How do I deal with Ai passiveness

[emperormao]

Well the title is a bit misleading I guess, since passiveness could probably be considered "smart". But the issue I face is the fact that the AI just waits, waits, waits, waits then eventually builds up a stupidly big force, then attacks. Typically I try to push the AI back to a point where  I can create either 1 or 2 bottle necks, so I can concentrate my fleets and defenses.

However the brunt of the issues : My actual shipping fleets are always far to weak to do much on the offensive once the ai starts building up 500-1000 defense squads, so I rely heavily on raiding with bulky starships (and for simplicity sake, this play through in particular has teleporter turtle as one of the ai, so big raids aren't an option anyway). But after hitting about 2-3 ai worlds, without fail I become surrounded by regenerating super fleets. In response I build up turrets and defenses on my bottleneck planets. In response to that, the ai just camps for a few hours, then sends a giant 5000-10000 fleet to utterly crush me. I cannot send ships through, they are too strong, I cannot deal with them via attrition because they grow faster than I can even dint them. I cannot send my own fleets because they are too weak and die. And I cannot nuke the hell out of them, because they spread out across multiple planets, regen stupidly fast anyway, and often spread out across a the individual planets as well anyway. So I am just donating to them free ai progress if I do that.


In fact the only way I ever could deal with them, is if they attacked me on my turret filled planet before they built up a stupidly huge force.


SO what should I be doing? is this strategy simply bad from the start? how can I deal with 500+ fleets, many with mk 4-5, when I can at best muster 1k or so mk 1-3's myself (or wait it out, buy mercs, then watch their forces grow regardless)?

[emperormao]

Should also mention that spamming warp entrances with tractor turrets, then nuking them when they finally DO attack does work. But not for long, the fleets build up very quick after and I only get dozen or so minutes to take any actions.

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the forums

What settings are you playing with?  What is the AIP?  And how much game time is it taking to build up, say, 1000 ships outside your front door?  It sounds like something is going on to accumulate them that fast, but you may be expecting a different timeframe than most of us think in so I'm not sure.

Also, what bonus ships are available to you?  What Fabricators are available?  Any golems?  Etc.

Anyway, one popular way to deal with threatballs (piles of AI ships camping you but not committing to an attack) is mobile tractor ships (the mkI Riot Starship is always available, though you may want a higher mark, and the Black Widow Golem is the master of this) sent through the wormhole, grab a bunch of AI ships, go right back through the wormhole, process them with chipper-shredderturrets, rinse, repeat.  If the Riots aren't likely to survive, send mkI fighters or other fodder to absorb the AI's alpha strike and clog up targeting lists, then send in the threat-thief units.

This is harder now that the AI tends to camp about 20,000 range out from wormholes (blame Faulty Logic for that, it was his suggestion), but you can probably get them to come closer to the wormhole by sending the fodder (mkI fighters, cheap stuff, etc) through and sitting on the wormhole (maybe a bit further from the wormhole than from the blob so they come close enough), and then send in the threat-thieves.

There are several bonus types that make threat-clearing relatively trivial in many cases: Zenith Autobombs, Neinzul Fireflies, and to a lesser extent the Youngling Nanoswarm or any other Youngling.  The first two do significant aoe damage, but all of them are cheap enough to do something like this:
- build like 15 space docks directly next to the other side of the wormhole being camped.  You may want to cover these with forcefields but often they're simply not going to be attacked during the operation
- stack as many engineers as you can spare next to the space docks.  If you haven't unlocked engineer IIs, consider doing so.
- set all the space docks to FRD-move (V+right-click) to the target planet
- set all the space docks to loop-build
- set all the space docks to build one of each of the incredibly cheap units listed above that you have
- observe absurd ship quantities pour through the wormhole and attack the threatball (and anything else over there)

This can actually run your resources dry, so that could be an issue, but often you can do a simply ludicrous amount of damage to the threat on the other side for relatively little expense.  At worst, the distraction of the stream of ships will make it easier for you to get your threat-thieves or simply your fleet in there to start killing the things.

