AI Neinzul-Hybrid Hive spawn rates

[Minty]

I'm currently almost three hours into a game with one Hybrid AI..

Two AI planets adjacent to my empire have 10 Hybrid Hives, and a third has 20 or so.

I've kind of reached a bit of a stalemate, as I send my fleet through (All grade I, as I've been teching up on defences, as I've also got the Neinzul Preservationists coming through, playing merry hell with my production), and the fleet makes it about half way to the Command Station before being wiped.

Now, if this is the intended behaviour, and the Hybrid Plots are intended as a fairly significant leap in difficulty, I don't have an issue, and can suck it up, and see if I can grind em down. If not, then Hybrid Hives need their spawnrate significantly nerfed.

Other than that, I'm absolutely loving the new toys we get to play with, and the new sticks the AI gets to beat us with!

Oh.. Something just came to mind.. The new Guard Posts, while fantastic, and oodles of fun.. Are they intended to not have Tachyon Beams, like the old ones did?

Keith, Chris, keep up the good work, fellas!

[keith.lamothe]

Well, the hybrids are intended to be a very significant increase in difficulty, though it is a fine line as I don't want them to make it impossible to get to the mid-game or anything like that.  But if you're combining them with the Preservation Wardens you're really asking for it

I think I will tweak the Hybrid spawn rate down a slight bit more (they used to spawn much faster, already tweaked down) and we'll see how it goes.  The idea is that eventually one will mature into the class "queen" (roughly 2.5% chance that a hybrid takes that path, and the maturation takes something like 6 hours total) and be able to build additional spawners and thus increase spawn rate and/or replace lost spawn rate from spawners that were destroyed by the humans.  I should emphasize that point, actually: if you can raid Mk IV+ worlds to destroy their spawner (1 each, generally), it will help

[Mánagarmr]

I'm 12 hours into my game, having destroyed maybe 30 or so hybrids and still have some 10 running around. I have located one of their spawners (on a MK IV core world...yay). This is with one AI set to hybrid plot.

[keith.lamothe]

Sounds like you're doing pretty well.  And yea, setting one AI to hybrids and not the other is a good way to help not get overwhelmed   Also, plan on playing a fairly offensive early game so they can't block you at just one or two chokepoints.  And then find some weapons that are effective against them

[mlaskus]

Ha! Take a look what happens if there is only one wormhole leading into your territory!


3 hours ingame, 80 Hybrids on a single planet!

I'm not complaining about Hybrids, I like them. I'm just in way over my head in this game. 2 diff 10 AI's and every feature from both expansions apart from mining golem turned on. Also, the only system bordering my home planet is a mark IV full of nasty things like Ion cannons and I was unable to get on offense at all. Though some time ago I realized that I can sustain my defense almost indefinitely with my current AI progress.

I just had an idea. You might be able to prevent Hybrids from creating such stalemates without lowering their spawn rates. You could try limiting the number of Hybrids that can gather on a single planet at a given time and make the limit go up as players capture new systems. So hybrids wouldn't block all possibilities of expansion at first but later as players expand, the Hybrid fleets could reach those massive sizes.

[Diazo]

10 diff? Ouch.

I made a some serious tries with diff 10 a few months back before all the new expansion stuff came out and never got past the mid-game.

I don't even want to think about how bad it would be with all the stuff that has been added.

D.

[keith.lamothe]

If you play against two diff 10 AIs both with Hybrids on, you will lose unless you have "no waves" against two mad-bombers or something like that, and even that would be touch-and-go

But anyway, the Hybrid's behavior for picking defense and offense targets doesn't have anything to do with the number of planets captured by the humans (except in the obvious impact on graph complexity) and I have no plans to change that   There are a few ways of dealing with the early bottleneck problem, and I think they can be balanced properly without any fundamentally new forms of limitation.

[superking]

hybrids probably dont need dps as high (and long ranged) as they have atm, it annoys me that even the starting ones can 1v1 a flagship and win

[mlaskus]

I wasn't expecting to win, I only wanted to see how long would I last.

There are a few ways of dealing with the early bottleneck problem, and I think they can be balanced properly without any fundamentally new forms of limitation.

