Forcefields a bit of a lackluster?

[Vinraith]

Sounds like you should turn on schizo waves. Personally I think they're a lot more fun.

[Zeyurn]

I'd forgotten about those, I'll have to give that a try, thanks!

[TechSY730]

Well, I can't really say why the AI in your game seems to love bombers. Because everything at Mk. I is pretty much a joke (with the notable exceptions of certain starships and recently, fortresses), frequently you will find that your first couple of unlocks are determined by what the AI chooses to use for that game. You had the unfortunate case where the AI loves bombers. In another game (such as playing a vicious raider) they will love ships that are immune to tractor beams, so you will need to invest in things that can slow ships down (such as gravity turrets and sniper turrets for their engine damage).

However, I will concede that bombers are disproportionately (read, to an unbalanced degree) the scariest of the triangle ships when used against a human player. The structural bonus of bomber like fleet ships most certainly needs a rebalance of some sort.

If you want more homogeneous waves, try settings the schizophrenic AI modifier in the lobby. The AI will then used mixed waves, instead of each wave being a single fleet ship type. It's a little sad that this is not the default, as it seems much smarter and is a lot more fun to fight. Sadly, you cannot apply that to a current game, you will need to restart the game to get this.

EDIT: Dang it, ninja'd badly on the scitzo settings suggestion. That's what I get when I don't refresh apparently.
EDIT2: WOOO!!! 100th POST!!! 

[Zeyurn]

I don't think I've ever had an AI _not_ love bombers.  Or any triangle ship really at the start of a game, because with the 3 homeworld multiplayer they get a lot of waves they can send.  Sure, the waves aren't really a problem once I get set up with some tractors / turrets since the new changes made bombers really bad at actually killing turrets (excepting the aforementioned carrier flying right through everything).  I'm not really posting to complain about difficulty specifically, once we got over the abrupt start difficulty our double 8 game has been going pretty much fine and 8 should be tough.  I'm a little disappointed I have to keep the AIP so low because I enjoyed games in the past where I let it get it high enough for mark 3 or even 4 waves and for the computer to start getting new ship types, but from reading I see that they've been having problems with people playing and only taking a very few planets.  I haven't gotten far enough in this game though to say whether I think it's overreacted some to the problem for people who play in a style more about taking many of the planets, though.

Anyway, I posted in this particular thread (I can be on topic!) mostly just a commentary that bombers (and the one horrifying game where the computer got eye bots when their structural multiplier was still 10) are really the only ship I fear as a human player precisely because they can vaporize the force fields and command center before you can even respond if you're unlucky at the beginning.  I'd rather have human force fields that were a little less invincible in general if they could stand up a touch better against bombers.

[Dyers_Eve]

Your wave defense planet needs to be 1-3 hops away from your most vital planets so that if your defenses fail you have time to intercept them and then rebuild. To counter carriers you need the gravitational turret unlock which will slow down everything, heck that will even help when enemy waves are so big they overload your tractor turret defenses. Also, diff8 is really hard, if you are dying well that's just normal Save often.

[Signata]

Countering bombers with force field tech is like countering fortresses with infiltrators.

All that stuff about countering bombers with things that counter bombers, I agree with. Swarm your planet with gravity, tractors, engine damaging stuff (riot ships are good, so long as you kite them out of bomber's range), turrets (lasers are finally good against bombers), and lots and lots of fighters. Pump that K into fighters instead of shields. Nice thing about that defence is that, fighters aside, it's great against other stuff, too.

Pin down the bombers and then hit them with fighters or anything else you might have that smears polycrystal. Just don't let them get to point B in the first place.

[Zeyurn]

Countering bombers with force field tech is like countering fortresses with infiltrators.

All that stuff about countering bombers with things that counter bombers, I agree with. Swarm your planet with gravity, tractors, engine damaging stuff (riot ships are good, so long as you kite them out of bomber's range), turrets (lasers are finally good against bombers), and lots and lots of fighters. Pump that K into fighters instead of shields. Nice thing about that defence is that, fighters aside, it's great against other stuff, too.

