = rand(2,9) = 2
randomAmount = floor( randomRoll * player.AIDifficulty * 10 ) = 200
realInterval = baseInterval + randomAmount = 920
NextWaveSizeMultiplier = realInterval / baseInterval = 1.28
= So will announce next wave for this player at T+920, around 12:53:31

4/16/2014 12:02:38 AM (7.020)
-----------------------------------
Starting CreateWaveToPlanet at Game Time: 12:53:32 ; Player.AIType: Vanilla ; Player.AIDifficulty: 10 ; EffectiveAIP: 164 ; AITechLevel: 2 ; IsSchizo: False
MultiplierFromWaveInterval = 1.28
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 16, 2014, 08:56:01 AM
Yea, I realized this morning that nerfing the jumpship has the tiger by the wrong end.  I've been considering for a little while now adding a rule where, rather than all threat on a planet either going with the "no interesting human presence here" AI branch (which looks for new places to bust up) or with the one of the "fight it out" branches, I could have it:

- if AI threat strength on planet > total human strength on planet * 10
- and there are no non-mobile irreplaceable units to kill
-- then have enough threat do "fight it out" to maintain 10x superiority
-- have the rest of the threat act as if there is no interesting human presence here and find something else to kill

So in this case you could potentially have tied up a chunk of the threat indefinitely, but the rest would have cruised on.  And quite possibly won.

Though I have great confidence another cheese would be devised ;)
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: Draco18s April 16, 2014, 10:27:09 AM
Though I have great confidence another cheese would be devised ;)

Two or three planets performing this tactic (with 25 times as many human units being the distraction). :P

Although that would lock up a chunk of fairly limited size (500 times as big as the human force).
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 16, 2014, 10:32:18 AM
Two or three planets performing this tactic (with 25 times as many human units being the distraction). :P

Although that would lock up a chunk of fairly limited size (500 times as big as the human force).
Yea, if you can pull off this kind of dance across 3+ planets then I think that crosses the line from "cheese" to "you're a machine, have fun" ;)  And even there it wouldn't have the theoretically-unlimited capacity it currently does on just 1 planet.

I have no problem with (and indeed I heartily encourage) clever human tactics that establish inordinately high kill-to-loss ratios (or "strength-tied-up"-to-"strength-defending" ratios), so long as it isn't a "if I do this trick, my ratio is infinite in my favor" situation... kinda like this one :)
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: Aklyon April 16, 2014, 01:00:20 PM
With enough moving MSDs on hand, you could contain threat indefinitely*
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 16, 2014, 01:57:47 PM
MSDs are always fun. Now if only they were capable of cloaking while producing units, and were EMP immune...

Keith I broadly agree with what you're proposing. However I'd still have a couple of minute timer in there personally, just so it's not too horrifically misanthropoic. Sometimes the only thing saving you is the 30 seconds the threat spend cleaning up all the turrets on a recently popped world.

Now thanks to easter coming up, the grace of the British goverment, and the fact I'm a contractor and can take time off whenever I want anyway I have 5 days of holiday starting tomorrow. Time to pour a snifter of whiskey and finish this thing in time for the TLF release.

( Public service announcment: Friends don't let friends play AI War drunk. It never ends well, and oftens ends with half the galaxy nuked. )

At this stage I have a choice. I can pick away at the AI homeworlds, using suave tactics to skillfully erode them to the point where the slightest breeze will take out the AI home command stations. Or, second option, I can cleanse the galaxy of their presence altogether.

I'm taking the second option.

Roadlinl is the next target, along with its quite delightful core laser turret controller and grav ripper, protector starship and engineer fabs. The protector starships will be very handy in keeping my fleet alive once they pop their heads in to the AI homeworlds, and the turrets useful as anti-heavy-stuff-in-exos defences. This will also leave me with 6,000 knowledge from both Zupreape and Roadlinl. Now, 6,000 knowledge isn't massively useful at the moment. But 6,500 ... well, that would allow me to buy both Mk.2 and Mk. 3 bombers. Which gets me Mk. 4s from my advanced factory. Those Mk. 5 forcefields covering everything on the AI homeworlds will weep for mercy before I'm through.

So - Take Roadlinl. Then it's time to go knowledge hack the AI homeworld.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 16, 2014, 02:09:05 PM
Keith I broadly agree with what you're proposing. However I'd still have a couple of minute timer in there personally, just so it's not too horrifically misanthropoic. Sometimes the only thing saving you is the 30 seconds the threat spend cleaning up all the turrets on a recently popped world.
That's a good point. 

Kind of like the normal retreat timer: sure, it's smarter for the AI to immediately put a wave in "advance in retrograde" mode if it warps in on top of the Turretry Of Doom (and thus gradually accumulate a lot of threat) but it's not as fun for the player overall.

Anyway, I'll probably have it so that:
Diff < 7 : never does the "move on" mechanic
Diff <= 8 : only does it after 3 minutes
Diff < 10 : only does it after 2 minutes
Diff 10 : only does it after 1 minute


( Public service announcment: Friends don't let friends play AI War drunk. It never ends well, and oftens ends with half the galaxy nuked. )
Only half?


At this stage I have a choice. I can pick away at the AI homeworlds, using suave tactics to skillfully erode them to the point where the slightest breeze will take out the AI home command stations. Or, second option, I can cleanse the galaxy of their presence altogether.
I know where this is going.


So - Take Roadlinl. Then it's time to go knowledge hack the AI homeworld.
What could go wrong?
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: Draco18s April 16, 2014, 02:30:26 PM
( Public service announcment: Friends don't let friends play AI War drunk. It never ends well, and oftens ends with half the galaxy nuked. )

Who says you need to be drunk (http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,15220.0.html)?
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 16, 2014, 04:28:44 PM
Velociraptors, naturally, need no such assistance to enable ultraviolence mode.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 16, 2014, 05:47:22 PM
13.04: Spaceplanes are told to go harass the fortress and the Mk. 5 shield it's sitting under. Everyone else is told to GTFO so they don't auto-FRD suicide. However they are free to take potshots at the threat fleet while flying back througn Murdoch.

Oh, and I also pop two carriers letting loose 2,000 angry but soon-to-attrition youngling tigers.

13.05: Thinking about it, I should probably see how much scrap is on Murdoch. Oh, 10 million you say? Looks like my later kills haven't been accumulating any then, for shame. Still, +10,000 metal/s is handy. Wonder how long the command station will last this time.

13.06.13: About a minute apparently. Still, should have got enough to build Zupreape's defence grid.

