Out of Metal and Crystal - What To Do?

[bssybeep]

hmmm, I seem to have put myself into a corner in my current game.  It's a catch-22, I have two planets but in my battles have managed to use up all my metal and crystal (both are at 1).  Energy is fine (81,700).  The AI managed to ravage my two planets and kill most of my mines.  I beat them back and then went to rebuild the mines.  But since my metal and crystal = 1, no mines are being built.  I tried to delete several power stations, but it only helped a little.

I took a third planet, but again I cannot build any mines.

My current readings:
metals -416/s=120-536  (2 unused), crystal -576/s = 120-698 (1 unised)

Am I screwed or is there something I'm missing?

[Revenantus]

Shut down any reactors that aren't required right now, that will minimize wasted resources. There's no need to delete them.

There's most likely such a heavy drain on your resources because you're attempting to build so many mines at once. If you pause construction of some of the mines, more resources will be diverted towards the construction of the remaining mines. This will allow you to complete the mines in the more important locations quickly.

You're not out of the game yet, but it sounds like a tough situation. Good luck!

[Kjara]

Honestly unless you have way too many power plants running, you should be able to recover(note that power plants pull crystal and metal constantly--with mkII plants being the most efficient and mkIII the least efficient).  First thing to do is set as many powerplants as you can into low power mod(no need to scrap them, low power has the same effect).  Furthermore, if you can do so without worrying about enemies, you can always set all(or at least most) of your ships into low powermode to cut down on energy costs even further.

2nd, turn off(low power) all of your docks/constructors.

3rd, build only a few harvesters at a time(since crystal harvesters take metal, and metal harvesters take crystal).  If you have more building than what your income can support, it will take longer for them all to finish, rather than having some come online and start providing income. Again, if you have already queued them up, just pause them, rather than scrapping them.

It sounds like you might have some other buildings in the process of building as well, if thats true, set those in low power while you get the harvesters back up.

[bssybeep]

Appreciate the replies, helped a lot 

I set most of my power stations to low power (totally missed that option) and turned off my Space Docks.  At least building has resumed.  Thanks

[Haagenti]

Also look at the power use of your ships: e.g. parasites use 400 energy each and engineers use 5000 or so.

[nullspace]

Additionally, you might like this explanation for Cross-Planet Attacks, which I just added based on a player question in another thread:  http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Cross_Planet_Attacks

Yeah, that's very useful information for anticipating where the AI will attack, and how strongly.  

For the AI rules thing, if you have other questions, please do let me know.  I think most of them are explained well enough by the tutorials that you can plan pretty well, and some of it comes about through exploration.  But for those who want to Know From The Start and be able to plan without experimentation (which, for some but certainly not all players, is part of the fun of it), the wiki is intended to be a comprehensive (or nearly so) guide.  These two topics were definitely lacking, so I've added those in.  If there are other topics that you find are missing from the wiki, please do let me know!

I think there's a lot to explore and experiment with even if you know all the base rules  

So here's my next question.  I know how much the AI can reinforce, and where it can, but there are more planets on alert than it can reinforce, so how does it choose which planets actually get ships?  It seems like it prefers to reinforce planets near my biggest fleet; is this true and and does it depend on the AI actually being able to see my fleet?  

I've taken a planet next to an AI's home world, but it was a drawn out battle that nearly eliminated my fleet and resource stockpile.  I'm rebuilding my fleet at that planet, but the AI is reinforcing its homeworld at almost the same rate.  Is OK to gather my forces right at the wormhole to my target (and the AI can see it because the warp gate is still there) or am I telegraphing my next move to my enemy?  Is it useful to hide my fleet, or pretend to threaten other planets?    

[x4000]

The AI uses a variety of internal factors to decide where to reinforce -- such as, it prefers to reinforce on home planets or planets that are adjacent to its home planets -- and it also does give a bit higher weight to planets next to planets where humans have a large presence. But there is also a huge random component to this, as well, which makes for interesting populations over time. 

The general rule of thumb is, don't trip the Alert Level on AI home planets or the ones adjacent, unless you're ready to deal with those.  If your fleet is substantial enough in the staging area next to the AI Home planet, that will trip the Alert Level (see the intel summary) regardless of what kind of ships the AI has on the planet you are at.  It treats all neutral planets as hostile, so if you've completely kicked it off but have not taken the planet it doesn't matter (it assumes you might be using that as a staging point for a big fleet, whether you are or not), and when it still does have ships there, even a few, of course it can see your big fleet same as you could on its planets.  Really, it treats any planet it doesn't control as hostile, and planets that it does control, but which you have a big fleet on, as hostile.

So, to answer your questions, you are indeed telegraphing your intent to the AI to some extent, even though it doesn't necessarily know you have a big fleet there.  It just knows that its home planet has now been exposed, and so it will reinforce heavily there no matter what you do now.  Previously, the better strategy would have been to build up your fleet on a planet two hops away from the AI home planet, and then send that fleet through hostile territory to take them unawares.  Now you'll want to just go in and clip off as many of those guard posts of the AI home planet as possible, and that will reduce the ship cap overall.  You'll then want a really big fleet in order to take out the actual command station and the mass of ships that is no doubt around that.  That mass will cap out at some point, so it's better to wait until you are really ready and have a huge fleet, compared to trying to rush in and repeatedly whittle them down, because they'll outpace you (because of the way the AI reacts to fleets on its own planets, see below).

