Core Shield Generators - Discussion

[Echo35]

I believe my answer of "i do not want to be forced to take ars" still holds.

The couple of Shield Generators I've found in my game were not on an ARS planet.

Was it an older version game originally? The spawning for all 5 networks didn't convert well for existing saves but works fine now in fresh games. Neither of my existing games have A, B, or C networks for example, although they should.

And no, it's the game I'm playing right this second with the current version

[Sunshine!]

This new shield update is a lot to keep track of.  It's another 9 things to track down and find, no questions, whereas the secondary objectives up to now have always been optional, the 5 ARS and the mark 4 factories and all that stuff (Which I always try to get).

That being said, it's something I would already be doing for the most part, I think.  That's why I only mildly dislike it, it's just one more thing to keep track of in a game that keeps getting more and more complex (not that I'm complaining, the complexity is amazing, it just seems like this is unnecessary complexity for me instead of interesting complexity like with the Hybrids).

[Kemeno]

I really wish I could playtest this to really solidify my feelings on it, but unfortunately I'm just not going to have time to play around with it in the next week  . I will say that RCIX makes a great point about giving me some intermediate objectives. I do oftentimes find myself sort of drifting with so many possible options; the strategy can become so complex that you get a sort of 'analysis paralysis' when you should really just being winging it and seeing what happens! Something to focus on when I'm not sure of my next course of action could really help here. (This gets at its worst once you've got your 'core' planet group down and start to enter the midgame.)

Forcing players to take the ARS planets is actually not that big a deal in my opinion. Getting the bonus ship types opens up alternative strategies that I as a player would not have considered with my previous ship mix - and getting these relatively early lets me use these strategies to the greatest effect. But I think there's also something to be said for making doing that *your* decision.

I want to add that I think the game really shines when you're trying to defend multiple fronts, which I think Chris touched on in a previous post here. I was playing with the lattice map type recently, and having so many avenues of attack from the AI just made the game so much more interesting. As a player, I always think, "obviously I should try to get a core of planets with exactly one enterance/exit; then my core will be super secure and I can just stack my defenses on one planet and not think about it anymore!" Oftentimes I'll look for maps specifically with this strategy in mind. But in reality, it actually sort of feels like a grind trying to capture the 8-15 planets in that core when you're playing this way; I noticed much less of this when I was playing on the lattice map, and the hybrid hives brought things to life even more. I'm really interested to continue that particular game and see how it affects the midgame and endgame...

My conclusion for now: I'm not really for or against this feature. I really need to test it out. It's tough with such a tight timetable for the expansion.   Regardless of the outcome, I think that the *option* to play with shield generators should be left in... I think it would be a boon for newer players in terms of helping them understand where they should be AIP wise before they hit the homeworlds. I actually think that there is something of a perception issue in terms of where the middle ground of AIP is, especially for newer players to the game. (At least, I had this problem when I first started playing.) The pressure to keep AIP as low as humanly possible is enormous, and it needs to be made clearer that 400-700 AIP is perfectly OK. Maybe this is addressed in the tutorial?

I don't think that progress gating is any worse than the current solution. If you can take 6 planets, drop a bunch of nukes, and then hit the homeworlds, you could just deep raid the shield generator planets and then deep raid the AI homeworlds. Things would still be broken either way. This solution is really the simplest and gives people the most freedom; we don't care how you get 500 AIP, but if you want to be in a good position hopefully you've been using that building up time productively. It doesn't give you the intermediate objectives that the shield generators give you, though, so newer players may still flounder as to what to do with the 500 AIP they need! Also, if you can take 6 planets, blow the rest of the AIP away, and win... I'm not really sure what to say to that

I'll end my post with another suggestion that ties into the shield generator and is sort of a twist on the "Threat Assessor" posts I'd mentioned in my previous suggestion - I'm suggesting a player made, maybe researchable structure that we'll call a "Shield Scrambler", "Shield Demodulator", or something like that. This is a somewhat expensive structure that must have a link to the AI Warp Grid. Building one of these would override the requirement for you to destroy one of the secondary shield generator grids or take 1 of the primary shield generators on an ARS planet. The catch is that it needs warp grid access and that these structures need to be at least 2 or 3 systems away from one another to function properly, and of course they only work as long as they're in supply (and intact!). What this means in an abstract sense is that you can choose to take whatever planet you want instead of one of the shield generator planets, but you actually have to hold it in order to assault the AI homeworlds, and you're also perhaps paying a knowledge cost to do it. This encourages a 'multiple front' style of play, which I think is a good thing.

