Author Topic: AI Ship Hoarding  (Read 5667 times)

Offline Trandrin

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AI Ship Hoarding
« on: November 30, 2012, 10:56:12 am »
I decided after a short break to start up AI war again. The game in question was one with CPA waves active. Noticed that the waves would refuse to attack several of my worlds. They would just sit at threat until several more waves piled up and they would overwhelm any logical defenses I would have installed on the world. I was unable to find a effective way of clearing out these giant threat pileups.

Made  a choice of ending the game and turning CPA off for a more normal game thinking it a fluke.  Game went along normally until I got my whipping boy up.  Again the AI refused to advance until their numbers were extremely in their favor. I used a world past the whipping boy to add a ingress point allowing them to not warp right into whipping boy. Insult to injury at times a wave, which had jumped right into the whipping boy, would just abandon its attack and retreat en mass. 

Eventually these waves would clog around worlds I had defended with no way for me to move them short of warheads. At first I used riot and other tractor craft to pull chunks of the wave into my worlds but their numbers got so high, they just instantly killed anything I sent out to fight them. Have just a light turret layer on the home world right now and a wave of 2.2k ships just sitting outside of it.

I rather dislike this new flow.  I used to imagine the AI being bloodthirsty with these ships as it always had more to throw at you and break you. Now they seem skittish and fearful for their lives. Saw that there was a change to make turret firepower no longer be considered 1/10. Think I might need to figure out new defenses measures.  :-\

Anyone else have any thought or advice on this?

Offline TechSY730

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Re: AI Ship Hoarding
« Reply #1 on: November 30, 2012, 11:21:23 am »
I decided after a short break to start up AI war again. The game in question was one with CPA waves active. Noticed that the waves would refuse to attack several of my worlds. They would just sit at threat until several more waves piled up and they would overwhelm any logical defenses I would have installed on the world. I was unable to find a effective way of clearing out these giant threat pileups.

Made  a choice of ending the game and turning CPA off for a more normal game thinking it a fluke.  Game went along normally until I got my whipping boy up.  Again the AI refused to advance until their numbers were extremely in their favor. I used a world past the whipping boy to add a ingress point allowing them to not warp right into whipping boy. Insult to injury at times a wave, which had jumped right into the whipping boy, would just abandon its attack and retreat en mass. 

Eventually these waves would clog around worlds I had defended with no way for me to move them short of warheads. At first I used riot and other tractor craft to pull chunks of the wave into my worlds but their numbers got so high, they just instantly killed anything I sent out to fight them. Have just a light turret layer on the home world right now and a wave of 2.2k ships just sitting outside of it.

I rather dislike this new flow.  I used to imagine the AI being bloodthirsty with these ships as it always had more to throw at you and break you. Now they seem skittish and fearful for their lives. Saw that there was a change to make turret firepower no longer be considered 1/10. Think I might need to figure out new defenses measures.  :-\

Anyone else have any thought or advice on this?

There are still some lurking bugs where the AI's ships get "stuck", refusing to move on to another planet even if it is vulnerable. Some of the ships you are seeing may be impacted by that.

You could say that in some respects, even though this behavior is not as "bloodthirsty" (aka, recklessly trying to get into the fray), it does make more sense. The AI has lots and lots of resources, but that doesn't mean that it should be suicidal with the resources it is dedicated to you, even if they have plenty more to spare. With what the AI is willing to commit to you, it makes sense that it would want to win with it instead of just toss it your way hoping it does something (and it usually doesn't)

That said, I do agree that the "cutoff" of when they are willing to go in needs to be brought down some, especially now that the turret firepower is now being considered properly. It shouldn't always be "do I have enough to probably win?" but rather "do I have enough to probably inflict massive damage?", as that can still lead to a long term "wear down" of the player while being less "grindy", and also make it harder to "herd" ships.
7016: Reduce the firepower cutoff ratio that "stalking a wormhole" AI ships will wait for before entering

Thankfully, the new threat fleet behavior will stop them from "lurking" too long.
What version are you on? There was a bug where threat fleet and special forces were hanging around longer than they should of if there was player owned remains on the planet they were on. The latest beta versions fix that.


