AI War Beta 4.049, "Firepower," Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2010/12/ai-war-beta-4049-firepower-released.html

It's 2am and I've stayed up far later than I should have to get this release ready, so for the most part I'll just leave you with these massive release notes.  Suffice it to say, this release is really exciting, and normally I'd write a pretty huge summary of the changes.  The short short version is:

"Firepower" display is now used in place of ship counts for a lot of things in the game, to better represent threat, etc.  A couple of new cheats.  A lot of balance tweaks.  Fixed a very important bug that was causing skyrocketing threat recently and in general had been a bug since 3.120 or before.  Introduced new Hunter/Killers in high-threat/attack situations to help performance and consolidate AI ships in a similar manner of carriers/barracks.  You will fear these, but your CPU/RAM will love them.  Spirecraft nerfs and buffs.  New AI anti-extreme-blobbing/bottlenecking mechanic similar to the anti-ultra-deepstriking mechanic.

See release notes for details.  It's a lot of stuff.  The firepower stuff in particular is preliminary, so not everything is valued properly with that -- feedback very welcome there, but I won't be on much over the weekend.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.  If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

[Wingflier]

YAY I was waiting for this I hoped it would come out tonight!!!! Great work guys I can't wait to play it.  NOW ENJOY UR WEEKEND!

[Echo35]

Another awesome update! I'm digging the Firepower display, as it seems immensely more useful than the previous mode of displaying only ships. I also like how you changed a lot of the scaling to simply a base value * Mk level. Seems like that will clean up and balance out a lot of stuff.

[fbgbt]

Sorry if I'm being stupid, but is the 'defender' campaign mode supposed to be not properly balanced? I played a 2-hour game (on 4.048) with my friend, and got an attack of 1000-5000 mark I ships every 30 minutes. Not hard to defend against, and really boring for the 25 minutes between waves. Admittedly we had a smallish galaxy size and three planets each, AI was 7.3.

[Vinraith]

@fgbt

Defender is still very, very, very beta and lately most of the effort's been put into rebalancing the main game.

[Lancefighter]

Spirecraft are now limited to a ship cap of two per type of spirecraft. Given that there are 50 different types of spirecraft, this is not a huge restriction (that's 100 different ships right there), but it does prevent some of the worst excesses of the spirecraft lifestyle, so to speak.

eh

some mining enclosures make 4x of them at a time?

[Dyers_Eve]

Please look at Sentinel frigate damage again or their cap. I just ended a fairly frustrating game because the AI would sometimes send waves of 450 Sentinel frigate IIs and they just slaughtered everything, I mean I had 4 fort Is and 200 turrets and a few hundred ships and they just smoked everything. If it wasn't for abusing planetary armor booster I would've gotten owned very fast (armor booster has 2 billion hp so any ai ships are just stuck there forever trying to kill it until I bring in reinforcements)

New AI behavior sounds interesting.

[superking]

Please look at Sentinel frigate damage again or their cap. I just ended a fairly frustrating game because the AI would sometimes send waves of 450 Sentinel frigate IIs and they just slaughtered everything,

I thought the 'huge wave of a shipcap 9 fleetship' had been fixed 

[Ozymandiaz]

Interesting changes, I will need to test eh anti blobbing thing tho to make some commentd

[Moo]

Just updated to this version from .045 - the AI really does not like my Black Widow golem. It's showing F:42000 by itself!

I was hanging back on .045 because I wanted to finish off killing my existing CPGs. Did that except for the As, so decided to update. I think my life is about to get a lot harder - which is good!

[keith.lamothe]

Please look at Sentinel frigate damage again or their cap. I just ended a fairly frustrating game because the AI would sometimes send waves of 450 Sentinel frigate IIs and they just slaughtered everything

They're not supposed to spawn 450 in a wave, that's the problem, not the actual stats

If you had Advanced Logging on it generated two wave-calculation logs in your RuntimeData directory that are absolutely invaluable for determining how it arrived at the 450 number and where the bug could be; so attaching those would be great.  If you didn't have advanced logging on, can you turn it on and make it happen again?

[wyvern83]

Spirecraft are now limited to a ship cap of two per type of spirecraft. Given that there are 50 different types of spirecraft, this is not a huge restriction (that's 100 different ships right there), but it does prevent some of the worst excesses of the spirecraft lifestyle, so to speak.

eh

some mining enclosures make 4x of them at a time?

I'd also like to know what will happen to existing overage of spirecraft you have already.

Also, how am I supposed to use these in large numbers to help with my system performance if I'm limited to just 2 of every kind, even the lower mark ones. Are spirecraft getting a buff of some kind to help with that?

