AI War Beta 5.007, "Zombies Are For Eating My Neighbors," Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2011/03/ai-war-beta-5007-zombies-are-for-eating.html

Well!  I've been so focused on A Valley Without Wind for the last month and a half that I really wanted to make sure AI War was getting the love it needs.  Keith has been doing updates for the game the last while, but we haven't had any really big burn-throughs of the mantis idea tracker in a while. 

Yesterday was mostly all about one big desync, so today I wanted to spend one more day in AI War land and accomplish a variety of player-requested stuff, before I head back to AVWW tomorrow.  That's what this release is all about, and it's the hugest one we've had since 5.0 came out.

One of the most notable things about this release is how minor factions and zombies have been tweaked.  Friendly ones will still guard your planets somewhat, but they're also a lot more likely to strike out and help you deal with the AI on nearby planets.  They thus act partly as a force for keeping the AI stalkers down, and for helping you with nearby offensives, rather than just being purely defensive.  The hostile zombies and minor factions have also gotten some improvements, and thus the devourer golem is now better at actually devouring AI ships in most cases, for instance.

Spirecraft Penetrators have gotten quite a nerf, but before you panic remember that nothing is written in stone.  These were clearly game-breaking in the hands of some players, though, so we went with some rather severe changes to work back up from there if this seems like too much.  Some of the players who've seen the notes on this already are pretty optimistic this is a lot closer, though, so that's a good sign.

There have also been not one but two very notable performance improvements.  Once massively reduces the load caused in big battles by gravitational effects, and the other makes control group adding/removing no longer cause crazy lag.  For me, that's also seemingly really speeding up the loading of savegames.

Beyond that, there are a couple dozen other smaller bugfixes and balance tweaks.  Oh, and a message that is sent now whenever an EMP or tachyon detonation occurs, which can help you detect breaches in your defenses when EMP guardians are secretly after you.

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.

[TechSY730]

Already a complaint about the new behavior of zombies and minor faction ships. The resistance ships in my game are indeed throwing themselves into situations where they are massively underpowered to deal with (100 ships can get more powerful than you might think, plus there are plenty of non freed ships that will also chip in to take them out). Worse, they trickle in slowly, instead of waiting until enough of them come around before entering. End result, almost all of the resistance ships patrolling my worlds died within like 5 minutes, because they got suicidally overconfident.

It seems like they should use a variation of the AI stalking mechanic, waiting until enough of them gather so they can enter at the same time. And preferably wait until their firepower is some ratio of the firepower they are going to face. so they don't try move in and try to cut down the threat but only manage to take themselves out without doing much to help out. (The 2:1 like the AI uses is of course going to make them wait too long. Would a .75 firepower from ships planning to enter : 1 firepower of the AI a good minimum build-up?). This should stop a group of 5 resistance ships throwing themselves into a 100 unit strong force on the other side, which will of course very likely just result in them dying without any real impact.

This new behavior is a step in the right direction, but you may of over compensated, BIG time.  

EDIT: However, I love everything else, keep up the good work.

EDIT2: Also, could some sort of retreat logic be implemented for repairable minor faction units? (This would exclude gattlings, as they cannot be repaired, and also exclude zombies, as they are supposed to be stupid) This should also help their average lifetime, and thus help their usefulness.

[x4000]

This sounds about right, actually, if you're loading it up for an existing save where the AI is really entrenched.  The allied minor factions and zombies were always meant to just show up for one battle, help out a minor bit, and then die.  That infinite patrolling was making them a thousand percent more useful than they were supposed to be, but that was done in response to them running off WAY into AI territory in the past and really stirring up the AI.  I view this as something of a middle ground for them.

A variation on the stalking mechanic of the AI would be particularly tricky, because the calculations for the stalking rely heavily on the processing power available to the AI thread, and the AI thread doesn't control these ships in any way.  It's possible some more changes might be needed here, but honestly I think this will work out to be closer than you might expect, long-term.  You'll still wind up with some guardians running around from time to time, but not huge stores of them (definitely my goal), and in the meantime they will put some dents into the surrounding AI planets with threat stalking ships, or aid you in offensive attacks, but they aren't going to win any battles on their own.