Oh that's nice.

[snrub_guy]

As it stands at the moment (3.183), I think that there are too many Hives. It is like fighting a third, highly aggressive and powerful A.I, without the ability to warp gate raid him to stop the attacks. I'm only an hour and a half in (my last two attempts came to a messy end at their hands), and while I can hold the attacks off at the moment, the last planet I attacked (a mk1 next to my homeworld) had 12 hybrid hives on it. I am also yet to spot any of the stations I can destroy to weaken them.

In that many of the recent changes have been to reduce the grindyness of taking planets, the hives seem to have the opposite effect.

Don't get me wrong. I love them, and think they are an awesome addition to the game. I also love puppies. And you can have too many puppies.

My suggestions to them at the moment, would be to reduce their number/spawn rate/ability to refit as quickly, and possibly increase our ability to influence their strength and distribution through more targets for us to strike at on A.I worlds.

Another small pet peeve I have with them is their ability to absolutely tear through any fighters in a mixed group, although I understand that this may be needed to balance out the fighter's strength vs. starships.

[keith.lamothe]

As it stands at the moment (3.183), I think that there are too many Hives.

With one AI having hybrids, or both?

It is like fighting a third, highly aggressive and powerful A.I, without the ability to warp gate raid him to stop the attacks.

That's... exactly what I want them to be I do plan to tweak them down a bit more, but we're approaching where I want them to be.  Later on we may provide a way to scale them down a bit (via AI difficulty or whatever), but they are intended to be "hard mode" in a lot of ways.

I am also yet to spot any of the stations I can destroy to weaken them.

They don't seed on any planet directly adjacent to a human homeworld, but if you scout a few levels beyond that you should see them; they're listed as "Hybrid Facilities" in the galaxy map summary of a planet, and look like control nodes in the planet-view sidebar summary.

In that many of the recent changes have been to reduce the grindyness of taking planets, the hives seem to have the opposite effect.

Yes, they will do that.  If you have only a few connections to AI territory they will clump up and try to hold that as a defensive chokepoint, much like humans do to the AI; if that number of connections stays low the entire game it will greatly slow your advance.  That said, it's intended to be a fun sort of "grind", which isn't the usual sense of that word.

Another small pet peeve I have with them is their ability to absolutely tear through any fighters in a mixed group, although I understand that this may be needed to balance out the fighter's strength vs. starships.

They do tear fighters apart particularly quickly, I intend to change that.

One thing to keep in mind is that players haven't had a lot of time to find the weakpoints of the Hybrids.  For exmaple, as one found out recently, Fortresses are pretty effective

[keith.lamothe]

FYI, these changes are now in for 3.184:

* Hybrid base "class" distribution changed from 47.5% Attacker / 47.5% Defender / 5% Builder to 40% Attacker / 30% Defender / 30% Builder.  This should moderately reduce their early-game threat and increase their later-game threat.

* Teleport Raider and Teleport Battlestation damage to Hybrid Facilities reduced to 20% and 40% of previous, respectivaly, to make it a bit harder to teleport through enemy territory and clean out all the Hybrid infrastructure.

* Reduced overall attack power of Hybrid machine gun and laser cannon modules by roughly 20%, and significantly reduced bonuses against various ship types (particularly fighters).

[snrub_guy]

Well this was with one A.I with hybrids on.

Hmm, maybe I've been unlucky in my scouting. There are a few mkIII and IV worlds blocking my scouts just now, so myabe a load of stations will show up all at once once I get past them.

I'm aware I haven't devoted enough time to their demise yet, and them and the neizul youngster A.I have seriously made me experiment with my defences a bit more. I think I'm using 3 new types of defender units that I never really touched before. I'm beginning to get the hang of defending against the hives, I was just concerned that if I was meeting 12 hives on a planet after a couple of hours, was I going to be meeting a ridiculous amount come hour 12? At the moment, you can scare them away by popping the command station of the planet they are on, so that's a bonus.

By the way- as far as defence goes, grav turrets and heavy beam cannons do an alright job...

Those changes look good. I in no way want them to be completely neutered. They are an awesome added challenge.