10/10 difficulty

[rabican]

oohkay so as plenty of people have demonstrated lately  its just too easy.

From my experience there are 2 main things that make things easy, ease of AIP control and pathetic AI planetary defense.

If i want to play low aip game i can keep aip below 60 when taking out AI homeworlds. This makes for one easy game.

AI has exactly 2 planets that you can't stomp easily. And even those are mostly challenging because of the core raid engines.


Suggestions:

Start the AIP floor at 10.

Force some auto AIP. Homeworld spire civil leader like structure.

Seed some barracks at map generation . Further away from player homeworld for higher chance of one. Also if ai has High cap ships(any high cap fleet ships are near useless for AI) fill the barracks mostly with these. And seed some more barracks.

Could break the mold a bit. Don't play with hybrids on? Tough luck i'm doom ai and i do what i want. Like seed some extra structures from other AI types(neinzul clusters, superfortresses) or plots (hybrid buildings astro trains).

Or if that is too much just seed some  more regular buildings .... like Raid engines, bhgs munitions boosters.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, the AIP math seems to be the main thing, though the point isn't to force people to be at 300 before they can win either.

Anyway, in a normal scenario you have to take 8 planets to break the Core Shield Generator network to be able to attempt to win the game.  That's 160 AIP.

The Coprocessors reduce AIP by 120, but cost 80 to kill (iirc there are always 4; the code isn't super-clear on this and the test I just ran showed me 4).  So net -40.

I just gen'd two quick diff 7 80-planet galaxies and it gave me 8 Data Centers.

Then I gen'd a diff 10 80-planet galaxy and it gave me... what, 10 data centers?  I told it a few versions ago to reduce the number seeded by 1 per player on diff 9+.  Possibly it was listening to me, and it would have seeded 12 without that.  Hmm.  Will need to investigate.  I'm pretty confident the number of DCs seeded at a given difficulty needs to remain constant for difficulty to not get skewed.

Anyway, right now you could get -200 AIP on a diff 10 80 planet game, potentially.

So even without superterminal or spire civilian leaders (good luck getting those to work in your favor) that's -240 AIP, or half again the amount you have to gain to win.  Meaning in theory you could actually win at the AIP floor of a fairly low value.

Hrm.

There's enough (probably more than enough) forcing going on with CSGs, so I'll approach this from another angle.

[Diazo]

We'll see how it goes for me, I'm going to start making 10/10 attempts again.

I play with no options or minor factions on so we'll see what that does to the difficulty.

D.

[keith.lamothe]

I think my Data Center results were being skewed by random AI types (one way doormaster, special forces captain, and various others get extra DCs to counteract their seeding extra AIP-increasing buildings).  With 10/10 Vanillas I saw 6 DCs in the galaxy, which is what I would expect.

[rabican]

Point about aip was that you rarely get past floor before it is homeworld time.  You can easily just cruise around at neglible ai levels for most of the game. IMO solution isn't adding moar dakka per aip for waves. That would just force you onto even tighter AIP control and cutting any strategic leeway when taking planets. And make for unfun game.

Coops give +60 -120, last one just reduces aip doesnt increase it. My latest games have had 6 DC's.  That is equal to 9 planets worth of CMD+ warp gate. Assuming no extra AIP increasing structures(they are pretty rare) and average of 1 SF guard posts per planet you have around 19aip(floor idontknow 40-50ish?).  So around 10-11 planets capturable before going over floor.

Euh, well euh. Forgot what i was about to type.

ANYWAYS, 10 starting floor just so i can't play another game where i can win before single exogalactic strikeforce arrives.

[Hearteater]

Could AIP reductions gets reduced by difficulty?  So at 10 DCs only knock off say 10 AIP (arbitrary value)?  The reason I suggest this over reducing number of DC spawns is knocking them out is part of the challenge, and making half as many just makes it takes half as much work, in a way countering the difficulty itself.

