AI War Beta 6.006 "The Pain Train" Released!

[LaughingThesaurus]

The scouts alerting a planet thing reminds me when I tried to slip scouts by in a sacrificial transport. The AI was like "SEND THE BATTLESHIPS" and wiped me out in seconds flat with a swarm of released mark IV ships.
Seriously.

[keith.lamothe]

The scouts alerting a planet thing reminds me when I tried to slip scouts by in a sacrificial transport. The AI was like "SEND THE BATTLESHIPS" and wiped me out in seconds flat with a swarm of released mark IV ships.
Seriously.

Transports are far too tempting as target practice.

[Lancefighter]

speaking of alerting scouts.

are privacy clusters never seeded? I seem to recall playing a few games with those back when they were released, but basically nothing since.

[Faulty Logic]

Special Forces now combines ships into carriers if SF non-carrier'd population gets over 3000 (aims to bring it down to 1500 or so). These carriers, and any ships they deploy, will all be Special Forces and follow that logic.
 Thanks to Dressari and Bruteforce123 for reporting a case where there were so many SF ships flying around it was causing massive lag just from that.
 

Interesting. On one hand, the carrier part of SF will be incredibly slow to get anywhere. On the other, I can't preempively nuke the SF and get all of them anymore.

With carrier nuke immunity, nukes are practically worthless. Please help these poor, innocent warheads.

[TechSY730]

Two things.
One, do special forces inside carriers count towards the SF cap? If so, would 7-8 thousand SF ships (only about the first 2000 or so being loose) normal for AIP 213?

Two, SF carriers don't seem to auto pop once the SF and the ship count of their current planet fall below their threshold, making it rather annoying to deal with them. (I have a save of this I can post later tonight.)

[Lancefighter]

Yeah, that number is right (if you ignore them a lot).

Carriers in general should pop when the population n the planet gets so low (1k i think?). if theyre not doing that then its a bug.

[keith.lamothe]

Two things.
One, do special forces inside carriers count towards the SF cap? If so, would 7-8 thousand SF ships (only about the first 2000 or so being loose) normal for AIP 213?

The stuff in the carriers counts towards the SF strength cap, yes.  There is no more count-cap as the carriers will now step in to keep that under control.  8k sounds quite possible on 213 AIP.  If you're curious you can check the log to see its actual strength cap and how that's computed.

Two, SF carriers don't seem to auto pop once the SF and the ship count of their current planet fall below their threshold, making it rather annoying to deal with them. (I have a save of this I can post later tonight.)

SF carriers shouldn't behave differently than other carriers with regard to auto-popping.  I don't recall if the threshold is actually per-planet in general, though.

[TechSY730]

OK. I have the save where SF carriers don't auto-pop.

I also threw in a case where the SF just hang around the border planet, instead of joining up with their newly spawned SF elsewhere and finding some other planet to hang around on in waiting.
If you wait around long enough for the glut of threat ships from the recent CPA to become threat fleet, they will just hang around to instead of find some other planet to wait for an opening.
Maybe trickle of dyson gattlings coming in to try to take a stab at the threat is fooling both SF and threat fleet that the planet is still under attack?

Both saves have the same planet with interesting behavior. Let me know if you want me to copy either one to mantis.




As you may notice, one of the AIs is the Special Forces Captain, which in addition to getting tons of SF guard posts, doesn't it also get a buff in SF spawn rate beyond just what the large number of SF posts would imply? If so, that would explain how it built up to 7000 (or at least it was 7-8 thousand before I beacheaded to get rid of a bunch of them) built up so quickly, and why this is like the 3rd time this game that special forces have built up to the point to be a major impediment to progress. It sort of is the SF Captains job.

[contingencyplan]

As a quick bug report, the game unpauses when I use the Custom Search (Narrow). For my search query (just trying it out), I typed in "Orbital" and it unpaused the game as I did so. It doesn't always unpause from what I can tell, but it may be related to the number of "dropped" items from the list. I can experiment around a bit more if it'd be helpful.

That's really bizarre.  If you'd pressed "P" (or whatever, if you rebound the key) I could understand how it might bug that way, but not with what you listed.  I'll make a note to look at it, but if you could put it in mantis so I don't lose track, that'd help, thanks

Here go, sorry for the delay: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=9917

EDIT: Also, are scouts supposed to trigger Eyes? (Yes, I'm playing a 16HW game, but still --- seems to be counter to their purpose.)

It's based purely on unit count, so yea.  For that matter, I think 50+ scouts actually alert a planet.  At some point it's kinda like a bunch of unarmed mimes: sure, they look harmless, but what is going on here?

Yeah, I've seen planets going on alert due to the number of scouts, so I guess that makes sense. Guess I just have to hope that it's not a Nuke Eye on a AI-chokepoint planet.

[KDR_11k]

Nuke eye has a timer IIRC, the scouts will disperse long before that ticks down.

[contingencyplan]

Nuke eye has a timer IIRC, the scouts will disperse long before that ticks down.

Oh, I know, but the thought of nuking a planet via scouts just struck me as funny.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Nuke eye has a timer IIRC, the scouts will disperse long before that ticks down.

Oh, I know, but the thought of nuking a planet via scouts just struck me as funny.

AI's gotta be a bit sensitive for that to happen. SEND THE NUKES, SCOUTS ARE INTRUDING

[Winge]

You would finish this change before I got the Train Master achievements...oh well, more FUN later, I suppose...

[keith.lamothe]

You would finish this change before I got the Train Master achievements...oh well, more FUN later, I suppose...

You only have to put them on intensity 4 for the achievements, and that's not all that tough.  If you're worried about it you can put your homeworld in a cul-de-sac that the trains will never go through, and try to set up a similar situation for your main defenses.  The cargo-spawns will be pretty infrequent until you're at a level where you can probably deal with the offensive component of them fairly easily.

[Don Carsto]

Hello,

played now 4 games (8/8) with one astro train plot level 10 and lost all the games very soon cause:

in the first 3 games the AI cargo trains constructed 2 golems and 1 hunter-killer and they very fast destroy my home command station cause I never had effective weapons against them in this early game state.
Now I though I am very clever and played a game with zenith mirrors, maybe they can kill golems and huinter killer quick (want to check this). But I never can test it cause:

A nuke train destroyed my home system (without the command station but the rest) without warning.
But in the list of enemy ships (right side of the screen) there only was a destroyed tachion train, not a nuke train.
Maybe its a bug that no warning appears and no destroyed nuke train was there?

It is really hard to play with the new train plot, cause they move so quick and are so hard to kill.
But I like that. But I hate the 2 golems and the 1 hunter-killer. Thats to hard.
Why the AI dont build up Ion cannons ore some other structure. Why it build up ships and golems?

Wishes,
DC