Experimental Postrelease 1: 1.013 (Efficiency up, new economic model)

[x4000]

Totally with you, Rev -- and this new max-based approach will help players avoid ever having underflows, which is the main worry.  The only thing that will be hard to predict to some degree will be the overages based on excess savings of one resource while another is still being drawn down.  That's less of a concern, I think.

[darke]

On 014 news, it seems to be quite a bit more playable then the previous patch was. Things feel like they build a little bit too slowly though, and I'm really starting to struggle with the energy limitations when playing AI10s. I wasn't all that impressed when I put my 4th Tech II generator down on my home world because I was struggling to get off (Tech IV and Tech III worlds adjacent) and it only gave me 4k energy. Especially since now with the greater starting cash I'm almost always at the "low energy warning" as soon as I start just due to defenses and such.

To be perfectly frank, I just can't imagine that playing all AI10s would be that much fun.  It's always going to be a long hard slog, and you're always going to be outmanned and outgunned, and something is always going to be going wrong.  Maybe that is the fun of it, but things like being out of energy because you don't have room to expand, etc, and having to come up with creative solutions to that problem, are just part of the game there IMO.  I'd really suggest playing more in the 8-9 range, where things are less insane, with a handicap to the AI and less of one to yourself -- you could probably get the same sort of difficulty without some of the headaches of just playing AI10s.

Of course AI10s are there for a reason, so if it floats your boat then go for it, but it's not meant to be an overly-friendly level of difficulty.  I'm glad that the new release is playing so much better for you, anyway!

It's not too bad. The first couple of hours trying to take over and stabilise your initial bunch of planets is probably the most interesting part of the game though. After you've got about 10+ planets it does tend to get a bit repetitive too.

Last game I played I took out one of the AI10 Turtles, then gave up taking out the other Turtler since for a change it wasn't adjacent to the first Tech V planet, but 6 planets away and I couldn't be bothered slogging through another 5 IV/III planets packed to the gills with Ion Cannons.

Currently playing with a pair of AI10 Backdoor Hackers. Still haven't quite worked out how to deal with their assaults of 250+ ships once every 10 minutes or so from their exo wormholes.

[x4000]

Currently playing with a pair of AI10 Backdoor Hackers. Still haven't quite worked out how to deal with their assaults of 250+ ships once every 10 minutes or so from their exo wormholes.

Ouch!

[darke]

Currently playing with a pair of AI10 Backdoor Hackers. Still haven't quite worked out how to deal with their assaults of 250+ ships once every 10 minutes or so from their exo wormholes.

Ouch!

That's been pretty much my reaction every time I've had a wave come in so far.

Have you considered upgrading the health of the player's base buildings since you've upped pretty much everything else in the game to make it nastier recently?

Space Docks are like cardboard to pretty much anything, even a couple of Tech II bombers will take one out in an eyeblink. A starship will take a pair out in a single shot (seen it happen with both raid and zenith in this game), I've seen generators taken out by simply collateral damage as the enemy's ships were flying through to take out my space docks.

Also I had one wave of a mix of ships enter and I got a single warning sound that my home control center was under attack as almost instantly the screen flashed white to say I had lost. I think there were only about 10 Tech II bombers in there but obviously the rest of the cruisers and whatever else had managed to get a shot in at the same time too. Was both quite unexpected and quite unpleasant.

[x4000]

Have you considered upgrading the health of the player's base buildings since you've upped pretty much everything else in the game to make it nastier recently?

Space Docks are like cardboard to pretty much anything, even a couple of Tech II bombers will take one out in an eyeblink. A starship will take a pair out in a single shot (seen it happen with both raid and zenith in this game), I've seen generators taken out by simply collateral damage as the enemy's ships were flying through to take out my space docks.

Also I had one wave of a mix of ships enter and I got a single warning sound that my home control center was under attack as almost instantly the screen flashed white to say I had lost. I think there were only about 10 Tech II bombers in there but obviously the rest of the cruisers and whatever else had managed to get a shot in at the same time too. Was both quite unexpected and quite unpleasant.

To me, this is the point of force fields.  I've thought about this off and on, and yes they are really brittle, but I kind of like the fact that you have to really put more effort into either a) not letting enemy ships get more near them, or b) putting them under serious protections.  I think that adds something to the early game on the lower difficulties in particular, too.  Otherwise there is just no chance of a loss at the start unless you crank the difficulty way up.

[darke]

To me, this is the point of force fields.  I've thought about this off and on, and yes they are really brittle, but I kind of like the fact that you have to really put more effort into either a) not letting enemy ships get more near them, or b) putting them under serious protections.  I think that adds something to the early game on the lower difficulties in particular, too.  Otherwise there is just no chance of a loss at the start unless you crank the difficulty way up.

Amusingly I've never had a problem with this until I started playing against AI10's, since the lower AI's (at least AI7 anyway) have a harvester vendetta, and they also have much smaller assault waves so you don't have so much of an issue with killing them off before they do too much damage (and you tend to have more ships, etc at any point in time too since the game is much easier, so that makes the assaults even more easy, relatively speaking).

With Tech I forcefields costing 23k (compared to the 1.5k cost of a space dock) and taking 4 minutes to build (compared to the 1:40 minute cost of a space dock), and they can't be accelerated (unlike a space dock...), and they get destroyed pretty much every assault wave (just like the space dock), they're pretty useless for defending anything except the orbital command station (and maybe your stack of generators, since the AI doesn't seem to deliberately target them unless there's nothing else to hit.

Late game I know they're a bit more valuable for things like particularly heavily attacked choke points, or defending an advanced factory, but they don't seem to be much use for defending "common" things given their expense, and the amount of firepower the AI and wield on a high AI difficulty.

Incidentally, the reason my command center went down in that previously described incident was because the forcefield I had placed had been taken out in a previous wave, and the time taken to build up the 23k resources required had resulted in the AI's next wave attacking when the new forcefield was only half built, thus the rather unexpected shock.

[x4000]

AI7s now have less of a harvester vendetta, by the way.

And yes, I think it would be a good idea to potentially look at lowering the costs of force fields, or doing something else to make them a little more usable for human players, but I'm not sure exactly what yet.

[Revenantus]

I don't have much experience against AI10s, but I generally deploy at least a tech I forcefield around my HCS as the game progresses, to create a buffer in the event of an emergency. I also certainly advocate using forcefields to create durable wormhole blockades and to defend advanced factories, but like you I'd be unlikely to ever use them in defense of spacedocks. The spacedocks are far too cheap and quick to build to bother defending with such an expensive installation.

There are some potential Spacedock Exoshields planned for future DLC. These could mesh well with the new flow system actually, perhaps constructing an Exo-Shield around a dock reduces the rate at which it can utilize resources? e.g. 15 -> 10.

I also occasionally deploy Harvester Exo-Shields on heavily contested planets. Not so much to actually protect the harvesters (they're so cheap, but this might be about to change if residual radiation clouds are implemented), but to cause attacking AI ships to linger in a single position, thereby making them easier to hunt down and eliminate.

[x4000]

There are some potential Spacedock Exoshields planned for future DLC. These could mesh well with the new flow system actually, perhaps constructing an Exo-Shield around a dock reduces the rate at which it can utilize resources? e.g. 15 -> 10.

Ooh!  Yeah, that would really do a good job there in fulfilling that niche, I think.