Pin down the bombers and then hit them with fighters or anything else you might have that smears polycrystal. Just don't let them get to point B in the first place.

Honestly, none of this advice is effective given the numbers I'm working with in my games.  Even 200 fighters is useless against 2000 bombers + 1000 frigates or fighters (or 1000 bombers and 2000 of something else) and then I've wasted research I could have used better elsewhere.  Mk 2 and 3 riots do alright to stop stuff for a bit, but really it's mk 2 and 3 flak and lightning turrets with gravity and mk 3 tractor to hold them in place or bust when the waves are always 3000+ ships.  I try to get missile and laser turrets for polycrystal bonuses and because they don't wilt when the missile frigates look in their direction but they're orders of magnitude less effective.

I feel like any research I put into single target ships is pretty much a total waste of my time lately except to kill the AoE immune missile frigates (and the standard free turrets work just fine against mark 1 missile frigates).  I feel like I'm playing a different game than a lot of the posters here honestly.  Strategies certainly vary but as a multiplayer only player I'm always swimming in enemy units.

[TechSY730]

Well, if you are outnumbered as badly as you say you are, then either you are playing at a too high of a difficulty, or there is some sort of wave scaling problem/imbalance you have stumbled across. (Is this a multiplayer game?)

I remember an earlier bug report where a player's handicap got set at 300% when loading a save game, when it wasn't before. You may want to double check the handicap of the AIs too make sure they aren't getting a spontaneous handicap.

[Zeyurn]

Well, if you are outnumbered as badly as you say you are, then either you are playing at a too high of a difficulty, or there is some sort of wave scaling problem/imbalance you have stumbled across. (Is this a multiplayer game?)

I remember an earlier bug report where a player's handicap got set at 300% when loading a save game, when it wasn't before. You may want to double check the handicap of the AIs too make sure they aren't getting a spontaneous handicap.

It is a multiplayer game, so I do have of course some help from my 2 partners, but they have their own things to do too, including also being attacked.  As I understand it, since it's a multiplayer game with 3 people, the AI gets 3 waves each instead of 1 whenever they do a wave.  Were I to be playing by myself it would be the single 1000ish wave and my ship caps would be 20% larger.

I mean, once I put my strategy in the 'focus solely on AE turrets and force fields in order to avoid bombers' while the other two players go a bit more offensively minded, we can push back the waves and make progress.  I'm not posting because I need help defeating the waves.  I just tend to agree with the original poster saying that force fields are kinda lackluster.

How would I check the AI handicap on a game in progress?  I don't think that's it though, the numbers per wave look right per the chart on the wiki, even if it seems kind of obscene for 130 AIP.

[TechSY730]

It should be somewhere in the stats screen, the same tab where player scores are shown. If there is a handicap, it will be shown in the rightmost column.

[TechSY730]

Oh, and I forgot to say. I don't think the devs have quite finished balancing how the AI scales up its difficulty with additional players/homeworlds. It might need some tweaking (or it may not, it may be just fine).

[Zeyurn]

Yeah, I really like how hard the Devs are working at making the game better and willing to try new things (and back them out if necessary).  So far my opinion is that multiplayer feels too grindy unless you use AoE weaponry but not too difficult, if that makes sense?  And that I hate enemy bombers, but that's always been true.

[TechSY730]

If you think that the AI is not scaling right with multiple players/homeworlds, you may want to post a bug report. At least there it can be stated explicitly instead of being buried in a unrelated forum thread. We can even vote on it and discuss it there too.

[Zeyurn]

Where's the right place to do that?

[TechSY730]

It should be on some stickied thread somewhere, but here you go:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/

Sadly, it is not integrated with the forum accounts; you will need to register for another account.
You should be able to use the same user name and password as your forum account, so that should simplify things.