That dials them back to about where I want them, maybe slightly weaker than I'd like, maybe not, I'm not sure.

[x4000]

Incidentally, their effectiveness will really vary by save, I suspect.  In the one I was testing with, they went from defending my planet to absolutely scouring an AI planet of all life, then returning to guarding my planets.  This was a save provided by another player, another in-situ case, basically.  That's why I'm not more alarmed by your report, because I think that if they are able to sometimes do scouring that's already plenty powerful, and that should be rare that they can do that, basically.

[TechSY730]

This sounds about right, actually, if you're loading it up for an existing save where the AI is really entrenched.  The allied minor factions and zombies were always meant to just show up for one battle, help out a minor bit, and then die.  That infinite patrolling was making them a thousand percent more useful than they were supposed to be, but that was done in response to them running off WAY into AI territory in the past and really stirring up the AI.  I view this as something of a middle ground for them.

A variation on the stalking mechanic of the AI would be particularly tricky, because the calculations for the stalking rely heavily on the processing power available to the AI thread, and the AI thread doesn't control these ships in any way.  It's possible some more changes might be needed here, but honestly I think this will work out to be closer than you might expect, long-term.  You'll still wind up with some guardians running around from time to time, but not huge stores of them (definitely my goal), and in the meantime they will put some dents into the surrounding AI planets with threat stalking ships, or aid you in offensive attacks, but they aren't going to win any battles on their own.

That dials them back to about where I want them, maybe slightly weaker than I'd like, maybe not, I'm not sure.

Ah, I see. So this was just one of those "old save game adjusting to new mechanics" things; although things may seem pretty bad now, that's due to game restabilizing to the new equilibrium. Once it reaches the new equilibrium, things should seem more reasonable. Sorry for my premature whining.

If minor faction units and behavior continue to be massively underwhelming even after my game adjusts to the new balance, then I'll raise this complaint again.

[x4000]

See my added comment -- it may also just be based on the scenario.  Partly you're absolutely right that it's your savegame trying to reach equilibrium, but whether or not a specific campaign ever will reach that equilibrium is based around playstyle, map orientation, and so forth.

For example, if you have one front door and the AI is stacking up there massively, and you've not done anything to cull the numbers there, and all you've got is dyson gatlings pouring slowly out and wandering around from a few planets back, that might not ever self-stabilize unless the AI stops stalking you and attacks, or you attack them, etc.  Then as the gatlings win some and have time to build up some critical mass while keeping the AI from doing so in return, then the situation slides into new territory, etc.

Honestly, I think this might even add a new style of strategy to the game, in designing situations in which your minor factions and zombies will do your work for you.   It won't happen in every map, but you can definitely stack the deck in their favor, I think.

[Fruden]

 Alright, that was one rough 20 minutes with all my dyson allies committing suicide and that 17000 threat taking its chances but thankfully they still love getting kitted by the cursed golem so now my 15000-20000 threat is back to a more reasonable 4000-5000.

 The hive golem's firepower rating when fully charged is still hilariously over the top though. Its total 84000 firepower rating is more than slightly out of touch with reality. That's equivalent to 84 armored golems or 2100 dysons...

 Also, when i had the massive threat, i would have some carriers with 1000 ships, many carriers with 200 ships, and lots of carriers with 10-50 ships. That was pretty weird.

[zebramatt]

I decided to go for the update, but not before engineering a situation guaranteed to cause the most carnage - my allies just cleared out about half a dozen planets I'd earmarked for my empire; and then cleared out the same again in planets beyond those! I used the time to consolidate my defenses on the major chokepoint worlds and prepare for life without a million Gatlings...

[Echo35]

"Zombies Are For Eating My Neighbors,"

You just HAD to remind me that I own that game didn't you

Looks good though! I'm currently waiting for my new laptop to arrive in the mail and will be returning to heavy amounts of AI War playing after that.