[TechSY730]

I think that AIP floor could stand to be increased (and as that math does not vary based on AI difficulty, this would be for all difficulties). If the AIP floor gets bumped up more per AIP gain, then "riding the floor" saves you much less AIP, thus letting the new AIP calculations actually do something. (Right now, AIP floor ~1/10 the AIP increases, which is WAY too small. Maybe bump this up to like 1/3 or 1/4, or possibly even 1/2)


That, and I do think that adding some new behaviors for the AI would be nifty. Pour through some of the mantis suggestions piled up over the last year or so for some nifty ideas.

EDIT: For the planetary defenses stuff.
1. Kieth has begun to clean up and tweak the reinforcement logic a bit, but he stated there is much more to look over. I suspect once a review and revision of the reinforcement logic is done, the AI planets will be a bit better defended by the mid to late game
2. Guard posts seem too weak.
3. Some clever new behaviours for the AI, like (warning, shameless self promotion incoming) permanent planetary defenders, make AI engineers use FRD, revise retreating logic (see linked issue and related issues), new "types" of schizo waves, and allow the AI to use idle threat ships and/or special forces ships on nearby planets to aid defense
Now, of course, none of these except for the AI engineer FRD and the percentage cutoff adjustment for retreat would be very easy to implement, so they may take a bit (and may have to wait for the expansion work, or possibly post expansion work), but I think this will make fighting the AI more challenging, but also more fun.

[keith.lamothe]

Realistically I need to be putting my "add clever mechanics" time into the expansion for the next month+

But adjusting the AIP Floor and/or AIP Reduction mechanics on higher difficulties seems like a good idea.

[Kahuna]

We'll see how it goes for me, I'm going to start making 10/10 attempts again.

I play with no options or minor factions on so we'll see what that does to the difficulty.

D.

Good luck. I found a very defensive play style to be effective. Remember to use spider sniper turrets and missile turrets Don't be afraid to just chill out to let resources stack and to build caps of all available ships. When defenses are good you have nothing to worry about

[Kahuna]

Maybe you could make the Guard Posts' health and damage scale with the difficulty and/or AIP. The higher the difficulty/AIP the higher the health and damage. Also the amount of Guard Posts could increase with the difficulty level.
Especially the Core Guard Posts need buffs.

Also make the AIs more aggressive on high difficulties. In my "10/10 The Tank/Crafty Spire" I had like 5k threat for hours. Make the AI use the "threat ships" more aggressively. Make them actually attack and maybe join the waves and exos. That would make threat management much more important. If you're not careful you would have to deal with thousands of extra ships. Also make the Guardians more likely to attack. Like if I have 5k threat the AI would also send Guardians not just normal ships. Guardians are nasty! More of those! That would certainly make things more interesting and challenging. If you're going to do this or something like this also consider my suggestion about deep striking.

[Varone]

The Coprocessors reduce AIP by 120, but cost 80 to kill (iirc there are always 4; the code isn't super-clear on this and the test I just ran showed me 4).  So net -40.

The last coporcessor to be destroyed doesn't + 20 then -120 it just takes the 120 AI progress away.

Perhaps a way to make taking out the data centers a little more difficult is to make them into a tough structure to destroy? At least it should take a few attemps from raid starships to destroy one. At the moment it's just so trivial to take one out, unless this is intended.

Or a new mechanic that might be interesting:
Double the AI progress penalty of all penalty actions.
Have the AI progress reduce by 1 every minute until half the penalty is reduced then stop.

Therefore everything is the same AI penalty as before it just spikes for an amount of time and then settles down, it's like the AI getting very angry and then cooling off. Would have the side effect of increasing the floor twice as much as well which is what someone suggested too.

[TechSY730]

Also make the AIs more aggressive on high difficulties. In my "10/10 The Tank/Crafty Spire" I had like 5k threat for hours. Make the AI use the "threat ships" more aggressively. Make them actually attack and maybe join the waves and exos. That would make threat management much more important. If you're not careful you would have to deal with thousands of extra ships.

Sounds like you would be interested in my idea to make the AI less timid about entering planets with threat balls, in addition to my previously posted suggestion about using idle/waiting freed ships on nearby planets to aid defense

If you're going to do this or something like this also consider my suggestion about deep striking.

