Crazy CPA

[eronrauch]

My friend and I were playing a game against a 7 and 7.3 (starship commander and spireling decedent). We're pretty new to the game, but have beat 7/7's before. We had a bit of a slog for the first few hours, since we had lots of dug-in worlds near our homes and constant harassment by the computers (often getting 3-4 waves only a minute or two apart at the same worlds). But got our caps up, expanded and started to get some momentum.We did a pretty decent job keeping the AIP low and digging in hard and deep at all our worlds. We were just about to settle in to the transition from mid game to late game  when we got a CPA. We doubled down on defenses, filled our caps with ships (we each had 3 or 4 tech IV ships and fortresses at every planet etc). Our AIP was about 210 to 220 here (previously was about 180-190 for the last couple hours). Then the CPA hit. 600 Mark V ships. 500 mark IV ships... and another 1000 mixed starships and other ships. Yes. you're reading that right. 600 core tech and 500 IV's unit at 6 hours in. Wow. GG. They nuked everything we had in a couple of minutes without even stopping. Anything we could have done to weather this? Is this a bug?

[Minotaar]

You were probably neutering a bit too much, so there wasn't enough low-mark ships in the galaxy to fill out the CPA, so the AI used higher marks for it.
Actually, those AI types are probably the roughest when it comes to CPA's, since they have the most individually powerful ships, and less ships in general (so they don't have enough low marks basically all the time). Now that I think about it, I have no idea how you would stop a CPA from them ever. Make sure you've got some superweapons next time, I guess 

[barryvm]

An armored golem can do wonders against a diffuse attack such as a CPA.
Also I found gravity or spider turrets usefull for stringing out the starships and higher mark ships and then destroying them in smaller groups with a huge fleet ball.
You could also try riot starships but the low caps would probable mean they aren't that effective.
Use as much long ranged stuff as possible (Siege starships ?)

You certainly picked some stiff opposition there.

[zoutzakje]

yeah CPA's free ships from planets. If you've destroyed or neutered all lower mark planets, and there aren't enough low mark ships left to fill the CPA, the AI will use higher marks instead. This is one of the reasons why I always play with at least 80 planets in a galaxy. More chance that there are plenty of low mark worlds out there somewhere which the AI can use for it's CPA's.
Golems and spirecraft (especially martyrs) could have been a huge help to counter this, combined with gravity and tractor turrets to keep the enemies at bay.

[Hearteater]

Ok, doing the math, assuming the 7.0 difficulty is the first AI, I get: (220 AIP) * (7.0 difficulty) * 0.8 * (1.33 player count)  = 1638 ships.  You listed 2100 ships.  What was your threat at before the CPA hit?  Because extra threat will join the party, so letting that get too high just increases the effective size of the next CPA.

Given your difficulty that should have been a Mark I CPA, which means it starts releasing Mark I ships, then Mark II, and so on until to release to threat a total of 1638 ships (or every AI ship in the galaxy is released).  It won't create extra ships.  So for 1100 Mark IV and V ships to be released, you had to have purged all but 538 Mark I-III ships from the entire galaxy.  You wouldn't be the first player to have learned that clearing out the galaxy, especially of low mark units, is a bad idea.  Are you by chance playing on a smaller map (less than 60 planets)?  It can be pretty easy to make that mistake on those.

[Diazo]

Ok, doing the math, assuming the 7.0 difficulty is the first AI, I get: (220 AIP) * (7.0 difficulty) * 0.8 * (1.33 player count)  = 1638 ships.  You listed 2100 ships.  What was your threat at before the CPA hit?  Because extra threat will join the party, so letting that get too high just increases the effective size of the next CPA.

I'm learning this the hard way in my current game. My threat has regularly been spiking really high and it is causing my no end of grief.

I'm actually going on threat hunts where I chase ships loose on threat down just so I can reduce the total threat in the galaxy.

D.

[zoutzakje]

yeah I already learned this the hard way. Leaving threat lying around is BAD. Anything my defenses can easily handle is ok, but if it would take my turrets more than a few seconds to destroy, I will clean it up. That's probably why I tend to make slow progress in my games. I do a lot of neutering and threat cleaning.
I don't consider a CPA finished until I cleared all the high numbers of threat.

