Noob Questions.

[Kingmaker]

So I get threat is a count of the number of ships in neighboring systems that might attack any time they see a weakness. What exactly generates threat? Waves that don't get destroyed or retreat right? Are all ships in neighboring alerted systems counted as threat? Are there things I'm doing that are boosting the numbers of these ships? Does running my ships through a neighboring planet increase threat by activating the ships within the system?

Sorry for all these questions, I've just put in 2, 12 hour games and lost as I was approaching the home worlds. I feel like I'm missing out on some underlying concept here.

[x4000]

Check out the wiki for all the really specific rules on what causes great when. I think it's under the ai section, but I'm typing from my phone.

In general:

1. No, all ships in a system are not threat. Threat is only ships that can attack you a any time. Most enemy ships are guards, special forces, or planetary roamers, none of which count as threat.

2. Waves where ai ships retreat are one big source of threat, sure. But also as you engage the enemy on their worlds, a lot of those guards, roamers, etc, will get alerted to you and become threat. Most of them you will kill, so it amounts to nothing. Some will run away and come back later, but you might miss that in the heat of battle. Other times you will lose a battle, and then those forces that drove you back will in turn go on the offensive.

3. There are other sources of threat such as cross planet attacks, border aggression, and similar. The wiki has the goods on them. Also some more specialized things, like alarm posts, cause threat. When you destroy a command station of the ai, that also has a 50% chance of making all it's ships on that planet into free/threat mode.

4. Bear in mind that most ships in threat mode won't attack you most of the time. They see they are outnumbered, so they stack up around your borders, usually in a loose pattern around the wormholes to your planets. This is "stalking." When they see they outnumber you, they will attack. If you were trying to trick them into attacking by temporarily withdrawing your forces, they will retreat again when you arrive. Some might try to slip past further into got territory, though so be careful. Most losses come from that.

Hope that helps as a starting point!

[BobTheJanitor]

Threat is mostly from you going into a system and alerting the ships there. If you raid something and leave ships alive, they'll go on threat status. Sending in scouts shouldn't cause this. Sending transports through will free stuff to threat status though. If you just send a few ships through, they'll probably only free stuff that's near them, but enough firepower coming through can free everything on the planet. A cross-planet attack works by simply picking a whole lot of ships and switching their status from guarding to threat.

Adjacent planets to your own, that show up as "AI Alerted" don't all go into threat status immediately just by you being nearby. They do build 'border aggression' though. It varies by difficulty setting and by how high your AI Progress is, but basically at some number of reinforcements the ships will start going free and piling up on the wormhole and waiting for a good time to come over and punch your nose. The exact measurements for border aggression are here: http://www.arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Border_Aggression

Edit: Ninja dev! Go code something, you! I'm posting this anyway so nyah!

[Kruztee]

Nice - this thread helped with some confusion with "threat" that I shared with the OP, so coolios for that.

Also, recently when stirring up a bit of a ruckus with a small fleet of raider starships, I got a message that my deep raiding activities were causing the AI to "generate" threat. So does this mean that ships were being spawned somewhere as threat, or perhaps that some ships were being released from other duties (guards, special ops) as threat? It was difficult to tell in-game exactly what was happening.

[x4000]

With he deep strike, it was actually adding new threat ships at the ai homeworlds that would come racin at you. Same idea as with he ai eye, or mark III science lab, but not in he local system.

[Kingmaker]

Interesting, so the only way level IV ships get "threat" status is if I wander through the system. It's good to know that Transports do it too. I actually think that may be one of the largest contributing problems. If you don't have a straight connection is it better to just smash your way through with a fleet, accept the losses but not have to worry about the threat production?

[BobTheJanitor]

It depends how you want to play it. Taking transports through will rile up some threat along the way, but building some defenses on the other end will keep it mostly contained. Going through and wiping out all the ships and guard posts along the route will make it easier to move later reinforcements through, but it's slow going, and not usually a good way to expend resources when you could be focusing on taking new worlds that you need. And even with just the command station and/or warp gate left, the AI will still keep pumping reinforcements into the world, so your cleaning efforts will be temporary at best.