13.07: Aww man, the command station made the sentinal frigates FRD. Right into the leech starships. Now they have snipers, ho ho ho.

13.08: 5,000 youngling tigers to Rakalurn. Ouch. At least the 1,200 on Murdoch are all about to attrition to death.

13.09: Space planes are really super ineffective against shields - they've got it down by 8%. Wave hits.

13.10: 4,200 younglings wiped out. At the cost of my entire fleet. The remainder make a run for ... somewhere. They'll attrition before long. I think some of the spare threat might have joined in that attack too, to be honest.

42,000 strength left on Murdoch.

Oh, and hey the human resistance show up again with 160 ships. Go get yourselves killed on Murdoch, please.

13.13: Huh, apparently the tigers went after the spaceplanes on Zupreape. Who knew. Human resistance are dead by this point, of course.

31,000 strength remaining on Murdoch. Reprocessors have been drafted in to start eating starships.

13.14: Reprocessors acting under cover of a vast field of lightning torpedos - super effective. How much these guys are actually boosting my economy though I'm not sure.

13.17: 1,000 ships left on Murdoch. 16,000 strength. 58 starships, 800 soon to attrition younglings. It may be time to send in the clowns rest of the fleet.

13.21: Reprocessors supported by flagships for attack boosts make absolute mincemeat of the starships until they come to the plasmas - ouch, super engine damage and artilley hull types. However seeing as they're the last 8 ships left on Murdoch I just send the entire fleet in.

The spaceplanes have managed to get the shield down to 64%. The fortress is taking great joy in wiping out the metal harvester next to it every 6 seconds.

13.22: Murdoch is finally threat free, and rebuilding can begin.

2,000 bombers to Rakalurn. 2,500 threat still unaccounted for - probably sitting on one of the two AI homeworlds.

13.23: That wave contained an abnormally large number of implosion guardians - threat fleet? Still, can't complain about 7 million salvage.

13.26: Oh cool, the warp jammer is blocking the dire guardian spawn on the AI homeworld. Rather than moving turrets back to Murdoch, half the beams and snipers move to Micvarape to deal with the soon to be incoming exos. Oh, and my penentrator is back up and has been for a while. How did I miss that.

13.29.30: Defences on Murdoch are back up to full capacity.

Now, in order to be able to exfiltrate that penentrator from the first AI homeworld I need to take down the grav reactor under a Mk. 5 shield. However even though it's in range of the Murdoch wormhole, the penetrator only does 56 million damage. I need another 4 million forcefield ignoring damage from somewhere.

Hey, I've leeched 28 zenith siege engines. Let's see what these babies can do when jumpshiped and placed under cloaker cover.

13.29.40: Nothing. They did nothing. Because I forgot the AI homeworld had planetary tachyon coverage.

13.31: While I'm waiting to think of something, and refleet, I send 900 ships through the wormhole to Roadlinl to take out an OMD / Mk. 5 MRLS next to the wormhole. Spaceplanes now have the forcefield at 32%, and can almost fire on the Mk. 3 fortress!

13.31.20: I may actually have come out of that with a net positive number of ships. Thanks leeches! Looks like about 4,500 special forces ships are domiciled on the AI homeworld at the moment. Oh, and did I mention there are currently 202 riot starships on Roadlinl? AI loves its riots.

13.35: Bombers. Why does it always have to be bombers.

13.38: Fully refleeted. +2,000 metal/s (all I get after matter converters). Time to exchange lives for guardposts! And I may as well use that penetrator here, while I'm waiting to think of a valid plan for the grav reactor.

13.40: 3 guardposts down. 12 to go. And remember - this planet has a grav drill on it. This could take a while. That said the AI seem intent on firing on my lightning missiles again and didn't actually do the fleet that much damage. All repaired in under a minute.

13.41: Spaceplanes finally take down the Mk. 3 fortress. That only took you 38 minutes guys, way to go!

13.42: So, the special forces are still sitting on Roadlinl. You know what this calls for? A nuk... EMP warhead!

13.43: I reckon a 30 second EMP will be just fine my purposes ... this time. Geronimo!

Psst. I just checked, grav drills are not immune to EMPs.

13.43.31: So, what's immune to EMPs? Mk. 5 guard posts. Riot starship. Normal starships. That Mk. 3 fortress sitting next to the command station. What isn't immune?

Carriers - including those holding most of the special forces
Fleet ships
Ion Cannons
Some of the guardians
The Grav Drill

And you know what goes well with a disabled grav drill? Jumpships.

13.43.33: Everybody jumps in. Party time! Main body of the fleet are left on the wormholes to cull the surrounding fleet ships and special forces. Raids are sent after ion cannons. And the reprocessors...

13.43.35: Oh come on, that's not fair! Teleportation is still disabled. And my ships' speed is still down to 32. Do me a favour and give grav drills EMP immunity if you're going to let them keep all their abilities :( (allllmost bug)

13.43.40: And to make matters worse, it turns out that ships *in* a carrier are not EMPed. So as I forgot to turn off auto-targetting carriers, 4,000 angry special forces ships smack me around a bit. Gang aft agley indeed.

13.43.45: Also, Mk. 5 disassembler guardians are everywhere and eating all my starships. Well they're getting focus fired.

13.44: All ships have retreated. Only lost a few hundred. Not sure exactly how much damage I did, but there's only 1,300 ships left on the planet and no carriers. Anyway, looks like we're back to the traditional way - slow, steady and heavily cloaked.

13.44.30: Zenith reprocessors take out a Mk. 5 MRLS. What, the jumpship might be slow while grav drilled but it's still a cloaked transport. Heck, I even manage to rescue 7 of them.

13.45.30: And by 'rescue', I of course mean send after a command station shield guard post just around the grav well.

13.49: Ding ding, fleet blob round 2.

13.50: Dire guardian spawning in 00.01. Timed that nicely. Of course, that just means he'll show up for round 3.

13.51: Warp gate guardian you say? On Roadlinl, you say? Well, that doesn't really both me in all honesty.

13.55: Space tanks. Makes a change from bombers, I suppose.

13.55.25: Vun. Vun Mk. 5 plasma starship to take out the last command station shield guard post. But can he survive in low power until the cloaking kicks in again?

13.55.26: That would be a no then. Of *course* there were disassembler guardians nearby.

13.56: 4,000 fighters? Don't mind if I do.

13.57.36: So 10 zenith siege engines, 7 flak guardians and 2 disassembler guardians are attacking Zupreape. And just took out the command station. Hey, I wonder if one of those has my plasma siege.

