AI War Beta 5.074-5.075 "Focused Forces" Released!

[orzelek]

When a ship is "targeted" by a projectile it is essentially marked for death, there is no way to prevent a ship from taking damage once something has been launched at it. For all intents and purposes, the projectile animation is only for looks. So when the ship is being shot at by Ion Cannons, it is already dead but you just don't see it until the shot hits.

Yeah, it just is silly that you can still load the marked for dead ship then.

This is quite silly with transports. Ship should die when loading as with going through wormhole.
But you can save ship from damage already in flight by hiding it under a force field - force field will take the hit. It works with normal damage - I admit I did not verify it with Ion cannon's instakill projectile.

[Toranth]

But you can save ship from damage already in flight by hiding it under a force field - force field will take the hit. It works with normal damage - I admit I did not verify it with Ion cannon's instakill projectile.

Are you sure about this?  I've tried this and have noticed issues - specifically with the new Champion insta-Force Fields.  I regularly have units take damage while sitting under the field.  For the field to defend a units, it seems like a) the field must be created before the enemy fires, b) the unit must be under the field before the enemy fires, and c) the same field must still cover the target when the projectile arrives.
If either condition fails, the unit takes the damage directly.

[Faulty Logic]

But you can save ship from damage already in flight by hiding it under a force field - force field will take the hit. It works with normal damage - I admit I did not verify it with Ion cannon's instakill projectile.

Are you sure about this?  I've tried this and have noticed issues - specifically with the new Champion insta-Force Fields.  I regularly have units take damage while sitting under the field.  For the field to defend a units, it seems like a) the field must be created before the enemy fires, b) the unit must be under the field before the enemy fires, and c) the same field must still cover the target when the projectile arrives.
If either condition fails, the unit takes the damage directly.

You can save a unit from damage with a new forcefield. In fact, in the time it takes a wave of bomber shots to reach home command, you can warp the champion back, deploy forcefields, and not lose. I have seen this work for mobile fleet ships as well.

[Cinth]

It takes time for the "shielding" to propagate through whatever you want to protect. You can actually watch this happen by flying ships through a FF. So if I'm not mistaken, all that you need is for that "switch" to be on before the projectiles hit.

[Minotaar]

You can also teleport around until the projectiles dissipate  but when you enter a wormhole or transport, they instantly hit.

[Soyweiser]

You can save a unit from damage with a new forcefield. In fact, in the time it takes a wave of bomber shots to reach home command, you can warp the champion back, deploy forcefields, and not lose. I have seen this work for mobile fleet ships as well.

Sounds like a bug to me. I think respawned champions should not have any shadow energy. (Now, play with 8 champions, and have your home command be immune to most attacks. Just let the champions spawn new forcefields again and again).

[keith.lamothe]

New one

[LordSloth]

So I saw 5.076 is out, so I'm going to give a rather neutral report on my new 5.075 game. The main thing I wanted to do was try out Starfleet Commander with the new starships and rebalanced starships and see if everything was working as intended. Short answer: Yes, but I didn't get far in three hours of play.

Map setup: 100 Stars, Simple Clusters, Stealth Battleship as bonus. 7.3/7.3 Gravity Drill/Starfleet Commander, (Advanced) Hybrid Hives on both, Astrotrains on both,  Normal+Champion, various minor factions set mostly on easypion

The map generation seems fine.  However, cluster is turning out a LOT more difficult than I expected. There are two Interplanetary Munitions Boosters in my corner of the galaxy. They're far out enough (at least 3 hops) that in a normal game, they'd be of no concern. Between the gravity drills, hive, and occasional Eye, I've a lot less room to go around than usual, and hunting hybrids is a nastier proposition than usual.

Incoming waves are fine... minirams, stealth battleships, that sort of thing. Oddly, I'm getting 3 starships from each wave, I had expected 4 from the tooltip - I presume it's a budget thing.

Where things are becoming really, really scary for me are the new and improved reinforcement mechanics. I have to plan a little bit more when there are 90 snipers in a gravity drill system and there may or may not be IPMB boosting it. In otherwords, bring the silly scouting starships already.

Ultimately, it isn't going too well, on account of my not being properly prepared. Three and half hours in, 3 systems. I spent way too much time on the Champion earlier when I should have probably been focusing all my attention on planning and executing a plan of attack . I did a lot of neutering, but time in the nebula counteracted that.

Ignoring everything up above, I wanted to see how starfleet commander handled with the new ship changes. Nothing broken, nothing particularly unusual, I saw Zenith Starships, Spire Starships, everything as expected except for seeing only three starships at a time.  I'm debating with myself whether I want to see the AI show a little more focus on incoming starships. The leeches and bombards and everything are dangerous enough, but if around half the time it picked one type (or two if was sending six or more) it might end up a lot scarier (if it wasn't for the leech starship change I wouldn't even consider suggesting this).

In this timeframe due to my slow expansion, I didn't have any opportunity to reflect on higher unlocks, but I'm going to aim for more Heavy Bomber Starships if I can break out of my self-imposed trap. If I can't, I'll start over on a new seed with the new patch, aiming for less IPMB. I really don't want to turn hives down, but I simply might not be able to multi-task well enough with normal expansion, hive hunting, champion championing.

P.S.
Next time I should try special forces commander plus gravity drills. It might be a little weird.