Early IV Harassment

[darke]

Managed to replicate an early game assault (under 6 minutes in! ) by Tech IV ships.

Save is attached. Cegor homeworld is currently being assaulted by a mix of ships including IV bombers, armour ships and raiders.

The only planet adjacent is a Tech I named Udonkai, it has a couple of the Tech IV ships still waiting at it's wormhole. Nearest IV world is a few planets away.

[x4000]

I suspect that this is related to the combining of AI ships -- basically, how it upgrades ships when it has too many.  In this case, I think it's been upgrading some ships that were special forces, and which then came into your planets.  The reason for the upgrades this early into the game are the extreme number of start planets you have.

I'll need to look at this logic some, but I'm almost positive that's what's going on here and not a resurgence of any of the other sorts of bugs with AI ships getting "released" incorrectly.

[eRe4s3r]

I am not sure its a bug.. i think this is a perfectly acceptable attack.
You are spread too thin, thats the only problem

[darke]

I suspect that this is related to the combining of AI ships -- basically, how it upgrades ships when it has too many.  In this case, I think it's been upgrading some ships that were special forces, and which then came into your planets.  The reason for the upgrades this early into the game are the extreme number of start planets you have.

Makes sense. I do have something like 50k enemy ships running around at the moment since I'm running with two Turtle AI's.

It might be worth making the turtler's less aggressive on combining through, or that they prefer to throw lower-level ships at you and keep the higher-level ones at their base (the whole "ultra-difficult-to-assault" world logic). As it is, I'm having more problems defending the assaults of this two-turtle start then I had with a two-"The Tank" start (where it was only at the hour mark that their assaults of 300+ ships really started hurting), and the turtler's are supposed to be harder assaulting, not defending against!

I am not sure its a bug.. i think this is a perfectly acceptable attack.
You are spread too thin, thats the only problem

Hrm... how do you think that? With an 8-world start, the smallest number of exits I've only found are 5 wormholes (connecting to 5 separate AI planets) spread across the 8 worlds. Where as this is 8 worlds, 6 wormholes, but they only connect to 4 enemy planets, so when I get stabilised it's pretty easy to reduce my attack surface simply by taking my first world.

8-wormholes for 8-world start is my normal "average" game start on AI7 when I last played it, though I have started with a 12-wormhole 8-world start previously (because the planets made a pretty pattern... yeah, glutton for punishment I guess). It was quite a bit tougher to defend at AI7, but I only had to worry about defending against Tech I/II ships with my Tech I ships/turrets, rather then having to worry about trying to defend against Tech IV ships with my Tech I ships and Tech II turrets.

[eRe4s3r]

I am saying that because with 1 planet you would have ~200 ships defending your home station, instead of 30 and the rest spread across the galaxy after 6-7 minutes

I am not sure if you know this, but if you have more planets the ai gets more stuff as well - the AI difficulty counts your PLANET COUNT pretty heavily in. This means that you make the game more difficult for yourself - more planets means more reinforcements earlier, that means by the time you reach the core homeworld the ai will have a LOT more ships then it would have if you'd start with 1 planet and expand slowly (relative).

If you capture less planets by force that means the ai can focus reinforcements for a longer time at planets and you will hit rock bottom because of those maxed out IV worlds adjacent to you, by the time you have a force to take them they are probably fully stacked with ships

[darke]

That's nice and all, but none of that is relevant.

For more reference/detail: I've played this exact map previously with the same worlds and the same AI10 level against both a pair of Sledgehammer AI's and against a pair of The Tank AI's. Both of these AI's are heavily offensive. I successfully defended against both of these AI's for over an hour (slowly taking over assorted other worlds whilst I was doing so) before I got eventually worn down. I eventually gave up at the 2 hour mark with The Tanks since they were throwing 600 ships a wave at me.

Turtle AIs are defensive, they're meant to be easy to defend against, but hard to attack their worlds. I can't last past 5 minutes defending against their assault. Not attacking their worlds and getting slaughtered defending against their assaults. Something I have no problems doing against offensive AIs. Thus the complaint.

[eRe4s3r]

But you won't win defending   The AI on the other, will win defending. After 3 hours your game will be lost no matter how good you defended. Because when all planets are stacked full to the brim, there is no way you could survive the cross planet attacks that are coming next.

I regard the AI like a garden weeds - If you don't weed them they overgrow the entire garden. Your tactic is akin to choosing a square in the that garden and defend it against weeds... you will succeed, but the rest of the garden will still overgrow ,p

Ie. Its a bad strategy if you want to win, or weed your garden ^^

[darke]

Correct. A fundamental end-game of the game is that you end up being eventually stalemated, then overwhelmed by the AI. It ends about 90% of my AI10 games, the remainder which I end when there's been a major upgrade to core game play of it, and I need to start again because it's broken my strategies, or has otherwise caused me problems when upgrading. I've only actually managed to get close to winning one game so far.

In any event, I still fail to see how to see this fundamental game axiom is relevant to the fact that it seems a performance optimization is making one (if not more) of the AIs play strangely in one of the game's most difficult difficulty-settings. Though given I've seen this happen identically in AI7 games with the Turtle AIs as well, though obviously it happens less often due to the smaller amount of ships.

[x4000]

The combination of AI ships into higher-level ships has nothing to do with strategy, and everything to do with keeping the unit counts lower so that lower-end CPUs can handle the game.  So if you see one Mark IV bomber attacking you, and I was to turn off the combination, that would then be 4 Mark II bombers or 8 Mark I bombers.  I think that would be just as difficult to defend against, if not more, just not as unsettling.

I think the real problem here is this:  since turtles reinforce only, that means they are also getting tons of special forces ships, which they are then using on the attack against you.  There is an imbalance on how the turtles get reinforcements, and I am starting to think they might should get no special forces reinforcements (or very few of them) in general.  I think those two things (the former of which is already on my list), are the two real issues that need to be fixed here for now.  The rest is just secondary effects of these primary issues, I think.

Thanks for reporting it, again!

[Haagenti]

Darke,

Are you still playing AI10 against a reasonably current patch? In that case, I'm interested in your tactics.

I'm now playing 7.6 against Vicious Raider and Counterspy and the early going is quite hard.

[darke]

Are you still playing AI10 against a reasonably current patch? In that case, I'm interested in your tactics.

I'm now playing 7.6 against Vicious Raider and Counterspy and the early going is quite hard.

I really haven't had much of a chance to play recently, but with 013 I wasn't having issues with emplacing and expanding in an AI10/8-planet-start game, but I'm having serious problems expanding in the latest-ish (014Q? Dammit there's too many releases to keep up!) builds. I keep getting hit with massive waves that it is simply impossible to defend against with the current ship caps even though I've got resources coming out of my ears to build ships that I lack the cap for.

Any particular problems you seem to be having? I might be able to offer some advice, but I am really only being able to play up to about the hour mark at the moment due to massive assaults, and I also and rather lacking in time to play full stop.

(Returns to working/studying/doing-research-projects/loosing-my-mind/maybe-getting-some-sleep.)