This could easily tie into progress gating; in addition to the progress gate you need to build X Shield Scramblers to disable the AI home shields. This forces you to open multiple fronts, which I argue is a good thing. (It also makes throwing nukes around to arbitrarily increase AIP a bit less viable, since you're going to need that research to defend the additional fronts you have to open!)

EDIT: At this point I wouldn't say that I'm for progress gating any more then I'm for the current shield generator setup; I just think it addresses the concerns of people who want a sandbox-style game while elimating the early deep-raid strategies. I wouldn't mind a choice at setup where I could select an "AI Homeworld Block" and being able to pick one or the other.

[Sizzle]

Ok disclaimer time:  I've not played with the new mechanism, simply I haven't had time to play games at all lately, but I do have time to peruse forums and got to see these long threads.

I apologize for the fact that anything I can contribute won't be from the basis of playtesting.

I'll state for the record that I voted "slightly dislike" -- for most of the same reasons others have iterated:

1) keeping track of 5 separate networks (Kill one monster that is a beast, one that is an elemental, one that is a dragon, one that is a humanoid, and one that is an undead) seems a bit too complex.
2) I tend to like sandbox worlds where my choice is unlimited.

So I would like to propose something that is radically different, will go through each of the checkbox list at the first post, and yet won't require any one SPECIFIC planet be take at all. Not one.  My hope is to suggest something that even Machine would like (and I think the community will miss him, and I hope he considers returning).

Please feel free to tear it apart, as I said I don't have the time to playtest the game, so I could be talking out of my butt.

Here are the rules:
1. It must require that players take a certain number of planets, at least probably 8 on the low side (on a 40/80 planet map), but more likely 10-12.  
2. It must prevent the player from having any hope whatsoever -- I mean black and white 0% chance -- of winning the game before #1 has come to pass.
3. It must not restrict players to taking a specific arbitrary set of planets.
4. It must not be ridiculously over-complex to play with, or to code.
5. Players shouldn't be able to just turtle up in one corner with all their planets next to one another.

The only thing I can't say whether this will pass or not will be #4. That will be up to Chris and Keith to determine.  I am simply trying to think outside the box.

---------------------------------------------------------

Create a set of Roaming AI processor cores (or call them what you like, the key fact is they are mobile. These wander around the galaxy following 2 rules:

1.  They will try to avoid another active processor core.
2.  They will avoid player held planets, trying to maintain at least a 2 (more?) hop distance from the player.

They can be tractored to hold them in place, but cannot be dragged through a wormhole. The player's goal is to "corral them" , tractor them in place, *capture the planet that the core is on* then construct some sort of facility that can hack the AI core or analyze it, or whatever.  This must be done by a player built structure that can only be created on a planet that is owned by the player.  The structure could have it's own tractor beam that will hold the core in place once built.  

The AI will defend these cores / send waves to liberate them.

The purpose of these cores is they maintain some sort of uber offensive or defensive capability on the AI home worlds such that not disabling all of these roaming cores means the player cannot win.
The exact capability can be up to Keith and Chris, but could be invulnerable force shields around the homeworld guard posts and command station, or eyes that spew endless ships while any player ship is in the system, or whatever works to fulfill #2.

The movement rules of these ships mean that for 5 of the AI cores, the player must extend their reach at least 10 hops away from their home world (if in a straight line, perhaps less depending on the local geography) it MAY be possible for the player to capture 5 of these in some sort of compact formation, but they would be stuck waiting a long time perhaps for all of them to "wander" close enough to their home base (yet still 2 planets away from any player held system).

It is a valid tactic to try to corner these guys down a specific short branch.

