Are fortresses being seeded too frequently?

[Sunshine!]

Prior to the fortress change, the fortress seeding was not problematic because fortresses didn't really have much in the way of teeth.  Now, I find myself constantly being bottled up by fortresses in the early game (especially on higher difficulties) - in my current game (9/9, no fortress baron), I have 3 entrances to my home world, and together those 3 entrances have 4 entrances, which between them have 4 mk1 and 1 mk3 fortress (one has double fortresses, and one has the fortress sitting next to a cloaker guard post, which is pretty hilarious).

It becomes very problematic because of a few reasons:

1.  You absolutely NEED bombers (alternatively, space tanks or some other Polycrystal bonus ship) because any other armor type gets wasted instantly.

2.  Bombers are very expensive and take forever to build.

3.  Bombers need support, so if you want to actually kill the fortress you need to send your entire fleet in to keep the enemy fleet off your bombers, and then the fortress wastes your fleet.  You can fiddle with this by sending the bombers in first, so that the fortress targets the bombers first, and then does not switch targets until after it destroys its first bomber (which will take a while, so you can kind of "screen" your fleet with bombers).

4.  You can't screen your force from fortresses with Neinzul Weasels any more (kind of an edge case, but one I've found extremely useful in the past).

The result is that I frequently find myself being forced to lose my entire fleet of mk1 and mk2 ships (fighters, bombers, frigates, raiders in the most recent case - no mk3 ships because this is early game) when trying to destroy even mk1 fortresses (most recent case was a mk3 planet - mk1 planets are easier, but even mk2 planets can cause the same kinds of problems).

It's even worse when there's a fortress on the Mk1 planet next to you, and then you're jammed between a Mk3 and Mk4 planet on the other side (and the mk3 has a fortress as well!).  Whoo boy!

Since my opinion is probably obvious, I'll toss out an idea that different marks of fortresses can only be seeded within certain "areas of influence" related to where the human homeworld is.  That is, no mk1 fortresses any closer than 3 hops (2 might even be okay, if they're maybe seeded at half frequency within 2 hops?), so 1 and 2 planets away from human homeworld will be clear of fortresses, mk2 no closer than 4 hops, and mk3 no closer than 5 hops.  This would be based off an 80 planet seed probably, and would become more restrictive for lower planet galaxies.

The above would give players some room to expand and build up forces to deal with fortresses without blocking them in and forcing them to take 3 or 4 extra, worthless planets early-game just for the knowledge.

[x4000]

A lot of what you describe (the primacy of bombers, etc) harks back to the AI War 2.0 days, though in those cases it was more to do with force fields rather than fortresses.  I would also note that the AI gets more fortresses on higher difficulties, if I recall correctly, so I think that's also something you're running into with playing on difficulty 9.  It's possible they may need to be tweaked downward slightly, but in general on difficulty 7, I think about... I'm not sure, maybe 10%... to 30% of the systems are having fortresses of some level.  On diff 9 it's a bit higher.  I'd have to consult the code for the real numbers, though, and I don't have it in front of me.

[Red Spot]

Forts are easy to take down, they just require planning and prevent you from sending your fleet like a headless chicken

Basicly just get as much 'free' ships out of the planet, get your bombers in which hardly take damage at all from the fort. Finish the fort, move the rest of fleet back in to clear out the planet.

If you wait near a planet and let it build up while it has a fort nearby the gate you enter the planet .. you may have some grinding to do, but if you spot them when you become neighbours and work a bit on them they still go down very very easy.

Edit: after reading my own post, I do not intend it to come across as if you dont know what you are doing, just that you have to get your fleet out of there ASAP when the free ships are gone and the rest of the planet will mostly leave your bombers alone while they bomb the crap out of the forts.

[x4000]

Yep, Red Spot, those are some good points also.  The old "rush the forcefield on an adjacent mark IV world right at the start of a game so it's not impossible later" strategy had disappeared, which I was unhappy about.  Fortresses embody a lot of that older sort of "we have to figure out a way to isolate and siege this big dangerous thing, while getting bombers into position, while protecting them with stuff that gets killed if we get too close" mentality.

I think that's an interesting twist, but bear in mind that anything on difficulty 9 is meant to kill 99% of all players.  Difficulty 9... isn't really meant to be won except by the sort of folks that are tournament champions for regional strategy game tournaments.  Difficulty 10 is intended to be a challenge for world champions.  Difficulty 8ish is more for the strategy players that are really really good segment, while difficulty 7 is more for the experienced strategy game players that are quite good segment (which is where I place myself, FYI).

