Can we have more intelligent enclaves?

[Lancefighter]

The other one felt like poor luck and little else. 

thats how i feel when i lose to enclaves/preservation wardens.

perhaps they should scale their bp or max bp based on time?

[keith.lamothe]

The other one felt like poor luck and little else. 

thats how i feel when i lose to enclaves/preservation wardens.

perhaps they should scale their bp or max bp based on time?

Wardens are scaled by the number of your resource harvesters both in the rate of Warden-spawns and the rate at which they build their squadrons.  I'm guessing that the roaming enclaves are giving you considerably more trouble than the wardens in the earlier game.

I'll go take a look at making the roaming enclaves a bit less enthusiastic about the early game

[Echo35]

The other one felt like poor luck and little else. 

thats how i feel when i lose to enclaves/preservation wardens.

perhaps they should scale their bp or max bp based on time?

Personally I'd be happy if the Roaming Enclaves didn't attack with more powerful ships than the AI has. Seems a little weird to me that the "Minor Faction" is WAY more powerful than the AI is at this stage in the game.

[keith.lamothe]

The minor faction types defined for use by the roamers only come in mark 3, so that's what they are.  It seemed better than any of the other marks for a default, and greatly simplified both the number of ship types that had to be added and the logic for making the whole thing work.

But the early game enclaves are a bit much right now, so just added for 4.049:

* Roaming enclaves now only hold 30% as many ships, but when the game spawns new roaming enclaves it spawns an additional enclave (of the same alignment) for every 50 AIP. So at 0-49 AIP it spawns 1 enclave, at 50-99 AIP it spawns 2, etc.


Perhaps this needs to be shifted to incrementing every 75 AIP, or reducing the ship count further (that 30% is still a fairly significant chunk), etc, but let's see how this goes.

[Lancefighter]

can you make their total bp scaling? for instance, every 50 aip it can hold +100 units? (so you wont see 1k units until 450 aip?)

this should help them scale better later in the game, assuming it wont just take forever to build 2k+ units

[keith.lamothe]

I can't change the number of ships it can hold during the game, that's set in the permanent unit data.  Nor can I change the size of the chunks it releases, nor the number of build points it requires to build 1 ship.

I can change the rate at which the build points accumulate, though, if you have a specific suggestion?

[Lancefighter]

I assume you can check their build points?

Set up some script to check their bp and stop them or make bp accumulate slower/not at all once they reach a certain limit based on aip.

You do something *similar* with wardens - as you get more harvesters, they gain bp faster...

[keith.lamothe]

A roaming enclave gains 50 build points per second, and can store up to 15,000; when it "triggers" it spawns 1 ship per 50 stored build points.  It would actually be possible to artificially keep the "ceiling" lower than 15,000 by simply refusing to increment build points beyond it if AIP is lower than xyz.  I think that's what you're suggestion.

So, given an AIP quantity, how would you want it to compute the build point ceiling?

[Lancefighter]

I dont know? what is its current 1k unit ceiling? ( the 15k number?)

[keith.lamothe]

15k is for 300 ships (300 * 50).

[Lancefighter]

there is no way 300 ships.. oh after you changed them already.

uh 300 units per like 100 aip doesnt sound bad. id throw the cap somewhere around 2k, else really late in the game youll have enclaves dropping 5k+.. with 1k of those being tigers, 1k being impossible to kill weasels, 1k commandos, who instakill turrets.. you see where I'm going with this

[keith.lamothe]

Right now it's set so that below 50 AIP only one enclave spawns per enclave-spawn; 50-99 two enclaves.  And so on.  So that's a max of 600 ships (if both go the same way, which is likely) at less than 100 AIP.

Would it be better to have a max of, say, 400 ships at 100 AIP?  That could be accomplished by enclaves only holding 200 ships.

I can also cap the actual build points by AIP, but this multi-spawn thing just sounds more interesting.  Thoughts?

[Lancefighter]

well, I just dont see enclaves working together very often. Unless you want them to be smaller more often attacks instead of possibly one large attack at farther time apart.. I'm really not sure which would be 'better' or even 'more interesting'.

it would just seem that increased total shipspawn scaling would work better later in teh game

[Echo35]

A roaming enclave gains 50 build points per second, and can store up to 15,000; when it "triggers" it spawns 1 ship per 50 stored build points.  It would actually be possible to artificially keep the "ceiling" lower than 15,000 by simply refusing to increment build points beyond it if AIP is lower than xyz.  I think that's what you're suggestion.

So, given an AIP quantity, how would you want it to compute the build point ceiling?

My current game at around 160 AIP is getting 300-400 ships in each Enclave, which isn't bad in itself so much as them attacking so frequently. I do like Lance's idea though, with making the spawn ceiling out based on the AIP. Not entirely sure what a good number would be, but the 300 at 100 AIP sounds pretty manageable, assuming they don't attack as frequently as they are in my game ><

[keith.lamothe]

Oh, frequency of enclave-spawns isn't involved in any of the stuff I've mentioned thus far.  That logic is below:

Code: [Select]

private void CheckForRoamingEnclaveSpawn()
{
bool ForceSpawn = false;//ForceMarauderSpawnOnNextCheck;
//ForceMarauderSpawnOnNextCheck = false;
if ( Game.Instance.GameSecond % 75 == 0 || ForceSpawn ) //every 75 seconds only
{
if ( Game.Instance.Options.AIMinorFactions[(int)AIMinorFaction.NeinzulRoamingEnclaves] || ForceSpawn )
{
int numberOfGameSecondsBeforeCountingStarts = (int)( ( 15 * 60 ) * ( this.AIDifficulty - (FInt)10 ) );

if ( Game.Instance.GameSecond > numberOfGameSecondsBeforeCountingStarts )
{
this.RoamingEnclaveCounter++;

int thresholdLow = this.AIDifficulty < 5
     ? 50
     : this.AIDifficulty < 8
     ? 37
     : 25;

int thresholdHigh = this.AIDifficulty < 5
      ? 75
      : this.AIDifficulty < 8
      ? ( 37 + 18 )
      : 37;

if ( this.RoamingEnclaveCounter >= Game.Instance.GameRandom.Next( thresholdLow, thresholdHigh ) || ForceSpawn )
{
                                      // goes on to actually pick an alignment, spawn the enclaves, and sets RoamingEnclaveCounter to zero

Just ignore the ForceSpawn thing, that's copypasta (that I might use later, but no need now).

Anyway, what this means is that on Diff 7, it doesn't even start counting until 45 minutes into the game.  Starting at roughly 45 minutes, every 75 seconds it increments RoamingEnclaveCounter.  After a minimum of 37 increments (which is 2775 seconds, or 46.25 minutes) and a maximum of 55 increments (which is 4125 seconds, or 68.75 minutes), it triggers an actual spawn.  Since it rerolls the threshold every check, the probabilityof the actual time-to-spawn is much weighted towards the lower end.

Difficulty 7.3 and 7.6 would differ only in that the counter would start counting at roughly 40 minutes and 35 minutes, respectively, instead of waiting until 45 minutes.  The interval between spawns would be identical to Diff 7.

So, questions:
1) What difficulty are you playing on (apologies if you already told me)?
2) What's the earliest enclave spawn?
3) How often are the enclaves spawning after that?

Thanks