Anyways, to deal with it now.
One, you could just wait for them to retreat naturally (thanks to the new threat fleet logic)

If you have Spirecraft enabled, martyrs were pretty much built to deal with situations like this.
You could also use a Spirecraft shield bearer to buy you a few seconds.

If you don't you can fall back to warheads. Yes, it costs AIP, but sometimes its that or being "stagnated" by both sides not having enough to take each other out on enemy turf.
A lightning warhead if

Offline Trandrin

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Re: AI Ship Hoarding
« Reply #2 on: November 30, 2012, 11:55:11 am »
No super weapons are currently on for my current game. If I had to resort to warheads it would have to be for more then one wave as this will happen again if they don't land right on the whipping boy and actually stay to fight. So eventually the AiP accumulation would gut me. First few times the tractor pulling with riot star ships onto my world worked. Now they spawn in large of numbers for conventional fleet actions without support from my mines/forts/turrets to work.

They now have two carriers+other ships at that wormhole still waiting. Sad part if they attacked they would probably win but yet they still hold back. As to them freeing and going elsewhere that won't accomplish much other then break a few worlds that I rebuild before they clot around the home world again. All they are doing is blocking one of the entrances making it trouble to move around them to continue with the game.

Had they attacked at each wave interval I would have fought them on normal terms and won against them even with some losses.  Game is the latest version. Inquiry, do mines effect firepower? I have many many dozens of them as it was part of my strategy,  to lay lines of them to their target and let them pulverize themselves through those before hitting a turret wall.

This AI retreating early mechanic is going to heavily impact any defenses where the AI can actually retreat. Guess its back to laying defenses and tractor turrets right at the wormhole so to catch them before they have a chance to flee. I can see the desire for the AI to command its fleet to be more cautious, but their acting kinda like cowards now. 

Offline TechSY730

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Re: AI Ship Hoarding
« Reply #3 on: November 30, 2012, 12:08:41 pm »
The AI retreating early I was referring to was the new threat fleet logic, where ships "waiting" to attack will eventually try to find some other target to attack (usually, a more "squishy" planet) if they can't gather enough strength to take on their target planet quick enough.

The AI retreating when on your is a different issue. It has already been noted elsewhere that something is causing the AI to retreat on the offense a bit too early sometimes. Keith has not yet looked into why yet. (Presumably, AVWW2 has been eating a lot of his time). Hopefully, this can be fixed soon as well.

Finally, what difficulty are you playing against?
If it is >8 (or was it >9?), then the AI will consider their ships only half as powerful as they really are. I also address that in the mantis issue I posted; half is WAY too much of an adjustment. I understand what they were trying to do (make higher level AIs "ball up" more), but I think half is overdoing it.

EDIT:

They now have two carriers+other ships at that wormhole still waiting. Sad part if they attacked they would probably win but yet they still hold back.

There is a decent chance some of those are special forces. Those won't always retreat based on time.

Actually, this brings up a good degenerate case. What happens if an AI "chokepoint" world (a world you MUST go through to make progress due to map layout) is one of the worlds the special forces will defend? In that case, you can't always prompt them to move elsewhere by just attacking a different planet, causing the AI to build up a huge "blob" you can't really unlodge or distract by attacking elsewhere, stagnating the game.

Though, they are supposed to move back away from the AI-human border some when idle. Do you have a save? There may be another bug lurking somewhere causing the SF to not always "move on" when they are supposed to.
« Last Edit: November 30, 2012, 12:14:38 pm by TechSY730 »

Offline Hearteater

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Re: AI Ship Hoarding
« Reply #4 on: November 30, 2012, 12:12:34 pm »
Keeping threat low is very useful.  When your threat is low, you don't need to worry about threat balls (the name for such piles of threat ships).

One method is to avoid gaining threat.  To do this, you need to know how threat is gained, and what threat even is.  I'm guessing you probably know some of this, but I'll cover as much as I can to try and be useful to anyone with questions on this.  I also don't know how useful this will be to your present situation.