But, difficulty fluctuated around for a while, and the game got way too easy for a bit there around 3.0 to 4.0.  The older 2.0 difficulty was the goal, and the game in general has shifted back there a bit.  So while it's certainly possible to play difficulty 9, and I have no idea how good you are, I just wanted to note the general design intent there.  I mostly expect to encounter people playing difficulty 9 and 10 just for the challenge of it, to see what they can do, but it's always a difficult slog.

Like Red Spot, I also want to just say that I'm not trying to turn this into a personal thing; for all I know, you belong at difficulty 9, and you've certainly made some really good observations.  I just figured it would be helpful to explain the design intent, since the actual design had fluctuated away from the intent for a while, and now it's just coming back into line with the intent.  I figured that the current changes might have been considered as a drift, when in fact it's the reigning in of a prior drift.  If that makes sense.

[BobTheJanitor]

In the difficulty 6 game that I just recently started, I was rather surprised to see a Mark IV world next door to my homeworld, with two Fortresses on it, of Marks II and III. Ugly! Is that normal for difficulty 6? I'm doing OK so far, but I can't really do much at this point to bring down the numbers on this world; anything I warp in right now is just going to get smashed. I'm worried it's going to become messy later once the reinforcements on this world get too high. It looks like my AI types are 'The Tank' and 'Vanilla' which I don't believe get any kind of fortress specialty.

[Sunshine!]

I play difficulty 9 (not particularly good at it yet) because it's a level at which the AI itself, without adding in all the modifiers, is challenging.  The waves, reinforcements, higher AI tech level, border and threat aggression, responses to raids, are all major events that need to be taken seriously, so it feels like the AI takes my actions seriously rather than getting a half-hearted response to me blowing up 6 planets in a row.  The fortresses don't really contribute to this, because they just block progress in a system or on a wormhole path without having any offensive capabilities or any "response" capability.  It's a "soft" block, so it's not like with the Core Shield Generators being seeded on AI-planets type block, but it ends up being not fun with the frequency I have to knock out fortresses because of the sheer amount of time and expenditure that goes into knocking out just one fortress.

Sure, it's partly a symptom of the difficulty at which I'm playing, and I probably came across as a bit petulant (this was after the third game-start today where I ended up with a serious blockage of fortresses, the third of which was a total blockage).  I realize fortresses are this really monolithic defense, and I realize it's supposed to take a huge effort to get past them, and I am okay with this (it's part of the challenge I like, after all).  But like I said, the frequency with which I have to do this - particularly the time spent simply having to rebuild my forces with nothing else I can do - is my main gripe.

Edit:

Fortresses embody a lot of that older sort of "we have to figure out a way to isolate and siege this big dangerous thing, while getting bombers into position, while protecting them with stuff that gets killed if we get too close" mentality.

The problem with this is that fortresses have such a huge range.  It's impossible to cover your bombers while they get into position while also keeping your covering forces out of the range of the fortress, so you end up in a lose-lose situation by attacking (because your fleet gets wasted by the fortress while their fleet wastes your bombers), rather than having a win-win situation by attacking correctly by screening your bombers.

Edit2:  I really want to hear from some other players that play difficulty 9 or above, I know we have some around here who are actually really good at it.  It may simply be that I'm not good enough to handle the AIP increases that are necessary to get the resources to tackle the fortresses.

How a game usually goes (80 planets, Random All diff 9 AI types) is I'll gate-raid the bordering planets, take the one with the most resources, build an econmk2 station on the planet, do a bunch of raiding through the non-fortress systems to clear tachyons so I can do more scouting to get a better picture of the surrounding area, and some of the time I'll get lucky and there will be easy targets of opportunity without fortresses guarding them, but more often than not I end up coming up against a situation where I can't advance (without taking planets I don't necessarily need, to get the extra resources) because there are two or three high mark planets with fortresses in my immediate vicinity that need to be dealt with.

You know, I think I've changed my mind about there being too many seeded - I'll keep trying and maybe I'll learn how to deal with fortresses in the next couple of weeks, and if not, I'll come back with more information.  In the meantime, anyone else's opinions?

[Red Spot]

....but it ends up being not fun with the frequency I have to knock out fortresses because of the sheer amount of time and expenditure that goes into knocking out just one fortress.

There I can agree in that their volume might be turned down a notch.

[hullu]

I used to have this exact same problem until I remember that I could bring 5 forcefields with me on an offense. Have the rest of the fleet under those, and bombers out blasting the fortress.

