How to play AI War?

[junker154]

That sounds incredibly useful, a 50 percent increase in firepower is incredible for heavy fortified systems.

Thanks for clearing that up with the hull types, these intricate small mechanics are still hard to figure out. Even when you hover units, you get bombared with informations. If Arcen didn't include those descriptions, I would be totally lost. Thank them for including them, it makes it far easier to learn.

[alocritani]

when I press W on the galaxy map, there's some information about warpgates, how does that exactly work?

it depends:
your planets have a red number: they represent  the number of adjacent planet that have a warp gate
example: you see a 3: this means that 3 of the adjacent planet have a warp gate. in other words, AI can warp waves at that planet from 3 different wormholes (in normal map you can see that wormholes enemy waves can arrive are bright red - wormholes that link to planet without warp gate are a lighter red)
Sometimes your planets has no number at all: this equals to 0 (ie: no adjacent planet have a warp gate -> no waves can hit that planet)

Enemy planets have green numbers, instead: they are the same as the red numbers: the only difference is the color. If you conquer that planet number will became red.

Regarding countering small weak ships: I really like riot starships as a counter, because they can be customized to have different type of attack against different hulls. Have a look at them, also.

edit: there are lot of "hidden" options (not really hidden, just a bit difficult to notice). I found useful to read release notes. It's a very long read, and often things changed more than once (so it can be a bit confusing, at times) but still some feature are only explained there.
you can find links to them all here

[zoutzakje]

I probably didn't explain it all right, but whatever i do seems to work most of the times. In late game, my AIP ends up being 500-600. With all datacenters, co-p's and possible superterminal I could bring it down to 300-400, but i don't always have to do that in order to win my game. I have one heavily defended world, where all the waves will come to. The rest of my worlds are very lightly defended but often have mk II, mk III grav turrets/tractor turrets + logistics to stall any enemies long enough for my fast fleet (or portions of it) to arrive. My fleet moves around, destroys threat, defends against CPA's and exo's and only makes actual progress when it's fairly quiet in my empire. Only ships with inconvenient immunities like raid starships can be a problem. A 100 planet game usually lasts about 20-25 hours. On normal caps endgame waves end up like 2k mk II,III missile frigs and stuff like that. I do have golems (medium) and spirecraft (hard) enabled at all times because i enjoy playing with them, but i don't need them to win my game.

with turrets i meant place them just in range of the wormhole, in the direction of your command center. The longer your turrets live the better of course, but you also don't want to give the enemies a chance to scatter in all directions (which they do) and possibly invade other less protected worlds. Several mks of HBC's, lightning, flak and possibly sniper/spider (sniper and spider as far away from wormhole as possible of course) and it takes down any regular waves (except teleporters, but that's why you build the cc at the other end of the turretball, still in range of the HBC's).

I guess it all depends on different playstyles... As i said before, higher AIP doesn't have to be a bad thing. Yes, destroying more warp gates costs more AIP, but personally I rather have higher AIP than more warp gates alive. It's a matter of preferences really, and to me it's all about being in control. AIP is something to be really careful about, but if you can handle it, go for it. I NEED a large amount of worlds in order for my playstyle to work properly. of course i don't pick them randomly, i carefully select them after doing intensive scouting.
Higher AIP means bigger waves, more enemy reinforces and all that jazz. But it also means more resources, more possible shiptypes (ARS, fabs), easier and faster acces to your systems, more asteroids if you play with Spirecraft, etc.
And nowadays we also have the hacking system. More AIP means more hacking possibilities, which has turned out to be a very useful tool.

I hardly ever unlock mk II logistics... they really do cost to much knowledge. Only thing I've found useful is warp jammers. Some well placed warp jammers can buy you enough time to win your game.
Now I don't know what 10/10 is like and it's a very strong possibility that my playstyle won't work at all on doom. But it works well on most 9/9 games and it certainly works on 7/7 even with 4 of the worst AI types. Making slight adjustments for each different AI type I fight against of course, but the basics of what i do are the same.

don't know if any of this makes sense. I'm not incredibly good at explaining things, but i try.