[zoutzakje]

Allright, I'm gonna download the update and try out the new dyson gatling / zombie behaviour. I already finished my last game where my entire defence was based on those 2 (finding a dyson sphere AND a botnet golem on the same planet, 3 hops away from my homeworld ), so I should do fine now. Fighting against tech parasite now, so can't turn most of it's ships into zombies anyways

EDIT: woot, I noticed this just now:
Fixed a problem with too-low throttles on minor faction / zombie ships preventing them from even attacking at all in some cases.
Thanks to zoutzakje for reporting.

first time my name shows up in the release notes (Is having a party to celebrate it)

[BobTheJanitor]

Incidentally, their effectiveness will really vary by save, I suspect.  In the one I was testing with, they went from defending my planet to absolutely scouring an AI planet of all life, then returning to guarding my planets.  This was a save provided by another player, another in-situ case, basically.  That's why I'm not more alarmed by your report, because I think that if they are able to sometimes do scouring that's already plenty powerful, and that should be rare that they can do that, basically.

It sounds to me (jumping to conclusions, of course) that you had a pre-change save where the allied ships had already had plenty of time under the old behavior to build up numbers. In a scenario under the old system where you had 250 gatlings patrolling a world, of course they're going to turn the next planet over into a parking lot if you suddenly shift them to the new behavior. What seems likely to happen with the new behavior is that a dyson will spawn a gatling, it will slowly travel through all your worlds until it finds a planet with 100+ threat, and then it will jump in there and die because there's a big stalking force on the wormhole. It doesn't seem like they'll ever get time to build up so much.

That said, I haven't had time to play with this new behavior at all yet. And my current game doesn't have a dyson sphere in it, although it does have resistance fighters. Maybe I'll see how they work out. And botnet zombies will probably be ok, since they usually spawn all at once in big groups.

[x4000]

first time my name shows up in the release notes (Is having a party to celebrate it)

It sounds to me (jumping to conclusions, of course) that you had a pre-change save where the allied ships had already had plenty of time under the old behavior to build up numbers. ... What seems likely to happen with the new behavior is that a dyson will spawn a gatling, it will slowly travel through all your worlds until it finds a planet with 100+ threat, and then it will jump in there and die because there's a big stalking force on the wormhole. It doesn't seem like they'll ever get time to build up so much.

Well, bear in mind that when you get to a dyson planet, often it's isolated and in a place where there is literally no threat surrounding it.  So once you take it, it's got quite a while to "power up," before it ever does anything.  In other circumstances where it comes in connected to your main body of planets, and there is a bunch of threat piled up already, sure it will probably be more like what you said.

On the other hand, how many planets really even have 100 threat on them?  A lot of people tend to bottleneck, which leads to most planets having approximately no threat, and a few having thousands.  So there's also somewhat good odds that the gatlings will wander quite a bit, building up defensive numbers, before hitting those few that have all the threat on them.  If you bottleneck on a single planet, you'll wind up with dozens, but not thousands, of gatlings wandering around protectively, I'd wager.

Of course, it will take waaay more data to figure this out for sure either way, because emergent systems can be... unexpected.  My expectation is that this will be effective some of the time, not effective some of the time, and really effective or ineffective a very small percentage of the time.  Which, if true, sounds about right.

[zoutzakje]

I haven't tested this out yet, since I expanded the exact opposite way of the dyson sphere in my new game... but if gatlings turn out to suicide to much with the 100 threat thing, is it maybe an idea to not let them go on the offensive until there are let's say 20 of them gathered on a planet? A massive stalking force can still easily wipe out 20 gatlings, but then at least they'll have some use instead of just sending 1 to it's death every few seconds.
but again, I haven't tried it out yet. I'll get to that tonight, time to expand towards the dyson.

[x4000]

It's a possibility, but I am worried about making them too overpowered.  I don't really want the gatlings killing off planets or large chunks of planets except in really rare circumstances.  I intend to collect a few weeks or months worth of data before changing them again unless some great epiphany happens or there's something that is just clearly WAY off.  But -- we'll see.

[Vinraith]

I just loaded up my save, I think the dyson gatlings are going to win the game for me. I may not actually need a fleet. I had about 250 stored up, they are casually knocking out every AI ship on every border world and taking few to no losses. I don't think "suiciding" is a concern.