2k+ wave ships at 7:00

[Wanderer]

So, I'm goofing around with the whole 8 homeworld /2xAI10 bit again, this time with wave AIs.  Fortress Baron and Entrenched Homeworlder, to be precise.  I've got the 1/2 ships mod on for CPU survivability (2x the strength, half the caps).

Between 6:30 and 7:10, both AIs launch the first wave.  I've gotten my galaxy to be the most easily defensible possible, with only a single world facing a small corridor of worlds I can use as a gauntlet.  However, there's nothing I can come up with that will let me survive this first wave.  I've tried turrets, full fleet caps (well, as much as I can build in 7 minutes), etc.  Nothing works.  They grind through me and the best I can kill are 3-400 of them.  It's just not enough time to setup a defense worth discussing.

I'm open to suggestions, I'm getting aced badly here and I can't even get the game started, basically.  I've purposely not hit the next world to try to keep the AIP down.  This is at AIP 10...

[keith.lamothe]

EMP warheads? Nukes (if this is a non-homeworld planet)?  Riot IIs with tazers? Chain of grav turrets under forcefields with logistics station and lots of long range engine damage (riots + spider turrets, etc)  I can think of a few ways of keeping them in one place, the tricky thing seems to be scaring up the firepower to take them down.  Particularly since you have a limited time in which to do so.

[Wanderer]

I've tried the Grav Turret Chain.  Really the problem is 2000 Tech IIs chew through my Tech I fleet that's only 1/3 as large in heartbeats.  Add to that there's a massive starship contingent (about 60 of them) in this that provides ~10-13 Raid Starships.

If I could buy myself five extra minutes I might have a shot (but probably not).  That 7 minute first salvo is just incredibly tight.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, yea, it may be into the realm of mathematically improbable quite that early in the game.  For countering the raids, I suggest the Antimatter Starships (which have to be within radar jamming distance if raids have that but can hit them, iirc) and sniper turrets.

Another general approach would be to pick your worlds so there's only one entry point, and immediately take the next world over (emp if you have to) and use that as a "sieve" to intentionally let certain parts of the wave through in sequences, so something like:

1) FF-immune stuff gets through first
2) Tractor beams to let the tractor-immune stuff through (once they get through the ffs)
3) Let some of the tractorable stuff move, and engine-kill it with spiders/riots.  Those will keep coming but you can "spread out" that part of the wave quite a bit.

Or you could specifically try to have two entry points and hope the two waves pick different ones.  I'm not sure if that actually helps you but sometimes diluting the concentration of force can work in your favor even if it's on both sides.

Also, if these are not schizo waves you can just savescum until you get wave "types" that are more manageable.  Fighters, for example, are typically much easier to defend against than bombers.  Not that savescumming is really a strategy, but the opening waves on a diff 10 game are not a strategy either, they're a sucker punch.

[Wanderer]

Hmm, yea, it may be into the realm of mathematically improbable quite that early in the game.  For countering the raids, I suggest the Antimatter Starships (which have to be within radar jamming distance if raids have that but can hit them, iirc) and sniper turrets.

The Antimatters might be useful, but they'd be the entire fleet due to the early economy.  I'd have nothing that countered the smaller stuff.  Snipers are great but they're so crystal heavy they can erase an economy on their own.

Another general approach would be to pick your worlds so there's only one entry point,

That's what I have at the moment.

and immediately take the next world over (emp if you have to) and use that as a "sieve" to intentionally let certain parts of the wave through in sequences, so something like:

1) FF-immune stuff gets through first
2) Tractor beams to let the tractor-immune stuff through (once they get through the ffs)
3) Let some of the tractorable stuff move, and engine-kill it with spiders/riots.  Those will keep coming but you can "spread out" that part of the wave quite a bit.

I agree in theory.  The problem is cleanup of a system can take ~5 minutes, and you need at least 2 minutes to have a reasonable 'small' fleet (say, 50/20/20 of the triangle units) to start the offensive with.  I've tried this twice to no avail. The non FF stuff might be stopped if I could get say 20-30 of them up.  Getting 2-3 up can be pricey.  The biggest thing here, I think, is old-school RTS economy optimization.  It looks like I'm going to have to sit down and do some hard-core number crunching to try to figure out what I can build out in x time.  I haven't done that since Starcraft I. 

Or you could specifically try to have two entry points and hope the two waves pick different ones.  I'm not sure if that actually helps you but sometimes diluting the concentration of force can work in your favor even if it's on both sides.

It might if it were a reasonable expectation.  Splitting the forces is actually more painful.  I tried this with fleet on one side and turrets on the other.  Flat on its nose. 

Also, if these are not schizo waves you can just savescum until you get wave "types" that are more manageable.  Fighters, for example, are typically much easier to defend against than bombers.  Not that savescumming is really a strategy, but the opening waves on a diff 10 game are not a strategy either, they're a sucker punch.

