The carrier could visit the worlds it needed reach to in turn. But I suppose during that time you'd have 4000+ threat wandering around....
Yea, that's why it's a pretty brute force thing: the purpose of the mechanic isn't challenge, really, it's to save your computer from the consequences of simulating tens of thousands of individual threat ships (while they're in the carrier they basically don't exist except as a single number that doesn't do any sim). Before carriers, if the AI sent a wave of over 2000 ships it was truncated to 2000 ships. This wasn't great
Do you have a method to check whether worlds are contiguously controlled by the AI? It would be better to limit the teleporting to local areas, if such exist.
It's fairly easy to do that, yes, and since the "where do I spawn this carrier?" logic doesn't happen much it could afford to do that. And yesterday while I was in there I was sorely tempted to go ahead and have it start respecting "the player has cut me off" and just spawn the carrier locally, but I have a limited amount of time to spend on AIW during AVWW development and there are some higher priority things for me right now. This would be a semi-complicated thing to do, to make sure it didn't create cases where your cpu is melting down because carriers are no longer able to do their threat-hoovering job.
Anyway, now that I know the mechanics I can deal with it, and once you expect it, it is less shocking to see.
I was hoping it would help. And I think something less shocking in general can happen later, just got to triage things. My next item, for example, is dealing with another fairly annoying aspect of carriers: the invincible-while-X-other-AI-ships-are-on-the-planet tomfoolery. It's also necessary to avoid cpu melting from the player simply popping 10 carriers in a short period of time, but it makes defending against really large incoming forces artificially difficult sometimes because you've got these ff-immune invinicible things just kind of cruising through. So going for a lateral solution in cases where the player pops one and there's not comfortable room for it to dump all its contents.
Another way to toy with the AI in this situation is to move your defenses. It's redeploying based on the firepower or something in the border worlds, and if you pull back it may be lured into leaving forces on those worlds.
The explosive redeployment just pulls all the "consumed" threat back to a carrier on the AI homeworld (if any, there's some other logic for picking a spawn point if the game's already been won), and it doesn't pay attention to your deployments in that.
Threat ships in general, however, don't go through a wormhole if there isn't enough of them waiting near the wormhole to go through that they think they have a chance. And since all a CPA is doing is freeing ships to become threat (or combining them into a carrier which in turn is a threat ship), that "should I go through?" logic is still there.
Cool about the pause. I now realize i noticed that you can scrap during pause as well. What about the two barracks though? I thought it was one max?
The place I was looking I saw 1 barracks for each AI player, which I think is allowed in the rules.
Thanks for taking the time to look into it and clarifying!
You're welcome, thanks for your patience
