Author Topic: Core World approach  (Read 13442 times)

Offline Hearteater

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #30 on: December 30, 2012, 11:55:39 pm »
Ok, first, you need to tighten up your system defenses.  I played through 4 waves, and while I defended successfully, the systems were in no position to protect themselves.  I need to swap turrets around, force fields, and such.  There is no reason not to get one of your two Modular Fortresses down next to your Advanced Factory.  Speaking of that system, you've got Sniper Turrets under the CS force field.  Delete them and put them at system edge.  Also, you've still got a Mark II Force Field left, use it on the Adv. Factory.  Also, as soon as that Missile Frigate wave hits, order all your Sniper Turrets to target the Raid Starships.  This is generally a good idea for Sniper Turrets anyway, but it is critical in systems with something to protect.  Sniper Turrets wreck Raid Starships.

As for the homeworld, I'm sure there are a few good methods, but this one will work for you fairly easily, although it is micro heavy.  If you've never done stealth ops, this is how it works:

Step 0) You need Scout Starships to negate the railguns on the Teuthida.  You've got Scout Starships wasting time on picket duty so delete them (leave the one on the other homeworld).  This gives you 4 Mark I Scout Starships.  You could use Mark IIs since you unlocked them, but they are more expensive to replace.  Your call.  Anyway, build a Starship constructor at the system you own in the top right.  Crank out 2 Cloaker Starships and 4 Scout Starships, and send them all to the Core World you are staging on.  Also, move that Warhead way out to the system edge so it doesn't get destroyed easily.

Step 1) Kill that Tachyon Guardian.  Use a full cap of Fighters I (to absorb damage), Missile Frigates I, and Heavy Bomber Starships (to do the killing).  Power them all down, and bring over your 4 Scout Starships.  Try and use Mark I Scout Starships since you are likely to lose them all.  Pile them all up on the worm hole and get ready.  Send one of the 4 scouts through, and right as it touches the worm hole, pause and order the rest of the group through.  Then switch screens and unpause.  You want most of your control group through.  As soon as you see the ship count under Control Group 1 (or whatever # you picked) hit about 175, pause (96+96+4=196).  Order them to attack the Tachyon Guardian and shift+rt.click the worm hole so they flee right after.  Then power them up and unpause.  Once it blows order your Scout Starships to retreat.  I was able to get some of the fleet ships out and all four of the Heavy Bomber Starships survived.

Step 2) Build 4 Transports at your staging world and send them over to the core world with your Plasma Siege Starships loaded up.  Once they get there, pack two of the transports with the following powered down ships: all 3 Raid Starships you have, all the Core Siege Engines, all the Plasma Siege Starships.  This, plus 4 Scout Starships and 2 Cloaker Starships are about to do some heavy lifting.

Step 3) Send your Mark II Scout STarship through to sit on the worm hole.  This will reveal all the mines, and protect anything you send through from sniper fire.  Next, send a Cloaker Starship through.  Be certain it doesn't hit a mine, so grab control of it immediately and move it somewhere safe, but still close to the worm hole.  You may need to send in a cap of Fighters to set off the mines if they are too much of a problem.  The AI won't rebuild them quickly (if ever).  Now send the 2 transports, 4 Scout Starships and the other Cloaker Starship.  Keep them all out of the mines and use G to group-move everything except the Mark II Scout Starship.  Fly a C route to the left around and up and to the left of the Teuthida, right at the edge of the system.  Spread your Scout Starships out to provide good counter-sniper coverage.  Unload your ships and make sure they all get cloaking.  You don't want to do this too close because sometimes it takes a second and something will get a shot off.  Put your Raid and Plasma Siege Starships away in the Transports.

Step 4) Group move the mass into position on that Orbital Mass Driver, this includes the Transports.  With the Siege Engines powered down, make sure they are in range of the Orbital Mass Driver.  Order them to attack it.  Nothing should happen.  Move your Transports around so they are really close to the Siege Engines.  Make sure you've got full Scout Starship coverage.  Select the Siege Engines and power them up.  Nothing will happen for 10 seconds.  Then they will fire, lose cloaking, and the AI will get pissed.  Make sure you let all 15 Siege Engines fire.  Then pause, power them down, and order them back into the Transports.  The Orbital Mass Driver will die, and you can retreat to system edge.