They aren't schizo, but there's 16 of them.  Getting a mix like that is unlikely.  And I agree, they're a straight up sucker punch.

[Cydonia]

Why can't you just gateraid?
I think this doesn't work for some reason or else you had already done that

[Wanderer]

Why can't you just gateraid?
I think this doesn't work for some reason or else you had already done that

They simply spawn another gate out and still land with the same amount of firepower.  However, to gateraid I need to spend some of the resources in an attack posture which lessens what I have available for the raid.  I'm tempted to do it anyway in hopes of 'stringing' the wave out a bit but it's expensive to hit the next area... and it also increase the wave size by 50% (10 AIP to 15 AIP)

[eRe4s3r]

gateraid will delay the wave by at least 3 to 5 minutes per world though, more if you raid more than 1 or 2 jumps.

Only thing i can tell you is not to play on Blitz and high unit caps ;p With 8 homeworlds you get 8 times the caps but so does the AI, if you play on larger caps the AI can field more units in the first wave. Something that makes the first wave nearly undefendable because the tractors you can get build do not thin it out enough.

Although i am not sure if unit caps affect how many units a tractor can affect

[Minotaar]

Tried this a couple times for fun (well, actually I want to see another absurd AAR out of this  ) and accidentally figured out a way to defeat this wave rather easily. I created a snake map to have the same starting conditions.
Basically what I did was kill the next system on the way, but I forgot to place the command station, which resulted in waves being sent to "? ? ?". The wave spawned on the next system as threat and I had some more time to consolidate my defenses, AND ships trickled in slowly and not all at the same time. On 31 AIP the wave size was the same as on 10 (around 1.8k on low caps).
The defense consisted of:
MK3 Military Command Station (the reason for taking the planet)
Full caps MK1 and MK2 Missile Turrets + 30 Sniper Turrets - to deal with problematic starships.
Some MK2 gravity turrets under forcefields
Cap of MK1 bombers which were used for taking the planet 
With the ships coming slowly out of the wormhole I barely had to do anything to defend.
If only diff 10 was that easy till the end  Gogogo GUDare, show us how it's done

[zoutzakje]

I've had my shares of attempts with this stuation as well. I tried to play the game like I normally do instead of cheesing it out with easier settings.... well, it didn't work. The initial waves were still fighting on my homeworld when the second waves arrived.... that was just overkill.
I'm currently playing fairly well against 9/9 random AI types ( stealth master and neinzul cluster bomber). so far 1 hour in the game and still making progress... I'll attempt some more 10/10 stuff when I'm done with this

[keith.lamothe]

The Antimatters might be useful, but they'd be the entire fleet due to the early economy.  I'd have nothing that countered the smaller stuff.  Snipers are great but they're so crystal heavy they can erase an economy on their own.

This is true; I'd been thinking that the 8x HW economy would give you what you needed, but yea, you've got 8x to build too.  The early-game economy is wayyyyy faster than it used to be many versions ago, but it is definitely finite.

However, to gateraid I need to spend some of the resources in an attack posture which lessens what I have available for the raid.

If it's not covered by a forcefield you can gank the warp-gate itself with a fairly small suicide force.  So resources, but not as much as you may think.

Alternatively you can turn on cpa-like-waves (it might be called cross-planet-waves in the lobby) which will basically make it always spawn waves like you'd gateraided your entire perimeter.  This generally makes the game harder (massive threatball buildup, I've noticed), but if your focused goal is surviving the first wave...

Also, as I think one of other posts was talking about, AI threat ships can be "persuaded" to wait on the other side of the wormhole if they think you've got enough firepower on your side.  That could give you the time you need.

and it also increase the wave size by 50% (10 AIP to 15 AIP)

In the very early game that's actually not true:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Why_Do_Enemy_Waves_Get_So_Large%3F#How_Wave_Sizes_Are_Calculated

Specifically, step 3 means that the actual individual wave sizes will be the same until you hit a certain AIP value (depending on difficulty).  There's also a degree of randomization in step 2, but that's largely diluted by the fact that you have 16 waves coming in (ouch!).

On Diff 10 the base size from step 1 is: AIProgress * 3.33~ and the floor in step 3 is 100.  Therefore you have to hit 30 AIP before wave sizes start to increase at all.  31 or 32, really.

Another thing to factor in to finding some solution, any solution to this is step 4: different AI types use different wave sizes.  If you play against 2 mad bombers then just forget it, as that doubles wave sizes right there (not to mention that those have a high chance of tossing a bomber starship into waves).  To assist, I expanded step 4 to include a table of current multipliers.  There are other AI-Type-related factors that play into the "defensive level" of planets and whatnot (whether a planet gets a fortress, how big of a fortress, etc) but those don't directly relate to the wave size question.

Another thought is that the wave AI isn't the smartest: you may be able to distract it by keeping it running around on a nearby AI world (assuming you've gateraided and the wave is coming in from a further out planet) to buy time or at least split it up.  Keeping your distraction forces alive long enough is left as an exercise to the reader.