13.58: Nope, apparently not. That's a shame.

13.59: Reprisal level 1. Surprised it took this long.

14.00: Well, not the most productive hour. And that EMP was just useless. However all defences are back, I'm nearly all refleeted now (including Mk. 2 bombers), and operation 'kick the special forces in the face' can continue to phase 3. Which is quite similar to phase 1 and 2, in all honesty.

Oh, and the command station on Roadlinl is exposed. I should probably send something in to pop it.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 16, 2014, 07:19:24 PM
14.01: 2,000 fighters? You really need to learn the meaning of this whole 'effective reprisal' thing. Looking at the logs it has a wave interval of 1, which is much lower than my normal waves. It's also taking strength directly from the salvage available, so player.AITypeData.WaveSizeMultiplier doesn't seem to be getting applied.

14.05: As previously alluded to, operation 'punch the special forces in the face' resumes.

14.06: Only 36 riot starships left now! Thinking about it I'll retreat and let the maws digest / my riots with tractors pull their prey to their doom.

14.07: Only 350 ships left on Roadlinl now, down from the peak of about 6,000. The jumpship has taken the opportunity to slowly move reprocessors into place as well, so another guardpost and an ion go down as the fleet retreats.

14.09: Uh, someone want to explain this one to me. Two design backups, 4 ship types?

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/fishydesign.png)

14.13: Raids take out the last ion cannon. Fully restocked fleet prepares for PtSFinF round 4, with the bonus goal this time of pushing on to the command station and popping both it and the Mk. 3 fort next door. The penetrator will be coming along to assist with that latter one.

14.14: Fleet enters Roadlinl airspace.

14.14.37: Penetrator takes a shot - 56 million damage is only 32% of the forts's HPs though. He turns tail and legs it.

14.14.45: Command station pops. +25 AIP. 226 enemy ships remaining on planet.

14.14.53: Fort is dead. Now to clean up the guard posts. By which I mean, of course, retreat all ships to the wormhole exit and let the lightining torpedo frigates, sentinels and enclaves take care of things.

14.17: Right, so what do we have left. 100 ships, mostly guardians. 2 missiles, 2 MRLSes, 3 needlers and a spire shield. Appropriate type ships, to your stations.

14.18: 3,700 fighters. Murdoch. Yay, scrap. Helpful when you need to constantly refleet like me.

14.19: Oh, and 2,000 bombers too? Thanks! 6,000 wave, zero concerns.

14.22: 14 million scrap.

14.23: Oh hey, I forgot about the dire guardian lair on Roadlinl. Spawning in 10 minutes ... getting destroyed before that.

14.25: 1,300 ships ready to rock. Dire guardian hunting time.

14.28: All starships on planet dealt with. 1,000 ships sitting next to the dire guardian lair. lightnings, sentinals and enclaves sitting on the wormhole. Let's do this.

12.28.07: Dire widow, dire raider, dire needler. Widow is a fairly big problem, so burn that first. Then the raider.

12.28.11: Oh F@*#. Widow decides to take a trip to the AI homeworld. 575 ships go with it. All forces, retreat!

12.28.12: Oh wait, a widow. And a grav reactor. They can't.

12.28.23: Uh ... widow decides to bring them back to Zupreape? Why?

12.28.27: Needler guardian down. And the widow has gone back to the AI homeworld. Just ... what?

14.30: Wow, so that was ... I'm going to say extraordinarily and maliciously painful. Dire guardian lair next to the wormhole to the AI homeworld? Fine. Dire widow guardian pulling in 500+ ships, including most of my expensive maws? Not so fine. Little bleeder is now sitting back on Roadlinl at 44% health smirking at me.

14.32: 1,000 ships to Roadlinl. Burn this sucker before he fully regenerates.

14.32.30: Done. And a 1,500 armor ship reprisal.

14.34: And another reprisal? Also, I've just realised that the warp gate guardians on Roadlinl are acting as reinforcement warp gates, along with the special forces, which is what is feeding the constant stream of ships into the planet.

14.34.40: Murdoch command goes down to the first reprisal wave. Man I hate armor ships and their 4x structural (i.e. forcefield) multipliers.

14.39: Murdoch defence grid back up, although I have very little money now so refleeting may take a while.

14.41: 1,200 ships is good enough. Go back in, seek and destroy those warp gate guardians.

14.41.41: I, uh, I don't get it. 2 more warp gate guardians just spawned on Roadlinl. But the command station is dead. So are the special forces guard posts. Where are they coming from!?! Please don't tell me warp gate guardians spawn in more warp gate guardians as reinforcements.

14.44: Whoops, Murdoch goes down again. This time to a 3,500 ship fighter wave I didn't notice.

14.47: 3,500 bombers to ???. Haven't seen that in a while.

14.48: 800 ships join the 'rescue Murdoch' mission. Only about 100 survive. 6,000 threat, economy is flatlined and only 500 mobile ships.

14.57: Murdoch defences back online.

15.00: Wow. Okay, so what I was hoping would be a quick win has turned into a horrific morass. Both with that grav drill slowing everything down, and those warp gate guardians absolutely reaming me. We're now back up to 300 odd ships on Roadlinl, far too many of them starships. I've essentially been running in place since 14.07.

Think I'll give this a break for tonight and continue in the morning.


: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 16, 2014, 10:12:57 PM
The fortress is taking great joy in wiping out the metal harvester next to it every 6 seconds.
Simple minds, simple pleasures.


Do me a favour and give grav drills EMP immunity if you're going to let them keep all their abilities :( (allllmost bug)
Made a note to do so.  Sorry it doesn't disable them; that's one of those abilities which triggers off of "is there any unit in this list?", and units don't get moved in and out of those kinds of lists, regardless of state changes, unless they leave the planet or die.

Wouldn't it be a shame if one of those two conditions were to occur to that innocent grav drill?


14.01: 2,000 fighters? You really need to learn the meaning of this whole 'effective reprisal' thing. Looking at the logs it has a wave interval of 1, which is much lower than my normal waves. It's also taking strength directly from the salvage available, so player.AITypeData.WaveSizeMultiplier doesn't seem to be getting applied.
I think the WaveSizeMultiplier thing isn't a problem: Reprisal Level 1 (which is the soonest it can actually launch the reprisal) = the normal strength of a wave with interval:1 and everything else as it would normally be (the random factor takes the averaged middle).