[eronrauch]

Ok, doing the math, assuming the 7.0 difficulty is the first AI, I get: (220 AIP) * (7.0 difficulty) * 0.8 * (1.33 player count)  = 1638 ships.  You listed 2100 ships.  What was your threat at before the CPA hit?  Because extra threat will join the party, so letting that get too high just increases the effective size of the next CPA.

Given your difficulty that should have been a Mark I CPA, which means it starts releasing Mark I ships, then Mark II, and so on until to release to threat a total of 1638 ships (or every AI ship in the galaxy is released).  It won't create extra ships.  So for 1100 Mark IV and V ships to be released, you had to have purged all but 538 Mark I-III ships from the entire galaxy.  You wouldn't be the first player to have learned that clearing out the galaxy, especially of low mark units, is a bad idea.  Are you by chance playing on a smaller map (less than 60 planets)?  It can be pretty easy to make that mistake on those.

Aside from a bug (which we had a few weird ones in this game) lack of low tier units to fill out the CPA was our working suspicion. Considering we were on an 80 planet map and only held about 20 worlds and we had only neutered a handful more (maybe 8-ish?) we weren't paying too much attention to having this happen. 

Also, good to know about the threat — we were getting so many crazy fast waves in this game (occasionally were we'd get up to three reps of double-waves hitting 30 seconds apart at the same world) that I'll bet 10 to 1 our floating threat was super high, probably pushing over 300. Also, the starship commander and spireling were both relying on really rough units like stealth battleships and mini-rams,. A mk V spire stealth battleship is obviously way more obnoxious than a mk V deflector drone.

Would there be a way to manage this issue in future games, such as deliberately alerting a bunch of low tech planets? I'd love to know a way to avoid this, considering how even though we were playing safe and steady it feels like we just got insta-killed by rng.  The last time I felt like I got my butt kicked this bad in a game was when jumped in to a Team Fortress 2 match and half the American nationals team jumped in on the other side lol.

[Also, this game we were experimenting with having golems off. If I had had a hive golem, who knows what the outcome might have been.]

[Brise Bonbons]

Hey all,

I'm the other unfortunate in the debacle described by the OP. Thanks for your replies so far, the situation is making more sense now.

I loaded up our last save before the CPA to give the map a closer look. We had 17 planets, the AI 62 (of an 80 planet map). Our AIP was actually around 275 at this point: I think we'd just taken several worlds, and the AIP had very recently been in the 220 range. The CPA itself was about 2200 ships. As my colleague mentions, there was some floating threat as well.

We did have grav turrets and tractors, as well as gravity drains. I don't believe either of us built Martyrs. I've tinkered with them in the past but didn't grok how they worked or how to utilize them, and have been ignoring them since. Perhaps I should correct that.

This galaxy has been heavily skewed to mark III and IV planets since the beginning, with several mark IV worlds adjacent to our homes. Most of the planets we've neutered or taken have also been high tech - we've not bullied easy worlds by any means. Out of the 62 AI planets when the CPA launched, 18 were mark I or II, with the majority sitting far from our territory. Many were never alerted, having as few as 14 or 15 ships. Doing some math it is easy to see how the AI pulled several hundred mark IV and V assets: There were simply not many low tech ships in the galaxy, a fact exacerbated by the AI preference for stealth battleships, gravity drains, Mini Rams, and other low-cap ship types, as noted above.

Is this just an extremely tough game given the map gen and the AI types we had? I see how in future we should purposefully leave pockets of low tech AI ships for potential CPAs to pull from, and I now better understand the benefit of strategically putting low tech worlds on alert to sap reinforcements. To expand a bit on my associate's questions, are there any other helpful tricks for maps with large numbers of high tech worlds, or when the low tech worlds are inconvenient to reach? Is it just a matter of sending raids to those low-tech worlds to get them alerted? Perhaps we needed to focus more heavily on anti-battleship tech?

Anyway, thanks again for all the great replies, and looking forward to more discussion on the topic. It's very curious, and I must say a little bit frustrating and counter intuitive. I thought it was a positive thing that we'd been neutering a lot, and ignoring all those uninteresting areas! Always more to learn in AI War, I guess.