As far as how you can get onto the offensive, there are some general tactics I could advise (a solid core of high-mark starships can work wonderfully as a raiding/stomping force) but we're really getting into territory where your specific game situation dictates what would work best, so feel free to post a save and some of us can take a look

[Tridus]

It sounds like you might be taking too many planets.

AI War is kind of counterintuitive in that way. The more territory you take, the stronger the AI response gets. That relationship is represented by the AI Progress score at the top of the screen. The AI is actually a giant, overwhelming force compared to you in many ways, and you're an annoyance. Your goal is to take key systems and valuable things from the AI to get ready for an attack on the homeworlds, without becoming a big enough annoyance that the AI gets serious about dealing with you. Generally speaking less is more, and you can't just take half the map to set up bottlenecks.

Well, you can, but on the other side of those bottlenecks the AI is going to create huge fleets and be a real pain (or totally lethal, depending on difficulty).

(The exception to that is if you turn on the "Fallen Spire" game option, which gives you a large list of objectives that give you defensive buildings that can survive a full scale assault by the AI on your chokepoints, and a special fleet that gets so powerful that it can take on the giant AI fleets you see by conquering the map. If you do turn that on, set it to 1/10 as a newbie, because the AI response to this option can by itself get pretty ugly if the number is up too high.)

[LordSloth]

They've made the AI smarter about assessing threat, but an old trick was to pull your fleet back a system, lower your 'firepower' so the AI thought it was safe enough to move in, then jump back in. In particular, you never wanted to leave a golem directly on a planet you actually wanted the AI to attack. Now you might actually need to pull further back, load transports, and question whether your golems will get there in time.

Damage being what it is nowadays, I'm not certain it will work (I will probably be trying this out in my ongoing game), but an Armored Warhead should theoretically be able to cross the distance. Barring certain ships, a cloaker starship and lightning warhead of sufficent mark (radius) could be useful.

If you screen and lure with (default case) fighters or even cutlasses (which won't do much damage, but will be built fast enough to draw the AI over to the wormhole) or some of the ships keith mentioned, Riot Starships will help, but also keep an eye out for Fabricators. There are several tractor bonus ships, but the spire tractor platform is the best of the lot. I think they added etherjet fabs too, but I haven't had the opportunity to try them out.

Another thing that people have been known to do is set up a relatively weak but durable planet outside their chokepoint, perhaps a military command, or with sufficient spider turrets, logistics. You would want to keep it from being a valid target for Waves, but be in a position to soak threat balls, which should retarget given enough time and opportunity. If I remember from patch notes, something like thirty minutes?

Sadly I don't remember a lot of the details, including the difference between plain threat and threatfleet, so I might be off on some of the details. I expect to get some practical experience in the latest version this weekend, but take what I say with a grain of salt unless someone seconds it.

If you can't set up a distraction planet without ruining your chokepoint, then after somehow clearing it (not a nuke, you need the supply), setting up a beachhead might be useful. If the warpgate is still up, the beachhead won't have to deal with the waves, just the border aggression. As long as you have supply you can send in the mobile builder and (depending on what you're facing) possibly keep a strong enough force to wear down the special forces patrol and border aggression as they trickle in.

[emperormao]

Welcome to the forums

What settings are you playing with?  What is the AIP?  And how much game time is it taking to build up, say, 1000 ships outside your front door?  It sounds like something is going on to accumulate them that fast, but you may be expecting a different timeframe than most of us think in so I'm not sure.

Also, what bonus ships are available to you?  What Fabricators are available?  Any golems?  Etc.

Anyway, one popular way to deal with threatballs (piles of AI ships camping you but not committing to an attack) is mobile tractor ships (the mkI Riot Starship is always available, though you may want a higher mark, and the Black Widow Golem is the master of this) sent through the wormhole, grab a bunch of AI ships, go right back through the wormhole, process them with chipper-shredderturrets, rinse, repeat.  If the Riots aren't likely to survive, send mkI fighters or other fodder to absorb the AI's alpha strike and clog up targeting lists, then send in the threat-thief units.