But perhaps it needs to assume an interval of 2, rather than 1; several mechanics based off wave strength do that.

Either way, the higher the threshold, the longer it takes to charge one of those.  That's why it's been taking so long to charge them.


14.09: Uh, someone want to explain this one to me. Two design backups, 4 ship types?
The bug there is actually that there's 2 backups.  The designs are tied to the planet (and require the presence of a backup), rather than to a specific unit.  But in general it doesn't impact you whether there's 2 backups on the planet or 2 dozen.


12.28.23: Uh ... widow decides to bring them back to Zupreape? Why?
Hmm, yea, maybe it ought to just stay put when on an AI HW with a tractor load.  I think it was just hunting back and forth between planets because it always assumes it needs to be taking the tractor load to some other AI planet.  Though I guess that other planet wasn't AI anymore.


Please don't tell me warp gate guardians spawn in more warp gate guardians as reinforcements.
Ok, I won't tell you ;)


and those warp gate guardians absolutely reaming me
You may thank for that: Kahuna's recent reminder that those weren't getting spawned in any games.  And people think this game has no PvP.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 17, 2014, 06:41:29 AM
15.02: 3,000 ships hit Murdoch. Guess some of that threat got antsy.

15.03: Aaand once again Murdoch command goes down.

15.04: That's a rather large number of guardians on Zupreape.

15.05: Aaand Zupreape goes down to 8 plasma sieges and a spire starship.

OH COME ON. Three more warp gate guardians spawn on Roadlinl.

15.05: Uh, another 2,000 threat at Murdoch. The AI is taking this thing rather seriously.

15.06: It's not threat at all. It appears to be the remnants of the special forces taking revenge. I'll just leave them there to level the planet.

15.10: Murdoch and Zupreape back up, although defences are still building. Due to the early popping of command stations in both cases I didn't get nearly as much scrap as I need - seriously considering popping a distribution node at this point.

Oh, and 2,200 bombers to the defenceless Murdoch.

15.13: Wave dealt with. Thinking about it, the wormhole from Murdoch to the AI homeworld is my only remaining warp accessible point (bar the warp gate guardians), so I should probably move the minefields.

Oh hey, you can't sabotage hack distribution nodes you own. Lame.

15.15: 6,000 tachyon microfighters. Definitely not playing around anymore.

15.17: Yeah, so moving the minefields was a good idea. Those killed about 3k on their own. 3,100 threat though, some from escapees and about 2,500 from before.

As expected, 2,000 of that is on Samuockash.

15.27: Still refleeting. The warp gate guardians have bought the ships on Roadlinl back up to 500. Still, I have 1,000 odd ships so the plan this time is to warp in, stay by the wormhole, and see if I can't snipe some of these irritating warpers.

15.28: 1 down, 4 to go. At 48 million health these things take a while to snipe.

15.30: One left. 100 enemy ships left on the planet.

OH COME ON. The last warp gate guardian spawns a reinfocement wave ... with 4 wave guardians!

1,100 cloaked ship to Murdoch. Defences can soak that on their own.

15.32: Reprisal 1. 900 grav drains to Murdoch. My fleet on Roadlinl is down to about 500 now. Doesn't help that the warp guardians like hanging out next to the Mk. 5 guard posts I haven't yet taken down.

15.34: Well, all my expensive starships have died. However I've finally taken out the last warp guardian. And there are just 49 ships and 2 guardposts left on the planet.

15.40: Refleeting to take out the last 8 remaining starships. I think I can say, with great sincerity, that this is the most problems a planet has ever given me after I've already popped the command station. Literally, this has taken me an hour and a half to clear.

15.42: Finally the last starship dies. Warp jammer command goes up next to the irreplacable cluster. I'll also put a forcefield over the grav drill, because honestly 180 metal/s and 40,000 energy is actually a significant contribution to my economy. The Mk. 2 radar jammer is on its own though.

15.44: Finally the station goes up. Takes a while, when your engineers are moving at 32 speed to get there. Grav effect is still applying to all my ships - I thought it only affected enemies? Anyway protector starships, grav rippers and more engineers are mine. Along with laser turrets, delightful laser turrets.

Normal defence grid goes up, all my current ships retreat.

15.45: 5,500 tachyon microfighters to Murdoch. If at first you don't succeed, try again with a smaller wave?

15.49: Rakalurn is relatively safe now, I don't think it needs 10 forcefields anymore. 6 are distributed between Roadlinl and Micvarape.

Okay, now that I've finally taken Roadlinl the next step is of course the AI homeworld. It makes sense to take the one next to Murdoch first, as those exos will beeline through Micvarape to my homeworld. I still have to figure out some way of taking out that grav reactor though...

15.50: Rebuilding the defence grid. It makes sense to move everything back to Micvarape and stick a warp jammer back on Murdoch. Move all the tractors / grav turrets / snipers from Rakalurn back as well. And, for the first time in quite a while, turn off the warp gates on Rakalurn.

Hey, you want to know what a real crashing economy looks like? -59,000 metal/s. With constructors turned off. On the plus side though, turns out Roadlinl is the motherlode. 7 metal harvesters and for some reason the grav drill is actually giving me 270 metal rather than the 180 it promised. +750/s, even after the warp jammer is taken into account, which is a solid 20% economy boost.

15.55: Riddle me this. What is immune to forcefields, does 4 million damage, and I actually have access to?

A: A Mk. 2 armored warhead.

15.57: The core protector starship design I'm using is called the 'Kitchen sink', by the way. One of everything, including the shield generator.

15.59: Lyudmila pops her head into Desenan and take out the core warhead interceptor. 1,000 threat here.

3,800 missile frigates to Micvarape. With no fleet ships there. This could be a good test of the defences.

16.00: Alrighty then. Time to take the fight to the AI homeworlds. Be interesting to see if this really works out the way I'm hoping, but I can't think of any other way to chew 4 million health off that shielded grav reactor. Also, it seems like it has been a very long time since the last CPA...

EDIT: State of the empire:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/16hours.png)
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 17, 2014, 08:12:38 AM
16.02: Yep, not a problem. Even when 1,000 bombers show up all they do is set off the area mines and hurt the missile frigates.

16.04: Just realised that Mk. 2 armored warheads actually cost 800,000 metal. That's a much as a core protector starship or Mk. 5 plasma. In the middle of a refleet, this might take a while.

16.06.40: Jumpship drops a scout starship and 20 grav drains at the extremities of the homeworld grav well, to lure all the defending ships over there.

