AI War Beta 5.084 "Diplomatic Incident" Released!

[Draco18s]

Depends on how cooperative it is.

Bad code never cooperates.

[keith.lamothe]

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

[TechSY730]

Spotted this in the 5.085 notes:

    The special-difficulty scaling (used for exos and other superweapon stuff, mainly, but some other stuff as well) is now higher on higher difficulties.

Um, I was under the impression that people are feeling that exo waves and other stuff using this logic (especially "early carrier pop" spawns) feels "hax" high on the high difficulty levels, to an unfun magnitude. Won't this make it even worse? Was my impression just off?

[keith.lamothe]

Um, I was under the impression that people are feeling that exo waves and other stuff using this logic (especially "early carrier pop" spawns) feels "hax" high on the high difficulty levels, to an unfun magnitude. Won't this make it even worse? Was my impression just off?

The main reason for it is that golems are still stomping the AI way more than the golems-hard exos are stomping the player on those higher difficulties.

And the consequences of early-popping a carrier are supposed to be roughly as bad as the ships it's carrying, and are entirely avoidable (with the fix to make ally-factions and player zombies not shoot at them, at least).

If it's too high I can adjust it back downward, we'll see.  It isn't the only thing I'm intending to do in the near future for the high difficulties, just the one quick thing I had time for in the midst of all the scenario work.

[chemical_art]

Um, I was under the impression that people are feeling that exo waves and other stuff using this logic (especially "early carrier pop" spawns) feels "hax" high on the high difficulty levels, to an unfun magnitude. Won't this make it even worse? Was my impression just off?

The main reason for it is that golems are still stomping the AI way more than the golems-hard exos are stomping the player on those higher difficulties.

And the consequences of early-popping a carrier are supposed to be roughly as bad as the ships it's carrying, and are entirely avoidable (with the fix to make ally-factions and player zombies not shoot at them, at least).

If it's too high I can adjust it back downward, we'll see.  It isn't the only thing I'm intending to do in the near future for the high difficulties, just the one quick thing I had time for in the midst of all the scenario work.

I find the golems > exo waves occur in low aip games.

The solution to your patch of greater exo waves is lower aip games.

So you are encouraging the edge case you are trying to address while harming the mainstream much harder.

[keith.lamothe]

The solution to your patch of greater exo waves is lower aip games.

So you are encouraging the edge case you are trying to address while harming the mainstream much harder.

For a while now exo waves have used a minimum-effective-aip rule similar to what was used (later) in the cpa logic (in this case it's 50 + 1-per-6-minutes to a max of 250).  Holding your AIP below that effective minimum obviously helps you not get any harder than necessary, but it doesn't stop the accumulation from speeding up.

So it hasn't rewarded ultra-low aip for a while, really.

[TechSY730]

Um, I was under the impression that people are feeling that exo waves and other stuff using this logic (especially "early carrier pop" spawns) feels "hax" high on the high difficulty levels, to an unfun magnitude. Won't this make it even worse? Was my impression just off?

The main reason for it is that golems are still stomping the AI way more than the golems-hard exos are stomping the player on those higher difficulties.

And the consequences of early-popping a carrier are supposed to be roughly as bad as the ships it's carrying, and are entirely avoidable (with the fix to make ally-factions and player zombies not shoot at them, at least).

If it's too high I can adjust it back downward, we'll see.  It isn't the only thing I'm intending to do in the near future for the high difficulties, just the one quick thing I had time for in the midst of all the scenario work.

I find the golems > exo waves occur in low aip games.

The solution to your patch of greater exo waves is lower aip games.

So you are encouraging the edge case you are trying to address while harming the mainstream much harder.

So I guess would be ideal would be a new formula (possibly only for higher difficulties) that is > the current formula for lower AIPs, but converges to the current (5.084) formula as AIP goes up.
I can try to propose such a formula if you want. I'll even toss in a simplistic proof showing the limit of the new formula converges to the old formula for no extra charge. 

Actually, that might be nifty for wave sizes as well, but in return, bumping down the exponent in the wave size for higher difficulties from 1.1 to 1.05 or 1.075 or something like that.

EDIT: Ninja'd by Keith. It is already doing a super-linear increase for lower AIPs by a piecewise function, in this case constant <50 AIP. (It's super linear for less than 50 AIP because the values it would of returned for <50 is less than the constant it returns instead for these ranges)
Still, my proposal for a similar revision for wave sizes still holds.

