AI Carrier Destroying ????? Please Help

[Shadoz]

Hi guys.

I have a unhappy problem. All my units i select and give them the order to destroy / attack an AI Carrier Transporter don't shoot on them. They fly around the Carrier for a short time ... after this they attack other targets and let the carriers alive ... sometimes they shoot at self ... i want tactically to destroy the Carries on my will ...
I tryed to give my group multiple attack orders by holding "shift" and click 10times or more on the carrier ... sometimes it helps and they attack sometimes ... but thats not what i want ... my units must kill by my orders these carriers ...

I play 5.000 with all addons ...

The problem is if i cannt destroy the carriers fast enought they came an attacking my planets to near to the shilds and if they deploy all units its to hard ... i play on difficiult 9 and the AI gets +300% resource boosts and with 2 extreme raider :-)) ... its very nice but after playing around 10 hours the attacks are so heavy that its a problem for me that i cannt destroy the carriers on my will on my orders ...
For another if the AI waits around wormhole to my boarder they have most time around 40k units and around 25-30k are in these carriers ... i sended spire penetrators through to kill only the carriers for get a good chance for EMP and than attack ... but the spire penetrators dont shoot too ...

No unit shoot on carriers if i give the order ...

can someone help me please How to solve this problem ? i reinstalled the game - started new games but every time the same problem ...


THX for helping

[Invelios]

Carriers can't be destroyed if there are more than a certain number of enemy ships on the planet. The point of carriers is to help save CPU without having to lower the threat of waves. This immunity prevents your ships from auto-killing them real quick and defeating the point of them.

[Shadoz]

puh ... so if it's like you explain ... i wonder to have succsess to killem by giving multiple attack orders ... if i want to killem i have to pause the game take my group and by holding shift give more than 25 attack orders on the same target ... in a couple of seconds some are attacking ... but its a very time waste method and does not make fun :-)

on other way if enemys wait at wormhole ... if i fly through with big army in a couble of time they destroy them automatically and that doesent effect cpu usage in better or badder ways ... if there are 10k enemys and 10 carriers of 1k enemys inside they destroy them too so you have 20k at planet doesent matter CPU anything ...

on the third hand carriers can fly through shields ... its a bad thing without black hole mashiene in extreme front missions ...

i cant imagine that carriers are only cause of CPU usage ... thats not the point ... its more cause of energy usage of the AI itself ...


but that doesent solve the problem to killem ... its possible to killem thats not the fact ... if you fly with army through enemy terretory your ships shoot them time by time itself ...
but if i give direct orders (in normal way without 25x multiple orders) they dont killem ...




another thing i want to ask here is now is there an option that your ships DONT attack the carriers automatically


so this twice components i dont understand ... your ships attack automatically sometimes time by time the carriers ... but by direct orders they dont do anything most time ...

by defending my planets i want all carriers open so that i have max direct effect of my attritioner power :-)
by attacking i want to kill direct to get EMP and stun all OR dont to shoot the carriers automatically ....

please help me there have to be some options to handle my problem ... .. .




thx for any answers

[Nalgas]

if i want to killem i have to pause the game take my group and by holding shift give more than 25 attack orders on the same target

Unless there's a bug, the reason they attack eventually is not because you clicked on them a lot.  You cannot kill carriers if there are already too many ships in the system, as far as I know.  Once you kill enough of the other ships, then you can attack the carriers.  The only thing clicking on them 25 times does is waste enough time for your other defenses to kill the non-carrier ships in the system, which lowers the number of ships far enough that you can kill the carriers.

i cant imagine that carriers are only cause of CPU usage ... thats not the point ... its more cause of energy usage of the AI itself ...

This...I'm not even sure what you're trying to say, actually.  Heh.  Carriers were added to the game because having 20k ships in one system uses a lot of CPU/RAM and needs a much better video card to handle drawing all of it at once.  On my desktop, it's not really a big deal, but my laptop gets very, very slow trying to do that.  Putting some of those ships in carriers helps a lot with that problem, because now the game has half (just making that number up as an example) as much stuff to worry about.  "Energy usage of the AI itself" has nothing to do with anything.  It's mostly for performance reasons, not fictional/in-game reasons.

[Red Spot]

You can kill any carrier on a planet, no matter how many ships are there ... I've personally not found a cap there at least.
However, if you say jump to an AI planet which has several carriers, pop them, than remove your presence from that planet, the game will redistribute* those ships again if it reaches a certain mass of freed ships.

*read: put them back into carriers somewhere else

[Nalgas]

You can kill any carrier on a planet, no matter how many ships are there ... I've personally not found a cap there at least.

That's what I thought, but then I started running into ones that explicitly had the "external invincibility provided" message on them.  I don't actually know for sure if it's because of number of ships (I've read so many change logs in the past few months that I'm still sorting out what's actually in the game now and what's not), but that at least makes sense in the context of when I've seen that happen, so I was going along with Invelios on that one.  Heh.

[Red Spot]

Interesting, I'm playing on 8.7 but get nowhere near 40k ships in 1 place .. unless I play 'bottleneck supreme' and even than it would all be about timing and seeing every attack land at the same time.

As a developer on an other forum tends to say when you do something that breaks something: dont do that than
 

[Invelios]

I'm pretty sure the way I described is how they work, if not then it was that way at one point. It shouldn't be that huge a deal, the amount of ships that triggers carrier invincibility is decently high. Of course, I'm playing with high ship caps, not sure if that makes a difference, I don't think it should. The point of carriers is to keep some of the ships of the wave out of the calculations the CPU and Video Card has to do for every ship (and probably save some RAM as well), until you kill enough ships, and then you kill a carrier to free those ships. This lets big waves still happen without having the CPU/Graphics load of every ship at once. In my playthroughs, the carrier killing happens pretty much automatically once it can be killed, so I've never had to worry about microing my ships to attack the carrier.

[Shadoz]

how to understand the ""carrier invincibility""

If i toggle mouse over the carrier it displays "carrier invincibility x245"
what does the x245 means at earlyer times it was x65 than x125 and soo on ... time by time it increased ...

[Invelios]

My guess is that is the amount of enemy ships there are on the current planet over the limit that prevents you from destroying carriers.