Author Topic: Strategic Advice (or Help My Last Stand)  (Read 1542 times)

Offline Jaunt

  • Newbie Mark II
  • *
  • Posts: 17
Strategic Advice (or Help My Last Stand)
« on: December 29, 2011, 06:04:44 pm »
So my partner and I have decided to give AI War another shot. Not the game so much as winning. If we don't succeed this time, it'll be a year before I come back, having been waylaid by Skyrim, Minecraft, Terraria, and the 9000 steam games I just kind of bought. By way of background, we're not bad. We can usually hold our own against a pair of 7's, and we actually destroyed a homeworld once, and were a couple hops away from winning when hardware trouble caused us to shelve the game and subsequently misplace our saves. But that was a fairly vanilla game.

Now we (read: I) have become fixated on beating a particular seed, with particular settings. And those settings are basically 80 systems, "everything on". Again, we're not rookies, we've played probably 10 games or so together, and we usually stall or run out of RL time to play, rather than lose, without very much in the way of save scumming. The beauty of the seed is that it's got a single system called Reach (yes, custom name file) with 8 or 9 connections, and it serves as a natural bottleneck that divides the galaxy up into roughly three sectors, kind of like a mini-X. But unlike X, the outside of two of the sectors connects in a few places, so while it's not as eminently defensible as the middle of the X, it doesn't cause the same level of stalemate in the middle.

But back to the settings. We know that hybrids are a huge pain, we know that we're overwhelming ourselves with the sheer amount of stuff we have. We're okay with that. We just would like to find a way to succeed in spite of it. So I'm going to rattle off basically how our game went:

We started off in the back of the isolated quadrant. I took Reach, and plopped every turret I owned on it, and made sure it was the only system we'd have to defend. She took responsibility for clearing the rest of the quadrant and we split the systems equitably. We did some scouting, and found several golems, several ARSs, one factory and one fab. We also found some data centers and raided them with minimal losses despite having to fly 4 or more hops into hostile space. Here progress started to slow and then grind to an aimless stop. Our difficulties were basically explaiend as follows.

1) Exowaves. I don't think we were getting the maximum use out of our golems and especially spirecraft. I had some attritioners chilling out in Reach, which helped a bunch against the mostly homogenous attack waves. Then some implosion artillary for a rainy day. We had a botnet golem and a black widow. The botnet got a nice little swarm of ships from the attack waves, but wasn't enough to really swing the game for us. On the flip side, Hunter Killers absolutely wrecked us, and with 2 players, they were starting as early as wave 2 (or as late as wave 4 or 5; exos were highly luck dependent). Their movement can't be controlled, their damage is sickening at that stage in the game, and as soon as we ran out of fleet ships to feed it, our stack of pyramids would just explode. Implosion ships helped, and we even wasted some penetrator shots on it, but it still did terrible, terrible damage and was basically uncontrollable.
Possible solutions: I'm drawing blanks. An artillarly golem would be nice. Prioritizing ships over turrets would help too, because the thing has command grade armor, rendering turrets all but useless. Not to mention it's only in range of whatever it wants to be in range of. I really don't think we're making optimal use of spirecraft, but I don't know how to use low-end asteroids better.

2) Hybrids. They harass the bejesus out of us. Reach normally just reaches out and murders them with sheer bulk of turret fire, but they tend to get really obnoxious anywhere else they show up.
Possible solutions: get better about posting grav turrets and anti-hybrid forces wherever they tend to show up. On the offense, neutering a planet would let me dump a ton of ships into hostile territory, kill the hybrids, and come back with few consequences besides those the hybrids themselves inflict upon me.

3) Hateful topography. The factory IV was in the middle of a bunch of otherwise worthless systems, with about 5 ways in, including several that were "forward", roughly speaking. Defending it would've been nightmarish. I see no real answer to this one. We had enough trouble fighting back exos with everything concentrated in one place. Splitting our forces in two would've made the situation hopeless. And I don't know of any way to reposition our fleets from one half of the galaxy to the other in the time it takes an exo to traverse 2 or 3 systems in the best case.
Possible solutions: push forward and find a better located factory, I guess. I dunno.

4) Everything else. Not that all the other elements were hard to deal with or posed significant challenges, but each one incrementally eats up finite resources.
Solution: Deal with 1-3 better, thus freeing up resources to kill the mining golems while liberating the colonies, fight off the random annoying marauders,

Possible solutions: Heavy gate raiding, combined with fortifying it strongly against exos/CPAs. I think I'd still probably end up losing the factory.

Ultimately, we spend so much time trying to secure ourselves against the exos and the hybrids and everything else coming our way that the offense stalls, the exos get worse and worse, we start save scumming, get depressed and play something else. Perhaps this reflects an unacceptably slow rate of expansion prior to the game getting dicey. Then again, more often than not, we're dealing with full ship caps prior to the exo. Perhaps that means we're not researching enough ships.