Threat are ships that have been freed (aka, released) to attack you whenever they like.  They are generally the non-greyed out ships on the map (some non-greyed ships are something other than threat, such as Special Forces or part of an Exo Wave).  In general, once freed, a ship is freed permanently.  I can't think of an exception to this, but I'm sure there is at least one.  So, how and why are ships released:

1) You attack an AI planet and upset them.  If you attack with an overwhelming force, all the ships will be released in a system.  If you destroy the AI Command Station, often all the ships will be released.  If your attack force is smaller, only ships you get in range of (either you shoot them or they can shoot you) get released.  In general releasing happens by Guard Post.  So you'll release all the ships at a Guard Post, or none of them.  This means that if a Guard Post has even one really long range ship (Zenith Bombard for example) they are much easier to trigger.  The Guard Post shooting matters as well, so Missile Guard Posts are very easy to trigger.

So once you've woken up the AI ships, they'll generally either attack you or flee.  They normally only flee if you outgun them.  This can cause a problem if you attack with a huge force, because you wake everything up and then cause a lot of them to flee, leaving you with threat hiding out on other AI systems.  Attacking with a smaller force to wake up ships piecemeal and grind them down causes less threat to escape.  You can also use a small attack force to kill the Command Station and you'll often get all the ships in the system converge to attack you.  Lead them back to your worm hole and bring the rest of your fleet in to finish them off before they can flee.

2) Retreating waves result in threat.  Waves only retreat when they feel overwhelmed, and they are supposed to stick around at least 30 seconds.  But often players have things set up so the waves are vastly outgunned, so they will retreat at 30 seconds.  To counter this, get a Black Hole Machine setup on your whipping boy or build several Force Fields over top of the worm hole waves are coming from.  This pins the wave in long enough to get destroyed.  Underneath those Force Fields is also a handy spot to drop some Lightning Turrets, Flak Turrets, a Gravity Turret, a Tachyon Turret and possibly some Tractor Turrets.

3) CPA always produce threat, a lot of threat, so you need to learn how to clear it.  Nothing you can do about it.  Around every two hours or so you have to handle it.  If your defenses are strong, a CPA is just threat creation.  If they are weak, it is attacks from multiple locations.  CPAs and existing threat is a really bad combination, so always try and clear out threat before a CPA hits.


There are other reasons to clear threat quickly.  Threat ships are own their own for 30 minutes.  Then they group up with other ships that have been threat for a long time and form a threat fleet that will cause you tons of grief.  So, clearing threat quickly is much easier than waiting, especially for large amounts of threat such as produced by a CPA.  If you have scouts on all your adjacent planets, in the Galaxy Map you can change the filter to view threat and see exactly where all the threat ships are.  This lets you take in your fleet ships to clear them out.  Since threat ships generally sit on your worm holes waiting to attack, you can often decimate them fairly easily.  Be careful about sending in too many of your own ships or you can trigger a lot of ships to be released in the system.

Another fun trick is to use Riot Starships with Tractor Beams.  Pop through the worm hole and come right back, dragging all those threat ships camping the worm hole to their death at the hands of your waiting fleet.  Other mobile tractor beam ships can do this too, but Riots are always available.  Give this a try and see if you can prune the threat back.  If your Riots get too beat up, try sending in a cap of Mark I Fighters too.  They'll absorb a lot of hits while your Riots bounce in and out without costing you much to replace.

Offline TechSY730

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Re: AI Ship Hoarding
« Reply #5 on: November 30, 2012, 12:16:01 pm »
2) Retreating waves result in threat.  Waves only retreat when they feel overwhelmed, and they are supposed to stick around at least 30 seconds.  But often players have things set up so the waves are vastly outgunned, so they will retreat at 30 seconds.  To counter this, get a Black Hole Machine setup on your whipping boy or build several Force Fields over top of the worm hole waves are coming from.  This pins the wave in long enough to get destroyed.  Underneath those Force Fields is also a handy spot to drop some Lightning Turrets, Flak Turrets, a Gravity Turret, a Tachyon Turret and possibly some Tractor Turrets.