[Faulty Logic]

I don't think that carrier firepower when popped should vary with difficulty, because they are always supposed to represent the (static) firepower of their contents.

I like the exo-strength increase (assuming it is reasonable, in the x1.5 range), but I agree with Wanderer's old idea that the golem exos should vary with both AIP and the number of golems captured (mainly because players shouldn't be able to get a fair deal on 10/10).

I find the golems > exo waves occur in low aip games.

The solution to your patch of greater exo waves is lower aip games.

So you are encouraging the edge case you are trying to address while harming the mainstream much harder.

I disagree.
Playing low AIP (or the floor) against exos means you are trying to defend a fragmented empire, and have fewer resources to defend against it. I find playing with exo-sources is a strong motivation to take more planets, not fewer.

Edit: ouch, double ninja'd.

[chemical_art]

The solution to your patch of greater exo waves is lower aip games.

So you are encouraging the edge case you are trying to address while harming the mainstream much harder.

For a while now exo waves have used a minimum-effective-aip rule similar to what was used (later) in the cpa logic (in this case it's 50 + 1-per-6-minutes to a max of 250).  Holding your AIP below that effective minimum obviously helps you not get any harder than necessary, but it doesn't stop the accumulation from speeding up.

So it hasn't rewarded ultra-low aip for a while, really.

Interesting. I guess the exo waves do need a boost then, for they went ridiculously slow on the build up, but the max power still hurt big time.

[keith.lamothe]

I can redo the carrier-pop logic; the problem earlier was that the results were not sufficient to make it much of a decision whether to pop or not: just always pop.  I don't want that

The other ideas of unit combining (having a "super version" of each ship that's 10x as the health and attack), etc, wouldn't really be workable code-wise.

In general I think the exo logic isn't valuing ships properly.  It does it well enough, but I think the higher-cost ships are not actually worth nearly the number of equivalent bombers, for example.  The silver lining is that the player doesn't really notice, but it becomes noticeable on the macro-level when exo difficulty increases much more slowly at the higher levels.

[TechSY730]

I can redo the carrier-pop logic; the problem earlier was that the results were not sufficient to make it much of a decision whether to pop or not: just always pop.  I don't want that

The other ideas of unit combining (having a "super version" of each ship that's 10x as the health and attack), etc, wouldn't really be workable code-wise.

In general I think the exo logic isn't valuing ships properly.  It does it well enough, but I think the higher-cost ships are not actually worth nearly the number of equivalent bombers, for example.  The silver lining is that the player doesn't really notice, but it becomes noticeable on the macro-level when exo difficulty increases much more slowly at the higher levels.

Yea, many of the exo-costs could use some double checking. It isn't terrible right now, but a few odd cases are enough to sometimes really throw off balance.

[KDR_11k]

The other ideas of unit combining (having a "super version" of each ship that's 10x as the health and attack), etc, wouldn't really be workable code-wise.

So no MkX units then?

[Hearteater]

I think he was referring to this idea.  Which is sad, because it is such a nice solution if I do say so myself .  I'd assumed it was possible to derive a new ShipStack class from the Ship class that handles all the stacking issues, but can be passed around like a single ship.  You'd need a few tweaks for the base Ship, mainly giving it a ShipsInStack method that always returns 1 and adjust code elsewhere to use that return value when counting ships (like when displaying the total number of ships the player has boxed).  But there are numerous reasons that type of solution could be an issue in the code.

[Trandrin]

Question in regards to the threat of a exo wave. Is it normal for them to be following golems at all times. I saw this on my current game vs chaos. I would have a golem or 5 in a system. Wave would jump in and make beelines to them. This allowed me a far greater time to shoot at them then if they just tried to straight up crush my static targets such as the command center. As I could just move the double speed golems away from the enemy ships.

Maybe having them try to actually kill stationery stuff on planet then move on to next player world and being weakened number or speed wise would be beneficial. Would prevent the fun of running circles around engine dead waves slowly picking them apart all on one world. While still allowing the player to chip away at the numbers or straight up crush it if they are that prepared?

[keith.lamothe]

I think he was referring to this idea.  Which is sad, because it is such a nice solution if I do say so myself

Yes, and I knew you'd bring it up again (it would be a pretty good idea if it worked), so I included the mention .

But there are numerous reasons that type of solution could be an issue in the code.

The main reason is that the performance implications of having virtual/abstract members and inheritance involved in the ForegroundObject class, particularly for commonly-referenced members like health and attack power... it would be brutal.