Examination of the rules:
1) For each of the AI cores the player needs to capture, they need to capture a world.  Requiring 8 of these to be captured, is 8 worlds required.
2) Uber defense / offense if any of these are not captured and held solves #2.
3) There are no specific arbitary planets.  Players can either wait for these to wander close enough to capture with a scouting raid force, or will perhaps have to hunt them down to the far reaches of the universe, it all depends on how keith / chris code their pathing algorithm.  They could for example try to actively avoid the player's home territory even more than the X hop rule.
4) Simple in concept,  Machine's "requirement" that only ONE objective (capture all of X) is met, much more dynamic in player "execution" -- there is literally no one planet that is required, it is all down to where the players can trap these.
5) Players should not be able to turtle up, because the roaming nature of these could mean that they might have to hunt these down  to a further corner of the galaxy.  At a minimum, the player's empire will have to span a certain # of stars, because of the rule that these will avoid player "lands".  The goal is to "string out" the player empire somewhat so that it is harder to defend.

I kinda like this idea much better myself, but please feel free to change it up.   I wanted to let the player be in *complete* control of which planets they choose to colonize, while forcing the player to string out a little bit, and also to capture a certain number of planets.  

Other things that may have to happen:
-- make the AI core indestructible so the player cannot capture one,  nuke his own command station so the planet is neutral, wait for the next one to roll by, and repeat.  (That is, enforce that *different* planets must be captured) -- this should be avoided because of movement rule #1, they won't wander to a place that already has a core, and the player should not be able to "release" the hacked core into the wild.

Other sneaky bits by the players.

[Echo35]

This new shield update is a lot to keep track of.  It's another 9 things to track down and find, no questions, whereas the secondary objectives up to now have always been optional, the 5 ARS and the mark 4 factories and all that stuff (Which I always try to get).

That being said, it's something I would already be doing for the most part, I think.  That's why I only mildly dislike it, it's just one more thing to keep track of in a game that keeps getting more and more complex (not that I'm complaining, the complexity is amazing, it just seems like this is unnecessary complexity for me instead of interesting complexity like with the Hybrids).

Truth. Like I said before, even the base game has a billion different capturable things and side objectives, which are amazing and really add a lot of neat stuff to the game, but as you said, are all optional. It just kinda seems like an artificial way to make mid game more complicated.

[Kemeno]

This new shield update is a lot to keep track of.  It's another 9 things to track down and find, no questions, whereas the secondary objectives up to now have always been optional, the 5 ARS and the mark 4 factories and all that stuff (Which I always try to get).

That being said, it's something I would already be doing for the most part, I think.  That's why I only mildly dislike it, it's just one more thing to keep track of in a game that keeps getting more and more complex (not that I'm complaining, the complexity is amazing, it just seems like this is unnecessary complexity for me instead of interesting complexity like with the Hybrids).

Truth. Like I said before, even the base game has a billion different capturable things and side objectives, which are amazing and really add a lot of neat stuff to the game, but as you said, are all optional. It just kinda seems like an artificial way to make mid game more complicated.

That's a solvable problem, I think! Get rid of shield generators. Turn ARS's/Adv. Factories/Etc into an open-ended sub-campaign.

The AI has a shield that you need to take out to kill it. You need to capture the adv. research stations to grab AI data/specs on the shield. (You also happen to find extra ship designs when you capture them; what a deal!) Once you have enough, you need an advanced factory to build a "Trojan Horse" virus ship or something. You then need to capture an AI Shield modulator and bring the virus ship to it (just load it in) and viola! You've disabled the shield!

Maybe there can be another step or two to the process; this abstracts 3 of the shield networks (A, B, E) into the current mechanics, removing this extra "I need to keep track of X" stuff.

[Sunshine!]

Interesting idea, but it hinges on your Mk4 factories not getting blown up, and that's way too much to ask since accidents do happen, and losing a mk4 factory on some undefended backwater shouldn't be game-crippling.

[Kemeno]

Interesting idea, but it hinges on your Mk4 factories not getting blown up, and that's way too much to ask since accidents do happen, and losing a mk4 factory on some undefended backwater shouldn't be game-crippling.

Good point - Totally didn't think about that! We could remedy that easily enough by simply saying that you need to capture the advanced factory to understand how to create a device to interface with AI technology properly, while the actual device is simply built from the const tab. (This also solves the problem of physically transporting the virus ship across the galaxy.) If you capture one in advance and then lose it, everything is ok; as long as you had an adv. factory at some point you have the knowledge required to construct the thing.

