AI low cap ships

[keith.lamothe]

Hmmmmm....  So a canny player could soften up an upcoming CPA by pruning all the Blade Spawners and Stealth Battleships, while letting the Infiltrators and Lazer Gatlings be?

If you could really pull that off, definitely.  But it would involve cracking open an awful lot of barracks, which would make those ships threat (and not eligible for CPA-draw) anyway.

But sure, if you made a point of assassinating low-cap guards wherever you could (bearing in mind that their fellow guards on that guard post will become threat), while leaving high-cap ships in guard positions, that could help a bit.  There are probably more time-efficient ways to help your chances against the next CPA, though.

[KDR_11k]

It's probably easier to just face the CPA instead of patrolling all AI planets to track down low cap units.

[Bognor]

Actually I'm envisaging something at a coarser level.  Like regularly parking the Cursed Golem / unloading the Hive Golem at two or three particular planets, each chosen because their primary reinforcement is low cap.

Perhaps the converse might also be useful: put a couple of planets that reinforce with high cap ships on alert, then just avoid those planets, allowing the numbers of weak fleet ships to build up.

Either strategy would depend on finding planets of the appropriate Mark.

[TechSY730]

Sorry for bump, but have you gotten any logs showing these sorts of skewed ratios yet?

[Faulty Logic]

These are mostly logs of my current game, which has planets with, for example, 44 Spire blade spawners, 193 Zenith medic frigates, and less than a cap of each of the triangles. This is consistent accross all AI planets which have been alerted for a significant amount of time.

Edit: main thread logs attached.

[TechSY730]

These are mostly logs of my current game, which has planets with, for example, 44 Spire blade spawners, 193 Zenith medic frigates, and less than a cap of each of the triangles. This is consistent accross all AI planets which have been alerted for a significant amount of time.

Do you have the one from the main thread as well?

[TechSY730]

These are mostly logs of my current game, which has planets with, for example, 44 Spire blade spawners, 193 Zenith medic frigates, and less than a cap of each of the triangles. This is consistent accross all AI planets which have been alerted for a significant amount of time.

Just from a quick glance, it seems that the AI you have is REALLY fond of choosing Z medic frigates. It is getting charged properly each time for them (as far as I can tell), which includes a substancial decrease in reinforements elsewhere every times it "overspends" to get one, but the fact that is choosing Z medic frigates so often (and to a lesser extend, Spire blade spawners) would explain why the skew is there. If it chose triangle ships each time, you would of seen FAR more ships on those planets.

Still, why the AI is deciding to choose low ship cap ships early in the reinforcement process on a quite consistent basis may be worth looking into, even though it is getting penalized properly for doing so.

[Wanderer]

The new changes implemented a 'world preference' for planets.  Most of these ships will be taken from a set of 3 choices.  You've got a nasty case of RNG blues, it would seem.

[keith.lamothe]

These are mostly logs of my current game, which has planets with, for example, 44 Spire blade spawners, 193 Zenith medic frigates, and less than a cap of each of the triangles. This is consistent accross all AI planets which have been alerted for a significant amount of time.

Edit: main thread logs attached.

Interesting.  There certainly are some cases where a planet is picking a ton of medic frigates because it's picked that as one of the planet's reinforcement focus types, but there's a lot of entries in that log showing it doing reinforcements where no focus types have been picked.  Possibly that's due to them not being AI planets but something sounds fishy.  Do you have a save?

If you're curious, the log lines (in the ai thread log) about the focus types look like "Reinforcement focus types: Fighter,Bomber,Raptor".

[Faulty Logic]

Do you have a save?

Sorry, I don't (routine deletion of non-current games). It was fairly consistent accross alerted AI planets.

[TechSY730]

A relevant repost from another thread:

Also, with the new reinforcement "preferences", I think there is a strong argument to be made to reintroduce the planetary per type caps for low cap ships, to prevent the AI from "cheesing" the overall planetary reinforcement cap by just always choosing the lower cap ships and thus "packing" the planetary cap to a much stronger degree than intended. Either that, or make the planetary reinforcement "count" towards the cap be a weighted sum, such that lower cap ships take away more "count" to their planetary reinforcement total cap than higher cap ships. Either would solve this extremely obnoxious, and now very plausible, no longer rare case.

[Kahuna]

This happened:

[keith.lamothe]

My guess is most of those honeycombs are hybrid drones

[Kahuna]

My guess is most of those honeycombs are hybrid drones

Hmm.. are Special Forces allowed to join CPAs? If not are you sure there isn't a bug which allows them to join CPAs? That's a CPA and before that I only saw that many tractors platforms in Special Forces.

Oh and what is a "hybrid drone"? There's is no information about them in the Wiki.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm.. are Special Forces allowed to join CPAs? If not are you sure there isn't a bug which allows them to join CPAs? That's a CPA and before that I only saw that many tractors platforms in Special Forces.

Ah, yes, SF are effectively on "guard duty" (in fact they're totally defensive now) so they are eligible for CPA inclusion.  SF spawns also have a predeliction for tractor units if it can get them (though it does pay the very high per-unit cost for tractor platforms, you can see it in the special forces advanced-log if you like), because it's a jerk.

So yea, SF may be a better theory than hybrid drones.

Oh and what is a "hybrid drone"? There's is no information about them in the Wiki.

Hybrid drones are the ships that escort a hybrid; they're built from the hybrid drone spawners on various planets, when the hybrid is on the planet without a full complement of drones.  I don't recall off hand if that's in the wiki.