Problems with AI Raid starships

[Suzera]

What difficulty are you on? I'm not sure I've ever been attacked by 5 raid starships at the same time.

You don't want your units under normal force fields because they'll do 1/4 their normal damage.

[hullu]

What difficulty are you on? I'm not sure I've ever been attacked by 5 raid starships at the same time.

This was fallen spire campaign with diff 7 and 8 AIs. I regularly got over 100 capital ship attacks at once in the very end. These attacks included those over 100 spire ships and pretty much an equal amount of star ships, including some thousands of mark iv and v escorts. AI progress was somewhere around 800.

You don't want your units under normal force fields because they'll do 1/4 their normal damage.

Not many of them, spire maws and blade spawners come to mind as some I wouldn't want in frd.

[hullu]

Just loaded a midgame save to check if I was exaggerating above.

The screenshot contains a 23 capital ship exo strike force - tiny compared to the >100 towards the end of the game, still 9 raid starships of which 7 mark III.

Nasty. Oh don't worry about my ship placement or tactics here, just loaded the game to get 'proof' of the perhaps bugging golem wave coming a few mins after this...

[Suzera]

I don't know what to tell you about that other than manage your AIP better and don't get it so high. Is one of the AIs a Starship Commander?

[hullu]

I don't know what to tell you about that other than manage your AIP better and don't get it so high. Is one of the AIs a Starship Commander?

Nope, Spire hammer and Neinzul viral enthusiast were the AIs. I usually play low-AIP games but for LotS campaign I intentionally covered a lot of area and tried that approach for a change. And well, you need a lot of systems to get the LotS victory. 14 is the absolute minimum I think. I had 35 or so;)

I would actually think it'd be a huge boon to this game if home command station would be a LOT more durable against raid starships (well, actually it could be more durable against anything, it's so brittle it's weird really). It's not that they're unstoppable or challenging, it's just simply not fun having to micro a lot because of one ship type, all the golems and spirecraft compared were absolutely trivial to destroy compared to a few raid starships.

[BobTheJanitor]

The problem as I see it is that there's simply nothing fun about losing to a raid starship. I mean there's rarely anything fun about losing. But if the AI cleverly coordinated a wave along with a planet to planet attack from multiple directions and just overwhelmed you, it feels fair and it feels like you weren't cheated. But a cheap little raid starship or two that just zips past all your defenses and ignores your forcefields so that it can piddle your home command station to death isn't a clever victory, it's just lame. And of course you're going to reload your last save and micro the starship to death, because no one is going to admit defeat in that situation. So the question becomes, why should it be allowed to do it in the first place?

[hullu]

You aired my thoughts very well Sir

[Nalgas]

But a cheap little raid starship or two that just zips past all your defenses and ignores your forcefields so that it can piddle your home command station to death isn't a clever victory, it's just lame.

To be fair, it's no lamer than the ridiculous number of times I've abused the AI with my raid starship army of doom (which was even easier and cheesier pre-4.0; I could wipe every data center off the map without losing a single one in a 7/7 game, and without even having a friendly system within 10 jumps of many of them).

And of course you're going to reload your last save and micro the starship to death, because no one is going to admit defeat in that situation.

Maybe I'm just a weirdo, but when I die, I die, even to something stupid like that, and then I start over.  Which is kind of weird, now that I think about it, because I generally hate "hardcore" mode in almost every other game I've ever played and will happily reload saves over and over until I get it right.  Now I really wonder why I'm apparently ok with repeatedly losing in AI War.  Heh.

[TechSY730]

But a cheap little raid starship or two that just zips past all your defenses and ignores your forcefields so that it can piddle your home command station to death isn't a clever victory, it's just lame.

To be fair, it's no lamer than the ridiculous number of times I've abused the AI with my raid starship army of doom (which was even easier and cheesier pre-4.0; I could wipe every data center off the map without losing a single one in a 7/7 game, and without even having a friendly system within 10 jumps of many of them)...

Exactly. When the AI does something cheap, we are in no position to complain if we can use the exact same cheapness on them. In this case, largish numbers of well managed Raid Starships can be game breakers, in both the AI and the Human's hands. Simply not allowing the AI to not use raid starships but allowing us to still use them because they are really good is the "wussy's" way out. Either let both keep them (and maybe tweak the balance a bit, though it is pretty close to balanced as it is), or remove them from both (something I actually wouldn't mind, even though it would be hard to find something to take its old job, even if it would be less effective)

EDIT: Derp, didn't prune the quote correctly. Fixed.

