AI War state of the game

[KDR_11k]

The champion is an army of one, you don't use it when refleeting, you use it so you never need to refleet.

[LordSloth]

Clearly, the Champion needs to set off a Mk1 Nuke every time it dies. It's the only elegant solution.

[Lancefighter]

I feel like possibly giving the champion a lot of build time, but not a real cost, would be he say to go; you can now use it while refleeting, but you may need to devote a fair bit of engineer time to getting it back in the field. (NOT resource cost, just build time)

Either that, or just kinda increase the minimum shadow charge for respawn by a per hull basis (100 per mk?)

Maybe both?


Also, nebula ships should lose a ton of speed. And probably the champion

[KDR_11k]

A time delay is just a little bit of tedium (and maybe nasty during nebulas), it doesn't stop the champ from being a replaceable superweapon. At destroyer level or above the champ starts soloing entire planets! A cruiser is roughly equivalent to a golem. I've never even seen the battleship (my latest game put a nebula beneath each AI homeworld...) but that's not stopping me from using my champion as my main attack fleet with the rest of my army usually staying at home and dealing with the waves that come. Sure, if I need to deal with a heavily alerted MkIV or V world the whole fleetblob has to come along but anything less is champion-solvable. Failing an assault is no problem, even if a massive counterattack of freed ships follows I've still got my entire fleet ready to defend.

The Champion is an extremely fast, very powerful unit that can easily wipe out threats that would otherwise be devastating for you. Its speed lets it rush through dangerous situations without taking much damage (well, unless Spire Gravity Drains are involved which they ALWAYS are if the AI has unlocked them because they have a cap of 50 when a single SGD is enough to lock your whole army down).

[chemical_art]

The fact that my posts says quite blatantly that I cheat and yet someone else thinks it is well thought out and is complementing me is either a testament to me actually putting serious thought and effort into it, a sign that I can lie my ass off well enough nobody knows I am doing it, or a stealth troll...

I just figured chemical_art was drunk again.

I truely enjoyed what ZaneWollfe wrote.

There was an acknowledgement of cheating, and said cheating does make some comments about the game out the window.

However, plenty of other things are still valid in discussion when playing cheating games if using 300% handicap games with massive amounts of K.

I assure you ZaneWolfe I had no ill will of any sort in complimenting on your post. 

[keith.lamothe]

I just figured chemical_art was drunk again.

I truely enjoyed what ZaneWollfe wrote.

The two are not mutually exclusive

[Irxallis]

Overall champion  status

From my point of view the champion respawning / champion build time increase will only mean my wife will be unhappy while she waits for her champion to respawn (as she doesn't like shared control) doing absolutely nothing in front of AI War ;-).

I do agree champion is extremely powerful as a unit, and I do agree the problem lies in the fact that champion power is completely separate from AIP increase, unlike normal player's operation (though I cannot imagine I - a normal player - could simply hunker down and wait till she hunts her nebulas; I'd die of boredom. It's always a joint operation, with engineers with cloaker, planet neutering etc).

I think the deep strike is too simple when you have a champion, especially now when you can repair a champion in the nebula (so no problem with "cloaker and 5 engineers generating deepstrike on enemy planet all the time to repair her champion").

The problem as I see it

The problem with the champion - for me - is the lack of "conflicting gauge", like AIP. Not the economy (though I don't mind it nerfed even if I usually have HORRIBLE energy problems).


A three-part suggestion

Anyway, my suggestions (more of a brainstorm than fully fleshed-out implementations). I have thought about them as a group of suggestions, not "A or B or C separately", but we are far less experienced in AI War than other posters in this thread, so feel free to modify them ;-).


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01 - If a champion is in game and deep strike takes place for more than 30 seconds (so it is not accidential), spawn an aggressive Nemesis. One per a short interval of time (3 minutes?) or something.

Reason: Champion is a perfect deep strike unit - swift, durable, incredibly efficient paired with raid starships. Let the opportunity cost of the Champion be the extremely feared Nemesis unit, which becomes a part of the threat fleet. In other words, if we want to raid the AI, we'd better have good defences in place. It's better to take one more planet as a base of operations (it can always be a Warp Jammer planet, or a highly defended world - the role of a normal player (in other words, me)).

If undefended, this Warp Jammer planet can fall and raid party in long range operations will become a deep strike. Then a player has two options: scrap the fleet, forfeiting the operation (with usual cost of losing fleet) or eat the deep strike.

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02 - If a champion enters a Nebula, spawn a retaliatory "Nemesis wave" which comes out of the Nebula.

Reason: As far as I read it, the problem comes from the fact a player can create a decent defense force and do nothing and a champion can enter Nebulas at will. So this is an action with no "AI reaction cost".
First 1-3 Nemesis waves should be quite simple, as Champion is quite useless before destroyer level, but 4th Nemesis wave (including Destroyers) could be quite dangerous for a single-planet player.

This, especially combined with deep striking, will force defending player to create a defence able to accomodate the new-found dangers.

If the Nebula planet is ours, normal player can prepare for this wave. Else, it might increase the Threat fleet.

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03 - Reduce starting knowledge (not Metal and Crystals, Knowledge) from 10k to 5k. Increase knowledge gain from planets from 3k to 3.5k.