16.06.52: 12 seconds later it returns with 8 reprocessors and leaves them next to the unshielded core electric post. Which promptly explodes.

16.07: Huh, exo split. Half goes to Murdoch, apparently en-route to Rakalurn. The rest to Micvarape. Both die, obviously. Actually, I probably got more salvage from that than a normal wave, so thanks for the refleeting boost!

16.09: So what does that leave us with. A shielded core beam post and riot control, both within firing distance of the Murdoch wormhole. The grav reactor under the shield. Another, unshielded riot control guardpost. And my old friend the beam spewing core sentinel post, who likes to take long sojourns across the planet. I think he's next. Oh, and the obligatory Mk.3 fortress next to the command station, of course.

16.12: Sentinel beams have 8,000 range. Reprocessors have 8,000 range. The jumpship drops them off just outside spitting distance, then quickly evacs.

16.13: I forgot about radar dampening. The lucky sentinal escapes with about 10% health.

Thinking of radar dampening, that gives me another problem - my penetrator won't be able to shoot from the wormhole, it'll need to get with 5,500 range of the grav reactor.

16.14: 5,300 missile frigates and 80 starships to Micvarape. Wow. Time to shuttle in some sentinal frigates and leech starships.

Also, I just tried an experiment. Turns out, the Mk. 5 jumpship doesn't attrition on the AI homeworlds despite saying it does so on worlds >= Mk. 5. All that super-fast micro action, and it wasn't even attritioning anyway! (bug?)

16.16: Huh, that wasn't actually too bad at all. Thinking about it, are these waves getting chipper shredded? That would explain why I'm seeing so many guardians.

Actually, according to advanced logging that is exactly what is happening. Good old auto-target carriers.

16.19: Minefields are back up. Time to provoke another exo.

16.19.20: I really need to remember to jump some ships to the edge of the grav well and pull off the few thousand ships clustered around the core sentinal before doing this again.

16.22: Finally the tricksy sentinel goes down. Reprisal level 1.

16.23: Uh, yeah, one of those exos just spawned on the second AI homeworld. As in, the one which wasn't attacked. EventAttackPopulation log doesn't give any clues as to why. (bug, or just ... ?)

16.25: Reprisal is a 1,000 odd bombers.

Uhhh, so I just looked in the wave logs and I think something is badly broken in the CPA code. I've been getting one of these every minute or two for the last 2 hours:

4/16/2014 11:55:35 PM (7.020)
-----------------------------------
Triggering CPA (always from first AI); Game Time: 14:39:00
effectiveAIPForCPAPurposes = this.AIProgressionLevelEffective = 191
since diff > 9, numberOfSecondsPerPointOfMinimumAIPForCPAPurposes = 240 + ( (FInt)120 * ( (FInt)9 - this.AIDifficulty ) ).IntValue = 120
minimumAIPForCPAPurposes = Game.Instance.GameSecond / numberOfSecondsPerPointOfMinimumAIPForCPAPurposes = 439
effectiveAIPForCPAPurposes = Max(effectiveAIPForCPAPurposes,minimumAIPForCPAPurposes) = 439
difficultyFactor = ( this.AIDifficulty * this.GetHandicapMultiplier() ) / ( 13 - this.AIDifficulty ) : 3.33
aiTypeFactor = 1
simulateMaxTimeWaveFactor = Mat.One + ( ( this.AIDifficulty * 2 ) / ( ( 14 - this.AIDifficulty ) * 3 ) ) : 2.67
simulateDoubleWaveFactor = 2
simulateDifficultySpecificWaveSizeMultiplier = (if <= 3 then 1, <= 4 : 1.5, <= 5 : 1.75, <= 6 : 2, <= 7 : 2.25, <= 9 : 2.5, <= 9.3 : 2.9, <= 9.6 : 3.3, <= 9.8 : 4, 10 : 5) = 5
humanHomeworldCountMultiplier = Mat.One + ( (FInt)( humanHomeworldCount - 1 ) * FInt.FromParts( 0, 330 ) ) = 1
numberOfShips (before applying cap-scale) = ( (FInt)effectiveAIPForCPAPurposes * difficultyFactor * aiTypeFactor * simulateMaxTimeWaveFactor * simulateDoubleWaveFactor * simulateDifficultySpecificWaveSizeMultiplier * humanHomeworldCountMultiplier ).IntValue = 39018

But I've never gotten a CPA. Say what would happen if someone, theoretically, destroyed the AI command stations on every single planet in the galaxy except the AI homeworlds?

(bug?!?)

This is actually a net disadvantage for me, means I can't rely on the CPAs to clear out the strategic reserve.

16.27.33: So, let's jump a hacker to the AI homeworld. Edge of the grav well. Hmm, 15 seconds 'til the next tick?

Wait, I can still build more knowledge hackers. In fact, I can build an infinite number of knowledge hackers. And when they all come online a second later - each one does its own instant tick before going into a 15 second cooldown.

16.27.44: Yeah, you might want ... you might want to make that a global cooldown. Or limit the number of covert knowledge extractors on a planet. Otherwise something like this might happen:

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/hackWhoops.png)
 
Hmm, hacking progress cost of next point of covert knowledge extraction: 0.0015 HaP. Or is that normal, seeing as my total HaP seems to have gone down from 51 to 24.

(this one, obviously, bug).
 
16.29: Unshielded core riot control post. 8 reprocessors. 4 flagships, and a couple of decoy drones. Biiig badda-boom.

Oh hey, the exo gave me a black widow golem this time. Cool. Lyudmila sends her regards.
 
16.30: Okay, I think I've broken the game enough for the moment. When I return, I shall have to figure out how to deal with those three remaining shielded guard posts.
 
Hint: It'll probably involve the Mk. IV bombers I just got from that knowledge raid.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 17, 2014, 10:14:10 PM
And it goes marching on... Odd about the CPAs and whatnot.  Will try to look at the stuff you pointed out after the TLF release tomorrow settles down a bit.  Goodness it's been a lot of hours this week :)
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 18, 2014, 07:14:47 AM
Yeah, and I'm not sure reading AI War AARs really counts as relaxation ;)

TLF of course takes priority, and I'm quite looking forward to playing it. Managed to keep myself relatively unspoilt so far so I can come at it fresh. After I post this I'm going to go see if I can figure out where the buy button on your site is hiding this time - always nice not to give steam their cut when you can.