Oh, yea, I saw that suggestion. I voted it up.

[Martyn van Buren]

That said is it a problem if you can make 10/10 doable with the right options or AI types?  I mean surely until someone beats 10/10 with the Core and a Technologist Raider we've still got a monsterously tough game in there?  I wonder if we might be able to give people a goal past 10/10 by adding a lobby setup script that sets fairly high AIP/time and some of the harder options in a predictable way so that our little core of super-high-level players can focus on one particular setup?

[keith.lamothe]

That said is it a problem if you can make 10/10 doable with the right options or AI types?

Yea, that doesn't bother me.  The bug is that people are beating straight-up honest 10/10 games (and in one case, one with a bunch of nastiness like advanced hybrids and the devourer running around, I mean good grief)

[Wanderer]

My apologies to everyone, particularly Kahuna and Faulty Logic.  Congratulations on your 10/10 wins.  My silence wasn't on purpose, I was just left with mouth agape and not a hell of a lot to say after your magnificent wins... and I got distracted arguing with Dwarven Science for a bit.

So, I suppose I should chime in.  Btw, you two can fight over my 10/10 crown, I left it on the throne over there.  Y'all can have that until I get back into form.   Don't worry, it's a musical chairs kind of seat.

Looking over their descriptions of their wins, a few things stand out to me.

The Botnet's already on the chopping block, otherwise Kahuna had a rather cheeseless win.  Kahuna doesn't tend to get into the nitty gritty of what happened and when, so it can be hard to tell if there are specific items or tactics that were more (or less) effective.  However, that was a pretty significant combo of Minor Factions, particularly allowing for the Super-Hybrid/Dyson plot in any form.

The only other significant tactic that I was able to witness was instead of using Military CCs logistics were used to slow the enemy and a reliance on kiting and long range turrettry.  Kahuna, tell me if that's inaccurate?

For Faulty, you really have to look at the starting options, even though they were semi balanced the scales are exponential as you go up from four.  In particular, Resistance 10, Dyson 10.  Preservation Wardens and Roaming enclaves will force you to keep rear defenders, sure, and the Fallen Spire if I read his AAR correctly was nearly ignored.

Also, again, there was a reliance on Logistics + Kiting with ED.  Also, the HWs spawned heavy on the Eyes.  And regarding nukes and eyes... I'm chagrined to mention I'd never thought to look if they weren't immune.   

Add to this a SuperTerminal ride to the ground (which was very well done and included a wave defense with his fleet in the middle) with dyson and resistance support.  Also include speed boosters (which I never can seem to keep alive) allow for lightning response times for the fleet, allowing for lower AIP than expected from not forcing gate raids.  The final assault of primarily experimental MK V fab ships and starships under cloak worked a lot better than I'd expected, as well.  Also, fine use of missiles during the final moments when AIP no longer was a serious consideration.

Please note, I'm merely trying to put the successful tactics and methods involved into a single coherent though.  I'm not for or against any of them, just making sure I understand them.

So, from a vanilla standpoint, only two significant items stand out.  The first is Riot Starships are able to kite far too easily in a defensive standpoint, particularly when coupled with a Logistics station.  Two minor tweaks would ease this and bring things more in line with expected research.  First, Logistics command stations should have a 10%/25%/50% slowdown affect through their research tree, alongside similar bonuses from Military stations.  Secondly, drop riot Starships down to frigate speed, 44, so they can't directly outrun any triangle fleet ship.

The second 'standout' of this is Data Center luck.  Find them early and you're golden, find them late and you're screwed.  A more explicit seeding pattern would help in balancing.  Say, for the 6 in 10/10, figure the range between the hw(s) and the AI HWs and place two 1/3 out, two 2/3's out, and two near the AI HWs themselves (perhaps on a coreworld).  Leave the halfway mark for the other 2 that usually spawn in anything under 10/10.

I can't say for sure about the rest of it as I'm sure Keith is doing other analysis, but these are the pieces of their strategy that allowed for successful 10/10 wins.