AI War Beta 5.076 "Clusters Of Pain" Released!

[keith.lamothe]

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edit; just looked at changelog:

All fleet ship caps have been adjusted to be multiples of 8 (generally by rounding down, unless something was 1 away from the next higher multiple, in some cases), except for those fleet ships which don't change caps at different unit cap scales.

    This involved about 5 metric tons of relatively minor changes to health, attack power, metal cost, crystal cost and energy cost. Mostly health and damage didn't change by more than 1% in either direction; m,c,e costs vary a bit more but nothing earthshaking. The numbers are internally arranged in a much better fashion now which should help with other changes going forward.
    The main immediate benefit of this is that the ultra-low-caps setting no longer impacts the balance of fleet ship types whose caps are not multiples of 8, because, well, they are now.
    Turrets still need to be done, of course, but I've had enough swimming-in-numbers for one day.
    Thanks to Hearteater and others for the suggestion.

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I look at that and see tons of work (Human Spire Maws get a 60% dps per cap buff ) and that all of the "Pseudo-Starship Fleetships" now look a bit less like starships.

I think you missed the part that says

except for those fleet ships which don't change caps at different unit cap scales.

  They don't need to be multiples of 8 because their caps don't change when the scale is lowered.  The whole point between making them divisible-by-8 is so that UltraLow caps doesn't impact their balance due to chopping off part of the cap.

Also, the change notes have since been amended to note that the stat changes being within a few percent are referring to the per-cap results, not the individual ship stats.  The idea is that the balance has been maintained pretty close despite the ship cap changes.

[keith.lamothe]

The change-log is looking epic. I say this is going to be the third most epic patch of AI war ever!

Err, not really   Not just a hotfix, true, but I don't think it'd be hard to find more epic patches fairly recently

Are you planning on it to come out tonight, or do you need one more day to "cram" everything you want to get done in it in there?

Depends, I was wanting to get another bonus ship type or two in, after I finish some more bugs, but I might just get it out without the bonus ships and get those out tomorrow.

[Diazo]

I think 10/10 is actually fairly close at this point (in the next version) to where it needs to be, though I'm sure our resident cheesemasters will find some way of breaking that illusion

10/10 can still be won without cheese and I don't think the ship cap change in the next patch will change that. It will affect the player too not just the AI. I will probably win the double 10 Special Forces Captain game next weekend.

Those special forces may surprise you, even without the special-forces-captain part   I haven't seen a 10/10 win since they were made more interesting, though it hasn't been long.

Heh.

I think it is the barracks change, and their subsequent buff to CPAs that are going to be a bigger problem for 10/10 then the special forces change.

I'm not expecting 10,000 ship monsters like my current game to be a regular thing, I got that due to the barracks being added in the middle of my game, but even a 6,000 ship CPA is going to be problematic.

Not that the special forces can be ignored or anything....

D.

[keith.lamothe]

Oh, right, I'd actually forgotten about the truckload of barracks I dumped over all the galaxies, and the CPA buffs.  Those should be more significant than the special forces, yea.  I think Faulty Logic has been working his way to another victory, despite some fairly beefy CPAs, but just the first two thus far, I think.

[platinawolf]

So you handle all waves with a mobile force, and spread out your turrets to support your mobile units against waves?

I only play at 7 / 7.3 so ^^* But I usually have one wormhole I expect trouble from and while I'm gathering the crystals I still have a few worlds that could throw a wave from them unless I pop their gate. But all hostile wormholes are in the same system, just different part of the same system. Once I get all the shards its AI stomping time In the meantime I use mostly my towers to keep safe, together with any modular fortress I've managed to get from my champion as well as a truckload of dyson's (If I'm lucky to get the dyson within 9 jumps) and doomshrooms. Most of my (massive reclaimed) army is offworld to reduce the lag from all those things trying to target stuff.

Uploading savegame if ya wanna take a closer look It's far from perfect and I usually collect more crystals before reaching so far out but with both a Super Terminal and other goodies spread around I cleaned house earlier than usual. At times I do get massive clusters of nasties on my doorstep but its not that bad as long as you keep knocking them down.

[keith.lamothe]

New one

[LordSloth]

In my current singleplayer game (I have a thread open on it), I have a Clusters (Microcosm) map, and I've had the great luck to be in a crosshatch style cluster with two raid engines, hybrid hives, special forces, and gravity drills. This is the first game *I* have ever played where my homeworld had at least four hostile wormholes three hours or so in. It hasn't been so bad, actually. Until I was nearly ready to take out the raid engine, I simply made sure each system I took had four turrets each (of basic, missile, mlrs, laser) along with 4-9 sniper/spider turrets, and one mk1 forcefield, way off of on the edge of the system. My homeworld got the lions share of turrets and forcefields. As long as I went and gathered my entire forces to fight off incoming waves it was fine. It got hairy at one point when the AI started sending waves of armor rotters who just have too much engine health. It was at that point I finally focused on getting my mark two ships to support as well. I did take some extra care maintaining a minimum spare energy level.

There are two ideal places to set up a pair of choke points branching into new clusters. I'm aiming for them now, but given the presence of a broken golem and ARS near each choke, I'll probably duplicate the sniper/spider/logistics satellite system setup to spread out the incoming waves and alert status  reinforcements as well as let me situate a full-fledged spire city hub.

I normally prefer the one warp choke setup a *lot*. But given the initial nasty layout, I'm gonna run with and see how far I can take a spread out approach. It'll probably get slaughtered by the exogalactic waves, but if not maybe it'll help with delaying for final challenging ending instead.

[relmz32]

...
I think you missed the part that says

except for those fleet ships which don't change caps at different unit cap scales.

  They don't need to be multiples of 8 because their caps don't change when the scale is lowered.  The whole point between making them divisible-by-8 is so that UltraLow caps doesn't impact their balance due to chopping off part of the cap.

...

Aww, i think Kieth just called me a dummy.
well, derp-a-derp, that's what happens when excitement overcomes reading.
 

Enjoying the beta so far, i just haven't had much to contribute.  I have a couple ideas for fun of many varieties, but i think its probably out of scope to the expansion, so i will just sit on it for a while.

I also have some off topic rebuttals for others, but i'll sit on that for a while, too.

[keith.lamothe]

Aww, i think Kieth just called me a dummy.

Not at all, you just missed part of the notes