Or it could just spawn at an Adv. factory as an indestructible + permacloaked ship when you capture an adv. factory and have the adv. research ships needed (or spawn at your homeworld if you captured an adv. factory and later lost it for whatever reason).

[Suzera]

Going to cut these to relevant bits for this reply

I don't buy the "I don't care about ARSes" argument.
Essentially "free" ships?  As in, not costing knowledge?  What could be more win?  These are central to the game, and always have been.  The fact that some players don't value them is... well, my read is that's been created by the culture of rushing and uber-low-AI-Progress that some advanced players have come by.  If the AI progress were higher, you'd want all those ships.  Put another way: if you just had to capture 8 more planets than you normally would choose to, I'd bet that 3-4 of those would be ARS planets in most cases.

2. So, now you have some random new ship type.  What do you do with it?  Your strategic milieu has just expanded in an unexpected and unpredictable fashion.  Maybe you just throw the mark 1 ships into your mix of defensive ships.  Or maybe this is a unit that changes everything about how you formulate your fleets on this map, based on what the AI has and what you are doing.  It makes you play with ships you'd otherwise completely ignore, and -- surprise -- you might find some really new things to love while doing that.  It's assumed that players will just pick from their stable of favorite bonus ship types, and thus they wind up restricting them to just a tiny percentage of ship types.  With all the expansions, there are now 54 bonus ship types.  The only way most people will explore most of those is by discovering them in an ARS.  And so many of those ship types can be used in fascinating combinations people wouldn't casually think of from reading about them in the game lobby: again, something that only gets discovered via the ARS.

This is why I'm so fond of it making the players take the ARS planets, at least four of them.  In 1.0 and thereabouts, you had NO HOPE of beating the AI home planets without taking 3-4 ARSes, and that was great.  But as the game evolved, that's no longer true.  And the game is better for it, in many ways (less grind, more interesting/powerful starships, etc).  So I think of this as sort of a retroactive fix to bring back that one positive aspect of the 1.0-era design that has since been lost by the other many positive changes that have come since.

Referring back to my "this actually opens up some different kinds of choices" section, in the case of taking a distant ARS planet you have just incurred irreversible AIP, right?  And you have a new ship for it.  But now you also have this planet that may be in a weak position, that may require protection, and so on.  It's not part of your core blob.  You can just abandon it, if you like.  But you paid for it.  In an AIP sense, it's yours for free now.  So are the resources worth it?  Do you hold it?  For how long?  Do you abandon it and come back to hold it, briefly, later?  You get none of this sort of interplay if you're always able to choose the planets you take.

ARS are largely useless because knowledge is generally too limited and only maybe 10 ships are practically useful for efficient wins. MRLS, FFB, Tank, Autobomb (wave defense), paralyzers, planes (maybe, power cost is very rough), new strength snipers (maybe after the above are mk 3) and a few others like the boosters (particularly if you have FFBs so they don't explode so fast). You're better off making sure the triangles are all unlocked to mk 3, as well as MRS, the entire flagship series, all the beam cannons, the entire chain of economy and/or logistics bases and many more above all the ships except FFBs, MRLSs and tanks. FFBs are irreplaceable and provide the ONLY counter in the game to AE damage units, to the point I think they or a weaker version of them should be default units in case the AI gets autobombs or other AE special units, MRLS are generally better than cruisers unless you really want to micro, tanks are like combination bomber/fighters. If old school research raiding were in again, taking an ARS would potentially be more valueable unless you get stuck with something inefficient like raiders (very expensive for a 3x triangle cap unit and quite flimsy so the cost racks up quick) since you could actually bump up even relatively useless ships to mk 3 without the tedium that is using mk 3 research stations. As is, however, knowledge is too scarce and almost everything an ARS would give gets out-prioritized by many other things.