[chemical_art]

I agree with others that if the player has access to raid starships, so should the AI. Perhaps a tab enabling them to be disabled (similar to how other ship types can be enabled/disabled in game settings) could work? That way if they really annoy you there is the option to disable them? I don't want to enter the slippery slope of "I dislike X ship, so I want to disable it" but for this case it could work.

[BobTheJanitor]

There's some difference. I don't know what it is, but I do know that one of my raid ships will die quickly by itself on an AI world but one of theirs can happily waltz through my defenses right up to my home command station and eat it. Maybe it's some difference in armor piercing or... I don't know what. So the problem may not be in the ships themselves, but instead in the speed that one team can kill it over the other.

Also I want to be able to build my own core shield generator network. I want to AI Raid Starship attack force to get to my home command station and see 'External Invincibility Provided 8x' and stop and say, "WHAT?"

[TechSY730]

Maybe we can generalize that a bit. A new ship filter (like cloaked ships, heavy defenses, mines, etc) in the lobby, force field piercers. If it is disabled, all ships that can shoot through force fields are disabled. (Maybe excepting astro-trains). Since this property is something MANY players (myself NOT included) complain about ruining balance, those players can be "dealt with" by giving them this option. Like the other filters, this will affect the AIs and the humans.

EDIT: As an alternative, maybe instead of removing those ships, only that property is removed. Those ships remain, but are now a whole lot less useful because they have to actually fight through the force fields like everything else.

[chemical_art]

There's some difference. I don't know what it is, but I do know that one of my raid ships will die quickly by itself on an AI world but one of theirs can happily waltz through my defenses right up to my home command station and eat it. Maybe it's some difference in armor piercing or... I don't know what. So the problem may not be in the ships themselves, but instead in the speed that one team can kill it over the other.

Are you sending those raiders of yours onto built up AI worlds or lightly guarded worlds? If the planet has been on alert for a while and is now built up, your raiders will simply be overwhelmed. It would be like the AI sending a few raiders to attack your own heavily defended worlds alone and expecting to survive. In fact, a military post with its own teleporting shots can counter lone raiders by simply punting them.

To compare the two accurately, you must make them similar: Either use your own raiders on ai planets who are not on alert (Thus truly "raiding") or send your own massive fleet in at the same time with your own raiders.

[BobTheJanitor]

I'm comparing this to an AI raid ship traipsing in to my home world past about 5 of each turret type and any units that might be spawning there from the space dock and making ribbons out of my command station. Admittedly I can't say exactly what units were shooting at it, or how long it was taking to bring its HP total down. Since I was sitting there helpless watching it zap the command station it seemed like it took either a few seconds, or a few minutes. Like watching a car crash when everything slows down. (No I don't get too involved in my games, what ever gave you that idea?) So I can't give an accurate time estimate. But it seemed like it was taking waaaaaaaaaaay longer to die than my ships would, and that would be with a fleet backing it up. So it's anecdotal evidence, but I haven't had any more raiders come running past lately (thankfully) so I don't have a larger pool of evidence to draw from.

[Nalgas]

There's some difference. I don't know what it is, but I do know that one of my raid ships will die quickly by itself on an AI world but one of theirs can happily waltz through my defenses right up to my home command station and eat it. Maybe it's some difference in armor piercing or... I don't know what. So the problem may not be in the ships themselves, but instead in the speed that one team can kill it over the other.

It depends what you're sending them up against.  If the AI doesn't have anything that's strong against them, raid starships are brutally effective, because their high speed and decent damage lets them get in, pop a weak target (data center, warp gate, etc.), and get back out before getting hurt much.  They can be really useful for that reason, even against things that aren't shielded.  On the other hand, if the system is full of stuff like artillery guardians, your raid ships will get wrecked in no time flat.  It's as hopeless as trying to kill a wave of bombers with a fortress.

In older versions, they were much more universally useful in my experience, but these days there's a lot more variety in enemy systems that requires different approaches to them, and some things are much more situational now than they used to be (like raid starships).  It takes more work and more planning ahead, and it is more fun this way, but I do kind of miss my unstoppable raid fleet of doom sometimes...

Edit: Knew I was forgetting something.  Raid starships are one of the units that benefit most from micromanagement, at least out of the ones I use regularly.  They get massively more effective if you guide them by hand whenever they're anywhere threatening to them, because they're ridiculously maneuverable for something that powerful but aren't smart enough to take advantage of that on their own.