Step 5) From system edge, you are going to need to wait out the re-cloak delay with your Siege Engines.  So unload them and watch as everything charges at you.  At the last moment, reload them and let everything retreat.  After about 30 seconds, do this again.  You should have enough time to get them cloaked on the second try.  Let everything settle.

Step 6) Optionally, go back and repeat steps 4 & 5 to take out the Warhead Interceptor, just in case you later want to use some warheads.

Step 7) Bring your stealth ops squad down to the Ion Cannon.  This time use your Raid Starships instead.  They will kill it nearly instantly, so just order them to attack and retreat back into the Transports.  The Warhead Interceptor was reducing Raid Starship damage by 75%, that's why they wouldn't work very well last time.  Repeat step #5 with your Raid Starships to get them cloaked.  Make sure to power them down.

Step 8) You are now going to attack the Teuthida just like the Orbital Mass Driver.  The difference here is it has Radar Dampening so you need to get a lot closer.  Also, it is going to take 6 rounds to kill, since you do about 19% per volley depending on if you can get your Plasma Siege to fire on time.  Use your Siege Engines powered down to find the range you need by clicking on the Teuthida and waiting for them to stop.  Make sure you keep your Cloaker Starships with them.  Remember, it is dangerous to unload in range, so unload everything out of range and "walk" them in under the Cloakers.

Step 9)  With the Siege Engines in range, but powered down, take a shot just like you did against the OMD.  Retreat them into Transports.  Now have your Plasma Siege Starships take a shot once things cool down, and retreat them.  Then do your re-cloaking dance at system edge.  Repeat until dead.

Ta-da, Teuthida dead and no super weapons used.

If you want to make your life easier, I recommend unlocking a Mobile Repair Station.  Leave one on the Core World as it will help you keep everything health there much easier.  But bring another with you onto the homeworld.  It is cloaked and can repair while cloaked, so you can use it to repair all your stealth ops units during the re-cloaking dance.  This means you don't need to worry about attrition cutting your fun short.  Unlocking Mark II Cloaker Starships might be helpful too, especially if you want to increase the size of your stealth ops team.  Remember to bring only Reclamation immune units.

I've attached my save of doing all of the above, up to taking the first shot on the Teuthida.  You'll notice I've got a bunch of enemies dragged up toward my preferred re-cloak dance spot.  I'd need to shift left or right a decent bit to do my dance again.  This save is an example of a slightly messed up shot because I got my Siege Engines out of sync, but I was rushed for time.  Also, a wave knocked out Murdoch, mainly because I didn't have time in real life to deal with it and I wanted to give you a save with a solid hit on the Teuthida.

Any questions, let me know.

Offline Kahuna

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #31 on: December 31, 2012, 01:51:21 am »
Except the teuthida isn't destroyed in that save. Also why the homeworlds don't have Eyes with planetary tachyon? EVERY time I look at a homeworld it has an Eye so I've completely forgot about cloaker starships. IF Cloaker Starships can be used destroying Ancient Shadows Core Guard Posts is possible.
« Last Edit: December 31, 2012, 01:59:20 am by Kahuna »
set /A diff=10
if %diff%==max (
   set /A me=:)
) else (
   set /A me=SadPanda
)
echo Check out my AI War strategy guide and find your inner Super Cat!
echo 2592 hours of AI War and counting!
echo Kahuna matata!

Offline Ragnarok

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #32 on: December 31, 2012, 06:15:21 am »
Hm. Thanks Hearteater.
I know my systems defense is messed up in that save. I have another one around 10 minutes later with system defense consolidated and some more warp gates killed.

I appreciate your help. I have one question though and that is about the use of pause. I normally would consider "pause" as cheating, in that i dont want to pause/unpause ten times just to get the micro right. I feel like it doesnt suit with what AIW is trying to do at all. I suppose there is no way to get the HW without pausing ? If so, thats kinda akward. I always try to play AIW like i would play other MP RTS games, which would mean live micro. hum-hum.
thanks a lot for your time !

Offline Ragnarok

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #33 on: December 31, 2012, 07:38:31 am »
I tried and i give up up so many tries. I hope it gets fixed because i still feel certain things are vastly imbalanced. Maybe i try again once Arcen made a patch (or two).
12 hours of my live mostly wasted -_-

Nontheless, thanks a lot for your time Hearteater.