For what it's worth, one of our ARSs was spire mini rams. Two full caps predictably made roughly no dents in the HKs.

Anyway. I'm interested in hearing any and all advice. My tactics revolve pretty heavily around fleet ships, transports, gravity turrets, and forcefields. My partner is a bit more balanced. Thanks in advance all.

Offline Philo

  • Full Member Mark II
  • ***
  • Posts: 176
Re: Strategic Advice (or Help My Last Stand)
« Reply #1 on: December 31, 2011, 04:10:46 am »
A picture of the Galaxy Map with some explanation where stuff is would be nice since other than that there's not much to go on. On the game press F12 I think, then get the screenshot from the AI Wars > Screenshots folder and upload it on imageshack or something.

Offline tigersfan

  • Arcen Games Contractor
  • Arcen Staff
  • Master Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,599
Re: Strategic Advice (or Help My Last Stand)
« Reply #2 on: January 02, 2012, 12:29:56 pm »
Wow... I really wish I had some advice for you, but, to be perfectly honest, I've never tried anything close to that hard. Hopefully someone around here has an idea.

Also, Philo is right, if you could post at least maybe a screen shot of your map, that might help others visualize what you've got going on.

Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,651
Re: Strategic Advice (or Help My Last Stand)
« Reply #3 on: January 03, 2012, 09:31:34 am »
Well... my main thoughts are that you're in a really tough strategic position in general.  You've got the exo-waves, spirecraft, golems, hybrids, AND a hard map.  Yikes!  A few thoughts:

1. Regarding the exo-waves, you could also try augmenting your stuff with shields and fortresses.  Just having some extra firepower combined with your larger centerpieces (and some other damage sponges, for that matter) can really make an amazing difference.  A golem or spirecraft by itself is pretty great, but combined with a fortress, or mass of turrets, or something else that either helps it deal more damage or which acts as a damage sponge... that can be really powerful.

2. Yeah, the hybrids are really... working as intended. ;)  I honestly don't play with them on because they are too tough for me, but I know a lot of folks on the forums really love them, and hopefully will post some thoughts.  There are some hybrid-specific threads in this subforum, I seem to recall, but I don't recall how up to date they are with the current version of the game.

3. Did you find the other factory IV?  There should be two of them per player, so really there ought to be four of them in that galaxy all told.  Unless the galaxy is too small to fit all of them, which can happen with lower planet counts.  But anyway, maybe there's another factory tucked away somewhere safe for you.

I can also definitely recommend using the player warp gates to move your forces around -- if your fleet ships are dying pretty routinely anyhow, then you don't really need to move them... you just need to rebuild them somewhere else.  But that depends on timing and your economy, of course.

Another thought is that you might just have to do without a factory IV -- you've got all the golems and spirecraft, and that might be enough to hold the line if your forces aren't split across the galaxy.  Some campaigns the mark IV ships are just simply out of practical reach, but with some higher-tier starships and such instead of the fleet ships, you can definitely work around that. 

Additionally, if you really want mark IV ships and have the CoN expansion, you could always unlock the Neinzul Enclave Starships, the highest tier of which allows you to build mark IV ships anywhere in the galaxy.  That is a TON of knowledge, though, so usually it's not attractive -- but given your situation here, it might be easier to get the K than defend that one world, I don't know.

4. Holy heck, you've got a really packed galaxy it sounds like.  If you've turned on all the minor factions, might I suggest befriending the dyson sphere golem if you've not already done so?  Especially if it's close to you, that will eat up some AI ships and provide some good defenses for you.

TLDR: That is definitely one intense scenario you've got going there, and major props for hanging in there with it that far into the game already.  I think it could be a winnable situation, but it's more standard for folks to choose a few minor factions per game rather than ALL of them at once, heh.  To each his or her own, of course.  Anyway, hope the above tips help at least some!
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline Jaunt

  • Newbie Mark II
  • *
  • Posts: 17
Re: Strategic Advice (or Help My Last Stand)
« Reply #4 on: January 04, 2012, 12:20:54 pm »
Philo, I'm at work, otherwise I would. It's crazy trying to find a spare moment at home this time of year.

Chris, thanks much for the post the length of which can only be described as...I dunno, x4000ian.

I'm not sure the map is actually hard. Reach is a perfect chokepoint, and there are ways around it, just none which involve long strings of conquerable worlds that won't create new fronts. That strikes me as more of "not the easiest". But that's semantics.

The more I play, the more I begin to think that Golems and Spirecraft should be regarded as additional difficulty modifiers, not break-evens that can be leveraged into advantage.

