Hybrid Issues

[chemical_art]

Or if it deforms the barrel, or if it knocks out the electronics for tracking or the motor for turning the turret, or if it gives the gunner a concussion (or incapacitates them entirely), etc, etc.  Lots of things that could reduce the accuracy of the shots, disable the weapon, etc.  This is assuming you're using a gun capable of damaging the tank at all, of course.

And if you've hit the tank _several_ times and it's got the equivalent of a red health bar in AI War, it's almost certainly operating with reduced offensive capacity.

We just use an abstraction since modeling that kind of detail at our scale would overload both the computer and the player's ability to intelligently interact with that kind of complexity.  If you were only working with a squadron of a dozen or so ships, that would be different.

Of course! There is a reason why first person shooters don't try to mimic this when they do vehicles (tires, treads, aerodynamics). The physics behind it are immense to even program accurately, and if you do, it has to be dynamically implemented made via the cpu. These shooters have at most 100 units. strategy games with waves of 1k simply cannot keep track of all this.

[keith.lamothe]

The cpu load on all of these things are hard.

I couldn't find the text where that quote came from.  Paraphrasing is fine, but I prefer it if the words placed in my mouth have the same (or greater, if you're feeling charitable) level of grammatical correctness as my original wording

[superking]

I'm playing on a 100 planet map with 2 8.7 AIs. After taking a few planets I encountered a planet with over 1200 ships, spawn by Hybrids, which themself where ~120 units strong.

Only thing I could do to 'break' that planet was send in a Penetrator to waste the AI-CC.
I tried a group of Martyrs to pave a bit of a way to the CC, but 6 of them didn't even get away from the gate.

Just to illustrate that these guys can be a true pain and really almost impossible to get past when you still have to unlock some mk2 version fleetship ... however I like it, I enabled them for a reason

this is where a nuke might come in handy

[Shrugging Khan]

Nukes? Nonesense, my pretty!

This is where you let wave after wave slam into them, to fatal effect! 

[Red Spot]

My new game is fun
I have Hybrids and Advanced Hybrids on. Now that I have taken 7 planets the AI just send in 60 Hybrids with escorts and are rampaging my planets, killing the CC (and FF protecting it) while the escort keep my defences busy, and moving on to the next planet.
Rather difficult to keep an effective defence going when you have no economy

Probably what you get from taking on 2 mad-bombers on 8.6 ...  
On the attached screenshot the Hybrids launch a few seconds after the shot was taken from the planet 2 hops south-west, taking about 400 ships in total of that planet (most mk3 and 4).

[Shrugging Khan]

I just failed to notice a 1200 ships wave led by 70 hybrids taking out my homeworld. That's what I get for concentrating on the wrong end of my empire 

Reloading an earlier save, I want to see whether I could have prevented it.

[superking]

Of course! There is a reason why first person shooters don't try to mimic this when they do vehicles (tires, treads, aerodynamics). The physics behind it are immense to even program accurately, and if you do, it has to be dynamically implemented made via the cpu. These shooters have at most 100 units. strategy games with waves of 1k simply cannot keep track of all this.

I raise you a Star Ruler (http://starruler.blind-mind.com/) indy game in which every ship is custom designed and fleets can easily reach 1000+ ships- and despite the sexy 3D, it runs quicker than AI war in every respect

[Shrugging Khan]

Star Ruler isn't that good an example, tho. The basic Idea is right, but it leaves just about everything to be desired in its execution.

Also, I could have just about murdered the devs when I realised the state of the thing I'd paid for...seriously. Their release strategy was just a nasty kind of wrong.

[superking]

have you played recently? huge improvements in the last month, and with the galactic armoury mod its pretty sweet

[Shrugging Khan]

Yeah, I've tried the latest version. I'm still far from satisfied, there's too much missing to make gameplay fun for me.

And mods, no thank you. They all seem to say "Realism, don't want that", and go straight into sci-fantasy land.

Edit: Scratch that last one. Reading about the GAM, it looks a lot better than most others.

Edit2: Although the additions are pretty nice, the underlying issues persist. Most glaringly: the lousy interface, controls, and the horrid degree of micromanagement necessary.

[superking]

Edit2: Although the additions are pretty nice, the underlying issues persist. Most glaringly: the lousy interface, controls, and the horrid degree of micromanagement necessary.

I agree with interface & controls to an extent.

I completely disagree with micromanagement.. I'm pretty fly at SR 1v1 multiplayer and can affirm right now that very little micromanagement is required to play competetively (auto colonising, auto governers, auto almost everything.) my SR APM is probably about 12, and I'm one of the better regulars on the IRC

the main problems (if you dont mind ugly fx.. I dont mind) are entirely balance related, and mainly fixed by galactic armoury

[Shrugging Khan]

Research and Ship Building come to mind for two things that require way too much clickage 

[TechSY730]

Research and Ship Building come to mind for two things that require way too much clickage 

You know what also requires lots of "clickage"? Sending units to attack, building your defenses on a new planet, moving your forces around to planets that need defending, etc, etc. 

Yea, I'm sort of making fun of you, but more-so I am pointing out that removing almost all "clickage" will move the game away from an RTS and into a programming game. Don't get me wrong, programming games are fun too, but AI War was never supposed to be one (despite its name  )

There needs to be a line where automation needs to stop or risk shifting the genre or paradigm of the game. Of course, it can be hard to find where to "draw the line".


That said, I wouldn't mind a separate "research" screen or panel or whatever that is available as long as you have at least one science lab in supply on at least one planet. That way, you don't have to try to find a research lab somewhere in your empire just to research something, where it doesn't really matter what science lab is chosen.

On the other hand, it does matter which shipyard (or whatever) builds a unit, so having a separate "build panel" would not work so well. One nifty way to help ease its use that has been proposed it "ship builder queue templates". Its somewhere on mantis, so vote it up if you like the idea.

[Shrugging Khan]

Techsy man, we were talking about Star Ruler, not AIW 

As far as AIW is concerned, my primary complaint at the moment is actually that the save-and-paste-building-pattern thingy hasn't been ported, for all that I know.

PS: Programming games. Tell me more about them.

[TechSY730]

Techsy man, we were talking about Star Ruler, not AIW  

As far as AIW is concerned, my primary complaint at the moment is actually that the save-and-paste-building-pattern thingy hasn't been ported, for all that I know.

PS: Programming games. Tell me more about them.

Basically, you don't give your units or unit or whatever orders directly, but rather write an "AI script". The level of complexity that these AI scripts can evolve to depends on game to game, but the more involved ones will let you script actions and situations that those actions are allowed to execute. A good reference for the more complicated sort of scripts would be the gambit system of Final Fantasy XII or the macros (or whatever they are called) of Dragon Age. Now, imagine a whole game revolving around designing and tweaking those scripts.

One such programming game with a moderately simple scripting system is Gratuitous Space Battles. It also has the advantage of every ship having modules and those modules losing effectiveness as they take damage. And as the modular concept would typically imply, you can design each base ship extensively to your desires. It suffers from a few notable balance issues right now, and the UI is quite clunky, but for the most part I like it. From the way you seem to have been describing things you would like in a game, I think you would like it. It is also an indie game, and it is also on Steam.

P.S. Once again, I fail to keep up with the discussion.