AI War Beta 6.007-6.009 "Burying The Hatchet" Released!

[Orelius]

Wow, the new enclaves are horrifyingly powerful, even on intensity 4.  I eventually got so many enclaves loitering on my worlds that I got 8000 youngling reinforcements whenever the AI sneezed.

[chemical_art]

Bloody distractions, causing a mouth between updates 

[keith.lamothe]

Bloody distractions, causing a mouth between updates 

Yea, it's been a while   It was a good time for a break, though.

[Eternaly_Lost]

Bloody distractions, causing a mouth between updates 

Yea, it's been a while   It was a good time for a break, though.

Nice break, but that one change on patch .010 has been taunting me. I have save files that I load up and 20,000 ship spawn on my homeworld. Good thing is that if the AI decided so try and say hello then, it can't. Bad thing is that the next 5 minutes takes at least 4 times that.

[Diazo]

I'm back!   

I've essentially been offline for a month (and a bit?) and decided to get back into the swing of things by firing up a new game to have fun with trains.

Having said that, my question actually has to do with the search on the galaxy map.

I'm doing my initial scouting and I've come across LOTS of train stations, and while I was looking at those I found a Raid Engine I'd originally missed.

So, I'm trying to do a search for Raid Engines, but it seems like search is broken. After 15 minutes of messing around, I have figured out that is not actually broken but I really, really dislike how it is implemented.

Right now, search only displays units on planets that you currently have visibility on. I use Auto-Scouting so I have more planets without visibility then I do with it.

I can see that raid engine on mouse-over of the system, why can't I see it in when I search for it?

In this case I was searching for Raid Engines because I'd already found it by mouse-over, but what if I'd missed it and was doing a check for Raid Engines before I started sending out my attack forces? Search would come back showing no Raid Engines and I would blindly activate it because I did not know it was there.

How I assumed search originally worked was that anything I could see in the system when I was in planet view would show in search, even if I did not have visibility on the planet. So everything that you can see in a 'grayed-out' system when you scout it and then lose visibility would still show in search.

If that's not possible, search needs some sort of indicator in game that it searches planets with visibility only. It took me 10 to 15 minutes to figure that out because I was so certain that Search would search all units I could see when I was in the planet view regardless of if I had visibility on that planet currently or not.

(Apologies if this has come up already, I've been offline and missed any previous discussion.)

((No, I have not forgotten about the Wiki, hoping to look at that later today.))

D.

edit: Bah, it's on Mantis already.

edit the 2nd:

Cargo Train:
Harmless in itself, but each "delivery" contributes towards a counter for that player, and when that fills up (you'll see an alert once it's past 50%) it spawns some surprises. The spawns are unpleasant but not massively so (unless you're on intensity 8 or higher, where you're asking for it).

You.... weren't kidding were you?

That game only lasted an hour. 

Fun times though.

[Kahuna]

So what do the cargo trains actually do? Add spoiler warnings.

[Lancefighter]

SPOILER ALERT:

Cargo trains spawn ai ships that kill you

/SPOILER ALERT

[Diazo]

Yes, you get very, very dead.

It's been over a month and a half since that was added so I figure I'm pretty safe revealing what happens but spoilers to be safe.

Highlight to reveal:
When the cargo train reaches its destination it adds build points to what is essentially a mini exo-wave queue. Because I wanted to see what happens I stuck the Astro Train AI plot for both AIs at 10.

Oops.

Both AI's reached completion at about the 56-60 minute mark. Each AI spawned 3 "Large Ships".

I never saw what the second AI spawned but the first AI spawned an Armored Golem, and Artillery Golem and a Spire Implosion Ship.

As I had no superweapons of my own and was on a single HW start, I very quickly died.

But ya, Astro Trains 10 is serious pain, seriously.

I never had a chance to scout so I do not know if there is a structure somewhere you can destroy to reset the build queue, I'll have to try a saner difficulty and see if there is some way to stop the spawn.

So ya, started another game with trains off so I can actually win it.

D.

End Spoiler.

[Lancefighter]

Wait. For how long has color=transparent been a thing o.0

[Diazo]

Since forever probably.

I learned of it a bit ago from another forum.

D.

[Hearteater]

TIL about color=transparent.

Also, I really like the destroyable cargo structure to reset cargo progress.  Either it would need to respawn on a random world, or there could be a fixed number of cargo structures to begin with that never respawn, limiting how many resets you have during a given game.

[Bognor]

Yes, you get very, very dead.

It's been over a month and a half since that was added so I figure I'm pretty safe revealing what happens but spoilers to be safe.

[spoilers]

Ha! Diazo, you haven't seen half of it 

Edit: That was probably an overstatement.  You've probably seen half of it.  But you haven't seen all of it 

[Diazo]

Lol! I bet.

I assume that it scales like everything else, but 6 superweapons at the 1 hour gametime mark is enough to ruin anyone's day when you have just your own lonely homeworld and no superweapons of your own to defend with.

Having said that, now that I know what's coming I'm tempted to try and cheese it, at least the first spawn, I'm assuming the second is worse.....

D.

[chemical_art]

I think I was able to juggle a 10/10 minor faction game for 5 hours before giving up

[Wordsmith]

There's currently no way to reset the build progress meter, as far as I know. Destroying Train Stations makes the Cargo Trains take longer to reach their destinations, which means it builds more slowly, and destroying Cargo Trains will buy you a brief reprieve (if you can manage it, that is), but that number is going to go up until the AI gets Happy Fun Stuff.