This is harder now that the AI tends to camp about 20,000 range out from wormholes (blame Faulty Logic for that, it was his suggestion), but you can probably get them to come closer to the wormhole by sending the fodder (mkI fighters, cheap stuff, etc) through and sitting on the wormhole (maybe a bit further from the wormhole than from the blob so they come close enough), and then send in the threat-thieves.

There are several bonus types that make threat-clearing relatively trivial in many cases: Zenith Autobombs, Neinzul Fireflies, and to a lesser extent the Youngling Nanoswarm or any other Youngling.  The first two do significant aoe damage, but all of them are cheap enough to do something like this:
- build like 15 space docks directly next to the other side of the wormhole being camped.  You may want to cover these with forcefields but often they're simply not going to be attacked during the operation
- stack as many engineers as you can spare next to the space docks.  If you haven't unlocked engineer IIs, consider doing so.
- set all the space docks to FRD-move (V+right-click) to the target planet
- set all the space docks to loop-build
- set all the space docks to build one of each of the incredibly cheap units listed above that you have
- observe absurd ship quantities pour through the wormhole and attack the threatball (and anything else over there)

This can actually run your resources dry, so that could be an issue, but often you can do a simply ludicrous amount of damage to the threat on the other side for relatively little expense.  At worst, the distraction of the stream of ships will make it easier for you to get your threat-thieves or simply your fleet in there to start killing the things.

As far as how you can get onto the offensive, there are some general tactics I could advise (a solid core of high-mark starships can work wonderfully as a raiding/stomping force) but we're really getting into territory where your specific game situation dictates what would work best, so feel free to post a save and some of us can take a look

Hey, thanks for the welcome and the tips. The tractor beam idea is actually pretty funny, and the AI use it against me so I probably should have thought of that sooner lol.


But I think the big issue is the fact that the AI has 4 barracks within 4-5 hops of my chokepoint planet, and are constantly creating 200+ carriers. Never knew that would happen, but after raiding the barracks the waves slowed down for a bit (till the ai remade them). So maybe that is the reason they are growing so huge so rapidly I guess?

It sounds like you might be taking too many planets.

AI War is kind of counterintuitive in that way. The more territory you take, the stronger the AI response gets. That relationship is represented by the AI Progress score at the top of the screen. The AI is actually a giant, overwhelming force compared to you in many ways, and you're an annoyance. Your goal is to take key systems and valuable things from the AI to get ready for an attack on the homeworlds, without becoming a big enough annoyance that the AI gets serious about dealing with you. Generally speaking less is more, and you can't just take half the map to set up bottlenecks.

Well, you can, but on the other side of those bottlenecks the AI is going to create huge fleets and be a real pain (or totally lethal, depending on difficulty).

(The exception to that is if you turn on the "Fallen Spire" game option, which gives you a large list of objectives that give you defensive buildings that can survive a full scale assault by the AI on your chokepoints, and a special fleet that gets so powerful that it can take on the giant AI fleets you see by conquering the map. If you do turn that on, set it to 1/10 as a newbie, because the AI response to this option can by itself get pretty ugly if the number is up too high.)

Actually I only have about 6 planets  . But as I mentioned above, do you think it might be because of some "near by (4-5 hops) barracks' that are churning out 200+ carriers all the time? It is hard to deal with them, because I have one AI set as teleporter turtle, and they power up massive ion + reclaim cannons that wipe out mk 5 ships (lol learnt that the hard way) if you have 2x the ships of the ai on X planet. But I think I can raid them with some starships as keith.lamothe mentioned.

They've made the AI smarter about assessing threat, but an old trick was to pull your fleet back a system, lower your 'firepower' so the AI thought it was safe enough to move in, then jump back in. In particular, you never wanted to leave a golem directly on a planet you actually wanted the AI to attack. Now you might actually need to pull further back, load transports, and question whether your golems will get there in time.