Although i am not sure if unit caps affect how many units a tractor can affect

Tractor turrets have scaling caps too, so even if the enemy has 2x as many fleetships, you have 2x as many tractor turrets, so you're even.  The Riot-starship based tractor modules do not scale, though, so they are more useful on low than on high; I intend to fix that but it's not a top priority.

[Hearteater]

Just want to see if I have this right:
Step 1: 33.3 (10 AIP)
Step 2: 33.3 (randomly x1.0)
Step 3: 100 (minimum)
Step 4: 100 (assume x1.0 wave multiplier)
Step 5: 100 (x1.0 for first wave)
Step 6: 100 (assume a ship type with x1.0 is selected)
Step 7: 150 (x1.5 for Mark I ships)
Step 8: 375 (x2.5 for difficulty 7.3+)
Step 9: 375 (no change, exceeds ship cap minimum)

On Low caps, that gets halved to 187.5 ships.  He was 16 waves incoming, which makes it 3000 ships assuming ship types with x1.0 ship type multipliers.  That seems a touch, uh, high.  Even with one homeworld, I'm pretty sure I could not stop the equivalent 750 ships (normal caps) at 7 minutes.

I'm all for a punishingly difficult setting, but losing at 7 minutes unless you select AI types without waves (or at least one no-wave AI type) seems to be tuned a little high, considering the rest of the game isn't going to get any easier!  Not that balance on diff 10 is probably all that critical, but maybe Step 3 should have slightly lower minimums for wave one on higher difficulties, just to at least give someone a fighting chance against normal AI types.  Let wave two be the one to crush them.  At least they'll have gotten 15 minutes of playtime to realize how hopeless the situation is .

[Wanderer]

Good stuff, folks.  Thanks particuarly Keith and Minotaar. 

Eraser, I'm definately not on blitz and as already mentioned, the tractors scale so that's not as big an issue.  I'd hoped they were gonna stay the same briefly, then I realized how overkill that was going to be.

I've been thinking the only way I'd be able to hold it is to figure out a way to crush down the next door system somehow and at the least string out the aggressors, hopefully getting those raid ships in quicker than everyone else.  At this stage of the game they're almost as nasty as H/Ks.  I haven't quit on this theory I just got frustrated so I took a day off from trying.  I'll be beating on it again shortly.

[keith.lamothe]

I'm all for a punishingly difficult setting, but losing at 7 minutes unless you select AI types without waves (or at least one no-wave AI type) seems to be tuned a little high, considering the rest of the game isn't going to get any easier!

Actually the game gets a lot easier from that point forward because you've had more time to fully exploit your available unit caps, etc.  But yea, it levels off at "very punishing" nonetheless

Not that balance on diff 10 is probably all that critical, but maybe Step 3 should have slightly lower minimums for wave one on higher difficulties, just to at least give someone a fighting chance against normal AI types.  Let wave two be the one to crush them.  At least they'll have gotten 15 minutes of playtime to realize how hopeless the situation is .

Hmm, yea, I think scaling back the minimum a bit would be a good thing in terms of letting someone actually get a chance to set up.  The other side is that we want someone to realize that diff-10 is "death incarnate" very early in the game so they don't get too invested in the whole "breathing" thing   But I suppose that dying at 15 minutes (unless they're really good) is not so much worse than dying at 7 minutes in that case.

One potential thing is to just set the minimum to 30 or 40 or something like that, regardless of difficulty.  So basically diff 10 would automatically start at the minimum and you'd immediately see bigger waves from more AIP whereas on lower difficulties you'd get a few "free" AIP points before it actually increases wave size (that's not the only thing it does, but it's the most obvious at the very early game).

[keith.lamothe]

Went ahead and changed step 3:

* Wave size calculation: the minimum base wave size is now 34, regardless of difficulty.
** The minimum base size of a wave used to be (AI Player Difficulty * 10 * AI Player Handicap).  Assuming no positive or negative handicap this generally meant that the first few points of AIP would not increase wave size and the initial wave size was prevented from being embarrassingly tiny.
*** This has served us well but caused the first wave on very high difficulties to be disproportionately difficult such that it's a punishing puzzle to survive the first 7 minutes and after that holding on is significantly easier (though still very tough) because then the player has had more time to actually build initial defenses and so on.  It's better for the first wave to not be way more difficult than the second wave on non-trivial difficulties, so the minimum is now just 34.  This actually makes difficulties 1-3 harder, but those are so incredibly easy to start with that it's not likely to make much difference.
** Now AIP increases will actually have an impact on wave size much earlier on difficulties 4+.
** AI handicap is still factored in (so with 300% it will have a minimum size of 102).
** The wave size calculation article has been updated to reflect this change, and is a good reference if you want more info.

(from the notes for the upcoming 5.021)