10/10 Bandwagon Go!

[Orelius]

I looked around and saw none but 10/10 games, so, I figured why not.  My AI opponents will be two Grav Drillers.
AI War Version: 5.024 (At start)

Map settings:
# of Planets: 80
Map Style: Maze C
Campaign Type: Conquest
Map Seed: 222590831

AI Type and Level:
2 Level 10 Grav Drillers

Expansions:
The Zenith Remnant
Children of Neinzul
Light of the Spire

Ship Types: Complex

Disabled Ships:
Swallowers
Core Shield Generators

Game Options:
Combat Style: Blitz (I also play on +10 speed all the time)
Unit Cap Scale: Normal
Performance Profile: Extremely Low[166ms]
Visibility: Full Fog of War
Other: Show Unexplored Planets
[/b]Minor Factions:
Human Marauders
Human Resistance Fighters
Broken Golems (Medium)
Zenith Devourer
Zenith Dyson Sphere
Zenith Traders
Fallen Spire
Spirecraft (Medium)
AI Modifiers:
Reveal Random AI Types (irrelevant)
Auto AI Progress:
None
AI Plots:
None
Starting ship type:
Raptors  (Immune to gravity!  I'm so clever.)

First update will be tommorow!  I'm just busy working out some of the kinks and practicing how to not die immediately right now.

[chemical_art]

*hint*

gravity turrets

[keith.lamothe]

Punishment-gluttony appears to be spreading.  The AI must be so happy

[HellishFiend]

We must have missed that day in tactical school.

[Orelius]

I'm doing my initial test run and here are the things I've learned:

Distribution nodes are a godsend.
Raptors aren't that bad.  Good raiders with a lightning fast speed and cloaking.
Once you kill an AI command station, that +20 AIP makes waves five times as large.  I managed to survive that, however.
Logistic/military command stations are your only hope since every planet you take is an uphill battle.
EVERYTHING IS A MARK IV PLANET.
You never have enough to build starships.
Missile Frigates are to be feared.  They come in mass quantities, slaughter your fighters, and are immune to warheads.
Fallen spire just isn't worth the trouble.

I don't think I can support the economy to maintain a fleet long enough to not be slaughtered by waves with just one home command station.  In my first test run, I was methodically beaten down in an hour by sequential massive missile frigate waves.  This is really odd, because I'll have a 600 missile frigate raid, then a 99 bomber raid.  I can't help but feel that something's off.

[keith.lamothe]

This is really odd, because I'll have a 600 missile frigate raid, then a 99 bomber raid.  I can't help but feel that something's off.

Sounds like different wave size multipliers due to time, in addition to some type-specific multipliers.  If you turn on advanced logging it will log wave size calc stuff in your runtimedata directory, and I can take a look at that

Brave progress, thus far

[Wanderer]

I don't think I can support the economy to maintain a fleet long enough to not be slaughtered by waves with just one home command station.  In my first test run, I was methodically beaten down in an hour by sequential massive missile frigate waves.  This is really odd, because I'll have a 600 missile frigate raid, then a 99 bomber raid.  I can't help but feel that something's off.

Thus why I recommend Econ IIIs...   That sounds right, it sounds like you're getting speed raided instead of heavy raided.  That can be a helpful thing, believe it or not.

[Wanderer]

Punishment-gluttony appears to be spreading.  The AI must be so happy

It appears I started a trend...  Next thing you know everyone will be playing 5+ homeworlds, too.

[Hearteater]

And CPUs everywhere cry out in pain.

[zoutzakje]

hehe I will never play with multiple homeworlds. First of all, my crappy laptop will not survive it And second... having multiple homeworlds per player doesn't make any sense to me. Humanity is almost extinct, so having more than one homeworlds just seems kinda silly to me. If I'm ever going to be able to beat 10/10 wave types, I will probably really have to cheese it out (golems easy, spirecraft easy, full visibility, disabling lot of ship types, etc). I really don't like playing like that though.

[keith.lamothe]

having multiple homeworlds per player doesn't make any sense to me

As Shrugging Khan recently observed: this is a space game with maximum velocities.

Sense?

[Orelius]

I fear I may have bitten off a bit more than I can chew!  Namely, my computer is struggling to not die when playing on normal caps.  I'm probably going to have to change a LOT of things in order to get this to work.

Also, I'm having major problems when dealing with the tremendous amount of Mark IV worlds that have AI eyes.  Does anyone have any ideas as to how to deal with them?  I've had to restart several times (and in some cases, get a more suitable map), because of these seemingly impenetrable obstacles.

[Hearteater]

Are you really able to double a Mark IV planet's firepower that easily to trigger them?  Have you tried Cloaking Starship+Transports to assassinate Guard Posts?

[Orelius]

AI eyes trigger based on number of ships, and when all I have are a bunch of mark I/II ships, you can see how it's not very pretty.  I've tried using cloaking starships+ transports but it's too difficult to maintain on a single planet.

I'm probably just going to restart on a different map, probably with two homeworlds this time.

[zoutzakje]

try sending in smaller groups at a time, for dealing with AI eyes. sure it can take some time... but at least you won't trigger the AI eye. Even if it takes you 10 attacks with smaller to finally kill a single guard post, that means you're still making some progress. But yeah, mk IV planets can be tough like that. I got several mk IV planets with AI eyes on my 10/10 game and I'm avoiding them like the plague for now. Trying to put as few high mark planets on alert at the same time as possible.