[zoutzakje]

welcome to the forums ^^
As for mapgen and AI types... things could get much, much worse I'd avoid any of the technologists for now. Some of them make CPA's the least of your worries.
I guess it's just matter of over neutering the planets you guys had alerted. The other non-alerted low mark worlds probably already had their ships drained in previous CPA's, as 14 ships on a planet is extremely low. Important to keep the high mark worlds heavily neutered (III and IV), and the low marks not as much.
I'm currently playing a 9/9 crosshatch map type game myself and I've noticed most worlds are mk III or IV (out of 80 planets). The few low marks I've got on alert are slowly increasing in numbers and I'm letting them. The higher marks require my constant attention. Especially the numbers on bordering mk IV worlds gotta be kept low at all times. They can easily get out of control.
If you truely want to send ships to alert a somewhat distant low mark world, I wouldn't use raid starships. they'll die. I guess a group of cloacked military units (so no scouts) could do the trick, though I have never tried it myself.

And yes, AI war is a massive game. The basics are easy to learn, but there always things out there somewhere that can get you by surprise. Got over 550 hours of game time on AI war and I still occasionally learn something new lol.

[Hearteater]

You can kill the Command Station with one adjacent Mark I-II worlds to help keep CPA strength down without you needing to defend a remote planet.  If you leave a Reinforcement Gate alive (Special Forces Guard Post) that world itself will still get reinforcements too (don't do that if the world is a Mark IV, you want low Mark reinforcements).  Be careful though, your ships will auto-attack Special Forces Guard Posts, so you need to keep tight control on them to keep it alive.

If you have a nice dead-end cluster with some Mark I-II planets, you can make a choke point and put the whole cluster on alert by clearing a Command Station or two.  Then by clearing out most of the other Mark I/II ships in the map, you turn future CPAs into a wave that hits your prepared choke point.  Be careful though, once you hit tech level III you'll be in for a surprise.

[Wanderer]

You can kill the Command Station with one adjacent Mark I-II worlds to help keep CPA strength down without you needing to defend a remote planet.  If you leave a Reinforcement Gate alive (Special Forces Guard Post) that world itself will still get reinforcements too (don't do that if the world is a Mark IV, you want low Mark reinforcements).  Be careful though, your ships will auto-attack Special Forces Guard Posts, so you need to keep tight control on them to keep it alive.

If you have a nice dead-end cluster with some Mark I-II planets, you can make a choke point and put the whole cluster on alert by clearing a Command Station or two.  Then by clearing out most of the other Mark I/II ships in the map, you turn future CPAs into a wave that hits your prepared choke point.  Be careful though, once you hit tech level III you'll be in for a surprise.

Another tactic I find useful is cloaker starships and some other starship (Leech works nicely due to my playstyle) to fire up an alert on that planet and all surrounding ones.  Seems to keep them nice and busy.  Just never want to go into that area again.

[eronrauch]

Thanks to everyone for the advice! While it was super-frustrating to lose that way, we've both learned a ton from the dialog we've had because of it. Next game I'm sure we'll have some other silly/dramatic death that we'll be asking about

I did have one further question about CPAs — does anyone know how the AI determines when it's going to launch one? Is it pure rng or is there some sort of calculation that affects it's timing? For instance, this CPA was the first in this game at hour 6 or 7 but I've had games where I already had two CPAs before hour 5. Thanks again!

[Wanderer]

Thanks to everyone for the advice! While it was super-frustrating to lose that way, we've both learned a ton from the dialog we've had because of it. Next game I'm sure we'll have some other silly/dramatic death that we'll be asking about

I did have one further question about CPAs — does anyone know how the AI determines when it's going to launch one? Is it pure rng or is there some sort of calculation that affects it's timing? For instance, this CPA was the first in this game at hour 6 or 7 but I've had games where I already had two CPAs before hour 5. Thanks again!

In general it's RNG to the exact moment, however, difficulty plays a huge part in it.  For example, my usual games are 9+, and CPA's will occur between the 3rd and 4th hour and then every 3 1/2 roughly.  Meanwhile, at 7 or so they usually iterate every 5 hours? or so.  Depends heavily on difficulty.

[eronrauch]

Thanks Wanderer Going to start another game up soon and we'll see how it goes.