AI Carrier Help

[Kell]

I've had the game a while, but recently upgraded with the expansions and still getting to grips with a lot of the changes. In particular, I'm having some extreme trouble in a Difficulty 7 game versus a Fortress Baron and Shield Ninny. I went with two defense-oriented AIs since I figured pursuing the Spire campaign would give me enough mass waves my first time through it. I've been pretty careful with gate raiding and keeping the possible ingress points to my territory low, while keeping a handful of planets on alert so nothing gets reinforced too insanely.

I'm nearing the end at around 15 hours, but all of a sudden these defensive AIs have started becoming insanely offensive (outside of the spire event/exogalactic waves). I don't have any core/home or adjacent planets on alert, only a handful of mark II planets. Yet apparently over the 15 hours I've been playing, the AI homeworlds have been reinforcing themselves and have begun sending out waves of thousands of Core/markV units in carriers. I've got some scouts on the AI home commands, and despite not being on alert and with plenty of adjacent-to-human sectors to reinforce, they're filling up with thousands of core units and I'm getting notifications of carriers every 15 minutes or so. Its been a tug of war, and as I've struggled to keep a defensive line against these carriers, I've ended up taking worlds I probably shouldn't have, ending up with an AI progress around 600. Regular waves and the exogalactic waves aren't a problem at all.

I'm beginning to think I'm too outmatched at this point- defeating thousands of core ships decimates a good portion of my standing forces, which then take time to rebuild while more carriers are built up. Is there something I'm doing thats prompting the core worlds to massively reinforce without having them on alert? Are there any strategies to minimise the threat carriers pose?

[Elok]

Does you mean something like this?

http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/7057/2011071800004.jpg
http://img803.imageshack.us/img803/4632/2011071800003.jpg

If the answer is yes, I got the same problem. Those carrier come from the Purple AI Core world at the bottom-left side of the map.

[Kell]

Thats more or less it. I'm mainly just concerned with what I should be doing to keep the number down, or if its not supposed to be that way. Is there something other than being on alert that could cause it?

[Elok]

Well in my case, the Yellow AI core world is alerted for a few hours now. As soon as he was alarmed, he started sending me wave of around 1500 ship every 4 min, and I had GPA of about the same number of ships.

But all a sudden, I still don't know what's the cause, I had a GPA of a few thousand ship that was finally those 7 carrier with a total of over 6000 ships.

[Lemon]

http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_AI_Reinforcements

I gather that your AI has "filled up" on reinforcements.

Basically, the AI is always constantly trying to reinforce Alert planets up to a certain limit (250 per guard post). This limit prevents the AI from stationing monstrously huge amounts of units guarding a planet (good thing, wouldn't want 100k guards 2 hours into the game!). But when all Alert planets are full, the AI still gets reinforcements. These are then applied to non-Alert planets, with the same limit per planet applying. If the limit is reached the AI can start upgrading their craft to a higher mark, making heavily reinforced worlds increasingly well entrenched.

Now, when all AI planets are completely full with Mk V ships, those extra reinforcement ships don't just go away because the AI can't find a place to have them guard. They spill over and become offensive ships that can be used however they like. This can lead to 15-18 planets worth of guards coming at you all at once every time a reinforcement cycle comes. Suffice to say, this can be a lot of high powered ships.

If you start playing a bit more offensively you can hopefully eventually get back to having the AI slowly filling up individual systems with guards, which can then be fought individually instead of fighting 15 systems worth of guards at once. Ideally you should never let this situation happen in the first place, but its an easy mistake to make to turtle a bit too long I'm sure.

[Kell]

Thanks for the explanation. I wasn't seeing ships/planets begin to improve their marks so I didn't think it had triggered that. Hopefully some aggressive expansion will ease some of the pressure.

[laughingman]

It's a good idea to make regular raids into AI territory to prevent that kind of buildup. Time is on the AI's side here: the longer you leave it alone the stronger it becomes. Once you start reacting to what it's doing, rather than making it react to you, you're already halfway to losing.

Elok, your screenshots tell the story: like Lemon was saying, the AI has a set number of reinforcements it sends. Since you've taken so many worlds from it, those reinforcements have to go to the worlds it controls. Once those limited number of worlds fill up, you get the situation you have now. You can avoid that in future games by being more selective about the planets you take from the AI.

It's going to be a difficult fight. Good luck!

[Gudamor]

I seem to have an acute case of this problem.

What confuses me is that my AIP is quite low and the number of planets I have taken is also small (13, not the 9 I have remaining in the screenshot). I know that once planets have "filled up" with reinforcements, further reinforcements get routed to barracks and then carriers, but what is causing the number of reinforcements to be so large? I went from a threat of 200 ships to 3000 to 150,000 ships 'in threat' in a little under an hour.

Any tips?

[Orelius]

I'm not entirely sure about that.  We'll probably need some more information, like what the handicaps are set to, the AI difficulty and type, which minor factions your turned on, etc.

[Nalgas]

I seem to have an acute case of this problem.

That's an understatement if I've ever seen one.  What in the Wide World of Sports did you enable to get that to happen?  Is there a hidden checkbox somewhere I haven't found to make the AI cheat and spawn free ships at will just to screw with you, or did you find a planet with 17 Raid Engines and 45 Troop Accelerators on it or something?  It's been a long time since I've seen anywhere near that many simultaneous ships outside of defender mode.

[Gudamor]

6/6 Vanilla/Random Easier(Mine Enthusiast) with no handicaps, 80 planets, Normal Ships, all expansions enabled.

Minor: Hard Golems, Neinzul Preservation, Neinzul Roaming.

AI plots: None.

[Nalgas]

I don't think any of those by themselves should be able to do anything remotely like that.  Did you alert/provoke any planets with structures that continuously generate ships?  That's still pretty crazy for that short a period of time for most realistic stuff I'm coming up with, especially for you to not be dead yet, so I'm kind of curious what's going on.  Heh.

[Gudamor]

Would a copy of the save help in determining what I did here? I don't know how to do that.

[Orelius]

Indeed, that does seem odd.  I've never had to deal with that many ships in any of my games, especially when facing two level 6 AIs.

[Lemon]

Did you happen to send military ships more than 3 (I think its 3 at least) systems away from any of your planets? This causes the AI to build up threat very rapidly. I once had the bright idea to spend about half an hour sending multiple caps of Space Planes to kill every single Tachyon post and data center in the galaxy, for which about half the time they were far away from my planets. Lets just say that the multiple 5k ship attacks hurt me somewhat more than the AIP being floored at ~20 helped me. You do get a warning about this, but the delayed effect of the AI ramping up its forces means you can easily bite off more than you can chew.

EDIT: From the screen shot it looks to me like you have a few hundred ships sitting on top of that AI homeworld. That... might be part of the problem