Me and my friends had our first game of AI War with CoN this weekend, and it was our first game for about 2 months, so this feedback covers everything that has changed since Keith and Chris came back to AI War after Tidalis release.
We played 2 random 7 difficulty AIs, with all neutral factions enabled, advanced hives enabled for both AIs, 2x waves, no wave warnings, schizophrenic and cross planetary waves, on 1 aip/5 mins. We got about 4-5 hours into the game.
My observations and comments on recent changes:
1. big thumbs up on the new types of guard posts: makes taking every planet a little different. We haven't gotten to a core planet yet but I imagine the new core planets will get a big thumbs up from me too.
2. thumbs up on the new layout of the home planet: having to defend 2 points (don't really care about the manufactory cluster) makes it more interesting
3. thumbs up on the new types for command stations. We didn't try the logistics one, but it seems from the description to be very weak compared to the economics one. A mark 3 logistics produces 40/40 less resources, which is the upkeep cost for a mark 3 reactor, which produces 80k energy (note that reactor 3s are the least efficient reactors). With that I can build about 3 space/time manipulators for the same sort of effect. Yes, I know it'll cost another 1k knowledge, it won't slow down enemy ships and there's a minor AI progress risk, but the economic command station + space/time manipulator is a lot more flexible. I get to choose to have all 5 of my economic planets become pseudo logistics planets by hosting 3 manipulators each, or leave all 5 as economic planets, or any combination inbetween, whereas unlocking the logistics station locks me into five logistics planets.
4. hesitant thumbs up on ion cannons going up to mark 5. seems that 4x/6x/10x waves or whatever it is is too harsh: would've thought 1x/2x/3x would've been more than enough. In particular, given ion cannons' firing speed, would've thought that 10x waves makes a mark 5 cannon clearly not worth it for the humans to keep except in exceptional circumstances where the humans can quickly capture all neighbouring planets also. It seems to me that if you're in a position where you can capture a mark 5 cannon, and then speedily capture all its neighbouring planets (keeping in mind that mark 5 cannons will tend to spawn towards the AI core and therefore it's mid to end gmae), then you're probably playing on a far too low difficulty. It seems like it could be one of those features that seem nice but don't get used (eg golems in the early days). also noting that this is one change that does make the game in general significantly harder, probably moreso than the other changes, since an ion 3 or 4 in a chokepoint is a significant roadblock
5. thumbs down on Neinzul Wardens and Neinzul Roaming Enclaves. I know the Roaming Enclaves can be friendly, but to us these new factions just seemed like generic gameplay features that are very similar to the human marauders and trains: that is: generic troops that wander into your systems, do some damage, are more annoying than damaging, don't add anything to the strategic thinking (in particular marauders, since they pop up anywhere), and don't seem to add anything to the game. The same way that flies and mosquitos don't add much to one's enjoyment of real life. The wardens in particular seemed to turn up very frequently (once every 3-5 minutes or so), which seemed too often.
6. while I'm on point, what's the point of astro trains now? they do next to no damage, and all they really do is make the 'your command station at x is being attacked' notification flash up to annoy you. The only time I've seen a train kill anything of mine was when one shot a few turrets that I had only just started building a few seconds earlier. Oh and they make your FRD'ed ships follow them around shooting at them instead of defending against the real threats. They seem like a useless feature right now.
7. reserved judgement on the hives. There seemed to be a lot of them, they weren't very scary or effective and didn't seem to do much in the way of threatening us or reinforcing planets. We saw plenty wander around in planets that we took and they fell easily. Two or three tried to hit my home base and they seemed to do very little damage to the force field, so they failed to make a dent. Since they're pseudo 'hero' units, it'd be nice if the info display for them made it clearer what their hero-like stats are: ie, what 'level' or 'xp' they are, what 'equipment' (ie modules) they have, how many ships they can command, what they can build, what 'class' they are, etc. Would also be cool if you got a notification whenever you took one down: 'you have slain x, a level y builder hive' or something like that. Right now it all seems a bit anticlimatic.
