Any high-threat saves around?

[x4000]

Okay, then nevermind.  I'll be getting through that stuff in greater detail later to really know what's up.

[keith.lamothe]

When hunting up stuck threat earlier I added a "debugThreat" flag to GameLoop.cs, though I commented it out later.  But you may have some use for it now.  It's good for hunting down where stuff is, though that was back in the easily-debuggable days.

[x4000]

I'll probably make a permanent cheat code for this: players may enjoy it, and it will be really useful for me, too.

[keith.lamothe]

I was planning to add a galaxy display filter for threat; combined with the full-vis cheat that's already there that should tell you quite a bit.  Or do you mean something that shows threat for each ForegroundObjectType?

[x4000]

Well, that would accomplish much the same thing, then, yes.

[Wingflier]

You deal with it by cleaning them out before they become overwhelming of course. If you let the AI get an overwhelming force, you're not paying enough attention.

Thanks for the response, but this wasn't really the answer I was looking for.  I don't know what difficulty you play on, but at 8.3 and above, going into MKIII and MKIV planets to clear out thousands of MKIII and MKIV ships every hour or so is not an easy task.  That's not to say that it's impossible, or even a bad design, I was just wondering if this was intended behavior.

@Chris, what's all this talk of Hunter-Killers?  I thought HKs were supposed to occur when a player tried to deep raid, are they being implemented as regular AI units now?  What is their new purpose and where can I read more on this?  Thanks.

[x4000]

Regarding the HKs, they were only briefly being considered relating to deep raids; they've actually been coded into the game since before 4.0, they just never get spawned now.  The original intent for them had been as siege-breakers against player bottlenecks.  Now I'm considering doing something else with them (converting threat into equivalent HKs) to help with performance in sieges.  That way instead of 17k ships it's more like 2k ships and a handful of HKs, for instance.  I haven't said anything about it beyond this thread, and I just made some oblique references to it here.

[Wingflier]

Regarding the HKs, they were only briefly being considered relating to deep raids; they've actually been coded into the game since before 4.0, they just never get spawned now.  The original intent for them had been as siege-breakers against player bottlenecks.  Now I'm considering doing something else with them (converting threat into equivalent HKs) to help with performance in sieges.  That way instead of 17k ships it's more like 2k ships and a handful of HKs, for instance.  I haven't said anything about it beyond this thread, and I just made some oblique references to it here.

Oh okay, I thought I had missed something.  Due to performance issues (especially if you have multiple people playing at once), I could see why this would be a tentative solution to the problem.  

My biggest question concerning HKs would be their hull type.  HKs would definitely be a common issue for players to face (especially CPA-mode players like me), and it would be important for us to know beforehand the hull type they were going to have so that we could be ready for an attack against them.  You could also base their hull type based on the majority of units they were "replacing", or if you wanted to be really sneaky, give them a "random" hull type each time (though that would be extremely hard to deal with ).

[x4000]

Well, I don't see it as even that tentative: converting massive numbers of small ships into smaller numbers of big ships is pretty much the order of the day, nowadays.  I'm trying to keep most games in the 40,000 to 70,000 ship range overall, whereas in the past it could get to double that.  I'm also trying very hard to keep most battles to 2,000 vs 2,000 at most if at all possible, whereas before it could get even crazier.

Given the recent changes to how the AI deals with impenetrable human bottlenecks, my old idea for the HKs wouldn't work anyhow (and it was complex enough I wasn't keen on it, as well as feeling a bit unfair against the humans).  Versus this is more like a linear conversion, which makes sense for way-too-high existing numbers of mobile ships in the same fashion that carriers did for way-too-high incoming waves and barracks/carriers did for way-too-high-immobile-defenders.

Either the AI's growth has to be halted at some point (which really isn't feasible for threat in particular), or there has to be some way to collapse things down into smaller chunks when things get too crazy, is basically my point.  I think it should work really nicely as a broad concept, though I'm sure quite a bit of refinement will be in order once we see it in practice.

I'm just saying that I think the concept of "collapse many ships into one beyond a certain threshold" is unavoidable, especially with the weak garbage collector in unity (but for performance reasons, even on slimdx this would have been smart).

[Suzera]

You deal with it by cleaning them out before they become overwhelming of course. If you let the AI get an overwhelming force, you're not paying enough attention.

Thanks for the response, but this wasn't really the answer I was looking for.  I don't know what difficulty you play on, but at 8.3 and above, going into MKIII and MKIV planets to clear out thousands of MKIII and MKIV ships every hour or so is not an easy task.  That's not to say that it's impossible, or even a bad design, I was just wondering if this was intended behavior.

@Chris, what's all this talk of Hunter-Killers?  I thought HKs were supposed to occur when a player tried to deep raid, are they being implemented as regular AI units now?  What is their new purpose and where can I read more on this?  Thanks.

Currently difficulty 8. I don't let them get to thousands. I don't have to clear them every hour either. What kind of AIP do you run?

[Wingflier]

I'm on 8.3 right now.  It's a lot tougher because the waves are much tougher, and thus much tougher to clear out of high-level planets.  I suspect that when I reach the 200 AIP mark and then start getting hit with MKIII ships, things are going to get a whole lot harder.  Also, do you play Cross-Planet Attack mode?  This seems to be an issue that is more directly related with that setting; waves do not arrive on my planets, they simply gather up on adjacent planets over time and reach critical mass.

@Chris:  Did you have any ideas for the hull types of HKS?

[x4000]

I don't recall much about the specific HK design, I haven't looked at it since October or before.  You can see them in the F1-cycled versions of the planetary summary, if you have ideas.  I will probably need to change these a lot, though, to get them where they need to be for this current implementation plan.

Most likely I won't be on that until tomorrow, though, as tonight I've got some Tidalis stuff that I have to get done today; so I'm mostly on that, aside from any critical AI War fixes, until tomorrow.  But now Keith is done with his part of the Tidalis stuff, so he'll be back on other aspects of AI War, which I suspect will involve massive changes to bonus ship balance.

Anyway, lots coming, either way, but I can't speak too directly about HKs yet because I just don't remember well what is already there, and a lot of what I'll implement will involve some testing numbers before release to fine tune them.  Right now it's more broad-concept.

[Suzera]

I'm on 8.3 right now.  It's a lot tougher because the waves are much tougher, and thus much tougher to clear out of high-level planets.  I suspect that when I reach the 200 AIP mark and then start getting hit with MKIII ships, things are going to get a whole lot harder.  Also, do you play Cross-Planet Attack mode?  This seems to be an issue that is more directly related with that setting; waves do not arrive on my planets, they simply gather up on adjacent planets over time and reach critical mass.

@Chris:  Did you have any ideas for the hull types of HKS?

8.3 is only about 10% more ship strength. It doesn't send the same number of a higher mk ship, it compacts them so you fight less ships. Doing cross planet attacks would have that effect even in my games however, but it would probably end up tens of thousands unless I blew them up every wave.

8.3 is possibly easier because there are overall less ships to tractor. Particularly with the new mk wave size multipliers.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, the difference there is the cross-planet-waves; this new stalking mechanic has _heavily_ changed the playing field of that option.

[x4000]

I think that some ships are getting "stuck," even in case where they should not be stalking any longer.  Not sure on that, though.

Possibly the AI shouldn't be waiting until it has 2x or 3x the power of the humans on a planet before breaching, though; perhaps it should only be like 120% or150% instead of 200% or 300%.