Ow.

[Toranth]

An AAR is probably not a good spot to get a lot of responses.

Yea, I was mainly asking the two of you actually tracking with me here.  20k sounds like a good first shot.

Not sure what you want with the 'waiting-off-the-wormhole' bit.  If you want to protect the threatball from warheads and tractor raids, then yeah, 20,000 or so is fine.  But that means most units will be out of range to shoot anything.
I'd think you either want to have the units pull back to say 90% of their range (so all units are still barely covering the wormhole) or 5 seconds at that units move speed from the wormhole.
Either of these, especially if you spread it out in an arc, will scatter the units but still leave them effective.  The range pull back is the combination of safest/most aggressive, while the time pull back is so that when the threatball DOES decide to attack, all units would arrive at about the same time.

You could make the degree to which it bends the rules for sync'ing be related to game time.  So early game syncs are just random.  But the longer the game drags on, the more "effort" is put into syncing.  For example, for every one hour of game time, a CPA or Exo can be bumped two minutes later to coincide with the other.

That is an excellent idea.

I agree.  I've always wanted a little more variance in Exos in general (like normal waves), and timing them to sync a little better both does that and improves the 'impact' as the importance of syncing goes up.

[Faulty Logic]

Note to self: don't accidentally click lock topic.

Anyway, this is an AAR, so:

===Operation Excess Spending====
The rebels come with a third artillery golem, and another in the branch has a second regen (still my least favorite of the golems, but not nearly as bad as it was). I now have all the golems, and unlock riots III, zenith II, and flagships III.

Then I hack a couple more systems. Still going with two hackers.

Then I clean up another CPA (14,000 ships), leaving about 2000 around.

Raiding for the only titanite and then the four adamantite (penetrators IV/V, implosion V, attritioners IV) take the gametime to 11 hours. Mercenary fleet at full fighter, beam frigate, and enclave caps, with 73 bombers as well. I like having incomes of ~5,000 each per second.

Exo at 58%.

Now, about those hacking changes...

===Operation ICE Breaker====

The fifth hack gets interesting. Those implosion guardians really do a number on the golems.

Exo-galactic strikeforce responding to hacking
What the?! Ok that got my attention; pausing the hack (1044 k extracted).

Well, that was unexpected. A few groups come at Midnight and evaporate, but one went for High Lab, and the mercenary fleet took some casualties.

Repaired, econ back at ~500,000 each, and I redeploy, with more of the fleet available for response, and less on site.

Wow, this hurts. Subhacked until I got to 3000 k. Unlocked Assault Transport.

Gate raided my local cluster, so the AI will have to break through Midnight to kill me.

Negotiated a cloak path to the blind homeworld. This does trigger a CPA post.

Same to the one with the eye.

Gametime is now 11:40

===Operation Five Minutes to Midnight====

I take the (whole) fleet and smash my way up to the first HW. Warheads under cloak kill the SR, and then I slaughter the guardposts, while the artillery golems knock out the core forcefields. I pop the command station, and go back to Midnight (which had no problems with the mini-exos).

Gametime 11:50.

Pop a few D nodes to refleet essentially instantly, and then send the entire fleet to the other homeworld. Eye killed instantly with penetrators, strategic reserve warheaded, forcefields artilleried, and victory achieved.

Observations

CPA posts need to activate immediately to have much impact.
The HWs should have planetary tachyons (I could have won simply with cloaked rams and penetrators).
Special forces should base themselves at the HWs, to prevent situations like me cutting them off.
If they are cut off, then they should redeploy via carriers.
SC shieldbearers are awesome come HW attack time.
Hacking responses are about right (at hack 5, it is usually easier to just conquer a planet).
SCLs might not be that bad. Possibly.

[keith.lamothe]

Anyway, this is an AAR

I have Aura of Thread Derailing +5, sorry

Exo-galactic strikeforce responding to hacking
What the?! Ok that got my attention; pausing the hack (1044 k extracted).

I thought you'd appreciate that.

Pop a few D nodes to refleet essentially instantly, and then send the entire fleet to the other homeworld. Eye killed instantly with penetrators, strategic reserve warheaded, forcefields artilleried

"Our powers combined..."

and victory achieved.

Congratulations!  Again.  (sound of AI tinkering in the background... was that a scream?)

Special forces should base themselves at the HWs, to prevent situations like me cutting them off.
If they are cut off, then they should redeploy via carriers.

As in cheat to hop to the HW?

SC shieldbearers are awesome come HW attack time.

Yea, they're kind of the defensive equivalent of the warhead.  The match seems natural.

SCLs might not be that bad. Possibly.

I noticed you riding the floor with those.  The AI should be a bit better at killing them when I'm through with them.

[Faulty Logic]

I have Aura of Thread Derailing +5, sorry 

No problem.

(sound of AI tinkering in the background... was that a scream?)

The sound of the AI attack synchronization?

As in cheat to hop to the HW?

Yup. On second thought, it wouldn't really affect me, beyond deploying a nuke.

I noticed you riding the floor with those.  The AI should be a bit better at killing them when I'm through with them.

Yeah, I saw some AI ships literally fly past one of them without killing it.


Oh, I forgot one of the goals of this game: chokepoint comparison. Yeah, single choke is a luxury, but it isn't necessary to victory. No-choke is possible without any superweapons, but you need to be constantly vigilant.

