AI War Beta 4.036 Released!

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, goodness, those things are ginormous

[orzelek]

After that rescaling from save load armada that attacked had a bit less than 100k points. It was very nice change after previous one.

I also think that your scaling is a bit exponential at some point. Each group from this wave had a golem and few battleships plus of course many guardians and some fleet ships. Compared to the previous one for 300k points - ship number seemes to be quite linear but ship types scale in some very strange way. Unless you also modified something in between ? Notes say about making 1/3rd less fleet ships in the pack - would this affect number of starships in the waves?

I'm not sure how fast this will grow but I will try to build next 3 cities if you will make colony build-able without refuge outpost if there are already cities around.

[keith.lamothe]

The ship types each get a point value based on a fictitious "tier" assigned to each.  A Black Widow Golem, for example. is considered a "Light Battleship", whereas most of the other golems are considered "Medium Battleship" and cost about 1.5 as much.  Those are still moving around a bit (honestly a Black Widow is more in the Heavy Cruiser realm, but I had to push things up at one point because they were being too painful, I intend to push them back down and adjust point costs and/or the rate of point "income" to compensate).

So it's not really exponential, it just feels that way

The lower fleet ship counts typically means leftover points that are pushed up to the escort ring, yes.  Which generally means more starships/guardians.  In theory if the points are high enough it can pick anything for an escort, it's just not until you get into things like 300k armadas that it gets silly where individual battle groups have 3 armored golems for _escorts_   One thing to bear in mind is that each city-hub-provoked armada sends one battlegroup at a home command station, one at the refugee outpost (if any, heh), and one at each city hub.  So as you add more hubs it will kind of scale down the individual groups a bit, though I'm not sure if that actually makes your turret grids feel any better.

And yea, I'm just removing the refugee-outpost requirement from the shard-built colony ships altogether.  There's the off chance of a bit of silliness now (how are you building it without the refugees, etc), but it's not harmful to the fun.

[Ozymandiaz]

I actually got laser MK II and Beam Mk II in my current game to beef up the modular spire ships as well, I like that feature (plus I really needed beefier defense against hordes of golems). But is it me, or dies teh Beam Cannon seem a bit under performing recently? Pre Unity it was very good at killing swarm ships, and a hard hitter against starships, but its 50k damage seem kind of weak since 10x sniper turrets do more raw damage then the beam cannon (only raw damage mind, no bonuses taken into account).

[orzelek]

Actually widows for example are very dangerous if you defend with fleet - when 3 of them catch most of your fleets in tractors only frigates will get to shoot

Are you planing to add some kind of cap to that points for whole battlegroup?

If I understand correctly each waves will contain 3 groups (or two when refuges are no longer present) and divide points between them.

And since you want us to have 5 cities this will go into insane numbers because you have % increase every wave which means that it increases quickly.
I'm wandering if we can get to a point at which you have 5 cities but can't do anything anyway - since you need to use all your forces to defend them and you will lose sooner or later since waves will increase. Or.. this is specially planned point and you need to finish before reaching it

Now I had at most 3 points to defend and two were close due to city proximity to HW. But with 5 cities this will get tricky


PS.
All that nice asteroids we have... they look so lonely... any idea when they will unveil hidden construction powers?

[keith.lamothe]

When you hit 5 cities you get... new opportunities

[x4000]

The new asteroids will start being useful... probably tomorrow.

[superking]

just encountered the special forces waypoint gaurdian, are these intended to be as indestructable as 12000 armour & 20 million health (effective 400 million health)?

[x4000]

just encountered the special forces waypoint gaurdian, are these intended to be as indestructable as 12000 armour & 20 million health (effective 400 million health)?

No, they need some balance work.  It's already in Mantis.

[Lancefighter]

its not quite that simple, just throw siege starships at them.. they have significantly less effective hp then.

[keith.lamothe]

By the way, in case anyone is testing the fallen-spire stuff on 4.036: watch out for botnet golems as part of those event attacks.  You can kill them pretty quickly with some Spire beam weapons, but if they catch a chunk of your fleet ships on frd or whatever they can quickly convert a huge part of your defenses into additional attackers.

For the next version I'm making botnet golems non-eligible to be part of event attacks until I can figure out where I want them balance-wise (if anywhere), but they can show up in 4.036 so I wanted to warn y'all

[unclean]

Haha, the spire campaign is awesome.

Spoiler for Hiden:

Just about had a panic attack when the AI threw 3 Golems at me. Noticed that there was an unnanouced wave on the galaxy map, didn't seem like anything special until I clicked on it and OH GOD WHAT

[UberJumper]

What exactly is supposed to happen after you build the subspace receiver?

I build it, and i get a notice of "Subspace signal on <insert planet>" but nothing happens and such what exactly do i do?

[Lancefighter]

send a survey ship to planet, of course!

[UberJumper]

Tried that, oddly the subspace signal is located on my other homeworld, and i already had a survey vessel there. Destroyed the survey ships, rebuilt them, rebuilt them somewhere else and brought em over, made a dozen survey vessels worship the subspace signal. Nothing.

Did i break it