Sorry, I meant, strong enough such that relying on that as a long term crutch is not viable at higher difficulties. I'm pretty certain you could not speed up the game to +9 or +!!!, wait an hour or 2 in real time (who knows how many hours of in game time that would be...), and be fine with only occasional fleet reshuffling to where waves coming in while at a negative income for almost that whole time because you have just that much stuff trying to be built. That would not work on 9/9. Waiting for refleets is NOT the kind of time scale I was talking about.
The single most threatening CPA is the first one. After that, I'm not concerned about them. I could wait 6 hours before attacking the AI homeworlds at 9/9 and it won't affect the outcome. I'm not sure where our play style differs, but once I lock down against CPAs they're just threat to be chewed up like any other threat.
So I ask this, how many CPAs on 9/9 should I wait and just +speed past before you'll believe me when I say that CPA escalation is not a valid balance point for economy? And are you going to address the point that the downside of building too many Matter Converters should not be losing the game 4 hours later?
Sorry, this thread's "topic" is getting kind of thin; it's getting hard for me to keep track of all the points of inquiry flying around.
I would agree that the AIs timeliness of punishing consistent, long-term poor economy by the human is not in a good shape right now. Yea, the AI may punish you "eventually" on higher difficulty levels for that, but "eventually" is not good enough.
The challenge is, how can this be made more timely without violating the "player has the most say over the pace" design objective?
EDIT: This isn't the same as punishing short-term mistakes (like fleet wipes or excessive guard freeing), as the player instigates those against the AI in a direct fashion. This is about punishing something that doesn't touch the AI directly, which is much trickier to do, especially in an asymmetric system like AI War's.
Maybe
partially compromise at that objective at higher difficulty levels? Maybe at like 9-10, the ratio is more like "Pace is 60% determined by the player, 40% determined by the AI" or something like that?
Maybe make some of the softer economic limits "harder" (like making your hard cap of energy lower unless you take more planets, which does have a long term, very real cost that can't be defeated by waiting (AIP))
Also, I would like to see if your experiences right now would still hold if sniper and especially spider turrets are brought back into balance, as I think right now they are OP (spiders especially).
If that makes the AIs intended "pressures" to the human back to the intended level of "scariness", maybe further big changes aren't needed.
