AI War Beta 7.011-7.012 "Salvaged Resources" Released!

[keith.lamothe]

In the end salvage does kind of put reclamation and reprocessing in a weird place, as up until now they were our salvagers.

Bear in mind that reclamation is way more efficient than salvage: if you reclaim a unit you necessarily get 100% of its metal value (assuming reclamation is changed to not also give salvage) because you get the whole unit, but if you just salvage it you're probably getting at most 15% (50% if you repelled the attack on your homeworld and 20/30% with higher-mark logistics stations).

[Chthon]

In the end salvage does kind of put reclamation and reprocessing in a weird place, as up until now they were our salvagers.

Bear in mind that reclamation is way more efficient than salvage: if you reclaim a unit you necessarily get 100% of its metal value (assuming reclamation is changed to not also give salvage) because you get the whole unit, but if you just salvage it you're probably getting at most 15% (50% if you repelled the attack on your homeworld and 20/30% with higher-mark logistics stations).

Yeah, I get you.  I know this, it's just that now you are getting >100% of the resources in effect.

I do have a question about salvage and Maws/disassembler guardians.  Do ships that expire inside these give salvage?

[Toranth]

Hrm...  This does sway the play balance a little bit.  Perhaps too much in the favor of reclamation units.  I already love reclaimer units, and am feeling this may overbalance early game Merc Parasites or even normal ones.

How on earth does this change buff reclaimers? You're going to get the same amount of salvage with and without reclaimers.

Hm I didn't know there is such thing as early game Merc Parasites. I'd rahter use my resources for Mark I Leech Starships.

On a purely resource-for-resource build comparison, the Mk I Leech Starships do 50% more reclamation damage.
On a cap-for-cap basis, though, Merc Parasites give about 20x reclaimation damage.  So, early Mercs in a slow game with lots (millions) of resources to spend can use Merc Parasites to build up a very large - and free - fleet, courtesy of the AI.

Still, probably the best anti-reclaimer-salvage argument is the Botnet Golem.  You could almost rename him the Banknet Golem.  Or maybe the Bitcoin Golem.

[keith.lamothe]

Or maybe the Bitcoin Golem.

Hahahaha.  Cryptocurrency applied directly to the forehead.

[LordSloth]

Oh god, that explains why the Zenith Miners keep on exploding planets in sets of three.... They're mining bitcoins in a peer-to-peer network.

[Magron]

oh shucks. Personally I'd have voted for a more involved economic model not simplifying it.  Oh well. 

[keith.lamothe]

oh shucks. Personally I'd have voted for a more involved economic model not simplifying it.  Oh well.

I think metal+salvage is more complex than metal+crystal, honestly

[Magron]

oh shucks. Personally I'd have voted for a more involved economic model not simplifying it.  Oh well.

I think metal+salvage is more complex than metal+crystal, honestly

as you describe it in the OP it's an automatic function giving some extra metal production to help offset fleet rebuild time.  I don't see any added complexity there.  In any case this game hardly needs any.  Careful you don't go too inbred with the long term players and turn it into an obsidian monolith for newbs. heh.
Still and all, I'm not walking in at this late date to complain about development. 
You're too stingy with the research points too. LOL

[Chthon]

oh shucks. Personally I'd have voted for a more involved economic model not simplifying it.  Oh well.

I think metal+salvage is more complex than metal+crystal, honestly

as you describe it in the OP it's an automatic function giving some extra metal production to help offset fleet rebuild time.  I don't see any added complexity there.  In any case this game hardly needs any.  Careful you don't go too inbred with the long term players and turn it into an obsidian monolith for newbs. heh.
Still and all, I'm not walking in at this late date to complain about development. 
You're too stingy with the research points too. LOL

I personally didn't think crystal was gone for good.  Just until we all decide on a good use for it that isn't identical to metal.

[Magron]

I personally didn't think crystal was gone for good.  Just until we all decide on a good use for it that isn't identical to metal.

i dunno. I'm new here and I'm sure it's been thrashed out completely in the past.
You can do the different resources to build different things which impacts what planets you need to take. Desirable? Probably been discussed.
I took a break because my brain was hurting, but the more I play I start to think the war needs full attention anyway.

[Aklyon]

Well if anything, I like the expanded resource limit. it reminds me of Supreme Commander with how huge the resource stocks can sound if you aren't using a ton of them.

[TechSY730]

Just a quick question. When the AI sends a "new scrap wave" at you, and it is earlier than it would of sent the wave, is the base strength of the wave proportionally smaller to the time "cut off", like the wave time is stronger if the AI waits longer to send the wave (for example, when waiting longer to "save up" to tackle a single inpoint)?

Also, I am gonna hold off on this version in favor of the next when the AI "new scrap waves" properly put the scrap strength into the wave as a whole, instead of just the starship "addon" part of it.

[keith.lamothe]

Just a quick question. When the AI sends a "new scrap wave" at you, and it is earlier than it would of sent the wave, is the base strength of the wave proportionally smaller to the time "cut off", like the wave time is stronger if the AI waits longer to send the wave (for example, when waiting longer to "save up" to tackle a single inpoint)?

As I was writing that part, I literally thought "TechSY730 is probably going to ask whether it adjusts to the actual interval..."

The answer is that it doesn't touch the interval-based multiplier so if it happened to be a long wait (for whatever reason) it would be bigger even if the salvage thing caused it to launch several minutes earlier.  I'll probably change it to adjust to the actual interval, but with a minimum interval multiplier of 1 for the salvage-reprisals.  Not less than 1 even if it's really soon after the previous wave because the idea is that your attack is prompting more attention than usual.

Also, I am gonna hold off on this version in favor of the next when the AI "new scrap waves" properly put the scrap strength into the wave as a whole, instead of just the starship "addon" part of it.

In practice it doesn't seem to be doing that in most cases, not sure.  Anyway, fixed in the next one.  Actually I've been refactoring the wave logic all the way through over the past few days, and now it's entirely Strength-based rather than unit-count-and-later-adjusted-by-cap-scale-etc so it spreads the salvage strength across all the fleet-ship-types instead of just the first one.

[Aklyon]

Should we expect bigger waves then?

[keith.lamothe]

Should we expect bigger waves then?

Actually it was mostly just an internal refactor and ideally won't impact wave sizes at all.  At least when I run tests of the same situation in my steam copy (latest public version) and my test copy (dev version) the resulting unit counts are within the normal random range (0.8 to 1.1) of each other).

The point was to refactor 5 years of layers of code (for the scheduling, generation, and announcement of waves) into something much easier to work with