AI War Beta 5.087 "Brawl Royale" Released!

[Aklyon]

I would do that but I'm pretty sure offline is indeed ze white box.

[orzelek]

It has a hint when you mouse over it... so it's kind of self explanatory

[keith.lamothe]

It has a hint when you mouse over it... so it's kind of self explanatory

Try your hand at tutorial design sometime.  I've probably flattened my forehead somewhat from the amount of headdesk due to not being able to assume that people will mouseover something they don't understand

It's not necessarily a problem on their end, but that doesn't stop it from hurting

[LaughingThesaurus]

Well, I figure someone was referencing something that I didn't get. That happens approximately 212% of the time around my circle of friends, so I'm used to it.

Now tutorial design...
I honestly want to try my hand at tutorial design. I remember doing that a fair bit for games that I've played that have easy to use level editors. Never distributed anything, because anybody who played the game knew how to play it. But, I did just to play around with all of the cool tools the game had and such. Knytt Stories is actually a very good example, since it's got a fair number of cool items to experiment with. But, I can't imagine approaching tutorial design for a game like AI War. There's too much to cover, really. You have to just give the player something adequate and hope that he or she manages to figure out the rest. That, or make like a 12 hour long tutorial.
...I need my level editor now. Where is a level editor? =(
Maybe Minecraft is called for, later today.

[Toranth]

Just finished a game with the last few patches of content, and have some comments.

The new Core Guardposts?  Ouch.  The Wrath Lance is awesome to watch, and painful.  The other two each do a good job of crush a common tactic:  The Teuthida is the fleetball-destroyer and must be raided first.  The Grav Reactor, however, is the anti-raider:  Any small group of ships will be stopped dead and swarmed by the other defenders.


On the Ancient Shadows front, a little more tweaking may be required for scenario rewards.  I had some bad RNG luck there.  I didn't get the Zenith hull until after nebula 9, or a Spire hull until after nebula 14.  I'm fortunate that I unlocked HBCs after nebula 5, because otherwise all the Heavy weapon modules would have been for hull lines I couldn't access.  Missiles are good at the beginning, but by the time you get to scenario 7 or 8, they just don't cut it anymore.  I tried several times to finish those last three scenarios, and was crushed every time.  Replaying them with HBCs was successful.
On the other hand, I did get to see what happens if you play them in sequence while losing - that was a great touch.  The final battle was amazing(-ly one sided against me).


Finally, while 5.084 toned down the bonus Exo-waves get from Champions, I'll say again, I still think this is a problem.  With 1HW, 8 Champions, and a single Spire city, the Exo was still charging at 7.5% per minute, 1 Exo-wave every 14 minutes.  This IS an improvement; it used to be 10%/minute. 
For comparison, though, a 12HW, zero Champion, 7 Spire city Exowave was charging at only 2% per minute - 50 minutes between Exo-waves.

[TechSY730]

Finally, while 5.084 toned down the bonus Exo-waves get from Champions, I'll say again, I still think this is a problem.  With 1HW, 8 Champions, and a single Spire city, the Exo was still charging at 7.5% per minute, 1 Exo-wave every 14 minutes.  This IS an improvement; it used to be 10%/minute. 
For comparison, though, a 12HW, zero Champion, 7 Spire city Exowave was charging at only 2% per minute - 50 minutes between Exo-waves.

Woa, woa, WHAT?

Another champion is adding MORE to the fallen spire exo than another homeworld/player? (or in this case 1 HW + 8 Champs > 12 HW)
That seems like a straight up bug...

[keith.lamothe]

The new Core Guardposts?  Ouch.

You're welcome

On the Ancient Shadows front, a little more tweaking may be required for scenario rewards.  I had some bad RNG luck there.  I didn't get the Zenith hull until after nebula 9, or a Spire hull until after nebula 14.

Hmm, I dunno how that happened.  It doesn't give a new-race-hull if it's already giving you a new-size-hull, and there are only 3 sizes to give; that leaves 6 rewards out of the (first) 9 scenarios.  There are not 6 scenarios where your allies are all human and/or neinzul (iirc there are 3), so I think the only way you can miss the other two race hulls is to lose the scenarios where you're allied with spire and/or zenith.  Unless I'm mistaken, of course.

In general if you lose scenarios you fall behind a bit (though losses do not cause a scale-up of later scenarios, only wins), but that's part of the point: they aren't just flat bonuses, they can help or hurt you depending on whether you do well.

Missiles are good at the beginning, but by the time you get to scenario 7 or 8, they just don't cut it anymore

Missiles are pretty good against starbases all the way to the end, but yea, there are cooler toys out there.