Damage being what it is nowadays, I'm not certain it will work (I will probably be trying this out in my ongoing game), but an Armored Warhead should theoretically be able to cross the distance. Barring certain ships, a cloaker starship and lightning warhead of sufficent mark (radius) could be useful.

If you screen and lure with (default case) fighters or even cutlasses (which won't do much damage, but will be built fast enough to draw the AI over to the wormhole) or some of the ships keith mentioned, Riot Starships will help, but also keep an eye out for Fabricators. There are several tractor bonus ships, but the spire tractor platform is the best of the lot. I think they added etherjet fabs too, but I haven't had the opportunity to try them out.

Another thing that people have been known to do is set up a relatively weak but durable planet outside their chokepoint, perhaps a military command, or with sufficient spider turrets, logistics. You would want to keep it from being a valid target for Waves, but be in a position to soak threat balls, which should retarget given enough time and opportunity. If I remember from patch notes, something like thirty minutes?

Sadly I don't remember a lot of the details, including the difference between plain threat and threatfleet, so I might be off on some of the details. I expect to get some practical experience in the latest version this weekend, but take what I say with a grain of salt unless someone seconds it.

If you can't set up a distraction planet without ruining your chokepoint, then after somehow clearing it (not a nuke, you need the supply), setting up a beachhead might be useful. If the warpgate is still up, the beachhead won't have to deal with the waves, just the border aggression. As long as you have supply you can send in the mobile builder and (depending on what you're facing) possibly keep a strong enough force to wear down the special forces patrol and border aggression as they trickle in.

I thought about doing this. But I have the wardens and marauders on, and they wiped my forward distraction base out before I could even start it lol. But I haven't tried backing my main fleet away and sending it back. I will have to give that a go.

Thanks for the responses guys! if nothing else, I have picked up a few interesting strategies from you all.

[Bognor]

...an Armored Warhead should theoretically be able to cross the distance. ...

Yeah, Armored Warheads recently went from having zero armor (heh) to having stupendous armor with no change in hit points, so they're essentially 5x as durable as they used to be (armor reduces damage by up to 80%).

[Tridus]

Actually I only have about 6 planets  . But as I mentioned above, do you think it might be because of some "near by (4-5 hops) barracks' that are churning out 200+ carriers all the time? It is hard to deal with them, because I have one AI set as teleporter turtle, and they power up massive ion + reclaim cannons that wipe out mk 5 ships (lol learnt that the hard way) if you have 2x the ships of the ai on X planet. But I think I can raid them with some starships as keith.lamothe mentioned.

Wow, really? Okay then. Can you post a save game? Lots of people here can take a look at it and see just what's going on.

Barracks are primarily for storing units to reduce the CPU load. When the AI has lots of units on a planet, it makes a barracks to store some of them. When that fills up, it starts making carriers instead. Destroying the barracks just thins out the existing ships there, but it doesn't stop more from showing up. If you want to make one planet not get so many ships you have a couple of options:

1. "Neuter" it. Planets are reinforced at their command station, warp gate, and all the guard posts (except wormhole guard posts). If you destroy the guard posts, fewer reinforcements will go there. If you destroy the warp gate, fewer reinforcements will go there *and* that planet won't be able to launch waves against you.

Note that you need to leave at least one planet with a warp gate up next to your planets. If you do, all the AI wave attacks will go there and you can control somewhat where you get attacked. Also note that the AI will do things like cross-planet-attacks and general border aggression which can appear at any border world.

2. Don't put it on alert. If you look at the planet on the galaxy map, there's a note that says if it's on alert or not. AI planets go on alert if they're next to a plane that is no longer an AI planet (ie: yours), or if you show up with a fleet and destroy buildings. Alerted worlds get many more reinforcements. So you can control somewhat where reinforcements go by limiting what planets you take.

