SF , these have lots and lots of low cap ships.
How exactly is this a bug, though? If you watch the special forces log you'll see that it pays a proportionately higher price for each low-cap ship. The SF popcap is also based on those relative strength values, not count.
Its chances for picking certain high-cap ships are higher partly due to certain role preferences (which is quite intentional), but also because of some other quirks of the way it picks things. But that's not a bug, that's the AI preferring (for whatever) certain ship types over other ship types. As we've talked about recently, a perfectly "balanced" force where each ship type has the same % of the total force strength actually makes for a
less varied player experience than if every force were 100% from one specific type.
This is kinda bad, if they are eglible for CPA , i think i read they are.
There I can see an issue, at least in part. Some background on the design philosophy:
1) The AI has three basic categories of mobile-military ship: Passive Defensive, Active Defensive, and Offensive.
2) The acquisition of all three kinds must respect the relative strength (e.g. ship cap) of the ship type being "bought". The only genuine exceptions to this right now are:
- The hybrids' acquisition of its escorts, which partly respects it through having a lower chance of picking most of the low-cap types.
- Deepstrike-generated threat, which partly respects it by omitting most of the low-cap types from the possible set entirely. This is a rare enough case that it's not a big deal, but I do want to convert this to doing something else that's more interesting and better respecting this rule.
3) The AI may not use Passive Defensive ships for anything other than defending the planets upon which they are spawned.
- This is basically just ships spawned at the beginning of the game and by reinforcements and assigned to guard specific objects (guard posts and command stations).
- Ships in barracks basically fit this too, except they're even more passive (not doing anything).
4) The AI may use Active Defensive ships to defend any AI-owned planet, but may not send them to a planet it does not own (if they're sent to an AI planet that becomes non-AI during that process, the effect varies, but in general the ships need to return to AI space after combat) :
- Special Forces ships.
- Strategic Reserve ships.
5) The AI may use Offensive ships however it pleases, whenever it pleases, up to and including taking them all together and bumrushing the player's home command station:
- Normal "freed" ships (however it got that way).
- Exo ships.
- Threat-Fleet ships.
- Hybrids and their escorts.
6) Certain specific conditions allow the AI to "reassign" Passive Defensive or Active Defensive ships to Offensive (iirc nothing can lead to reassignment from P-D to A-D) :
- If the player attacks P-D ships, they generally go offensive (threat) immediately.
- A CPA allows the AI to reassign X ships from P-D or A-D to offensive.
What you're objecting to, I think, is that point 6 doesn't say anything about the AI having to "pay extra" for reassigning a low-cap ship to offensive duty, at least in the CPA context.
I can understand that, but the objection cannot be levelled against Special Forces specifically, because it's just as true of drafting guard ships, strategic reserves, or barracks ships for CPA duty.
I don't mind switching CPAs to "pay" proportionately when reassigning, even though the AI has already paid to create the ship in the first place. But there's one big problem we'd run into:
The "number of ships" listed by the CPA announcement would become basically meaningless, as the actual number could wind up being 1/25th of that, or 4x that, depending on what exactly gets freed.
So, how would you handle that? Just stop showing an expected ship count on the CPA announcement and let the player sweat it from not knowing if it's 100 ships or 10,000 until it actually launches (it can continue telling them the quantity actually freed per mark) ?
Barracks. Popping these just gives equal amount of all stuff , probably.
All ships that go into the seeded-at-start-of-game barracks are paid for in a process that respects relative strength of the individual unit. It may prefer certain low-cap ships in that process but again, the AI having preferences is not a bug.
Barracks created mid-game draw on existing ships, so that just gets back to how they were paid for.
Are those the Railcluster icons? They need more internal black etching. They look too washed out compared to the other icons.
I agree; I was really surprised no one said anything during the beta, but that was one reason I didn't push the issue with Chris very much. He did redo the far-zoom icons a few days before the official release, but some do still appear to have way less internal contrast than what we're used to. LotS's units have a lot less than the base game units (imho) but more than most of the AS units.