[Aklyon]

Probably better to wonder what 9.8 is zout. After all, winning 10 has been confused with a bug before.

[zoutzakje]

haha yeah i remember that one

[junker154]

Both AIs decided to make a massive assault on our homeworld, he sent about 6675 ships at once. It was a huge fight but we managed to defeat him. It was really insane.

I'll take a look at the riot ships, a shield and some riot cannons would do the trick. Also we tried hacking a server backup from the AI which would give us a new shiptype. Anyway we tried to cloack it and it went well but then the scout cloacker got destroyed. Somehow our hackerstation was near enemy ships and the backup center and the AI didn't destroy it or responded to it at all. Only later they released a tachyon warhead. I don't know why the AI didn't attack the hacker center. Are hacker ships invisible for the AI?

Anyway we got a new ship type.


We did some further hacking and the enemy sent waves of 20000 ships alltogether, it was insane. All over a smaller period of time. Hacking doesn't seem to be worth it at all.

[zoutzakje]

It is worth it, depending on how you play it. Just don't overdo it and carefully chose what to hack. You'll have some extra benefits. You only get a few successful hacks in a whole campaign (depending on your hacking balance and on what you hack) before enemy retaliation gets too overwhelming. And yes, hacker ships are cloaked by default so the enemy won't be able to see it. That doesn't mean you don't have to defend it however. During the hacking process, the AI can release a tachyon blast which will expose your hacker for a short period of time.

[junker154]

Thanks for clearing that up, yeah we overdid it a bit, we hacked like 3 worlds in a short period of time. Gathering knowledge, design and sabotaging their orbital network. It was pretty fun though.

We came to the conclusion that it's only worth when you are able to get a new ship design, those are pretty nifty.

[alocritani]

Hacking is also very useful for sabotage of enemy force field, especially high level one on Homeworld, if you're able to defend the hacker (no cloaking there, because HW have planet coverage of tachyon).

[junker154]

I lost a game recently, we were doing really fine with some minor struggles until we hit an enemy coreworld. The coreworld was in isolated spot and connected by a hub world which led to 5 systems. Once we gained control of one of the adjacent planets, the AI started to wreak havoc all over us. At first he sent smaller waves but in a continious fashion, then the waves got bigger and bigger. At some point we where severely outmanned and outgunned. Even our whipping boys were no match. Most of the ships consisted of Mark 4 and 5 types. AI Progess was around 550.

We had this issue several times, everything works fine until we get near a homeworld. We don't really know how to tackle it, we tried hacking some defenses, hit and run tactics or general steamrolling. Still need to figure out how to deal with a AI homeworld.

We're missing something, but I don't know what exactly.

[alocritani]

well, 550 is a HUGE level of AI Progress (at least for me).
Probably you're attacked by reserve (nothing in top-left corner of the screen?) released when you enter a coreworld(a world usually next to homeworld). Maybe you are also facing special forces, released to protect important world.

[Nodor]

Not this game obviously, but one small change that makes things a little easier is to split the AI difficulty levels.

a 7.3/7.0 is an easier game than a 7.0/7.0 because the waves from each AI arrive at different times.   Cleaning up 2,400 ships and then another 2,000 ships is a LOT easier than killing 4,000 ships all at once.

[Bognor]

Not this game obviously, but one small change that makes things a little easier is to split the AI difficulty levels.

a 7.3/7.0 is an easier game than a 7.0/7.0 because the waves from each AI arrive at different times.   Cleaning up 2,400 ships and then another 2,000 ships is a LOT easier than killing 4,000 ships all at once.

Even at the same difficulty level, the waves will tend to drift apart over time, anyway.

If you do want to split, 7.0/7.3 is easier than 7.3/7.0, as some AI mechanics are based on the difficulty of the first AI.