Offline Kahuna

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #34 on: December 31, 2012, 07:53:02 am »
If something is put into the game in purpose and it works as intended it's not cheating. Pausing is as much cheating as pausing in sins of a solar empire, sprinting in an fps game or quick saving in Skyrim.
set /A diff=10
if %diff%==max (
   set /A me=:)
) else (
   set /A me=SadPanda
)
echo Check out my AI War strategy guide and find your inner Super Cat!
echo 2592 hours of AI War and counting!
echo Kahuna matata!

Offline Hearteater

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #35 on: December 31, 2012, 12:06:24 pm »
Except the teuthida isn't destroyed in that save.
Just for you, now it is.  Again, no super weapons needed.  I pulled in the Z-Repoc to speed things up.  They also work nicely, especially since they have their own cloaking.

Ragnarok, if you want to try and pick up from this save, good luck because there is a CPA in 1 minutes, 48 seconds :) .  If you can survive that, let me know how it goes.  One thing that sometimes comes up with stealth ops is when you are using powered-down ships, I sometimes find you need to issue the attack order AFTER you power them up.  Some ships forget the original attack order on power up, and this can result in the Siege Engines wasting their attacks on the Teuthida's drones.

Offline TechSY730

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #36 on: December 31, 2012, 12:24:47 pm »
Except the teuthida isn't destroyed in that save.
Just for you, now it is.  Again, no super weapons needed.  I pulled in the Z-Repoc to speed things up.  They also work nicely, especially since they have their own cloaking.

Ragnarok, if you want to try and pick up from this save, good luck because there is a CPA in 1 minutes, 48 seconds :) .  If you can survive that, let me know how it goes.  One thing that sometimes comes up with stealth ops is when you are using powered-down ships, I sometimes find you need to issue the attack order AFTER you power them up.  Some ships forget the original attack order on power up, and this can result in the Siege Engines wasting their attacks on the Teuthida's drones.

Though this is something that needs fixing, one way to work around it is to pause, power on, then give the attack, then unpause. The ships will power on and then attack (in that order), but on the "same frame", so they won't get distracted by other stuff.

Offline Hearteater

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #37 on: December 31, 2012, 12:39:34 pm »
Yeah, that's actually the way I do it, but I needed to do it really slow and write down each step to catch the issue.  When I typed up the steps from memory I missed that critical detail.

Offline orzelek

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #38 on: December 31, 2012, 04:54:14 pm »
I read through that tactics.. and you won't convince me that these guard posts are not op. And what if you will land with no reclamation immune units?

Offline TechSY730

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #39 on: December 31, 2012, 05:57:52 pm »
It may be very well that some of the new "brutal picks" are OP even by brutal pick standards. That is indeed something that needs to be examined. Sadly, they were introduced so soon before the AVWW2 "mandated" AI War hiatus and the Christmas holiday, so they didn't have time to get proper balance testing until it was too late, and now we are discovering balance problems when we are unlikely to get fixes for them.

BTW, I think this is one reason why I think the 3.0 days were so fondly remembered. The last 3.x version of AI War before the long hiatus (like half a year or something) was very solid all around; stable, polished, and well balanced. Not perfect, but pretty darn solid. Because of that, we were happy with the hiatus. Sadly, the "stuck" version during the "hiatuses" of AI War since then have not been as solid, despite having equivalently solid versions previously before a big "shake up" in balance which we got "stuck" with for weeks/months on end. (Repeat, there have been just as solid if not more solid versions of AI War since the 3.x versions, it's just that we almost never got a "hiatus" on them, so we didn't have a long period to let an individual version "sink in" to our impressions)

Just one of those things in public beta cycles I guess.  :-\
« Last Edit: January 16, 2013, 02:13:54 pm by TechSY730 »

Offline Hearteater

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #40 on: January 01, 2013, 12:41:44 am »
I read through that tactics.. and you won't convince me that these guard posts are not op. And what if you will land with no reclamation immune units?
All Starships are immune to reclamation, as are all Mark V units.  So any Fabs you capture may provide you something, but Starships absolutely will.  In particular, Plasma Siege Starships by themselves can get the job done,  you just need more volleys.  Thankfully they re-cloak faster so you can actually get more volleys in.  But you will need to unlock at least Mark II Plasma Siege to avoid insanity.  Mark I's with a Flagship boost only get about 1.6% damage per volley.  Mark II bring that to 4.8%, and Mark IIIs to 9.6%.  You can safely add Raid Starships too if you want.  If you are using a MRS, you can throw in Heavy Bomber Starships and let them get 2-3 volleys in most of the time.  They'll take damage, but the MRS will fix them up quickly.  Stack mutliple MRS to speed up repairs (they have a cap of 9).