[keith.lamothe]

(sound of AI tinkering in the background... was that a scream?)

The sound of the AI attack synchronization?

Among other things.

I just tested with a rule change that makes carriers do partial deployments to keep the number of AI ships on each planet (with any kind of battle) up to 2000.

With that rule change, and the coordination with the exos (which don't actually do a whole lot by themselves, unless the HK spawns on a line that takes it to the Midnight CS without going through the black hole), the cpa wiped Midnight clean.

I'm also shoulder-deep in the code that does planet-target selection for "local threat" (free ships that aren't in Threatfleet), and I'm pretty happy with the improvement thus far.  With that and the "don't wait right on top of the wormhole you moron" rule I think CPAs may actually be more effective if I have them not start in threatfleet anymore.  Gives them an opportunity to pick off outlying stuff even if the map is still "connected" for the AI.

I noticed you riding the floor with those.  The AI should be a bit better at killing them when I'm through with them.

Yeah, I saw some AI ships literally fly past one of them without killing it.

Yea, the AI didn't even consider it an "irreplaceable".  No longer.

Oh, I forgot one of the goals of this game: chokepoint comparison. Yeah, single choke is a luxury, but it isn't necessary to victory. No-choke is possible without any superweapons, but you need to be constantly vigilant.

Midnight certainly is pulling choke-duty.  It's also pulling map-fragmentation duty in a big way.  But yea, the Milkman's Lair angle is still open (until you gate raided back there anyway) and I've seen the AI pull off exo kills that way sometimes.  But player-attended it would still be very survivable.

[TechSY730]

For the AI HW tachyon thing.
You know how we get a "feature packed" forcefield on our planet (gravity and tachyon in a decently large radius)?

Why not make a AI HW core forcefield with the same sort of "bonus attributes" but is modeled after the AI core forcefield rather than the MK. I forcefield?

Like us, each AI would only get one of them, over their homeworld command station, and not replaceable. Also, maybe the AI should have a tachyon guardian over their HW command station always on game seed, and a higher chance to spawn them afterwards, with a large boost in chance if both that special forcefield and their is no tachyon guardian currently guarding the home.

This should be able to shut down most of the cheapest forms of cheese from being, well, cheap (as in, without having to invest any more than getting there and the units to do it), just like our home forcefield does.



For the special forces thing.
How about making it such that as the human gets closer and closer to an AI homeworld OR as the AI loses core guard posts, the "max staging distance from HW" for the special forces would go down. The "max staging distance from HW" would be based on whichever factor was more "severe" at the time. (The core guard post condition also being there is to prevent special forces from being "lazy" after repeated ultra deep-strike style cheese).

Note, I am referring to the "staging area" to be where special forces ships gather when there are no "jobs" for them to do. They would still go wherever they "feel" is worth defending if the AI under attack.

[TechSY730]

Derp. Almost forgot.

Congrats on the win, though I think you may have been able to finally uncover the situations and the "need" to deal with one of these few remaining "gaps" in the AI intelligence (where and when to attack). That may not bode well for your next AAR. 

[Faulty Logic]

Congrats on the win, though I think you may have been able to finally uncover the situations and the "need" to deal with one of these few remaining "gaps" in the AI intelligence (where and when to attack). That may not bode well for your next AAR.   

Thanks. I'm not too worried; the AI will be able to attack as intelligently as it likes. I will have eight champions and an FS fleet waiting for it. And warheads, of course.

In fact, this is much more of an issue.

[keith.lamothe]

Thanks. I'm not too worried; the AI will be able to attack as intelligently as it likes. I will have eight champions and an FS fleet waiting for it. And warheads, of course.

Yea, my guess is that the scaling nebula rewards will make you unassailable just by themselves.  32 Mod Forts?  Against single-HW stuff?  Sure you'll face like a billion nemesis units, but they won't scratch that defense.  If you can power it, at least.

In fact, this is much more of an issue.

The counter posts, or the CSGs themselves?

[Faulty Logic]

Yea, my guess is that the scaling nebula rewards will make you unassailable just by themselves.  32 Mod Forts?  Against single-HW stuff?  Sure you'll face like a billion nemesis units, but they won't scratch that defense.  If you can power it, at least.

Just 24 (human mod fort is a k unlock), and energy will be an issue. Further, the AI doesn't have to kill my defenses, just get past them. And it will be single-HW Exogalactic Transceiver stuff, so I doubt it will be all that easy. And I wouldn't put it past you to implement this in the middle of my AAR.

The counter posts, or the CSGs themselves?

The posts. The CSGs go away as soon as I conquer 1 of them, after all.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, spent all day in the individual-ships-tactics AI (writing a lot of toggleable logging that can be activated for one unit at a time, for my own understanding at least but should help people report some of the behavior oddities that don't reproduce after a save/load), made a ton of corrections.

Now that exo+cpa flattens an unattended Midnight while only taking about 20% casualties (didn't measure real close, but I think the high-water-mark was about 120k strength of threat, and it didn't get below 100k during the battle).

Still a bunch of things to fix, and I still expect you'll embarass the AI with 8 champs, but it should do a bit better job once I'm done with the current round of changes, do some make-sure-not-totally-broken testing, etc.