Works for me. Also bring a few engineers to keep the fields up. Of course it divides your fleet strength by four, but well, it cuts your losses by a billion %

[Vinraith]

Purely out of curiosity, Sunshine, when was the last time you played on a setting below 9?

[x4000]

BobTheJanitor -- yes, the seeding is random, so you can wind up with really nasty worlds right next to your world even on difficulty 1.  But the frequency of nasty worlds is based on the difficulty, so if it's nasty near your home that means it's easier somewhere else.

Sunshine!  -- that makes a lot of sense.  I'll wait to see if more of a consensus develops, or what.

[Sunshine!]

Purely out of curiosity, Sunshine, when was the last time you played on a setting below 9?

Judging based on save games, I had a difficulty 8 game I stopped playing on the 27th of december, and I think a difficulty 7 game I stopped playing on the 17th of december (or at least, these are the last save dates).  Those are also solo games, my multiplayer games tend to be either difficulty 7, or difficulty 10 snake maps.

Really quickly, what I don't like about difficulty 7 is that border incursions are frequent, but minor, so you're always dealing with a nuisance here and a nuisance there, and as a result the most efficient method for winning on a 40 planet map (at least for me) is to take every planet because there's no real strong resistance to doing that from the AI.  So, I get bored mid/late game when I try to play the game "properly" and keep the AIP down, but just end up wiping everything off the map.  I wasn't finishing most of my difficulty 7 games because they just simply got to be so boring and so much of a slog, and I'd been messing around with difficulty 9 a little with an eye towards some of the achievements, but then I ended up actually really, really liking difficulty 9.  Difficulty 8, when I tried to drop down, seemed like a bad mix, where the AI could kick me around, but only if it were so inclined.  Difficulty 9, the AI is constantly trying to kick me around whenever I do something, and that's the kind of aggressive push-back response I'm looking for out of my strategy games.

Edit: A little bit on my other strategy gaming: I rarely play against human opponents because I like large multiplayer games, not duels, and finding a game like that online that's not stacked is impossible, so it's just not fun (also, too much micro needed when playing against humans).  That being said, a while back playing just LAN games against friends I was more than capable of repeatedly crushing my friend's (and these were decent players) full 100 popcap armies with my 50 popcap Undead army (logistics was also part of it - rebuilding was much easier for me because I avoided upkeep and had a faster, more self-sufficient force by abusing the speed and vampire auras the Undead get, and I could get a force that was easy to maneuver and which I was comfortable with back in the field much faster than my opponents).

On the other hand, I do play against pretty much the highest difficulty AIs I can get my hands on.  In regular Supreme Commander, I got to the point where I could go 1v6 against the hardest difficulty AIs, in Forged Alliance 1v4 I think it was against the hardest non-cheating AIs, in CNC Generals I'm pretty sure at one point I could go 1v6 if not 1v7 against the hardest AIs, and in CNC 3 I do decently against the second hardest AIs (though not with hugely stacked odds - CNC 3 is a lot faster paced and a lot harder to keep track of things than with Generals, and resourcing is... odd).  Starcraft I haven't played in forever, but it had one of the best AIs I think I've seen in a strategy game of that sort, so even going 1v2 was difficult.

[Sunshine!]

To add some pictures to the discussion, here's a screeny from my current game with the fortress planets circled and labeled with the fortress' marks - keep in mind the green AI is a Tech Turtle (the other is a camouflager), so that could be skewing things a little bit.  This is as far as I can currently scout with mk1 and mk2 scouts.  Still, 10 planets with fortresses out of the 19 I've been able to scout.

[Fruden]

 If you're feeling cheap, it looks life forts are the only ships that will chase to outside the minimap. So its possible to attack with a bunch of transports that have some bombers in them, send them to the outer edge, wait for everything to go back, and when fort is isolated, send transport fleet to it and unload bombers. A little earlier I destroyed a mk2 fort on a very fortified mk4 planet with a cap of mk1 bombers and ~10 transports. Not using latest beta, I'm about 1 week late.

 Not cheap, i found the solution was to bring a fleet in transports, dump cloakers to cloak transports far from anything, get fleet out of transport and put it all in low power, wait till all cloaked, then walk to fort, power up, and blow it up. I generally have to distract to avoid losing too many ships, so i usually send extra transports or other sacrificial ships all over the place to draw stuff away from target.

 And yeah in lv9+ games there always end up being more fortresses than planets.

[BobTheJanitor]

Latest beta just made fortresses immobile and reduced the range of AI forts as well, so that tactic's right out the window.

[superking]

I would like to see less forts tbh, removing them so you can assault a planet is a fair amount of work and gets very repetitive