That's not to say the Teuthida doesn't need an adjustment.  The best change I could pick for Teuthida would probably be its drones.  At speed 300, doing 936,000 x10 damage, ignore armor, rot armor, damage engines, and paralyzes...that's a bit much.

1) Pull the armor piercing, armor damage, engine damage and paralyzation...that's really just cluttering up things.
2) Then maybe give them a x0 multiplier to an odd hull type...Neutron or Refractive maybe?  That gives one more chance to have something to wedge yourself in the door.
3) Lastly, cut their attrition time down much lower, say 45 seconds.  They get produced pretty fast (1/second), so there is really reason there needs to be 240 sitting around for 4 minutes.  That's just annoying wait time, because at present you need to wait 4 minutes between attacks or your force gets evaporated under 2.2 billion damage.

Offline Histidine

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #41 on: January 01, 2013, 02:08:58 am »
If I remember right (though now I can't find where this was actually stated), wasn't the idea behind the (4.0 or therabouts) homeworld revisions to make attacking the AI homeworlds more of a tactical problem (similar to how the nebula scenarios are intended to work), rather than a blob-on-blob collision?

The problem is that many of the additions to the homeworlds go against this by having effects that are planetwide or essentially so - Special Forces, core reserve, brutal guard posts (Eyes, Teuthida, Wrath Lance). Squid and Lance in particular will mess you up no matter what you bring or where on the planet it moves. I don't think you should need something as cheesegrindy as Hearteater's 1 page plan in order to deal with a brutal guard post if you were careful with the AIP and the alerts.

I'll quote Wanderer here (the whole post is probably worth rereading, but this bit captures my view on the subject):

I'm not convinced the homeworlds need to be harder.  I'm really not.  Most 10/10 games will die long before encountering the homeworld other than with a scout to see if it's even playable (for me anyways).  A 9/9 game is not supposed to be a rediculous slugfest there either.  It's the icing on the cake.

I want to see a throwdown, a massive winner take all kind of fight when I get there.  I've grinded my arse off to build my fleet, kill your shields, blow up your support, now I want to KILL you dammit... not spend the next 3 hours trying to punch you in the nose while you hold me back by the forehead like some gradeschooler.

Offline chemical_art

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #42 on: January 01, 2013, 01:41:48 pm »
Agreed. For much of the game there is a desired goal of making things tactical.

Homeworlds go the opposite. Strategic reserves can only be overcome with blobs.  All of the brutal picks are for blob on blob combat. They in some key way making tactical strikes very difficult, and when combined make it almost impossible.
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Offline TechSY730

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #43 on: January 01, 2013, 02:34:01 pm »
The idea that strategic reserves needing a nerf has been discussed elsewhere, and I agree with it. From what I saw, the consensus seems to be a nerf on regen rate would be a good first step for it.

The other things, not so sure about. It would be nice if the lifespan of the spawned "drones" of the new guard posts were shorter, to help alleviate the "entire planetary coverage" effect. Also, the Core AI giving planetary tachyon coverage I think may need to be reexamined. It just seems a cheap, unfair, OP way to cover up the fact that the AI doesn't know how to use mobile tachyon emitters. Maybe nerf it to a large sized but finite tachyon coverage radius? And also teaching the AI how to use mobile tachyon units?

Also, why does the Tethuda guard post have infinite range? It doesn't seem to fit. I'd rather see that on a non-brutal pick "sniper core guard post".

Offline TechSY730

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Re: Core World approach
« Reply #44 on: January 01, 2013, 02:37:56 pm »
About the special forces, there is a discussion about that already ongoing. (it also covers the Strategic Reserve)
« Last Edit: January 16, 2013, 02:18:37 pm by TechSY730 »