First off, merry christmas / whichever holiday applicable everyone!
I've been looking at AI War quite a bit, and had various thoughts about it crop up.
It's a bit jumbled, but I'll try to sort it a little bit. Bear with me. The following came from playing an AI level 7 game. AI autoprogress interval was set pretty low at 1 every 30 minutes(I play more "alongside other stuff" due to the easily switchable nature of the game).
I. UI Enhancement ideas:Macros / layoutsWhat I mean is that obviously almost every player ends up chucking tons of turrets around wormholes. Why not allow the player to save 3-5 "setups" of "turret blobs", which he can save / load as he wants.
Example: a 4 concentric ring circle of laser, basic and MLR turrets and at the core tractor beams, 5 of each. I place them, mark them, click on "Save as Turret Layour Nr 1", then get a button for that, then click on that, then click the second wormhole in the system, and voila, the same configuration once more, "stamped" on the wormhole.
Repeat as wanted and vary as wanted with the other remaining layouts.
A sub-version of this would be base layouts (Example: Base is placed manually, then Power Plant I+II+Space Dock+2 Engineers Mark II placed via Preset Layout, also again a Turret Layout).
If you want to add an interesting sub-feature, make the layouts rotateable by 90 degree increments before confirming placement.
Same idea for ships would be formations, i.e. after one arranges ones ship blobs in a way, have the same layout save option and 90 degree rotation/orientation option.
Not that I use ships anymore, and that leads to the second bit...
II. StrategyFirst and foremost,
the most important mantra you must realize and understand:
There is no resource other than one resource, and that resource is energy.That's right. The other two, metal and crystals, may SEEM important, but they are not.
They are in essence just a "delay" function for how long you must wait if you really screw up to build again, but
only energy is THE capping function for your ships.
Again:
ENERGY will decide how many ships/turrets you can field and steal, so it means EVERYTHING.
This will also make the decision to place MK III power plants that much easier. If all planets you own already have I and II, then yes, place IIIs until you can build all you want. No more thought wasted. I have found I still make 80-160 resources per second even with IIIs and barely any home planets.
Infrastructure: Engineers Mk II are a must. They can instantly go anywhere. Not just on one planet, but ACROSS SYSTEMS. What's more, they accelerate ship production insanely well while scaling modestly in cost. I don't feel that hot about the MK III yet.
This is one of the first upgrades I get.
They also replace repair ships, help in fortifying new planets, etc. They are insanely useful, even with the 3 second no-touch-no-repair rule.
This leads rather neatly into the actual
Attack strategies: As people have already found and pointed out, Starships are god. The first unlocks before ANYTHING else should be Engineer II and the Raid Starship.
ASAP after that, Leech Starship and eventually the Flag/Zenith.
Here is why:
Raid Starships, even completely on their own, can take down MK IV planets. Sure, they will suffer a bit, will need a bit of micro and should retreat a few times after taking out a guard station to repair in the jump-in-system(keep engineers ready there, I set all to RMB+V Free Roaming Defender all the time), but they WILL take out the complete system without a hitch, no other ship needed.
And if you do lose one, they are quite cheap and fast to build compared to what they can do.
You can madly accelerate build time with 6-10 engineers. I've seen no build time above 10 minutes on any starship this way and some built in less than 5.
RaidingIf you rather tech up first, do "research raiding":
Take all built raid starships, jump into a system, clear out the warp point(10-20 seconds..), jump in the research ship(s). Be aware that on higher level planets the warpfield reinforcements might be strong enough to insta-kill the research ship, so either seperate a guard and escort and move away a bit or just be aware of it and build some more research ships until you get all your knowledge.
You can bring along engineers as well if you like, but usually the snipers make it harder to repair much, so I just jump back out/in for a few seconds to repair.
Once you get Leech Starships, you will do the same for both knowledge raiding and system crushing, but you will bring along more engineers as you can now do a real beachhead approach of jumping in, converting all units and turrets via LS and then putting 2 engineers and 1 LS to a warppoint, while the remaining LS and Raiders clear out the place. This will not just keep the warppoints clear, but can also allow you to "chain through" 1-2 systems without a problem just using some engineers and LS, while your motherships / scouts shuttle through unmolested. I have permaharassed an unowned system for ages with 2 LS and 6 engineers, just to see how well it'd keep up. Think it was a MK III; it worked basically forever as long as you replaced engineers occassionally.
As for all the unecessary normal ships, I just use those to bolster normal defenses, as inevitably when taking out planets some leftover units escape into the wormhole from which I attack.
Bolstering the fleetNow LS and Raid Starships are great for turrets and stations, but they do have low hitpoints(1.3M) and can be rushed if not managed well. That's where the first tier ship oriented starships come in. At 3 and 7 million hitpoints, the Flagships and Zenith are quite useful, although the Zenith is definitely nicer, both for the 7M HP as well as for it's increased ship support range. If you ever want a bit of fire support, you can just let some MK I+II missile cruisers tag along, who then get their attack boosted to 3-5 times their original, just due to starship proximity.
They still don't last very long, but they do sensible damage while they do at least.
I've also grown to just stealing higher level ships via the leech starships while not even having the tech. Quite nice to get free MK III engineers and MK III+IV ships that way :p
Just shuttle them out of the system as soon as they convert.
Neutering, it hurtsHum. Yea. Well, basically I just wanted to say that you can basically keep AI progress rather tiny(I only kill guard + train stations if I don't intend to take the world) while teching up rather well(if only supply went 2 hops instead of 1 I'd have to take even less crappy places for knowledge) and playing basically solely a "hero driven"(because they are like buffed hero units in other RPG-RTS) game style of starship based rule of the galaxy.
And once AI progress gets worse and you need a bit more buffers, you already have so much knowledge that you can just throw more and more "normal" ships into your important planets and turret-stock them like crazy.
Pace yourself!Gameplay IS rather slow for me though, but it also makes it more individual(several review complaints have been that there isn't really that much "character" or flaire here).
Heck, if you allowed ships to gain combat experience and 1-2 upgrades(more hitpoints on the raid or leech = unbeatable, more anti-turret weapons on the Flag/Zenith or whatever) or features(how about an AI progress free starship missile that cost 50k resources each, had a reload time of 10 minutes, but took out 4 turrets or a guard station via EMP blast, rendering them inactive and had excellent hitpoints?) then you'd really have a "hero" system
Or maybe a "elite captain" research item that enabled small 5-20% buffs for starships etc.
But yea, that all just leads into making something near overpowered even stronger(which is why I bring it up :p ).
Right, well, this went from structured to big textblob rather swiftly :p
Nonetheless this is just what I've found as a rather from-the-get-go effective workaround to being "afraid" of MK IV worlds and all those other big boys(I took the MK IV next to my homeworld as 3rd world to take thanks to raid starships) and just wanted to pass this along since I've seen many others fall prey to the propaganda of the tutorial.
I, too, have started out making tons of tiny ships just to have them crushed after 1-2 planets and rebuild them all. Now I just take my handful of starships, annihilate everything whereever I want and at most replace ONE.
The fact that the starships stay alive means you have vastly more "constant firepower" than with a many tiny sub-components "army"/blob of ships, even if you rotate them out for repairs.
And no, not even rather pesky masses of arachnids can stop them. I think raiders were more of a threat en masse even if I didn't confuse their bulletsprites.
Thanks to the 7 million hitpoints of the 2 Zeniths and overall decent anti-arachnid firepower of starships, there is precious little reason to worry(10 starships with 9-14 shots of 10kish attack each tend to take a bit of opposition to be intimidated).
Right. So far :p
Feel free to reply, criticize etc.
