Managing carrier spam

[Regularity]

I've managed to setup a chokepoint system that funnels all traditional attacks through a single system, which has all the bells and whistles you could want: black hole generator, radar jammers, armor boosters and inhibitors, turrets, fortresses, attritioners, the works. Even went with a Logistics 3 command and place it on the far edge of the system to maximize the amount of time they have to suffer being fired on before reaching my command center, and stationed every ship I have there. But no matter what I try, carriers are still able to push through my blockade and knock out the command center. They aren't wiping out my defenses or fleets fast enough to build replacements, but just take far too long to kill to stop them from rushing my command center.

Besides standard fare of managing AIP, hacking, and threat level in general, are there any specific tricks or tips to managing carriers in huge numbers (as in, carrying tens of thousands of ships)? The standard strategy of concentrating firepower just isn't working out, so I may need some advice on countering carrier waves specifically.

I was thinking of going with a game start using the Zenith Mirror to try and reflect the massive firepower those carriers put out, any thoughts? Or maybe some tricks to get them to unload their ships so I can fight those instead of the carrier itself? Please give me your tried-and-true strategies, I feel like I'm grasping for straws at this point.

[Spikey00]

It depends on what phase of the game you're in, but from my current playthrough this is probably the most effective setup lategame:
* MK3 gravity turrets so you can afford to use a MK3 military station
* All forcefields you can muster to attract fire, and if necessary, micro them on and off to push all enemy ships back to the wormhole
* Any and everything else you can gather to distract carrier fire

The goal is just to keep at the wormhole for long as possible, but eventually they will get through if there's too many of them and you cannot replenish your distraction.  Spire fleet helps a lot (and the great majority of firepower), and pausing to do micro and reconstruction is necessary.  Honestly it does seem they are by far more threatening than any other unit because they have such gargantuan amounts of HP-per-unit-inside.  Also remember to focus munition boosting guardians because they affect carriers, and flag starships if their numbers are low.

A setup like this has been working for me ever since I was beginning to get hit by ten+ carriers in the midgame; with a large spire fleet, it can continue to hold against ~80 carriers (and massive golem/botnet/spirecraft/spire waves, sometimes simultaneously), but mostly because of the friendly neinzuls spawning thousands of absorbing ships.

https://i.imgur.com/pR0yW9W.jpg

[Kahuna]

Upload the save file.

[Regularity]

Is there a way to determine carrier usage in the game settings? Like to tell the game, "My PC has plenty of CPU, so you can increase the maximum number of ships in combat before resorting to carriers?" Or is it a hardwired thing?

[TechSY730]

It's a hardwired thing. The issue is not CPU, it's memory. The engine (Unity, or rather, the engine that Unity runs on, Mono) that AI war runs on tends to ungracefully crash if there is too much memory use. The limit (roughly 900MB of heap space) seemingly has no bearing on how much RAM your computer has. It is about 900MB even if your computer has several GB of free ram or even if you are using the 64-bit build. It's really dumb, and there isn't much the devs can do short of porting to a new platform or waiting for Unity to ship with a version of Mono that fixes the bug.

That said, with the memory improvements elsewhere, combined with the new Unity version since the last time the carrier "optimizations" were last adjusted, it may be that the AI doesn't need to be as aggressive with carriers anymore; maybe it can keep more ships around before having to resort to carriers now.

In any case, although there is no direct setting for it, you can indirectly control it using the ship-caps option (don't remember the actual text) on the game setup screen. The normal caps setting can still be a bit much for the more "epic" types of game setups. If that isn't enough, you can set handicaps to negative values (it is generally considered roughly "fair" if both you and the AI have the same handicaps, if you are worried about not winning fairly), to further reduce how quickly the AI (and you, if you set it for yourself) can build up ships.

[tadrinth]

What's generating those carriers? CPAs?  Waves?  If it's waves, make sure to use area mines; carriers will trigger every minefield they touch to fully explode. 

Make sure your heavy hitters are attack boosted to their cap.  Military Command Stations are great for this, but Flagships and Munitions Boosters will also work.  Military command stations also have translocating shots that deal engine damage, which help push away ships deployed from the carriers. 

Make sure you have Heavy Beam Cannon turrets.  They're very effective.  Turrets with bonuses vs Ultra-Heavy (IIRC, needler + laser) will also help, once the carriers get into range.  Make sure your forcefields cover the forward turrets (grav, tractor, lightning, flak) and the command station, but not the other turrets or fortresses. 

Carriers will bum-rush fortresses and/or command stations; make sure all of those structures are on a straight line that passes through the wormhole the carriers arrive through.  That will perfectly constrain their path, so you can heavily mine the approach and/or try to get them stuck on pairs of forcefields. 

When in doubt, there's always warheads.  Lots and lots of warheads.  That's more for CPAs than waves, though, if you have to warhead every wave you'll be hosed (unless it's a quadratic AI type). 

Playing on Low or Ultra Low ship caps will reduce the degree to which carriers are used, I think.  Fewer ships flying around, but the same thresholds for packing things into carriers, as I understand it.

I wrote up a summary of my defenses in my game vs Diff10 AIs here, with screenshots: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,15770.msg175890.html#msg175890

I don't think I had area mines or Grav IIIs at that point in the campaign, but both were extremely effective when I added them.  Area Mines wound up having one of the highest damage totals of any unit type at the end of the game, even though I unlocked them fairly late. 

I think those defenses could soak waves of 10k ships if it was a high-cap ship type, but 20k bombers would probably have been lethal.