Why the Roaming Enclave's Younglings aren't standard?

[Pumpkin]

I just realized the Younglings spawned by the Roaming Enclaves aren't standard MkIII Younglings. My question is: why? If it's a question of power, why not making more of them for the same "price" (Roaming Enclaves don't use metal but time, and have an "inside" cap). If it's a question of CPU saving, why not giving them MkV younglings at an equivalent power-price?

The dyson gatlings have the exact same stats, no matter if they are neutral, enemy or allied. The ships built by the Rebelling Colony are the exact same ships as the ones spawned by the Resistance Fighters minor faction. I love that: it gives a sense of fairness and of coherence to the game. Why are younglings different?

I don't understand. If someone know, please tell me.

[tadrinth]

http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War:Current_Post-6.000_Beta#Prerelease_6.010_Back_From_The_Valley

The individual ships in the friendly enclave launched-squadrons now have 4x the health and 4x the dps, but the enclaves produce them 1/4th as fast and can hold a maximum load 1/4th as numerous.

Just trying to keep the CPU impact of these down in the more extreme situations.

Thanks to Faulty Logic for inspiring this change.

The friendly roaming enclaves tend to accumulate to far larger numbers than the enemy roaming enclaves, that's why only they were changed.  The enemy roaming enclaves launch regular younglings.

I have two guesses about why that change was made, as opposed to making them launch MkV younglings:

* Mark V younglings might not have given enough unit compression to keep CPU usage at reasonable levels.  IE, it sounds like in whatever crazy savegame Faulty Logic submitted (and I have no doubt it was crazy, this is Faulty Logic we're talking about), the Roaming Enclave ships were using 4x as much CPU as was reasonable.  So, there needed to be 1/4th as many of them.  Making them Mark V probably didn't keep the CPU from keeling over.

* Mark V ships get extra immunities. Younglings are already immune to reclamation, but not nukes.  Would also affect what mark of Ion Cannon can insta-kill them. 

[Pumpkin]

Thanks a lot for the details. I imagined something like that. And, yeah, ion and nukes. I didn't think of them.

However, why don't the enemy enclaves have this x4 buff? Now I see why I feel they are underwhelming, even with Preservation Wardens included. I wonder how it would be to have the current friendly enclaves with matching x4 enemy ones. Maybe that would justify to split friends and foes in two distinct MF (recycling the rather bland Preservation Wardens) to allow different intensities. Enemy enclaves are interesting: they boldly invade planets (not like hybrids, for instance, who only strike to kill) and run through a hardshell of turrets to kill the soft, undefended economical OCStations in the backyard.

However... ah... I'm kinda sad it required a special new profile for younglings. Not a big deal, but... I would have preferred MkV. So bad for ion and nukes ; I thing real "homebrew" Neinzul deserve that kind of badass rank. Like if all MkI-IV younglings would be only imitations or weaker human/AI-cloned Neinzuls.

[tadrinth]

The friendly enclaves get younglings that are 4x as powerful, but they get 1/4th as many of them.  Each enemy enclave can deploy just as much firepower as a friendly enclave.  It would be more consistent if they all used the 4x younglings, but it wouldn't be a big balance change. 

The problem is, the way Roaming Enclaves works, every so often it spawns an independent enclave, an AI-friendly enclave, and a human enclave.  However, the human-friendly enclaves tend to be far more cautious, especially if you use the ally-config options to keep them at home until they build up into a massive fleet.  The AI-friendly ones tend to attack and get killed, so there's never very many of them at a time.

The AI-friendly ones probably need to either spawn in greater numbers, or to have better logic that helps them stay alive. That would balance the faction a bit better.  Right now, it's very friendly to the player; minor border aggression is a small price to pay for having the friendly roaming enclave fleet scour threat and protect your homeworld. 

[chemical_art]

A part of the reason why the AI doesn't do the 4x buff is because human defenses use AoE much more often then the AI does (except for AI homeworlds). Since the AI enclaves last very short periods of time, their numbers are still smaller then the bumps that are caused by the long lasting clusters of friendly enclaves.