On the other hand, I did get to see what happens if you play them in sequence while losing - that was a great touch.  The final battle was amazing(-ly one sided against me).

Yea, you'd have had to pulled off something pretty impressive to win that if you'd lost a lot of earlier ones, though it wouldn't surprise me if someone had sufficient cheesemastery for the purpose.

Finally, while 5.084 toned down the bonus Exo-waves get from Champions, I'll say again, I still think this is a problem.  With 1HW, 8 Champions, and a single Spire city, the Exo was still charging at 7.5% per minute, 1 Exo-wave every 14 minutes.  This IS an improvement; it used to be 10%/minute. 
For comparison, though, a 12HW, zero Champion, 7 Spire city Exowave was charging at only 2% per minute - 50 minutes between Exo-waves.

I think there's some confusion here: the max-base-budget and charge-rate of FS exos are based entirely on the number of spire city structures you have.  Nothing else.  All homeworld-count and champion-count (and difficulty, and handicap) do is multiply the base budget when the AI is actually allocating the points into a real exo.  They don't affect the interval between exos at all.

[keith.lamothe]

New one

[Toranth]

On the Ancient Shadows front, a little more tweaking may be required for scenario rewards.  I had some bad RNG luck there.  I didn't get the Zenith hull until after nebula 9, or a Spire hull until after nebula 14.

Hmm, I dunno how that happened.  It doesn't give a new-race-hull if it's already giving you a new-size-hull, and there are only 3 sizes to give; that leaves 6 rewards out of the (first) 9 scenarios.  There are not 6 scenarios where your allies are all human and/or neinzul (iirc there are 3), so I think the only way you can miss the other two race hulls is to lose the scenarios where you're allied with spire and/or zenith.  Unless I'm mistaken, of course.

In general if you lose scenarios you fall behind a bit (though losses do not cause a scale-up of later scenarios, only wins), but that's part of the point: they aren't just flat bonuses, they can help or hurt you depending on whether you do well.

I wasn't losing any of those early scenarios, and on the second run-through with HBCs, I won all scenarios.  I think it was just giving me modules instead of hull-types on those scenarios where I was eligible for the new hulls.  I certainly didn't fail/miss all Spire-related scenarios until #14!  (In fact, #13 gave me no rewards at all).

Missiles are good at the beginning, but by the time you get to scenario 7 or 8, they just don't cut it anymore

Missiles are pretty good against starbases all the way to the end, but yea, there are cooler toys out there.

Missiles are still good against starbases, yes, but not against the hordes of units that need to be killed to prevent your allies from being obliterated - they lack a Heavy multiplier.  That needs something a little nastier (Rail clusters, Photon Lances, HBCs, Heat Beams, Plasma Cannons).

Finally, while 5.084 toned down the bonus Exo-waves get from Champions, I'll say again, I still think this is a problem.  With 1HW, 8 Champions, and a single Spire city, the Exo was still charging at 7.5% per minute, 1 Exo-wave every 14 minutes.  This IS an improvement; it used to be 10%/minute. 
For comparison, though, a 12HW, zero Champion, 7 Spire city Exowave was charging at only 2% per minute - 50 minutes between Exo-waves.

I think there's some confusion here: the max-base-budget and charge-rate of FS exos are based entirely on the number of spire city structures you have.  Nothing else.  All homeworld-count and champion-count (and difficulty, and handicap) do is multiply the base budget when the AI is actually allocating the points into a real exo.  They don't affect the interval between exos at all.

Indeed, I seem to be confused.  Why, then, would 1 complete Spire city cause a faster charge rate than 6 complete Spire cities?

[TechSY730]

Finally, while 5.084 toned down the bonus Exo-waves get from Champions, I'll say again, I still think this is a problem.  With 1HW, 8 Champions, and a single Spire city, the Exo was still charging at 7.5% per minute, 1 Exo-wave every 14 minutes.  This IS an improvement; it used to be 10%/minute. 
For comparison, though, a 12HW, zero Champion, 7 Spire city Exowave was charging at only 2% per minute - 50 minutes between Exo-waves.

I think there's some confusion here: the max-base-budget and charge-rate of FS exos are based entirely on the number of spire city structures you have.  Nothing else.  All homeworld-count and champion-count (and difficulty, and handicap) do is multiply the base budget when the AI is actually allocating the points into a real exo.  They don't affect the interval between exos at all.

Indeed, I seem to be confused.  Why, then, would 1 complete Spire city cause a faster charge rate than 6 complete Spire cities?

