Hybrid Issues

[Shrugging Khan]

So, ever since Hybrids have been re-enabled, I had to reevaluate my strategies. Well, that's done and not the topic here.

What is is, for a first item, this: Is there a limit to how many hybrids can accumulate?

[keith.lamothe]

So, ever since Hybrids have been re-enabled, I had to reevaluate my strategies. Well, that's done and not the topic here.

What is is, for a first item, this: Is there a limit to how many hybrids can accumulate?

Yes.  It's:

( Number-of-planets * difficulty-based-multiplier ) + ( Number-of-hive-spawners * difficulty-based-multiplier * 2 )

the difficulty-based-multiplier is 1 at diff 7, 1.5 at diff 8, 2 at diff 9, and 3 at diff 10, and is linear between each of those points.  Lower than 7 it's diff * 0.15.

And then this is capped to ( Number-of-planets * difficulty-based-multiplier * 4).  That isn't so important now that they can't (currently) build more spawners, but it was important then, and will be when they can do that again.


For reference, each hive spawner produces 1 new hybrid roughly every 25 minutes, and every AI planet that's mkIV+ starts with a spawner.

[Shrugging Khan]

This explains why there's 120 Hybrids sitting in every system I haven't looked at for the last two hours.

[keith.lamothe]

120 hybrids for each planet?  How many planets have 120 hybrids?  And how many planets does the map have and what's the difficulty?

[Shrugging Khan]

In my last game, I concentrated on optimising my defences for my home planet. I didn't take any other planet for about 5 or 6 hours, and then I couldn't take any because there were oceanfuls of hybrids in every direction.

120 planet map, diff 9 / 8.6. Both AIs have Hybrids.

[TechSY730]

Even if they weren't mysteriously getting 120 on several planets, isn't >120 (a cap that even difficulty 7 could easily hit) a bit high of a cap for what is effectively a Mk. V starship with the same modules that the fallen spire ships can get? I know it takes them a quite a bit of time to reach that cap, but still, it seems a little absurd.

[keith.lamothe]

In my last game, I concentrated on optimising my defences for my home planet. I didn't take any other planet for about 5 or 6 hours, and then I couldn't take any because there were oceanfuls of hybrids in every direction.

120 planet map, diff 9 / 8.6. Both AIs have Hybrids.

Oh goodness, yea, that would be brutal.  I forgot to mention that the "supply cap" is per-ai-player, by the way.  Also, the difficulty multiplier is not per-player, it uses the higher of the two if there's a difference.

So 120 * 2 = 240 per player even aside from spawners (and diff 9 and 120 planets tend to have higher percentages of mkIV planets, iirc, so more spawners).  Yea, they could have swarmed you but good

Typically playing against hybrids and not being aggressive early on is an excellent plan if you want to lose  But if you only turn hybrids on for one of the AI players and don't have as many planets, it's at least a little less insane.  And diff 9 hybrids... that's pain.

And yes, hybrids are a little absurd, that's one of the reason's they're listed as an AI Plot (next to stuff like the Avenger) rather than a Minor Faction.

[TechSY730]

In my last game, I concentrated on optimising my defences for my home planet. I didn't take any other planet for about 5 or 6 hours, and then I couldn't take any because there were oceanfuls of hybrids in every direction.

120 planet map, diff 9 / 8.6. Both AIs have Hybrids.

Oh goodness, yea, that would be brutal.  I forgot to mention that the "supply cap" is per-ai-player, by the way.  Also, the difficulty multiplier is not per-player, it uses the higher of the two if there's a difference.

So 120 * 2 = 240 per player even aside from spawners (and diff 9 and 120 planets tend to have higher percentages of mkIV planets, iirc, so more spawners).  Yea, they could have swarmed you but good

Typically playing against hybrids and not being aggressive early on is an excellent plan if you want to lose  But if you only turn hybrids on for one of the AI players and don't have as many planets, it's at least a little less insane.  And diff 9 hybrids... that's pain.

And yes, hybrids are a little absurd, that's one of the reason's they're listed as an AI Plot (next to stuff like the Avenger) rather than a Minor Faction.

So in other words, he asked for it.

Then again, people should really stop complaining that the AI is unreasonable when one of the AIs is a level 9. They are supposed to be unreasonable at that point.

If you are seeing absurdly hard to beat behavior by the AI at level 9, try to see if you can reproduce that behavior on level 7 or 8. If you can, then your complaint actually holds some weight.

Because how often people do complain about level 9 and up, maybe you should flat out state in the tool-tips and the wiki that difficulty or fairness complaints using level 8.6 or up will be flat out ignored unless you can show it is indeed a true glitch or if you can show that the same absurd behavior shows up on lower difficulties as well.

[keith.lamothe]

Well I don't think he was complaining (to us, at least), just checking that the 480+ hybrids he may have been facing at that point weren't a bug.

But yes, playing on diff 9 can be a winning proposition for some folks, but if you suddenly throw (non-prevented-from-working-by-a-bug) hybrids into an already challenging mix, the recipe is one of disaster

[Shrugging Khan]

Hey, I'm not complaining. I've already found ways to deal with them. It's just a littly grindy, and a little shocking to see several thousand ships pop up all of a sudden just because you forgot to check that backwater planet for reinforcements.

PS: Ninja'd.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, I imagine hybrids on diff 9 would be fairly grindy.  The bright side is that if you can take out their spawners, their spawn rate drops quite a bit.  And if you kill all the spawners, no more new hybrids   It's kind of the silver lining of the "out to get you with no fooling" aspect.

[Shrugging Khan]

Actually, right now, I've got my bearings. Except for one thing...ONE THING - There's an EMP guardian. And 800 Hybrid drone underlings. And I don't dare make a raid because I know - the moment I don't pay attention, that guardian will go off like a rocket, making a beeline towards my homeworld, dragging an entourage of hybrids and hundreds of drones along with it.

Argh. Anyways, Hybrids. They make life interesting.

[Sunshine!]

What's your method of dealing with them?  I'm currently on hiatus from AI war, but I'm a glutton for punishment, and I'm certain to enable hybrids (and advanced hybrids) when I get back to it.

[Commiesalami]

What's your method of dealing with them?  I'm currently on hiatus from AI war, but I'm a glutton for punishment, and I'm certain to enable hybrids (and advanced hybrids) when I get back to it.

I've found gravity turrets to be excellent in stopping them from running away in order to help to keep down their numbers.

Also you could scout out 'hybrid highways' where growing hybrids travel along in order to buff themselves up.  Find a choke point along one of these and stuff a fortress + gravity turrets there.  The fortress will make short work of the hybrids in a few shots and they wont be able to run away.  This idea works best on the X map where I discovered it.

I have yet to try it out against hybrids, but you could convince a bunch of units on threat to attack sometimes by putting all of your ships in a system into low power mode and opportunists will jump in to attack.  I've had some success with this tactic put haven't put it through the rigors to see how effective it truly is.

One of my own questions about Hybrids: What exactly does the advanced hybrids sub-plot do? i.e. how does it make them stronger?  Also if I turned on Advanced Hives without turning on basic hybrids what is the result?  I could experiment but I've homework that needs to be done.  Starting a game to experiment may mean not stopping.

[Red Spot]

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