With this knowledge hacking thing, I could see a situation where an unscrupulous person could, say, jumpship a hacker onto every planet in the (80 planet) galaxy. Then pause the game, build 340 covert knowledge extractors per hacker, and one second later have about 240,00 knowledge to spend. And as it only takes a second, you don't normally see any hacking response in that time - so theoretically this can be done while already negative of HaP.

 
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 18, 2014, 11:01:20 AM
So I've moved back to my laptop temporarily as I'm travelling for Easter. This thing is four years old, about 1/3rd the power of my desktop and yet runs AI war so much better. Why? Because I've just realised that my Windows 8 desktop really, really hates firing effects. Lightning, beams, especially tractors just slow it to an absolute crawl. I just didn't notice it until I moved back to a Windows 7 box, where they all go off without a problem. Anybody else seen this kind of performance issue?

Anyway:

16.31: Y'know what, after the hand the RNG dealt me earlier I have absolutely no compunction about knowledge hacking the second AI homeworld as well. Now, what can I do with 5,500 knowledge?

Oh, Mk. 3 raid starships you say? SUPERB

16.34: Raids are building. 2,000 odd eyebots to Micvarape.

16.44.30: The raids are finished. 1.8 million lovely forcefield ignoring damage every 3 seconds. A cap of armor ships, spaceplanes, youngling tigers and some leeched tachyon microfighers join them on Murdoch.

16.44.50: Raids into the jumpship. That's going to sit at an oblique angle to the core beam post, away from the wormhole, hopefully keeping them out of the cross-fire

16.44.55: Chaff ships first, to asbsorb the first beam hit.

16.44.58: Okay, raids have 6 second until it reloads. Should allows us to get off 2/4 necessary shots.

16.45.21: Guardpost down. 9 raids still alive. They get told to take down the ion cannon that's also under the forcefield then make a run for it - they are, of course, black hole immune.

16.45.40: None of them survive. Ah well, mission accomplished.

16.46: Hmm, another attack through Zupreape. Save is attached from just before I wiped the core beam, if you're interested. Although you may have to do the heavy guard-post killing yourself.

16.50: 3,600 bombers to Micvarape. Thank goodness for area mines, huh. Jumpship is currently in the process of transporting everything except maws and sentinal frigates to Murdoch.

16.59: Mk. 2 armored missile is finally finished. Now to just wait for the rest of the refleeting. 3,600 threat somewhere is a tad concerning.

17.01: Only things we're waiting on now are the slow to build lightning frigates and a couple of maws. Let's go harrass the second AI homeworld in the meantime. Unshielded guard posts: Core booster, core Zenith fortress, core implosion drone, core arachnid. Three of which have hull susceptible to reprocessors.

17.05: Core archnid post goes down, along with an ion cannon.

17.06: Exos go through both Roadlinl and Zupreape - however I split the fleet in half to counter them anyway. Sweet, sweet salvage.

1,600 eyebots to Micvarape.

17.09: Zenith fortress pops. This time one exo spawns on the first AI homeworld and goes straight in to Micvarape.

17.17: Okay, any attempt to take the core booster is getting intercepted by a few hundred riots and their shields, so let's leave that for now. Fleet is back up to full capacity.

So, the plan. First, Lyudila will warp in to Desenan. That should draw the ships currently clustered around the Murdoch wormhole away. Once she leaves, a full cap of Mk. 1-4 bombers, 90 odd eyebots and every starship I own (including 9 raids) will warp in and engage the riot control post under the shield. The rest of the 1,800 strong fleet will dash towards the grav reactor, providing cover for both the penetrator and Mk. 2 armored warhead. Once the grav reactor goes down, everyone can then flee.

First though, 3.5k armored ships to Micvarape.

17.23: Wave terminated. Defences back up. 1 million in the bank. Time to do this thing.

One small change in plan - scouts indicate about 100 riot starships over both wormhole exits. Seeing a Lyudmila isn't immune to forcefields, that means she wouldn't be able to escape. So, jumpship to the edge of the grav well for distraction purposes.

17.23.45: Distractionary grav drains warped into far orbit. 3,800 ships start chasing them, along with another 4,500 special forces contained in carriers.

17.24.03: Grav drains start dying. Riots are miles from the wormholes. Lyudmila jumps in to pull the strategic reserve ships towards the Micvarape wormhole.

17.24.25: Lyudmila warps out at 60% health. Looks like this is about optimal for the attack. All forces on Murdoch are mobilised.

17.24.44: Penetrator takes its shot with 5% health left. A millisecond after firing, it goes down. Looks like I won't be able to use this tactic on the last grav reactor. Riot control guardpost is at 50% and the shield covering it appears to be down. But practically every AI ship is now in firing range of the 1,400 remaining fleet ships.

17.24.51: Riot control guard post goes down. Fleet ships are told to retreat into a protective ball around the lightning frigates. Just need that armored warhead to hit home now.

17.24.55: Lyudmila warps back in to provide long range fire support.

17.25.02: Armored warhead goes down. Dammit, so much for 'almost impossible to destroy'. Entire fleet is redirected to take down that grav reactor - even if takes them down to the last man.

17.25.12: Lyudmila at 14% health. However as the most juicy target on planet she has drawn off most of the strategic reserve from the main attack fleet. Remaining 5 raids are closing on the grav reactor. Lyudmila legs it.

17.25.15: Lyudmila escapes with 90,000 health. That's half the health of a standard Mk. 1 fighter, or 0.15% of her regular 60 million health. Engineers are instantly repairing, so that the threat which follows her doesn't finish the job.

17.25.30: Grav reactor at 1 million health. But only one Mk. 3 raid remaining. It needs to get three shots off to finish this.

17.25.35: Grav reactor down. I think plasma splash worked in my favour for a change. 372 friendly ships remain on Desenan, facing off against over 7,000.

Oh, and a 2,000 fighter reprisal wave to Micvarape. With another reprisal 1 in the offing.

17.26.04: Last ships either dies or exits the planet. In total only 54 of the 1,800 ships which started out escaped, mostly starships at 10% or less health. The majority of the lightnings also seem to have made it through, presumably because they were still sitting next to the wormhole.

17.26.09: One exo going through Roadlinl again. Another hitting Micvarape - it has an artillery golem. Focus fire that beast, quickly.

17.26.25: Arty golem goes down. Luckily it didn't get it into its head to attack Lyudmila.

17.27.30: Exos handled, along with the first reprisal wave. Still waiting for the last one to declare.

17.28: 1,000+ bombers. The salvage has restored the mines on Micvarape, this won't be an issue.

17.30: Bombers terminated.