That time of 30 seconds was reduced at some point, but I am not sure what it was reduced too.

Anyways, there seems to be a bug with that logic, as there have been cases where the AI retreats after a measly 2 (yes, two) seconds.

EDIT: Did you see my message above about the possibility of special forces?
« Last Edit: November 30, 2012, 12:33:41 pm by TechSY730 »

Offline Trandrin

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Re: AI Ship Hoarding
« Reply #6 on: November 30, 2012, 12:37:10 pm »
Difficulty 10/10 game. The Massive threat ball I have is not SF. They are stationed further back on another world. All the threat that is built up on my wormhole is wave based, those that hit planets other then the ones armed to the teeth. Even then some of the stuff from a few waves combating the fortified worlds fell back before large amounts of damage could be dealt, joining up with their "brothers".

Already been doing the trick with the Riot Star Ships, Even got Spire Tractor Platforms in on the action, throwing meat shields buys me some time to get them in and out but they still lost a number of their kin. Repeating this feet is taking a toll on their count, not to mention the pocket book.

As to finding other targets they will hit them and destroy the worlds. But then return to having to pick a fortified one to camp outside of until its time to repeat. Although a odd event just occured. Reloaded the save after taking a short break all hostile ships instantly warped into the worlds they stalemated on and brought ruin to them.

Offline TechSY730

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Re: AI Ship Hoarding
« Reply #7 on: November 30, 2012, 12:40:42 pm »
As to finding other targets they will hit them and destroy the worlds. But then return to having to pick a fortified one to camp outside of until its time to repeat. Although a odd event just occured. Reloaded the save after taking a short break all hostile ships instantly warped into the worlds they stalemated on and brought ruin to them.

Definitely suspicious. Sounds like a bug of some sort that was causing them to "ball up" longer than they were supposed to, that got "cleared up" upon game reload.

Have a save from before they went in?


And the 10/10, yea, as I mentioned, the AI is too timid with threat on higher difficulties due to it only thinking its ships are only as half as strong as they really are. On 10/10, it is just that the AI gets so much, that it can usually build up enough to overcome even that.

Offline Trandrin

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Re: AI Ship Hoarding
« Reply #8 on: November 30, 2012, 01:02:24 pm »
Checked my saves, only other one is well before the waves that make up this threat ball are even announced.. Even in the current state of the save though, reloading is causing a weird effect. Had just taken a ARS world, normally Special forces have usually kept going with their attack/defend order on a world like that, showing up late to party before departing. Now they all just stopped and flew back to their rally point, ignoring what they had been sent to do the first time round.

Hope the 10/10 can be made to have a little less care for its fleet. It considering its fleet to be half as strong is kind of silly when they number in thousands and then some.

Offline TechSY730

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Re: AI Ship Hoarding
« Reply #9 on: November 30, 2012, 01:06:38 pm »
Checked my saves, only other one is well before the waves that make up this threat ball are even announced.. Even in the current state of the save though, reloading is causing a weird effect. Had just taken a ARS world, normally Special forces have usually kept going with their attack/defend order on a world like that, showing up late to party before departing. Now they all just stopped and flew back to their rally point, ignoring what they had been sent to do the first time round.

Yep, sounds like there is either a pretty nasty "stall" bug that gets cleared on reload, or a bug with the reloading that is giving AI ships bad orders.
Either way, nasty.
In fact, bugs with the load process can sometimes point towards desyncs as well, though if it is in the AI, then no desync would happen (only the host computer runs the AI threads).

Hope the 10/10 can be made to have a little less care for its fleet. It considering its fleet to be half as strong is kind of silly when they number in thousands and then some.

It's not just 10, I think also 9.3 and up suffers from this. Maybe even 8.3 and up. (Will have to review the release notes to get the exact cutoff).

Offline Wanderer

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Re: AI Ship Hoarding
« Reply #10 on: November 30, 2012, 01:30:21 pm »
Made  a choice of ending the game and turning CPA off for a more normal game thinking it a fluke.  Game went along normally until I got my whipping boy up.

