settings for high AIP/time game?

[Martyn van Buren]

I was thinking it might be fun to try a game with seriously high AIP/time --- I'm hoping it will force me to worry more about my economy and make refleets more costly. Of course I still want to have a hope of winning, so I was thinking of dropping difficulty down from my usual 7.6 or 8 to 6/6 or 7/7 and doing 15-20 AIP/hour. I'm imagining I'll want to take a Neinzul bonus ship and lean a lot more on fighters than usual --- or possibly unlock a lot of starships and make damn sure not to use them. I do plan to abuse the pause button pretty heavily, since I'm a slow thinker. Anyway, wondering if people who have experience with this kind of game might want to weigh in on what good settings might be?

[Diazo]

15-20 AIP/hour?

Ouch.

The most I generally play with is 2 AIP/hour.

With CSGs on that would become a high AIP game from the auto progress alone.

Maybe in conjunction with giving yourself a 200% bonus? (In lobby to your income)

I would be a very different game though.

As for your actual question, play fast and loose. You are racing the clock more then you are fighting the AI in that setup.

D.

[Hearteater]

I always play with 1 AIP/30 minutes and that's just enough to keep me moving.  15-20/hour is going to be rough.  If you really want a chance, aside from just blitzing 10-planet map, I recommend Spire Civilian Leaders and assassinate all their Command Stations ASAP.  Should be an interesting race.

[Mánagarmr]

15-20 an hour is definitely going to put the pressure on you, but I'd not want to go below diff 7, since that puts some serious restraints on the AI. I'd rather go with Diazo's suggestion and give yourself a handicap to compensate.

[Martyn van Buren]

Yeah I'm looking to strike a balance where the game won't be too difficult as long as I move really fast.  I'll probably start tonight or tomorrow.  Anyway I don't expect to win but I am def expecting "fun."

[chemical_art]

hit me up on steam if you want to try it with the fun of co op.

Lately I've been playing to many 9+ games where everything is slow.

Now I'm itching for the blitzkrieg games I always played a year ago.

[Martyn van Buren]

I'm not fantastically reliable about having time, but I may have a good chunk of it free in the evenings this week.  Will see if I can find you if so.

[LordSloth]

I almost always play with spire civilian leaders on. Until recently I was not aware that merely popping an AI Command would stop progress. I was under the assumption that I had to colonize that planet and keep it alive, or assassinate it outright. I usually captured one or two, and had the rest die in Cross Planet Attacks

Thus, 10 AIP/hour sounds ... fairly reasonable on 7/7, or at least manageable. 100 or 150 AIP isn't going to end a game outright, depending on your AI partners. Double that sounds a bit crazy.

Given how you want to think about your economy and avoid refleeting as much, I think giving you a huge resource bonus defeats the whole purpose.

Therefore I have a few brainstorms for you, but not coming from the perspective of high auto AIP games, so much as the resource management and refleeting perspective.

Go with a low cap game. Individual units are more expensive, and so having a dozen engineers suddenly assisting the wrong build queue can wreck your economy.

(If not playing with champions) Enable "Engineers do not assist queues." Then manually assign a set of engineers to each stardock/starship factory. Barring the occasional rebuilding fortress or totally murdered turret ball, your economy becomes a lot more predictable, even with fallen spire campaign. As well reinforcements will be produced at a less than fantastic rate, so you'll be a pulling back sooner rather than loosing the entire group and waiting and waiting and waiting for it to rebuild. If you ARE playing with champions, this will prevent engineers from automatically rebuilding the modules.

Set game speed to Epic (do not combine with 20+ AIP/hour). The simple fact that things will take longer should cause you to be less reckless... or become incredibly frustrated as you rebuild your entire fleet from scratch.

Set game speed to Fast, and combine with 20+ AIP/hour. You'll probably suffer more losses and rebuilds than in an epic game, but you should have the opportunity to keep up with the ticking time bomb.

Just some random thoughts. After I finish with my gravity drill/hybrid hive game I'll probably try some of these suggestions on as close to a "Vanilla", no-expansion game of AI War. Right now, I haven't played a fast or epic game in a long while, so I could be off base

[Mánagarmr]

That's some good thoughts there. I never considered the difference in combat speeds to have a factor, but naturally they do.