AI War Beta 7.029-7.031 "Extermination Protocol MkII" Released!

[Draco18s]

I love having more AI Plot options, I like the warp relays, and I like not having to have counterattack GPs.
win-win-win

Ditto.

While I like the new mechanic more than CA guard posts (CAP?  CAGP?) I'm totally cool with having them come up occasionally because it mixes things up a little.

Having them as slider-based-plots would be AWESOME.

[keith.lamothe]

While I like the new mechanic more than CA guard posts (CAP?  CAGP?)

I believe the official designation is %$&@!

[Draco18s]

While I like the new mechanic more than CA guard posts (CAP?  CAGP?)

I believe the official designation is %$&@!

Hehe.

* Draco18s tries to use the swearword filter to come up with a creative description, but it doesn't...quite...work.

[Aklyon]

While I like the new mechanic more than CA guard posts (CAP?  CAGP?)

I believe the official designation is %$&@!

I thought that was the designation for the Rude Gesture subcommanders

[keith.lamothe]

I thought that was the designation for the Rude Gesture subcommanders

That designation is similar in character-set but considerably longer.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Thoughts?

Sounds good.

Let's face it - the ultra defensive positions that caused you to introduce warp relays are also a result of player choice in setup - players choosing to play on maps that have defensive terrain and/or enabling the Zenith trader rather than choosing to play on more open maps with less defensive terrain or without the Zenith trader. The choice of map and starting position all by itself probably has a larger impact on the total difficulty than any other individual factor apart from the two AI difficulty settings.

Thus having the AI suffer all the problems that follows from defensive terrain and fortifications (having difficulty beating it and/or bypassing it) sounds, as the default option, much better than giving the AI an "I'll magically teleport over defensive terrain rather than trying to bypass it on the tactical map if I cannot beat it" mechanic. If players play on chokepoint maps, it is reasonable to assume that in many cases it is because they expect defenses to be worthwhile and have the most fun gaming experience when they are, whereas players playing on non-chokepoint maps are looking for another experience.

So:

• Counterattack posts off by default because most people think they suck (for different reasons). Enable them as plot or get the Retaliatory Counterattack AI player to enjoy them in the game.
• Warp Relays off by default. Enable them to make it harder to defend yourself.

That said, I still think swapping the Core turret and normal turret restrictions is an excellent idea. It feels so silly that e.g. the find of a single Spider V controller allows me to build the best Spider turrets in the game everywhere, while painstakingly paying for Spider turrets with knowledge gives me a fixed amount of weaker turrets that, unless they are concentrated in chokepoints, are of little relevance. Defense in depth and playing with less defensive terrain would be a much more attractive option if one could actually build more defenses on more planets, so long as one's energy economy could support it. (Though this might requiring balancing the cap size and energy costs. Especially the energy costs for HBC's could stand to go up considerably, doubled or tripled, if they could be deployed up to a fixed number on a per-system basis.)

[Faulty Logic]

As long as the counterattack posts stay dead, I'm happy. New options are fine.

[Vinraith]

Ok, thanks for the feedback.

So some people like the idea, and some people really don't.  I suspect practice would be less onerous than theory but I think what I'll do here is move the relays (as-is, without the spawning-more-threat thing) over to an AI Plot too.

Sure, if someone leaves both counter posts and warp relays off, they're getting an easier defensive situation than I'm targeting balance-wise.  But if they're skilled enough at the game for that to matter they've probably also figured out how to turn nobs and tweak sliders in the lobby to give them the challenge they want.

And perhaps we can later expand the warp relays plot with higher intensity settings that add effects like "spawns more threat to join that threatball".

Thoughts?

Balancing around plots that are off by default seems intrinsically problematic. The "vanilla game" is no plots no factions, to my thinking, and it seems to me that game's just moved from a state where it had drifted too far toward "easy" to a state where it's even easier.

[keith.lamothe]

Balancing around plots that are off by default seems intrinsically problematic. The "vanilla game" is no plots no factions, to my thinking

And if you have no factions at all on, you wouldn't need any plots to maintain balance.  Purely vanilla chokepoints (no trader toys, no superweapons) aren't all that bad.  Doesn't mean it's not in need of adjustment, but I don't think warp relays are necessary for that scenario.

and it seems to me that game's just moved from a state where it had drifted too far toward "easy" to a state where it's even easier.