Pretending to threaten other planets won't help against their home planets, but it can help against other planets you want to take, to a small extent.  The reason is that the AI will divert reinforcements to planets that have big fleets of human ships on them -- not nearby, since it doesn't generally know that they are nearby, but they can mobilize pretty quick when you are attacking, as you may have noticed.  But, the home planets, when threatened, still take priority over even big fleets elsewhere, so you can't divert their attention in that fashion.

Good questions, let me know if you have any others!

[laxrulz777]

Pretending to threaten other planets won't help against their home planets, but it can help against other planets you want to take, to a small extent.  The reason is that the AI will divert reinforcements to planets that have big fleets of human ships on them -- not nearby, since it doesn't generally know that they are nearby, but they can mobilize pretty quick when you are attacking, as you may have noticed.  But, the home planets, when threatened, still take priority over even big fleets elsewhere, so you can't divert their attention in that fashion.

Good questions, let me know if you have any others!

Is that potentially exploitable? Can I try threaten the homeworld and then count on all of the various juicy targets all over the rest of the board getting no reinforcements for the rest of the game (or at least until the homeworld hits its cap)?

[x4000]

Pretending to threaten other planets won't help against their home planets, but it can help against other planets you want to take, to a small extent.  The reason is that the AI will divert reinforcements to planets that have big fleets of human ships on them -- not nearby, since it doesn't generally know that they are nearby, but they can mobilize pretty quick when you are attacking, as you may have noticed.  But, the home planets, when threatened, still take priority over even big fleets elsewhere, so you can't divert their attention in that fashion.

Good questions, let me know if you have any others!

Is that potentially exploitable? Can I try threaten the homeworld and then count on all of the various juicy targets all over the rest of the board getting no reinforcements for the rest of the game (or at least until the homeworld hits its cap)?

To a mild degree, you could exert some influence.  Given the reinforcement rules above (on how many planets get reinforced at once, etc), by the time you are able to threaten the AI home planet on a largish map, the AI is probably going to have at least 11 or 12 planets it can reinforce on at once.  So in that scenario, when you threaten its home planet, it will burn 2 or 3 of those into reinforcing its home planet, but still have a huge number of other planets that it can reinforce ships to.  And then when you finally do get around to going for the AI home planet, it will be much tougher to crack.

I don't really see that as exploitable simply because the penalties are worse then what you get for doing it, and it's not like the AI stops all reinforcements elsewhere while protecting its home.  The "exploit" that is present, and that is a core part of the strategy, is scouting ahead and then keeping the Alert level off on planets that have valuable prizes.  Then do a fast raid across the planets you did alert, and take the AI by surprise, and much more easily.  That's a core part of advanced play, and basically boils down to not telegraphing your moves, or telegraphing misleading moves to the AI.  The challenge with this is, often the maps themselves create situations where that's hard to pull off, and so you wind up having to choose the lesser of the various evils (what to alert when, versus what you get in return).

[laxrulz777]

ahh... that was the misunderstanding as I didn't realize reinforcements were capped (in addition to the overall ship cap)... I was thinking you could trick the AI into spending ALL of it's reinforcements on the homeworld and since I generally play largish maps (I like for my eyes to be bleeding when I go to bed at night) I could see a situation in which I prioritize a deep raid into a homeworld adjacent system early in the game SOLELY for the purpose of sucking up reinforcements and then doing deep raids for the other assets so that I can keep the AI progress down, eventually resulting in me having a huge fleet of mark III and IV ships while the AI progress never really let him get that high

glad to see it's not that easy

[x4000]

ahh... that was the misunderstanding as I didn't realize reinforcements were capped (in addition to the overall ship cap)... I was thinking you could trick the AI into spending ALL of it's reinforcements on the homeworld and since I generally play largish maps (I like for my eyes to be bleeding when I go to bed at night) I could see a situation in which I prioritize a deep raid into a homeworld adjacent system early in the game SOLELY for the purpose of sucking up reinforcements and then doing deep raids for the other assets so that I can keep the AI progress down, eventually resulting in me having a huge fleet of mark III and IV ships while the AI progress never really let him get that high

glad to see it's not that easy

That's another important point, actually -- the AI is asymmetrical from you in another important way, namely that it does not have per-ship-type ship caps.  Its ship caps are based on the worlds it controls, and its number of guard/command posts/stations at each, and stuff like that.  But it doesn't have any global ship caps of any kind, unlike you.  Of course, you have a degree of freedom in massing and splitting your forces that the AI can never hope to have, and additionally most of the AI's ships are relegated to guard duty in a way that they can be avoided in many circumstances, unlike yours.  So it all balances out, but it's definitely very asymmetrical.

But yeah, your analysis of why that wouldn't work overwell (though deep raiding is still often a wonderful idea) is spot on.