8. on the hives still - I know they're meant to retreat when low on health or have had their shields knocked down or something like that. I saw a few do this. They all tried to retreat far too late though - it seems they need a more robust way of figuring out whether they're doomed (some kind of calculation of their own fleet's strength + the planetary defences (if the planet is owned by the AI) vs human players' fleet strength + the planetary defences (if planet owned by human), and they run away if that ratio becomes too life threatening). Their inability to keep themselves alive meant that as far as I could tell, all the hives we encountered were very weak and probably close to the equivalent of level 1
9. thumbs up on the concept of mark 2/3 harvestors. Not such a big fan of the numbers right now. Getting mark 3 of both costs 4k + 5k knowledge for a 12/s -> 16/s increase. On a typical 8/8 planet, that's an increase of 32/32. For 4k + 5k knowledge I could get economic command station 3 for a 48/48 increase. Many planets are materially worse than 8/8 and so the comparison is even less favourable for the harvestors. Yes I know I'm comparing apples and oranges, and harvestor 2/3s build way faster, etc. But the relative 'feel' is that it's not worth it still.
10. on a related point: economic command stations are also more attractive due to our playstyle and what I imagine is a fairly common playstyle for people who play with friends they know. We tend to have 1-2 people in the team of 4 get higher mark command stations and take the lion's share of planets. To balance out everyone's economic incomes, those players then gift most of their harvestors to the other 2-3 players, since their economic command stations generate plenty of income for them. This maximises team economic income while minimising knowledge spent (since only 1-2 people need to research high level command stations). We can't pull the same kind of strategy with harvestor 2/3s because the rich player wouldn't be able to gift the harvestors to the poor ones, because the poor ones wouldn't have researched mark 2/3. So yet another reason mark 2/3 harvestors seem slightly underpowered compared to economic command stations. A simple boost to 15/15 and 18/18 might be enough to fix it, but of course that may unbalance the game in general - glad it's your problem not mine!
11. would be nice if the mark 3 power station, the nuclear silo, merc dock and the starship constructor all started paused at the start of a new game
12. thumbs up on occasional clusters of spider turrets: makes those planets more interesting. would be nice if the planetary summary on the galaxy map made these clusters more obvious though.
13. thumbs up on transport downgrade. i used to be a raiding fiend, but it was a bit silly to be able to have nigh on invincible transports that could instantly dump their whole load when almost every other strategy game with transports have them as very fragile, requiring of escorts, slow to unload, units
14. thumbs up on the coloured lines in the galaxy map.
15. thumbs up on the build speed increase for starships/silos. though it may be a little bit too fast now: spire starships don't feel so awesome when they come out that fast (silly I know)
16. general comment on fabricators: it seems that fabricators are perhaps not as distinctive as they should be: they're just not useful enough to be of strategic significance. I can't recall the last time I saw a non-starship fabricator that I was willing to change my plan of attack for, even if all I had to do was to change my route by one planet. Compared to the huge importance of ARSes, Mark 4 factories or even the lesser lights like Zenith Power Stations and Zenith reserves, they're just not important enough. They don't produce enough ships to make a meaningful difference to a big fleet, they're fragile and die easily if not protected properly (and the 'proper protection' required often outweighs the value of having the ships that it produces), they take additional micro to share them around with your teammates, etc. There's virtually no situation that I can think of where I'd take and hold a dangerous planet just for one or two fabricators, whereas for a lot of other neutral structures you'd definitely consider raiding or capturing it temporarily: ARSes are the obvious example, others are things like data centers, co-processors. Perhaps if fabricators were made more like those buildings then they'd be strategically interesting again: maybe if capturing a fabricator meant that you could build more of them (even if they're extremely expensive, are of limited number, cost a lot of power and cause AI progress upon death)
Anyway, I think I've rambled long enough. Will update with further comments when we get around to our game again.