I'm willing to accept this change but it does present a problem to how I'd hoped to use them in lieu of large 8k+ lag fleets. I agree they need a limit but I may try to finish my two current games before updating.    Though I'll probably update anyway later today.

[keith.lamothe]

Also, how am I supposed to use these in large numbers to help with my system performance if I'm limited to just 2 of every kind, even the lower mark ones. Are spirecraft getting a buff of some kind to help with that?

Well, Chris is the better one to answer, but keep in mind that the limit is per-mark level, so you can actually have 10 of each type (just 2 of each of the five marks).  The total spirecraft you can have is still pretty high.  And it's not like the cap of 2 is in-stone; maybe something like 4 is feasible too.  But that's up to Chris, of course

I'm willing to accept this change but it does present a problem to how I'd hoped to use them in lieu of large 8k+ lag fleets.

8k?  Is that on normal caps with a single homeworld?  We certainly do want to avoid people needing to resort to laggy numbers of ships, just want to understand what you're actually experiencing.

[wyvern83]

Well, Chris is the better one to answer, but keep in mind that the limit is per-mark level, so you can actually have 10 of each type (just 2 of each of the five marks).  The total spirecraft you can have is still pretty high.  And it's not like the cap of 2 is in-stone; maybe something like 4 is feasible too.  But that's up to Chris, of course

As Lance pointed out some of the enclosures create 4 spirecraft, or at least should. I think those should still be allowed as a minimum as it was an interesting choice to make but would still be within a limit.

8k?  Is that on normal caps with a single homeworld?  We certainly do want to avoid people needing to resort to laggy numbers of ships, just want to understand what you're actually experiencing.

No, it's a multi-planet game on normal caps, 80 planets on a snake map with 8 homeworlds which was the max at the time. I wanted to conquer the galaxy and I'm over half way there. It's also the last as I've moved to single planet on low since then but I still wanted to finish it. However I still like taking lots planets as a general rule.

My main concern is that at least some of the spirecraft were supposedly able to take on hundreds or thousands of ships but most are more like 2-3x starships, which I'm ok with. The only one that looks like it could is the newer SC attritioner but even then you'd have to hid them and it'd still take a while. The SC siege tower could come close but only at the higher marks and if you had a lot of them.

So with the new low limit you'd still need large lag fleets to solve all your problems at a certain point. Ex: This campaign and, I fear, the Fallen Spire campaign which I'm intend to finish for the first time now that I'm done with college for the moment. Now I'm not saying you shouldn't have a large fleet, esp. in my case, but if you were trying to get around the lag such large numbers can cause, you'd be out of luck with the new limitation.

[keith.lamothe]

No, it's a multi-planet game on normal caps, 80 planets on a snake map with 8 homeworlds which was the max at the time

Yea, 8 homeworlds will lead to lag fleets, I don't think there's much way around that (playing on low caps helps, of course).

I wanted to conquer the galaxy and I'm over half way there. It's also the last as I've moved to single planet on low since then but I still wanted to finish it. However I still like taking lots planets as a general rule.

I also like the more straightforward conquest approach, that's one of the inspirations behind the Fallen Spire progression

My main concern is that at least some of the spirecraft were supposedly able to take on hundreds or thousands of ships but most are more like 2-3x starships, which I'm ok with. The only one that looks like it could is the newer SC attritioner but even then you'd have to hid them and it'd still take a while. The SC siege tower could come close but only at the higher marks and if you had a lot of them.

My understanding is that Chris intended the spirecraft to be more powerful than starships and less powerful than golems (maybe the most powerful spirecraft being on par with the less powerful golems).  It sounds like they aren't _too_ far off of that intention.  Though we certainly aren't done balancing stuff

So with the new low limit you'd still need large lag fleets to solve all your problems at a certain point. Ex: This campaign and, I fear, the Fallen Spire campaign which I'm intend to finish for the first time now that I'm done with college for the moment. Now I'm not saying you shouldn't have a large fleet, esp. in my case, but if you were trying to get around the lag such large numbers can cause, you'd be out of luck with the new limitation.

I do want to clarify that the Spire Capital Ships in the FS campaign are not spirecraft, and are in no way impacted by this spirecraft-ship-cap change   It simply wouldn't be possible to complete the campaign if you could only have 2 of each size class... well, I shouldn't say that, I'm sure many of you could figure out a way of winning, but it'd be a ton harder.

The bottleneck-firepower counter-spawns, on the other hand, are probably playing absolute havoc with the FS stuff in 4.049, still working out a solution to that.