Power is also a big limiter in single player because you can't stack a set of efficient power for every player on every planet like in multiplayer and you have to continually place mk 3 power generators and micro them to keep their upkeep from sucking up 1/2 your income. You just can't afford the power to make mk 1 anything unless it is a ship that is REALLY good at mk1 like autobombs, paralyzers or FFBs. Just making mk 2 and 3 of frigates, bombers and fighters + 1 special ship type plus the flagships for attack boost and the mk 1 bomber and raid starships you need to kill AI Eyes, you're talking several hundred thousand power, and you haven't even factored in all the turrets you need to build for defense.

Also, I played pre-Zenith (that is 1.stuff right?) and I did the same floor AIP strategy then too. It was far far FAR easier back then and games in under an hour at 7 difficulty with 4-5 planets weren't too hard to pull off. This was because of space plane and eyebot supremacy mostly in addition to the floor AIP thing though. There's no super-ships nowadays that build rapidly for dirt cheap and blow absolutely everything up quickly. Shields made things kind of wacky back then. I believe I mentioned strategy this back then but not much came of it back then beside nerfing planes before I quit due to boredom. It wasn't nearly as refined then though because it really didn't need to be with the superplanes. Old style research raiding bumped things up then too, but things also cost far less so it was a double effect on that.

My one main response is regarding deepstrike games.  Why do I have such a vendetta against them?  Aren't they valid?  In my opinion, not really. 

Deepstriking is a map-scale tactic, not a game strategy. The strategy at fault for shortcutting the strategic depth and relatively trivializing difficulty is the low/floor AIP. Deepstriking should be one tool in the arsenal. With the previous low/floor AIP strategy that was the culprit or breaking the game into trivialty, deepstriking was just the only compatible map-scale tactic. Now that flooring isn't so easy, and the mk1 wave multipliers are smoothed out so that low AIP isn't so trivial to defend vs mk 2 AIP, defense may end up a bigger concern and drain some of the fleet that would have gone entirely to deepstriking before and promote a slightly broader strategy. That's not to say it wasn't overpowered as a tactic in a lot of cases, but other things have ameliorated that effect already for now.

If deepstrike games take 1/4 of the time as a regular game, you only have to win them 25% of the time for them to be equally viable to the main game style.

You're losing 3/4 of your games. That's terrible unless you're ok with losing. At any rate, I would win 100% of games with the previous floor strategy unless I started dipping into the 9s or 10s or taking crazy combos like backdoor hacker + tech sledge, so winning rate isn't really relevant to the discussion other than that it was quick, efficient, quick, easy and bypassed 95% of the stuff in the game. The game length isn't really the problem either. The only thing that really mattered for planets was the number of new warp links you would have to destroy when taking a new planet to keep it down to a maximum of one open warp link. Anything else was useless clutter. Even mk 4 factories were just ships that you could't readily afford and didn't need to make, and thus were a time drain if you tried. The only thing remotely useful were Zenith power generators since power was pretty precious with that few planets.

Note that in games of Civilization, for instance, there's no way you can just quickly rush your enemies and win.

Actually, this is a really big problem in all the Civ games against the computer unless you play on the higher difficulties where they start starting with a bunch of military units and multiple settlers. You just don't do it because it's boring unless you just like easy wins to tell the computer "HAHA! I win again!". You do something besides rush them or stop playing the game after rushing them a couple times. It's a little more gambly in Civ though than AI War, but only slightly so. You still can't quite rush in AI War. In the comparative phase you would be ready to take an AI HW in a floor AIP game, you're well beyond the "rush in that early game phase where the computer has a terrible army" phase in Civ 4. It's more comparable to a swordsman era fight, which while the AI was still pretty weak at on even terms, was at least a little more prepared for than warrior rushing.

That's fun to do a few times, but it's not really a strategy game that is long-term fun.  Most of them that used that heavily are no longer in the forums, I might note.  Haagenti and others, I'm thinking of here. 

This is why I quit back in the 2.0 era shortly after Zenith. It was dreadfully dull, and I couldn't quite force myself to hold to a middle ground. Anything different I did than floor AIP and deepstrike to try to win less hard felt kind of hollow because I knew I was just holding back.

To some extent, I have to watch out not only for what players want, but I also have to protect them from themselves.  I'm a prime example of that: AI War was designed to not let me play the way I normally would, because my normal playstyle kills my interest in all other RTS games. Normally I get the strongest economic civ, turtle like crazy, then find a pair of ube-strong units that I can spam and boom out with, destroying the opposing AI.