Reason:
The parity with the current state shall be achieved at 10 planets (+200 AIP). Although at ~15 planets the total knowledge of a player will get higher (by 2500, which is about one knowledge raid), but 20 planets games are very different to low AIP games anyway (and are not the 'Low AIP 10/10 wins' which seem to be the core of an argument in this thread).

Lately (since I started playing AI War, somewhere about version 4) some things were made "always available", for example Cloaker Starships, Gravity Turrets etc. Some of those were earlier my 'mandatory' unlocks. For me, this means I can always afford to unlock both Harvesters Mk3 (as a first move) and expand to 5-10 planets total having everything I need for the particular game.

If I had only 5k knowledge, I would not "automatically" unlock harvesters - I would have to decide "Turrets? Harvesters? Mk2 ships? Starships? What do I need?". A choice would be back, situation-specific. I wouldn't be able to make "a decent enough defense" having 5k knowledge (3k -> fortress, oh, no harvesters to support the power loss) for one planet, I would NEED to expand if I wanted to deep strike with a champion or take fourth nebula.

That way I would suggest against reducing nebula resources / energy bonus, because with nebulas the cost would be present, one of Nemesis. And as the knowledge has been reduced, some expansion is mandatory.

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To sum up:

1 - Would influence only the games with Champion players (Deep Strikes when Champions present spawn Nemesis)
2 - Would influence only the games with Champion players (Nemesis wave spawns when Nebulas entered)
3 - Would influence every game, and this worries me a bit. This is, sadly, crucial for #1 and #2. Maybe Champions - Easy and Champions - Hard is needed?



Small bonus, please ;-):

04 - For the sake of everything holy (or unholy, as you prefer), PLEASE eliminate Distribution Node 33% chance for a resource drain.

If I pop one of those, I either need it (lost a fleet and desperately need to rebuild) or it is the start of the game and I don't want to wait. I'd prefer to have 2 AIP cost than to have 33% chance to lose resources instead of gaining them.

[Drjones013]

Beyond that, the nebula rewards (m+c/e and ships) just need a nerf.  The ship stats will probably stay the same because I don't want to change the intra-nebula balance, but they'll probably be made to cost more and have a lower cap for the humans.  We'll see.

Why not just run them like the Dyson Sphere with a slower respawn?

[TechSY730]

Beyond that, the nebula rewards (m+c/e and ships) just need a nerf.  The ship stats will probably stay the same because I don't want to change the intra-nebula balance, but they'll probably be made to cost more and have a lower cap for the humans.  We'll see.

Why not just run them like the Dyson Sphere with a slower respawn?

You mean take them out of human player control?

That would be a sad loss, but that is sort of how many people expected it to behave when they first saw it, and then were surprised when they could actually build it instead.

[relmz32]

Brainstormings:

If people want to try crazy things, could we Keith just start adding some minor factions to implement the easiest changes. This would give us the ability to play with some crazy change without ruining newb or 'expected' gameplay.

An interesting nerf to harvesters with the new(ish) energy system is to just add large energy costs to higher mk harvesters (~5-10k for mk2, ~10-20k for mk3 per harvester) to force a trade-off for unlocking them. I lean high for the punishment to create decisions, if these are too high, they can obviously come down.

Champ unlocks on high AI level should lead to a greater offensive response, similar to the exo wave-responses that you get for spire cities.

[Lancefighter]

thats actually a kinda interesting point - Should harvestors be always good? Would adding some sort of net LOSS on mk3 harvesters be a good idea?

For instance, a system has somewhere between 3 and 6 harvesters.. If mk3 harvesters cost 20k or 30k energy per, that system would cost you energy. This might also increase the value of ZPGs..

In a multiplayer weird stuff happens, but you can support one reactor per player per planet anyway, so its not that big of a deal.


Also, we are officially in 'beta' land atm, changes made dont really need to be particularly final. Of course, most of the arcen betas are just as stable as the arcen official releases, so pretty much everyone installs them anyway.

[Oralordos]

Of course, most of the arcen betas are just as stable as the arcen official releases, so pretty much everyone installs them anyway.

Or at least everyone who watches the forums. Most people I've found who don't watch the forums stick to the officials.

[Draco18s]

Or at least everyone who watches the forums. Most people I've found who don't watch the forums stick to the officials.

My group always went "ooh, update!" and snagged it, even if we didn't know what was in it (we generally hit up the wiki changelog for details frequently to find out, though).

[Lancefighter]

i keep the wiki changelog open in my browser all the time.. I constantly hit refresh to see wht keith has been up to.

Turns out, not very much.

[Martyn van Buren]

04 - For the sake of everything holy (or unholy, as you prefer), PLEASE eliminate Distribution Node 33% chance for a resource drain.

If I pop one of those, I either need it (lost a fleet and desperately need to rebuild) or it is the start of the game and I don't want to wait. I'd prefer to have 2 AIP cost than to have 33% chance to lose resources instead of gaining them.

Why don't you just wait til you actually run out of resources to pop them?  You can't go negative, so if you're out a resource node is 2/3 chance gain, 1/3 stay where you are.