Some recent changes have buffed the difficulty significantly (specifically wave size, cpa size, hacking response, exo sizes, etc), and I haven't seen enough gameplay-based feedback since then to know if it's still drifting in the too-easy category or not.

But in this case, whatever the counterattack posts may have been contributing to difficulty (which is very arguable, at least for experienced players who knew when to pop them), they were contributing far more to annoyance.  So making a change there was a fairly obvious thing.

[keith.lamothe]

Update: 7.031 is out to shift the warp relays to a separate AI Plot (instead of being core-game) as the feedback on the idea rather changed once the feature was actually implemented.  Also some superterminal rebalancing.

[Fleet Unity]

Has the AI Type Chivalric been given a buff recently? Last time I played with one I was getting over 8,000 ships per wave I thought this was a lot it never was like this before. I only had like six planets or less at that time just wondering if this AI type was buffed or not as I saw nothing about it in the patch notes. Also waves are never usually that high with just six planets well on normal anyway.

[keith.lamothe]

Has the AI Type Chivalric been given a buff recently? Last time I played with one I was getting over 8,000 ships per wave I thought this was a lot it never was like this before. I only had like six planets or less at that time just wondering if this AI type was buffed or not as I saw nothing about it in the patch notes. Also waves are never usually that high with just six planets well on normal anyway.

It's not specific to that AI type, but there's a semi-recent change where excess reinforcements (that would have simply been lost due to capping) is now shunted to other things, like the size of the next wave.  There's also a more recent change that caps reinforcements at 200 AIP instead of Diff*Diff*5 (245 on Diff 7, higher on higher), which may be what you're seeing now.

There's also been a general boost to wave size, but it's pretty mild below diff 8, and not particularly intense until diff 9.

What's your difficulty and AIP?

Edit: it also reacts more strongly to situations where it only has one legal wave-target (i.e. you've made a chokepoint whipping-boy); previously it saved until it had 1.5x the normal strength for the wave, now it saves until it has 2x.

[Fleet Unity]

Has the AI Type Chivalric been given a buff recently? Last time I played with one I was getting over 8,000 ships per wave I thought this was a lot it never was like this before. I only had like six planets or less at that time just wondering if this AI type was buffed or not as I saw nothing about it in the patch notes. Also waves are never usually that high with just six planets well on normal anyway.

It's not specific to that AI type, but there's a semi-recent change where excess reinforcements (that would have simply been lost due to capping) is now shunted to other things, like the size of the next wave.  There's also a more recent change that caps reinforcements at 200 AIP instead of Diff*Diff*5 (245 on Diff 7, higher on higher), which may be what you're seeing now.

What's your difficulty and AIP?

It was only 7 on normal  for the AIP I think it was less that 140 or so I started a new game and tried different AI types I am not sure if I still have the save but I could always start a quick game to see if needed with Chivalric.

[keith.lamothe]

It was only 7 on normal  for the AIP I think it was less that 140 or so I started a new game and tried different AI types I am not sure if I still have the save but I could always start a quick game to see if needed with Chivalric if needed.

Diff 7, AIP 140, and an 8000 ship wave?  That doesn't sound right.  Was this a reprisal wave?  I guess if you wiped heavily enough with enough stuff that might happen.

If you have a save that'd be good.  You can also turn on Advanced Logging and check for a "LogicLog_AIMechanic_Waves_MainThread.txt" file in your AIW install's RuntimeData directory.  Uploading that here would let me take a look at the computations.

[Fleet Unity]

It was only 7 on normal  for the AIP I think it was less that 140 or so I started a new game and tried different AI types I am not sure if I still have the save but I could always start a quick game to see if needed with Chivalric if needed.

Diff 7, AIP 140, and an 8000 ship wave?  That doesn't sound right.  Was this a reprisal wave?  I guess if you wiped heavily enough with enough stuff that might happen.

If you have a save that'd be good.  You can also turn on Advanced Logging and check for a "LogicLog_AIMechanic_Waves_MainThread.txt" file in your AIW install's RuntimeData directory.  Uploading that here would let me take a look at the computations.

Ok I will start a new game and give you that save I cannot find the save I think I deleted it I thought that was too much if it does not happen once more then maybe something was changed recently but I tried starting a game with it twice even with a handicap set to -50% to see if it would lower the waves it did not I will put both AI types to Chivalric and try it once more and post the save to see if this still happens it was from a few versions ago.

Edit: It was a normal wave as well.