You can also make a planet go off alert by building the Warp Jammer building. Those are expensive though and should only be used in special cases (like near a core AI world, you *really* don't want those to go on alert until the end of the game).

Again, I'd really suggest posting a save.

[emperormao]

Actually I only have about 6 planets  . But as I mentioned above, do you think it might be because of some "near by (4-5 hops) barracks' that are churning out 200+ carriers all the time? It is hard to deal with them, because I have one AI set as teleporter turtle, and they power up massive ion + reclaim cannons that wipe out mk 5 ships (lol learnt that the hard way) if you have 2x the ships of the ai on X planet. But I think I can raid them with some starships as keith.lamothe mentioned.

Wow, really? Okay then. Can you post a save game? Lots of people here can take a look at it and see just what's going on.

Barracks are primarily for storing units to reduce the CPU load. When the AI has lots of units on a planet, it makes a barracks to store some of them. When that fills up, it starts making carriers instead. Destroying the barracks just thins out the existing ships there, but it doesn't stop more from showing up. If you want to make one planet not get so many ships you have a couple of options:

1. "Neuter" it. Planets are reinforced at their command station, warp gate, and all the guard posts (except wormhole guard posts). If you destroy the guard posts, fewer reinforcements will go there. If you destroy the warp gate, fewer reinforcements will go there *and* that planet won't be able to launch waves against you.

Note that you need to leave at least one planet with a warp gate up next to your planets. If you do, all the AI wave attacks will go there and you can control somewhat where you get attacked. Also note that the AI will do things like cross-planet-attacks and general border aggression which can appear at any border world.

2. Don't put it on alert. If you look at the planet on the galaxy map, there's a note that says if it's on alert or not. AI planets go on alert if they're next to a plane that is no longer an AI planet (ie: yours), or if you show up with a fleet and destroy buildings. Alerted worlds get many more reinforcements. So you can control somewhat where reinforcements go by limiting what planets you take.

You can also make a planet go off alert by building the Warp Jammer building. Those are expensive though and should only be used in special cases (like near a core AI world, you *really* don't want those to go on alert until the end of the game).

Again, I'd really suggest posting a save.

Well not sure if this would be considered posting a save, but it is a screenshot which sums up things way better than I can haha.

http://i.imgur.com/tZ91EWQ.jpg

Basically I have cleared all the worlds within 3 hops of my home world (which is sharpwi, and happens to be the bottleneck planet). As you can see I got brave and ended up losing 800+ ships when the ai wedged me an sent 2k or so. As of now most of my fleet is stranded on vergiona , and I have a looming 4k threat, which the ai will sit on till its sure so it will likely become 6k+. Although I have some ability to move ships along ardur and tiolarraee, I can't really see it helping much.

After posting last time I actually went out and cleared all the planets with barracks on them. As you say though, that isn't really going to help me lol, so now planets even further away send them instead and nothing changed. But as of now I am pretty screwed I think. Even if I do regroup and take out the 4k threat, it will be back within 10-20 mins anyway. .

I guess ultimately the issue is the fact that the further I press into the ai, the more difficult it gets. I have tech from all the area's I can, but can't really unlock anything that will really help me here, and I honestly spent most of it already on mk III ship techs. So for every planet I clear, the AI gets stronger (which I understand is the core mechanic here), yet I don't get stronger as my unit caps stay the same. On the other hand, If I send troops too far in and ignore other planets with nothing interesting on them at all, I get a "deep strike" alert warning, as the AI seems to being responding harshly to circumventing its worlds in other play throughs I have tried.

[onyhow]

394 AIP...no wonder why things are rather bad...

Also, by clearing the planet, do you mean blowing everything up including command stations?

[emperormao]

394 AIP...no wonder why things are rather bad...

Also, by clearing the planet, do you mean blowing everything up including command stations?

Yeah lol. Should I not be doing that?

And if not, how do I avoid deep strike penalties?