It would be great if this too were a viable strategy, in addition to others. I am sort of doing this in my current game right now. Building up behind a hard chokepoint in smaller chunks then when I have a base set up I'm going to nomadically deepstrike the necessary locations then pile through to the AI from bases two steps away. A combination of things, as it should be in my opinion. It is still fairly similar to what I was doing, but I may end up taking more planets for economy before starting my nomadic war in AI territory since the mk 2 gap isn't a huge wall of difficulty anymore, and floor AIP is really hard to keep with the removal of core planet data centers. That's also because I lose more ships due to planets ganging up and resupplying across 10 AI owned planets is tricky, so dragging some colony ships along to build docks and quickly harvest knowledge while I am out having to blow up AI planets isn't a bad idea.

The irony is that if one of those games had been altered to prevent my strategy, it probably would have lost me as a player.  I would have been pretty frustrated, I think.  But on the other hand, if those games hadn't allowed that sort of strategy from the start, then I would perhaps still be playing one of them, and AI War might not exist.

There actually was no reason to mar your strategy, because it already wasn't the best one and was just you hampering yourself in the name of what you wanted to do as fun. That hurts no one at all. The people who have fun winning hard are the ones doing infinite city spam for the free unit upkeep and more in Civ 3 or rampant tech brokering exploiting the computer diplomacy modifiers on deity in Civ4, or infinite city spamming with horsemen and tradeposts using Alexander to get tons of food from maritime cities in Civ5. Those strategies all still use significant sections of the strategic depth in those games though, unlike the previous floor AIP strategy which skipped over everything. Civ5 certainly has balance issues at the moment though and are taking their sweet time doing anything about it.

I think they wanted a solution that made deepstriking fixed, and more difficult, but I don't think that's really possible. No matter how you balance it, the risk/reward ratio just isn't there.  Either the chance of success is just so remote that no one in their right mind would do it, or there's some secret technique that makes it a lot easier to do and thus unbalanced, or there's a pretty good chance of doing it and it makes the actual game of AI War seem pointless because there's this easier-and-faster thing that can let you win at the expense of not really playing the game as a 4X, just a sort of large-unit-count RTS. 

Not necessarily true in my opinion. There doesn't need to necessarily be one clearly best and superior strategy (and certainly not to the extent that floor AIP was), and there doesn't necessarily always need to be a shortcut. There probably will be to some extent or other though with this many numbers flying around like in AI War though, but the difference can be minimized to promote a more diverse range of possible strategies and tactics to use at any given time, instead of focusing the game towards one specific strategy and tactic.

My response was to kill the deepstriking permanently and without ambiguity, which I think is the right call.  Regardless of the mechanics that ultimately wind up being here, I think that core thing is the right call.  It's less about choice, and more about "please play this as AI War, not Starcraft," if that makes sense.

Rest assured, you haven't killed deepstriking, and I am still playing it like an elongated game of Starcraft. Starcraft has base expansions and research upgrades and so on too. Floor AIP strategy seems fairly dead though which is good. Deepstriking is still a valid tactic however. Although, I think the change to make planets gang up helped a lot to keep the overwhelming firepower effect from keeping such a huge K:D in favor of the humans for those REALLY REALLY deep strikes across a hundred (literally) planets to make the extremes of it less extreme.

[Hypha]

In coop, this strategy really was quite easy before and our group could have a bunch of new people following Suzera's orders and we would still win handedly. Her playstyle completely changed my own. I stand by Suzera's points and hope more can be done to make the game more interesting. I personally feel that a AI behaviour change will do the most good rather than this shield system. Giving the AI ability to be dynamic in the face of deepstriking would be much better and I feel making the ganging up behaviour even larger would be a better step.

[RCIX]

There actually was no reason to mar your strategy, because it already wasn't the best one and was just you hampering yourself in the name of what you wanted to do as fun. That hurts no one at all. The people who have fun winning hard are the ones doing infinite city spam for the free unit upkeep and more in Civ 3 or rampant tech brokering exploiting the computer diplomacy modifiers on deity in Civ4, or infinite city spamming with horsemen and tradeposts using Alexander to get tons of food from maritime cities in Civ5. Those strategies all still use significant sections of the strategic depth in those games though, unlike the previous floor AIP strategy which skipped over everything. Civ5 certainly has balance issues at the moment though and are taking their sweet time doing anything about it.

