AI carriers: Where did we go wrong?

[mlhibou]

Hi all! A friend and I are big fans of the game, and I have spent plenty of time pouring over these forums learning details of the game.

We had a game end on us abruptly this morning, and we were left wondering how things could have gone so badly so quickly. We had AIP of only ~190 and were pushing slowly but surely to both home worlds, and we were feeling pretty optimistic at that point. Then suddenly, we started seeing these messages about the AI loading thousands of units on carriers over and over and over again. Within a short period of time, we had a threat level of 70k, and we were eventually killed by the nonstop onslaught of thousands of ships.

Picture:


I saw a similar thread about this, and some people mentioned about ship build up on AI planets spilling over to carriers if they get fully upgraded to mark V ships. We were being hit by thousands of mark I-III eye bots and space planes, not mark V ships though. We did neuter a lot of planets along the way. Would that have affected it?

Also, as much as I would like to think we were being aggressive, clearly at 15 hours in we weren't being aggressive enough. Still, though!

Can someone please tell me what we did to cause such a sudden and swift defeat? I can upload save files if that would help. Thanks for any input!

[x4000]

Probably you had a ton of planets on alert and those were going to barracks and then to carriers, but the fact that it happened so quickly and all at once makes me think something else is afoot.  Probably one of the planets you recently alerted had some sort of installation (either a large stationary ship, or a guard post) with special spawning powers.  70k is still incredibly rapid, though, so it makes me think that something else is up.  Whenever taking a new planet that will alert adjacent planets, it's always good to have very strong intel about those adjacent planets or some really nasty things can happen to you.  Not usually... this... though.

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the forums   The general mechanic is supposed to happen, yes, but 70k ships sounds like more than it's supposed to be.  Can you upload a save from before the carriers start getting loaded up, and tell me how to get from the save to the carrier-armageddon?

[mlhibou]

Thanks for the quick responses!

I only have three save files from the game. One is maybe 75-90 minutes before we started noticing tons of carriers coming at us, and I saved the "carrier onslaught" file shortly after it began. The 70k threat file was when we quit about 20 minutes later.

I'm sure there's a perfectly simple reason how we did this to ourselves, but neither of us are sure!

Edit: forgot to answer part of the question. In the intermittent 90 minutes, we neutered the last non-core planet where the resistance fighters are currently in that save in the south and took out a guard post or two on the adjacent core planet. Up north, we took Vilkas and Nuges, and we then knowledge raided Fenmik. Besides that I'm not sure if we did anything else...

[zoutzakje]

looking at the planets it happened on, and the amount of ships coming at you guys, I suppose you somehow triggered (probably more than once) a Core CPA guard post. These nasty buggers sit on enemy homeworlds and spawn a lot of ships if you have any (military?) ships there. Perhaps some of your ships got tractored somehow and made it all the way to the homeworld? Unlikely, but possible.

EDIT: looked into a save and that's not it. Strange, I don't know what can cause a massive response like that. To bad the Devourer wasn't near and you guys didn't seem to have a botnet golem. Those could have been helpful, even against this.

[Mánagarmr]

I just love how we invent new ways to break the game. Gives the guys something to do, eh?

[Diazo]

Okay, I was poking at this save just to see what was going on.

On the question that started the thread, I did not figure anything out. Enabling cheats and going full visibility I can see carriers spawning on each homeworld. Looks like about 3200 ships spawning in 4 carriers on each homeworld every 20 seconds or so. I do not see a reason for this to be happening, the closest (non-scout) units of any sort are a minimum 6 hops away.

However, I now have a question of my own. I spawned some ships on one of the homeworlds via cheats and got this message in the top left (where the wave warnings appear.)

AI is gathering threat because of your deepstrike on Wiway. (Wiway being the homeworld I spawned threat on.) What mechanic is this? I don't recall this coming up before.

D.

[keith.lamothe]

AI is gathering threat because of your deepstrike on Wiway. (Wiway being the homeworld I spawned threat on.) What mechanic is this? I don't recall this coming up before.

If you have military more than 4 (iirc) hops out from your territory then an AI home command station starts spewing zombies like an AI eye.  That's been around for a year and some months, I think.

[Diazo]

AI is gathering threat because of your deepstrike on Wiway. (Wiway being the homeworld I spawned threat on.) What mechanic is this? I don't recall this coming up before.

If you have military more than 4 (iirc) hops out from your territory then an AI home command station starts spewing zombies like an AI eye.  That's been around for a year and some months, I think.

Ah, just did some testing and I see why I've never run into it before.

I would actually say that statement should read:

"If you have military present in a system that all systems within 4 hops that are AI controlled, the AI spawns its counter to the Deep Strike."

The reason for this being an uncontrolled system with no command station present counts as 'human territory' for the purposes of this mechanic.  So even if you have military in a system 10 hops from any human command station, as long as you destroy an AI command station within 4 hops, it will not spawn the Deep Strike counter.

In my normal playstyle i never get more then 3 hops out before taking a system a as staging ground so I've just never run into this.

D.

[keith.lamothe]

For 5.032:

* Fixed a bug where if the AI had a pile of over 2000 zombie threat ships (and over 4000 total threat) it was possible for it to try to redeploy those zombies to carriers, and the carrier would be created with the appropriate contents, but the zombies would not actually be scrapped.  Causing the AI to redeploy them again, creating still more carriers, and failing to scrap the zombies again.  It was just carriers all the way down, leading rapidly to tens and hundreds of thousands of threat.  Fixed so that the scrapping works, and thus the duplicate redeployments no longer happen.

Thanks for letting us know about that, whew, what a game breaker




@Dazio: yes, I misspoke, I meant 4-deep (I forget exactly how many hops) into AI territory.

[Wanderer]

@Dazio: yes, I misspoke, I meant 4-deep (I forget exactly how many hops) into AI territory.

It's 5 deep.  You can go Neutral - ai - ai - ai - ai without a problem.  Go one more AI... and your threat meter's gonna start runnin'.

[Diazo]

Not sure how you are defining deep, but when I say hop I mean what you see on the galaxy map.

In my test earlier (using cheats) I went 8 hops away from my homeworld in a new game, popped a system without building a command station of my own and could place military units within 4 hops of that neutral system with no Deep Strike response while being 7+ hops away from any human controlled system.

D.

[Volatar]

TIL about the deepstriking response. That wasn't in the game back in 2.0 

Good thing spire shards spawn only 4 systems out...

[Wanderer]

Not sure how you are defining deep, but when I say hop I mean what you see on the galaxy map.

In my test earlier (using cheats) I went 8 hops away from my homeworld in a new game, popped a system without building a command station of my own and could place military units within 4 hops of that neutral system with no Deep Strike response while being 7+ hops away from any human controlled system.

D.

Same.

From any neutral world you can go 4 worlds out without a deep-strike response.  At 5 you get a problem.

Go 12 worlds out and pop a cmd station, and you're within 4 worlds again.  Only the 4 in the middle will cause a deepstrike.  Any non-AI held planet will give you 4 worlds of range from it.