Hybrid woes 3.189

[Diazo]

Actually, flooding the system with ships is the way to go, with an emp leading the way.

For whatever reason, hybrids hate scouts, when the emp takes your friendly scout's cloak down, the hybrids always chase that out of the system until the emp wears off, giving you time with your main fleet when you warp in.

Having said that, I warped in, destroyed the cloaked guard post on the warp point and a Short Range guard post that was close, then got out and only lost 1200 ships or so I think.

At which point I said screw it and nuked the system. AIP will be over 1k as it is, 50 AIP doesn't matter at this point.

Except the nuke didn't work as advertised.

It did pop the command station so the hybrids are leaving, but none of the hybrid fleets, which are all Mk III or lower, were destroyed by the nuke. I did expect the hybrids themselves to survive, but this is 10k or 11k ships that survived that should have been destroyed by the nuke.

As they weren't, I'm not sure the nuke was worth it, effectively all it destroyed was the AI Command Station.

And I'm done messing around with this. I could break the system, but it would take me 2 to 3 hours of gametime to do so. (I guesstimate anyway.)

D.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, yea, that is very odd about the nuke not killing the subfleets; I didn't put any logic in to affect that.

Cute tactic with emp'ing your own scout

[Rustayne]

Well I gave it an attempt to bypass the system, and lets just say that isn't going to work.  Once those clusters get wind of you, your are toast.  I'm sure the screenies speak for themselves.

PS:  30 Seconds later, AI war froze and refused to move again.  Think it is safe to say that I'm moving forward in this game.

[keith.lamothe]

Whoa



Hmm, I thought I had told those builders to put stuff on a randomly selected point including all the wormholes and guard posts... they appear to have decided to pile it all up on the command station.

[keith.lamothe]

And they're supposed to be planting like 7x as many clusters of "normal" turrets (including flaks and HBCs) as clusters... seems they have preferences.

[Rustayne]

Seems they don't want me to continue on.  Due to them being nuke immune, and emp immune, i have no way of not triggering them.  After the 50k mark or so, the game just goes poof, which I admit, is alot for any game to deal with.  Man I love finding ways to break games.

[keith.lamothe]

You could eventually whittle them down after nuking the system (since if you only attack one at a time only that one should spawn younglings, unless you get too close), but it wouldn't be a worthwhile use of your time

[Rustayne]

Well i'm going to attempt to kill it.  I do like something insane.  A note though, armored warheads aren't taking any damage from anything.  I've had a missile in the system for about a min or so game time, and not one shot at it.  I noticed they are immune to a few things, but i'd think the clusters would attack it as they are energybomb.

[keith.lamothe]

Interesting that they don't even try to kill it

Do the youngling spawns actually crash the game immediately?  If  not, then two warheads could work: one to anger them, one to kill an absurd number of younglings in one go

[Rustayne]

If i spawn it, yes, it tends to crash about 20 seconds after.  I aggro'd like 15k of them, and the reason it seems they are crashing the game is cause they want to move to my system, but i'm guessing all the commands to do that is just too intense for my computer to handle, or the game isn't capable of such information being transferred at the same time.  Here is a screen of what i get when AI war stops responding.

On a side note, this is the most fun I've had with breaking a game in my time playing games, (over 25 years). 

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, it's probably an out-of-memory thing from all those units initializing their various targeting structures and unit commands, etc.  You could check the memory consumption of the process if you wanted

Sounds like you have a small window to kill them with a followup armored warhead before your computer bites it; though the removal processing of that many units at once could cause its own problems.

Glad you're having fun breaking it

[Rustayne]

AIWar.exe is only using 710 megs of ram on my system, and 50% of my cpu capabilities.  I have about 49% memory free to be utilized, but it doesn't seem to want to use it all.

Your right, the window is very small.  The nuke itself is causing the crash as well, as I had 15k up, and went to nuke, and no go. 

I however did just leave it in the crashed state to post it, and it appears that it didn't actually crash.  Apparently it had to reload the game due to the massive change in forces.  I'm down to 4k threat after setting off a nuke, with 54k threat.  It is also in debug mode, so I don't know if that has any bearing on keeping it moving or not.  Either way, nuke 1 down, another one is ready if I need it.

[keith.lamothe]

Quite the nuke

Debug mode has a small overhead for rendering all that text, but it's not going to make much difference in a case like this.  Certainly doesn't impact gameplay (we have a test mode for that, but it does really crazy stuff).

[Rustayne]

Well another quick question for ya keith.  What are armored warheads considered?  They say major electric, but sadly they do no damage to the clusters.  The clusters don't list an immunity to it, not even minor lightning, so I'm confused why this tactic hasn't worked so far.  Also, in 20 seconds, game time, it had the clusters had the ability to regroup enough to have 22k ships.   Another nuke quelled it, without the major reload, but I think that at this rate, there isn't going to be a way to take them down.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, that's weird, they're not supposed to be immune to that.

Only thing I could suggest at this point is a full-on swarm, one after another, and whittle them down (the hybrids won't rebuild them since the command station is gone).  The casualties would be... incredible, of course.