Remember, the status thingy states percentage of buildup needed for the next exo, NOT absolute point accumulation.

For example, with some completely made up numbers:
If at 1 city, if it charged at 10 points / minute, and needs 100 points to launch an exo wave, then that would require 10 minutes to fully charge, reporting 10% gain in progress every minute.
If at 5 cities, if it charged at 40 points / minute, and needs 500 points to launch an exo wave, then that would require 12.5 minutes to fully charge, reporting 8% gain in progress every minute, even though the absolute rate has gone up. Yes, the waves come slightly less often, but they come with 5x the strength.

Also, IIRC, the number of points needed to launch an exo wave goes up with each wave (eventually hitting a ceiling). That means that, barring any other chamge, every exo waves starts coming in slower (to a point) even though build up rate is the same, but when they do come, it comes in stronger each time (again, to a point).

Thus, it could be that even though 6 cities are accumulating exo-points much, much faster, the waves may be coming in a bit slower, and thus reporting less percentage progression per minute.

There probably needs to be a log describing this in more detail though, so we can have some hard evidince if we think something is fishy with the strength cutoffs and/or build-up rates.

[keith.lamothe]

I think it was just giving me modules instead of hull-types on those scenarios where I was eligible for the new hulls.

No, hull rewards take priority over module rewards.  It always tries to give a new hull size if one's possible, if not then a new hull race, and if not that either it adds an extra module to whatever other rewards. 

(In fact, #13 gave me no rewards at all).

That doesn't make sense; do you have a save before winning that one so I can test the reward logic there?  Or a save before winning a spire-granting scenario where you don't have the spire hull before winning it, and after winning it you're given no hull at all?

[Bossman]

Indeed, I seem to be confused.  Why, then, would 1 complete Spire city cause a faster charge rate than 6 complete Spire cities?

Because the FS exos start off small: 10,000 points, with a cap of 60,000 points per city and galactic capital. The exos charge at 250 points/minute per city hub, 125 points/minute per city structure and 1000 points/minute for the capital. So the first exo shows up within 40 minutes based on how built up the city is, probably in the 20 minute range if you start building structures ASAP.

Each subsequent exo is 25% bigger than the previous until it reaches the cap. That means the second is 12,500, which takes 13-50 minutes. The third is 15,652, or 16-63 minutes. It takes nine exos to reach the first city's cap, three for the second city's, two each for the third and fourth cities, then one exo for every new city and the capital. When it reaches the current cap, the exos will arrive once an hour if all of your cities are developed.

[Cinth]

(In fact, #13 gave me no rewards at all).

That doesn't make sense; do you have a save before winning that one so I can test the reward logic there?  Or a save before winning a spire-granting scenario where you don't have the spire hull before winning it, and after winning it you're given no hull at all?

I have found this to be true if the scenario in question has no qualifying reward to give. Such as, no new hull size, no new hull, and modules of the type required have all been awarded previously.

With 15 scenarios it is entirely possible to have all the rewards from one faction type but not another. The repetition of scenarios causes this. I would full expect situations like this to pop up from scenarios 10-15.

[Toranth]

I think it was just giving me modules instead of hull-types on those scenarios where I was eligible for the new hulls.

No, hull rewards take priority over module rewards.  It always tries to give a new hull size if one's possible, if not then a new hull race, and if not that either it adds an extra module to whatever other rewards. 

(In fact, #13 gave me no rewards at all).

That doesn't make sense; do you have a save before winning that one so I can test the reward logic there?  Or a save before winning a spire-granting scenario where you don't have the spire hull before winning it, and after winning it you're given no hull at all?

I have a save after Nebula #9 (Unlocked BBs) and immediately after nebula #13 (no Spire hull).  Nothing inbetween, though.  I can try to replay up to #13 again, and see if I can duplicate the problem, if you'd like.

Looks like the Zenith hull wasn't #9, it was either #7 or #8 (Didn't have it after #6, did before #9).

(In fact, #13 gave me no rewards at all).

That doesn't make sense; do you have a save before winning that one so I can test the reward logic there?  Or a save before winning a spire-granting scenario where you don't have the spire hull before winning it, and after winning it you're given no hull at all?

I have found this to be true if the scenario in question has no qualifying reward to give. Such as, no new hull size, no new hull, and modules of the type required have all been awarded previously.

With 15 scenarios it is entirely possible to have all the rewards from one faction type but not another. The repetition of scenarios causes this. I would full expect situations like this to pop up from scenarios 10-15.

This may have been the case for #13.  It certainly was for #15.

[Cinth]

Just remember, you won't get a new hull type on scenarios that give out the larger hull sizes.