So, the first AI command station is now accessible. Couple of pretty hairy moments there, and it required far more of the fleet dying than I was hoping for. The failure of the armored warhead was particularly disappointing, but it overall losses weren't as bad as they could have been. Most of the high value starships and lightnings escaped. So, a half hour or so to refleet then I reckon I can blob-of-doom the AI command station.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: Aklyon April 18, 2014, 11:11:50 AM
Win8 (hopefully 8.1?) hates a lot of things. Basically anything I've seen on the internet has been 'halp halp program not working pls look (win8)', people finding problems like yours, or people complaining about all the complaints win8 gets despite it having sorta-irrelevant things like slightly-faster boot time.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 19, 2014, 07:24:27 AM
So, the AI war game got so intense that my laptop crashed. And lost the ongoing log. This means that (possibly thankfully) I can't give you the blow by blow.

In general though:

18.00: 1,800 ships to the AI homeworld. Home command station goes down. This time, not a single ship escapes. +20 AIP. Suprisingly, no reprisal wave. Maybe it doesn't send one once dead?

Unfortunately, this still leaves the best part of 4,000 ships on the planet. With about 80,000 strength.

18.30: Defences are moved to Zupreape, including most of the forcefields, snipers and mines. Hip hopping reprocessors also take out all but the remaining 2 core guardposts on the last AI homeworld: Only a core spire shield guardpost and the grav reactor remain.

19:00: So yeah, between waves and the complete refleet it takes the best part of an hour to rebuild. Once that's done, a warp jammer command station gets quick built on Desenan (for the scrap) and the fleet hops in to engage the remaining forces. They chew off about a thousand then retreat so as not to get overwhelmed by the huge number of guardians. In particular, the 30-odd implosion guardians on planet prevent me using Lyudmila.

Repeat several times.

20:00: New motto, 'when in doubt throw cloaked lightning warheads about'. Honestly, if it wasn't for the fact that I want the 13 metal extractors and the starship constructor that'll let me get Mk. 4 raids I probably would have nuked the place by now.

20.18: Between beach heading with a warp jammer / Mk. 5 turrets and the fleet I finally manage to take down the last ship on Desenan. More than 2 hours after actually taking the homeworld. Still, I at least got several million scrap to partially replace my losses, and the 13 metal harvesters will provide a very welcome boost to my economy.

It's at this point, of course, that I realise that by building a command station I actually flipped the advanced starship constructor early on, and it's now dead.

20.24: Well, that's a nasty shock. I didn't realise waves could come through the exo-galactic wormhole. 3,000 bombers hit Desenan while my fleet is all coalescing on Zupreape. Uhmm, let's hope a warp jammer command station takes care of that little problem in future.

20.31: Well, that was swiftly sorted out at least. Although it does take Lyudmila down to 9%.

20.39: Okay, this time around I'm going to deal with the special forces in a rational and reasonable manner. By which I mean, of course, I'm going to nuke the AI homeworld.

20.39.30: Scouts report a smidgeon over 14,000 ships on the AI homeworld.

20.39.40: +50 AIP progress from the nuke. +10 AIP progress from the troop accelerator. All but 31 of the 3,000 pending threat wiped out. Scouts indicate just 1,500 ships remaining on the AI homeworld.

Oh, and the Mk. 3 fortress has lost supply.

20.40.25: Okay, this seems like a perfect time to remove that last shielded grav reactor. Lyudmila and 1,800 ships warp in. With the strategic reserve online, we're back up to 4,000 ships on planet. Just a shame I can't nuke these guys too.

20.40.45: Lyudmila leaves orbit before becoming strategic reserve food. I should probably have bought some lightning warheads with me.

20.41.12: Grav reactor goes down. 1,200 friendly ships remaining on planet. However what I didn't notice is that there are apparently two dire widow guardians! That's what you get for ignoring the dire guardian lair. I'd be surprised if anyone escapes this.

20.41.34: Last dire widow guardian goes down. 600 ships remaining. Which are, of course, told to leg it. Oh, and at this point the guardian lair spawns a dire needler guardian.

20.43: Okay, that didn't go so badly. Looks like most of the expensive starships escaped, so refleeting shouldn't be too painful. The spire shield guardpost with its 200 million health is sitting right next to the Roadlinl wormhole, so the fleet is being redirected there.

20.47: Bomber wave attacks Zupreape. Then the dire needler guardian senses an opportunity and attacks Roadlinl. Both are terminated.

20.53: 1,400 ships to take out the spire shield guardpost. Piece of cake. Most of them even survive the experience.

20.56.45: Alrighty then, time for the big one. Hey, remember that Mk. 2 penetrator which has been hanging around on Kuer since about hour six? Yeah, he's tasked with the killing blow.

1,600 ships, including Lyudmila, warp in from Zupreape.

20.56.52: 7 seconds later, and it's all over.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/boomed.png)

One day, my true ambition, is to be able to play the AI War victory music on guitar.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/union2.png)

Yes, that was 15 achievements. That's what happens when you choose 4 different AI types at diff >= 9.

I'll follow this up with an after action report report sooner or later. But for now, I'm just going to bask in the glow of success.

(http://www.shock-therapy.org/hotlink/AIWarAAR/boomed2.png)
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 21, 2014, 11:01:52 PM
Congratulations!  First 10/10 victory for you, right?

Are the MVP units going to start a band?  "Lyudmila and The Jumpship" has a certain ring to it.

So, the AI war game got so intense that my laptop crashed. And lost the ongoing log. This means that (possibly thankfully) I can't give you the blow by blow.
Sorry about the crash.  Was it just one of those "generic windows popup informing you the game has crahsed" situations or did it actually give you a real error message?  OutOfMemoryException, etc.

20.24: Well, that's a nasty shock. I didn't realise waves could come through the exo-galactic wormhole.
Where else do you suppose they originally enter? :)


20.39: Okay, this time around I'm going to deal with the special forces in a rational and reasonable manner. By which I mean, of course, I'm going to nuke the AI homeworld.
There is no other rational conclusion.  We've got to make a Sun out of it.


Oh, and the Mk. 3 fortress has lost supply.
Cue massive computer rage against the subroutine that neglected to make sure the Fort's UPS units were properly maintained.


20.56.52: 7 seconds later, and it's all over.
And the Cage Match of Doom is won!  Epic tale, thanks for sharing it with us.

