Haha, yea, that could get pretty nasty. I wonder if there's enough stuffed away in those barracks to supply 10k ships.
There certainly was.
Good to know the barracks change achieved its purpose, then
I was wondering how to get the population up high enough for truly effective CPAs without bogging down the game (both CPA and normal-defensive-response) with thousands of extra reinforcements, etc. I think the barracks are a step in the right direction, at least.
The CPA ships all head to the same world somehow and combine into 9 carriers with escorts, which then stay nice and grouped up on their path my homeworld.
Owies, I'm done.
Yea, sounds like pain to me. In theory you might be able to fragment that a bit by popping a carrier or two earlier and using gravs/FFs to "strain" out the ships flying under their own power (the carriers can fly through the FFs, though their guns cannot ignore them). If you get the carriers by themselves while they're under attack I believe one will automatically pop to deploy its contents, so you can rinse, repeat.
The problem, of course, is getting any kind of gravs/FFs/whatever anywhere in effective range of that stack without it summarily
melting. 9 full carriers probably have H/K level firepower, all combined.
effectiveAIPForCPAPurposes = this.AIProgressionLevelEffective = 25
since diff > 7, numberOfSecondsPerPointOfMinimumAIPForCPAPurposes = 360 + ( (FInt)60 * ( (FInt)7 - this.AIDifficulty ) ).IntValue = 180
minimumAIPForCPAPurposes = Game.Instance.GameSecond / numberOfSecondsPerPointOfMinimumAIPForCPAPurposes = 233
effectiveAIPForCPAPurposes = Max(effectiveAIPForCPAPurposes,minimumAIPForCPAPurposes) = 233
Yep, that's one of the key changes: low AIP still saves you from just about everything in the base game (waves, reinforcements, etc), but CPAs will have a minimum "boss fight" intensity when they do happen. This is the AI saying "ok, I've sent a few dozen waves out with the mission 'find out what happened to the last one' so it's time for a little spring cleaning"
I've found that many players can effectively cheese
any oncoming AI attack so long as they have enough breathing room, but this should give folks a run for their money.
It's tied fairly heavily to difficulty so a 7 or 7.6 game isn't going to get hammered too hard there. If your AIP had already been 233+ you wouldn't have noticed (because you'd be dead, due to having 233 AIP on 10/10, but I digress). On Diff 7 the "wouldn't notice the different point" would be about 117 AIP, I think, and I imagine most diff 7 games have 117 AIP by the eleventh hour.
difficultyFactor = ( this.AIDifficulty * 2 * this.GetHandicapMultiplier() ) / ( 13 - this.AIDifficulty ) : 3.33
Actually a typo in there from an earlier version: the *2 is no longer happening in the math; fixed the typo for the next version.
simulateMaxTimeWaveFactor = Mat.One + ( ( this.AIDifficulty * 2 ) / ( ( 14 - this.AIDifficulty ) * 3 ) ) : 2.67
simulateDoubleWaveFactor = 2
This is the game making
sure the CPA won't be smaller than the wave attacks you've been facing
So it simulates two max-time waves.
simulateDifficultySpecificWaveSizeMultiplier = 4.5
This is taken straight from the wave size calcs: it's 4.5 on 10, 2.25 on 7, etc. All in all, difficulty hammers you on most of the steps in here, for a combined effect that is quite... educational.
The Achilles' heel here is that those barracks are finite, and if you'd had both the earlier CPAs (probably at 3000 and 6000 ships, respectively) and popped some barracks here and there you might have been able to empty out its "reserves", at which point we're back down to "4 ships have been freed" CPAs
But one thing at a time.