[keith.lamothe]

That screenshot looks a little strange... have you been scouting?  Most of the galaxy looks unscouted and/or simply destroyed and left uncolonized.  Scouting is super important

Those planets you destroyed can make you stronger if you take them and use the metal+crystal spots on them to speed up your rebuilds, and they do increase your unit caps via the additional knowledge you can collect from them (I think you said you were getting all the knowledge, but I'm not sure how you would with some of those further-out killed-planets because you can't gather Knowledge without supply, and to get supply you need a command station on that planet or an adjacent one.

Anyway, Deep Strike only happens if you're more than 4 (or is it just 4?  I keep forgetting) from the nearest non-AI (no AI command station) planet.  So you really don't have to pop many planets to prevent deep strike response, just one every 3 or 4 hops, and that one will make a huge area of the map eligible for you to hit without deepstrike.  Also, it's a good idea to at least try to hold the planets you pop for that purpose, at least long enough to get the knowledge from them.

[emperormao]

That screenshot looks a little strange... have you been scouting?  Most of the galaxy looks unscouted and/or simply destroyed and left uncolonized.  Scouting is super important

Those planets you destroyed can make you stronger if you take them and use the metal+crystal spots on them to speed up your rebuilds, and they do increase your unit caps via the additional knowledge you can collect from them (I think you said you were getting all the knowledge, but I'm not sure how you would with some of those further-out killed-planets because you can't gather Knowledge without supply, and to get supply you need a command station on that planet or an adjacent one.

Anyway, Deep Strike only happens if you're more than 4 (or is it just 4?  I keep forgetting) from the nearest non-AI (no AI command station) planet.  So you really don't have to pop many planets to prevent deep strike response, just one every 3 or 4 hops, and that one will make a huge area of the map eligible for you to hit without deepstrike.  Also, it's a good idea to at least try to hold the planets you pop for that purpose, at least long enough to get the knowledge from them.

Actually I sent cloaker ships with science labs, then built temp bases on adjacent planets to get the knowledge from those planets.

Also when ever I take out the decloakers so I can send scouts through, the Ai musters a giant force from said planet in response.


But thanks for the 3-4 hops tip. That isn't exactly intuitive lol, but I can see how that works. I guess I should scout for good planets (with caches, golems and labs), by taking out a single planet every few hops. And perhaps scout by sending a horde of scouts at the same time (they seem to get through some planets when I send them in groups).

Thanks.!

[Tridus]

Well not sure if this would be considered posting a save, but it is a screenshot which sums up things way better than I can haha.

http://i.imgur.com/tZ91EWQ.jpg

That helps, but no. The save files are in your AI War directory  (if you used Steam that's: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\AI War Fleet Command\RuntimeData\Save ). You can attach a save to a post here in the forum and we can load the game to see exactly what's going on.

[LordSloth]

Ah... about the AI swarming you when you're clearing a path for your scouts.

• Mark 4 Scouts (fleet/starship) are immune to decloaking
• Special Forces Patrol will protect certain systems. CSGs are a good indicator, but if they've been blown up, the AI will still protect things like advanced factories, broken golems.
• If the guardians of a system have been knocked over to threat behavior, they'll always intercept. You can check this by having a scout there and hovering over the threat counter until the tooltip gives you the breakdown, or through a certain galaxy view filter I've bound to a hotkey.
• If they're on guard behavior, it can pay to just send one mark's cap of bombers, preferably mark 1. The game used to do a firepower comparison but I believe it's been switched to a more accurate strength comparison. Anyways, the planetary ai will compare your 'firepower' to the local 'firepower' and will only agro the entire system if you're too strong. In other words, a single cap of mark 1 fighters can often fly in, take out a tachyon guardian sentinels, queue movement well away from other command stations, and then hit the other tachyon guardians sentinels and jump through with your expendable fighters to get the tachyon guardian on the other side.
• If you've cleared out the tachyon sentinels, you can pull back your pickets and send them out on a full force expedition. When they're done, simple select your replacements and alt-right click on empty space and "auto-picket".
• Beware raid engines when clearing tachyon sentinels.