But the key is, once you find that strategy that works best, what's the point of doing anything else (if you're going for the win, anyway)? You can't have a one best strategy or one best option (in the presence of other options) for anything really or, as you said, it feels like you're "holding back". This specific nerf neatly removes the deepstrike strat and adds short-term goals off the bat. Is it possible that there are better and/or more interesting ways to do it? Certainly. But this looks like a good start to me.

[Lancefighter]

Perhaps, if i might..

Deep striking should make hunter-killers spawn.

That is all.

[Suzera]

There actually was no reason to mar your strategy, because it already wasn't the best one and was just you hampering yourself in the name of what you wanted to do as fun. That hurts no one at all. The people who have fun winning hard are the ones doing infinite city spam for the free unit upkeep and more in Civ 3 or rampant tech brokering exploiting the computer diplomacy modifiers on deity in Civ4, or infinite city spamming with horsemen and tradeposts using Alexander to get tons of food from maritime cities in Civ5. Those strategies all still use significant sections of the strategic depth in those games though, unlike the previous floor AIP strategy which skipped over everything. Civ5 certainly has balance issues at the moment though and are taking their sweet time doing anything about it.

But the key is, once you find that strategy that works best, what's the point of doing anything else (if you're going for the win, anyway)? You can't have a one best strategy or one best option (in the presence of other options) for anything really or, as you said, it feels like you're "holding back". This specific nerf neatly removes the deepstrike strat and adds short-term goals off the bat. Is it possible that there are better and/or more interesting ways to do it? Certainly. But this looks like a good start to me.

Chris's civ strategy was not the best though, so there was no reason to nerf it into uselessness. That reply section was about him talking about Civ. He got to have his fun and the people playing to win as best they could did other things, but those other things still included huge swaths of the game unlike the floor AIP strategy in AI War. The AI in Civ is just pretty dumb, so if you play on the "no cheating" difficulties it's pretty easy to win if you know what you're doing to even a halfway extent. In Civ4 there was a huge problem with their worker management, and in 5 there's all kinds of issues. I forget what exactly the deal in 3 was, but they didn't take advantage of infinite city spam. They all had real issues making good use of air power if you haven't won a conquest victory by or shortly after riflemen.

[Hypha]

If I may further add, maybe make a specialized selection of units, hunter-killers if you must, which patrol deeper in AI territory and can really make deep striking risky. In other games, when I am deep in enemy territory, I am not comfortable and even though there is no pressing danger I am a lot more cautious. In AI wars, this is not the case and there is nothing to fear being surrounded by the AI deep in their zone. You can wonder in the AI's backyard very easily. The planets you owe are a safe zone and this feeling of safety is probably why many players don't realize that the AI is a paper tiger in its own territory. I want a little fear. Something like a hunter-killer squad which would be absolutely devastating if it caught you would make trips deeper and deeper into the unknown more dangerous and has a lot more character than these shield generators or might work well with them. The risk of deep striking is to face one of these hunter-killer squads which can eradicate your fleet. These squads though cannot enter human worlds and as the players expand, they decrease in strength till they are more manageable. Thus stealth, rather than firepower, is the key component but you can't expect stealth to get you through the AI homeworlds. This won't eliminate deep striking as a strategy but it will make it more tense to keep track of roving death squads that start to zero in the longer you stay in their territory. For me, this is more exciting.

[Suzera]

You don't want to go too far, so far as to eliminate deepstriking or making it a last ditch effort or you just end up with the opposite. It's all a huge slog of taking almost every planet with, again, no diversity of strategy. Granted, it's a significantly less bad situation since you could still direct it somewhat, but then you run into huge difficulty swings based on map seed from the scourge that is warp counterposts (though not quite as bad as a few patches ago). Right now the planet gangups and the recent halving of FFB health prevent such magnificient feats as deepstriking across 110 planets with 5-10% losses from being anywhere near as trivial to pull off.