In the midst of TLF post-release support (and actually trying to recuperate a bit) right now, but more AIW updates to come soon.  The dirty rotten tricks (and bugs) which permitted you this victory shall be dealt with ;)


One day, my true ambition, is to be able to play the AI War victory music on guitar.
If there's anything you need from Pablo on that, I can pass along the request.  He's always happy to discuss the music, and iirc he's given out guitar tabs and that kind of thing in the past.


I'll follow this up with an after action report report sooner or later. But for now, I'm just going to bask in the glow of success.
Well fought.
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: RockyBst April 22, 2014, 04:20:50 PM
Yup first attempt at a diff 10 in a long, long time. I like the look of my shiny new double paragon badge, just a shame it wasn't Godly. Do spirecraft count as a positive player handicap these days? The only other things I can think of are the Zenith trader and Dyson sphere, neither of which showed up.

Oh and the laptop wasn't a game crash, it was a 'This game is so intense I'm about to self immolate, so I'm shutting down' thing. It does that sometimes if I don't stick something under it to make sure the air intake is clear. Still though, as previously mentioned it can at least handle the particle effects which make my supposedly much superior windows 8 machine chug itself to death.

While I'd love AI War guitar tabs I think it's probably best to wait a couple of years for me to actually be able to play more than 8 chords. I'd rather not slaughter it right off the bat ;) Definitely up there with Bastion in regards to games where I'd happily pay for tabs, though.

So then, the After Action Report Report. Let's start with the MVPs.

Lyudmila, the little cursed golem who could: Saved my arse on numerous occasion, particularly by using her attractive personality to distract pretty much any AI ship. Even on the homeworld assaults popping her head into orbit made all the ships targeting my fleet on the other side of the planet break off and come after her. Essential for letting the raids / plasmas live long enough to take down that first shielded grav reactor. A steal at +10AIP, and I now feel criminally underrated in my normal games in favour of regen and black widow golems. I still think medium is actually harsher than hard with regards to golems, by the way, for both AIP and energy costs.

Rams, Martyrs and Penetrators: As always, awesome. If you need something under a shield taken care of, ram it or penetrate it. Got a CPA incoming? Martyr. I will happily eat exos for these guys. Just a shame I had such an ultra-limited supply of asteroids, seeing as they don't spawn on worlds next to your homeworld or on core worlds. That left just two worlds eligible.

Lightning Torpedo Frigates: Still utterly amazing, if somewhat cheesy. Despite the atrocious cost and build time the distractionary value of 700-1000 lightning warheads can't be discounted. Certainly the right starter ship pick - thanks for letting us choose now :)

Zenith Reprocessors: Holy. Hell. I mean, I knew these guys were painful when the AI included them in waves. But I never realised just what a fantastic anti-starship and anti-guardpost force these really are. 230,000 attack * 8 against most guardposts. Slap a couple of flagships with them you can destroy any high-value target. And for only 240,000 odd metal on a Mk. V cap, which is just a touch more than a Mk. 2 flagship on its own. Oh, and they're cloaked by default and have a short firing time. <3.

Sentinal Frigates: Possibly the best unlock I could have gotten from that first ARS. Long range means they can pick of nasty ships before getting near. Along with lightning frigates and eventually bombers, the only Mk. 4 fleet ships I had.

Area Mines and Core Turrets: With a decent chokepoint these guys were eating 6,000+ ship Mk. 2 waves for breakfast.

Matter Converters: Really, matter converters? Truth is, I couldn't have done it without them. By the end of the game I was running 14 matter converts on average, for a grand total of 700,000 additional energy. They destroyed my economy, normally taking up 40-50% of my standard metal income. But seriously, without 'em I wouldn't even have a fleet. Again criminally underrated in my normal games, although to be fair that might be because I normally have at least 2 zenith power generators. But the blasted traders didn't show up this time...

The second most important star of the show - The Mk. V Jumpship: Hooo boy, were these two exploited to the nth degree. Without these guys and the sneaky black-hole immunity granted to them a couple of patches ago there's no way I could ever have gotten across the AI homeworld which was cutting the graph at ~hour 6. I'd strongly recommend rolling out the blackhole immunity to Mk. III and IV jumpships as well. The ability to drop ships off right next to a guardpost is what took out pretty much every guardpost from the fourth hostile planet onwards, and was key to the homeworld assaults. The Murdoch cheese saved me from some 30,000-odd threat / 150,000 strength. All around, second only to...

The salvage mechanic: Oh yeah. Oh yeaaaah. With an average economy of < 3,000 metal a second, this is what made it all possible. Waves were dropping 4-10 million scrap. Core post exos 20 million. CPAs, sometimes up to 40. All at that lovely 10% warp jammer / 8% mil 2 salvage rate. The scrapyard worker is the salvation of the human race.

This game could have been finished much sooner if I didn't spend so long cleaning up residual AI ships who didn't move from their planets. It could have been over sooner if the CPAs didn't break when there are no non-homeworld planets left to spawn from, and hence gave me scrap and destroyed the strategic reserve at the same time. But still, I count this as a very nice win. As always, Arcen keeps me coming back with the intriguing tweaks and updates.

I think I've got a half-dozen things to write up on Mantis, at least. And I won't even invoice you, despite getting paid a fair sum to do the same thing on a professional level ;)

Now, back to TLF. Where I'm currently bribing the Acutians to dump toxic waste on the Boarine. Who regard me as somewhat of a messiah figure...

 
: Re: 10 planets, diff 10 ... what could go wrong
: keith.lamothe April 23, 2014, 08:46:45 PM
Yup first attempt at a diff 10 in a long, long time. I like the look of my shiny new double paragon badge, just a shame it wasn't Godly. Do spirecraft count as a positive player handicap these days? The only other things I can think of are the Zenith trader and Dyson sphere, neither of which showed up.
Odd, I don't think any of those things count.  That achievement's logic was written before my time.  Who knows what lurketh...


The salvage mechanic
It's kind of like Wile. E. Coyote looking at the Roadrunner and seeing a cooked bird on a platter all dressed up for the dinner table.

6,000 angry mkII ships?  All I see is delicious, delicious Metal.


But still, I count this as a very nice win. As always, Arcen keeps me coming back with the intriguing tweaks and updates.
Yep, there was lots of cheesing on both sides, but overall about as close to an honest win as there can be when the RNG cuts the graph with 3 Grav Reactors.  Goodness you must have offended that thing in a previous game.


Now, back to TLF. Where I'm currently bribing the Acutians to dump toxic waste on the Boarine. Who regard me as somewhat of a messiah figure...
"He can even make it rain! ... *sizzling sound*"