AI War Beta 6.022-6.023 "Honored Bugs" Released!

[TechSY730]

Wait, there's a big where the AI sometimes erroneously gets the human Mk IV raid starship instead of the AI version in a possible hacking response.

Combine this with what human Mk. IV raids get now...
Yea, let's say this bug's severity got bumped up a notch.

[keith.lamothe]

Wait, there's a big where the AI sometimes erroneously gets the human Mk IV raid starship instead of the AI version in a possible hacking response.

Combine this with what human Mk. IV raids get now...
Yea, let's say this bug's severity got bumped up a notch.

I actually quietly fixed it while doing the raid buffs

[TechSY730]

I actually quietly fixed it while doing the raid buffs

Ah, one of the legendary ninja bug fixes.

How appropriate for it to be about raid starships.

[Winge]

The Raid Starships Changes sound...delightful >D.  I think I just found a money sink for my high-AIP game...

This one congratulates the 4 winners of our recent poll by... well, exterminating them.  Sometimes it's tough being the winner.

Sounds almost like someone winning a 10/10 game...

[MaxAstro]

Considering Raid Starships are already my favorite starships, these changes make me... happy.  ^_^

And 5000k poorer in pretty much every game...  >.>

[Zeyi]

I guess is what I am saying is that I don't want higher mark AI raids buffed, but rather I think human raids (well, the Mk. III cloaking at least) were overbuffed.

Let's maybe give them a chance first?

I have just rushed to unlock them so i can start building the MKIVs in my vanilla kill as many planets as possible game and whilst i have similar reservations I think they probably wont be too bad. (it's not like you couldn't just cloak the old raid starships onto a planet... it just took longer.

Also I don't mind human raid starships being more buffed than the AIs, it kind of makes sense that as the aggressor and underdog, our fastest stealthiest attack ships would be our more advanced and probably our main focus of development. Whereas the AI is more interesting in making big powerful motherships, H/Ks to defend its homeworlds against the exogalactic threat.

[Diazo]

It is going to be interesting.

It is actually the missile immunity that is going to be the big change. This makes the Raid immune to both the MLRS and the Missile Guard Posts.

That's huge in terms of how effective it will be.

Now to find some time to try this out, that's the hard part.

D.

[chemical_art]

It is going to be interesting.

It is actually the missile immunity that is going to be the big change. This makes the Raid immune to both the MLRS and the Missile Guard Posts.

That's huge in terms of how effective it will be.

Now to find some time to try this out, that's the hard part.

D.

Considering their radar dampening, I don't know just how much on human defense that will influence them, considering snipers still destroy them.

On the other hand, for human hands, it will help a lot.

[Diazo]

Erm, I was talking in human hands.

I want to play with it, but I'm worried that a cap of Mk II's alone can now shift-right click all guard posts in a system and get away.

Add in the Mk IIIs and any guard post without a lot of defenders is just dead.

As I understood the guardpost changes, one of the intentions was to make it so a single unit could not clear a system on it's own like that.

As I said, I need to experiment.

D.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, I went back and forth on whether mkII should get cloaking and mkIII should get missile-immunity or vice versa, but ultimately went with II=>missile-immunity.  Basically you can spend that K to get a raid that's immune to its most common "can kill me quick" enemy (iirc) : missile and mlrs guard posts.  You still have to deal with arachnid posts, though, and so on.  If the enemy has enough ships, your raid's still dead.

Cloaking basically gives you conditional immunity to everything with proper tach drilling, so your raid starship can hit anything you can reach.

And the grav-immune for the big K investment + ASC gives you something that can pull off all the above in a grav-drill system, not worrying about grav guardians, etc.  In some ways this is the least significant of the three new abilities, but since so little can counter gravity, it can be pretty powerful situationally.

[Zeyi]

I think its worth noting that the raids while now having arguably OP MKIII and IV aren't completely amazing now as (I guess this may not be true for all people) you have to run them in two separate groups - the cloaked raids and the uncloaked. This is cool for using the lower marks as distractions while the higher marks go deeper to attack but it does require more micro and it does mean you don't have a full cap of all mark raids hitting any particular target at once. If you don't have ASC then your MKIIIs will be running solo.. or if not and you take them along with the MKI and IIs they have their cloaking completely negated.

[Vyndicu]

Is there any reason why my starship/fleet ships will NOT shoot at tractor-1 astro train that pass them within weapon range? I saw it happen few times already.

I thought all ships should be able to shoot them if there is nothing else to fire at within range.

[keith.lamothe]

Is there any reason why my starship/fleet ships will NOT shoot at tractor-1 astro train that pass them within weapon range? I saw it happen few times already.

I thought all ships should be able to shoot them if there is nothing else to fire at within range.

Are you giving them an order to shoot at them?

If their unit type says to not autotarget (which is true in that case, iirc) it avoids shooting at it "because there's nothing else to do" because enemies could come in through a wormhole at basically any moment and if your turret ball just fired its entire alpha strike at an astro train, well, it could be less than ideal

[Vyndicu]

Hmm I don't see anything about auto-target in the tooltip.

I don't use turret yet, have not gotten that far barely 1 hour in. I just happens to have a beautiful location to abuse zenith bombard at my homeworld very close to the cross-road on a X map. I had a full cap of mk 1 zenith bombard just sitting shoot at a nearby cargo astro train and it died. Then they just sit didn't try to shoot the tractor train even although there was enough time to reload and shoot.

Given that they always retreat from their target aka tractor astro train it is very unlikely that they would end up being pulled. The only case I can think of is when they are on top of the wormhole and a tractor train just pop through.

Yes they do fire when I give the order. It seem odd that most long range fleet ships or starships (inherent immune to tractor) would not fire without an explicit order. There are a few fleet ship that should not do so for obvious reason.

Edit:

I just thought of some cases where you might actually want to enforce this rule. If you receive some nebula npc scenario ships and they are immune to tractor but won't auto-target tractor train despite having decent firepower to do so. For obvious reason I can't give NPC an explicit order to fire on tractor train.

Edit 2:

I observed the same behavior described above to regeneration astro train. I had to explicit give a target order before they would fire in my territory. Obviously the regeneration train pose no threat to fleet ship/starship at all beyond tachyon emission it has.

[chemical_art]

Not sure.if set but a toggle within the game for.auto targetting annoying things like sqfer astro.trains, wormhole guardposts, etc would be. nicw.

Something like a toggle for nobannoying things.