I'm using a pile of force fields already, if that's what you mean by shields. There's also a shield booster building. The fortresses will certainly not go amiss, but as (basically) turrets, I believe they have a .1 mod versus command grade (and thus HKs). It's not the trash ships that pose us problems, it tends to be the centerpieces.

Glad to hear hybrids are supposed to be that painful. I checked around, and it seems ion cannons and bombers are the way to do it.

The next factory is somewhere far away, I'm sure. I can only get my scouts so far at the moment. I think, though I'm not sure, that there's another hard to defend factory nearby. Perhaps we'll bite the bullet and just clear out the surrounding area, and maybe move the chokepoint from Reach to that planet's best bottleneck. Having more of each ship will be nice and it's 33% more fodder for the HKs while the implosion artillary , but it's expensive fodder. The more that I write, the more I become convinced that my primary problem (hybrids, mining golems, and eyebots aside) is the Hunter-Killers. There's no real counter to them aside from "every ship of every player combined". Botnets and Black Widows just can't stand up to the kind of hate that exos dish out.

The galaxy isn't packed so much as busy. Or interesting.

Anyway, thanks a lot for your insights. I've loved AI War since the day I bought it, but you've only been my favorite dev team since I started reading the forums, which is intended as a compliment.

Anyone have any insights on the best way to utilize spirecraft? Low grade implosion artillary and attrition emitters don't seem to be cutting it for us.

Offline Wanderer

  • Master Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,579
  • If you're not drunk you're doing it wrong.
Re: Strategic Advice (or Help My Last Stand)
« Reply #5 on: January 05, 2012, 04:08:44 am »
I'm not sure the map is actually hard. Reach is a perfect chokepoint, and there are ways around it, just none which involve long strings of conquerable worlds that won't create new fronts. That strikes me as more of "not the easiest". But that's semantics.
  If you can post your seed, I'm curious to see your map.

Quote
The more I play, the more I begin to think that Golems and Spirecraft should be regarded as additional difficulty modifiers, not break-evens that can be leveraged into advantage.
Turn them on Easy or Medium and they're leverageable boosts.  On Hard, they're exactly that.

Quote
The fortresses will certainly not go amiss, but as (basically) turrets, I believe they have a .1 mod versus command grade (and thus HKs). It's not the trash ships that pose us problems, it tends to be the centerpieces.
  If you've got Zenith Traders on get yourself the armor inhibitor.  It'll help.  Also try a defense in depth plan.  Use the worlds just past Reach as softeners for the rest of the mob (a few fortresses and snipers can do wonders) so your main defense concentrates on the centerpieces.

Quote
The next factory is somewhere far away, I'm sure. I can only get my scouts so far at the moment. I think, though I'm not sure, that there's another hard to defend factory nearby. Perhaps we'll bite the bullet and just clear out the surrounding area, and maybe move the chokepoint from Reach to that planet's best bottleneck. Having more of each ship will be nice and it's 33% more fodder for the HKs while the implosion artillary , but it's expensive fodder.
It's also more dangerous fodder, but that's neither here nor there.  I personally would recommend tagging the Fact IV, even if it's eventually a losing proposition, to get any high range Tech IV ships you can (snipers, blade spawners, etc) and your Tech IV scouts.  That'll let you see the rest of the galaxy and hopefully find the other Fact IV in a more defensible position.

Quote
The more that I write, the more I become convinced that my primary problem (hybrids, mining golems, and eyebots aside) is the Hunter-Killers. There's no real counter to them aside from "every ship of every player combined". Botnets and Black Widows just can't stand up to the kind of hate that exos dish out.
I hate the mining golems.  I also utterly detest that 'I eat everything!' golem.  I personally just leave them off.  They're just not fun to have to deal with, though the mining golems die pretty easily to a set of rams you can build with your leftover asteroids.

Quote
Anyone have any insights on the best way to utilize spirecraft? Low grade implosion artillary and attrition emitters don't seem to be cutting it for us.
Low Grade Implosions are nearly pointless except on defense.  You're better off with the siegecraft until Grade III unless you can get a mob of them.  Use the Attrition Emitters in your softening systems to chew up the little guys.  They're not spectacular and are really more of a defensive unit, but very good at what they do if you apply them well.  x4000's suggestion of the Level IV Neinzul ship is probably your best bet for continuous Level IV units, but as mentioned that's about 20k-25k of research investment.  Nice thing about them is you can use them to build yourself a fleet anywhere.

I personally would probably dump the fleet ships and head up a starship research tree with that kind of lack for Fact IVs.  They're actually pretty powerful and are a nice compliment to the rest of your fleet.  Riot II's can also help keep your implosions alive a bit longer on the attack.
... and then we'll have cake.