On a side note, 10/10 is not usually considered a 'more normal game'.  ;D

Quote
Again the AI refused to advance until their numbers were extremely in their favor. I used a world past the whipping boy to add a ingress point allowing them to not warp right into whipping boy. Insult to injury at times a wave, which had jumped right into the whipping boy, would just abandon its attack and retreat en mass. 
I've dropped off a save with this situation to Keith already, and he's looking into it.  Short version of the story, until recently Turrets were valued at /10 of their actual firepower, so the 30 second wave enforcement didn't matter as much.  Recently it was updated to be straight firepower, and the waves see a real whipping boy and run like little girls now on entry.  Should be fixed in the reasonably near future.

Quote
Eventually these waves would clog around worlds I had defended with no way for me to move them short of warheads. At first I used riot and other tractor craft to pull chunks of the wave into my worlds but their numbers got so high, they just instantly killed anything I sent out to fight them. Have just a light turret layer on the home world right now and a wave of 2.2k ships just sitting outside of it.
Threat ships seem to be getting 'stuck' lately.  There was one bug recently cleared up because of dead turrets on the foreign world.  If the threat-building world just seems... asleep... for no reason and it's right on your border grab a save of the problem and Mantis it/post it here.  Keith is usually rather happy to un-dorf the AI when it gets silly.

SF posts up 3 worlds out, as do the threatballs.  They operate independently.  Threatfleet fires up after 30 minutes of 'idleness' by a smaller threat unit.  My guess is if you ignore your gate for 30 minutes, they'll wander off to the threatfleet.  They'll beat the demons out of your satellites but it'll at least get them off your doorstep.
... and then we'll have cake.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: AI Ship Hoarding
« Reply #11 on: November 30, 2012, 01:42:24 pm »
Yea, if you have stuff camping right on a wormhole over, say, 40 minutes after its creation with no sign of moving off to threatfleet or going through to get the party started: post a save :)

I do need to investigate the excessive retreat behavior.
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Offline Trandrin

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Re: AI Ship Hoarding
« Reply #12 on: November 30, 2012, 01:50:07 pm »
I have pitched fights with 10/10, even won one once barely, rest are/were in various levels of play.  I consider them to be a "normal" place to play, as you must be on your toes or they will take you apart. Even then most times it gets the better of you.

 As to stuff getting stuck I see it from time to time, where guards at posts move to engage something then "turn off" and go back to dormancy stretched out like a line from their spawn location, or large groups of ships just give up and stall. I saw it a lot more once the Special Forces were given their overhaul.



Offline Minotaar

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Re: AI Ship Hoarding
« Reply #13 on: November 30, 2012, 02:54:06 pm »
Keith, I have a save if you want to look into the retreating waves. When I actually played this (that was around 5.06x) the wave just instantly pulled out after warping. I tried replaying it a bunch of times and can't get it to do the same thing, but have some other results:
(the save has a 2,500 Frigate wave coming in 00:09)
1) if Auto-Target Carriers is on and the carriers get popped quickly, the wave almost never retreats
2) if it is off, some ships will definitely try retreating in 3-4 seconds, sometimes it includes the carriers, sometimes not. If it doesn't, the carriers eventually deploy and we're back to scenario 1.
This difference in behavior may have something to do with carriers' firepower not counting the ships inside.
3) if I scrap the harvesters before the wave so they don't get rebuilt, the wave seems more likely to retreat. If the harvesters are up, some of the ships go for them.

Another weird thing is that if the battle starts and the carriers pop or get deployed, some ships will start pulling back at some point even though the AI has a firepower advantage.
Hope that helps somehow  :)

Offline KDR_11k

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Re: AI Ship Hoarding
« Reply #14 on: November 30, 2012, 03:55:45 pm »
The retreat delay is only for going back the way they came, right? From what I see a wave that's too scared will simply run for the closest other wormhole and take that.

Would moving to the threatfleet actually make those ships end their siege? By the sound of it they're camping in front of the only accessible human planet. Where else should they go?