Hybrid woes 3.189

[Rustayne]

Whittling them down seems almost impossible.  When you get in range to attack one, 30-50 of them spawn, giving you what seemed an easy task, of 15k ships.  I managed to kill 12, before they overran my fleet, and eventually came and destroyed my bottleneck area.  It is definitely almost impossible as you said earlier.   As least, if anything, we found a few bugs in the process, so all is good in my book.  I think I might start a new game with hybrids off to actually test what I was supposed to be testing to begin with.

[keith.lamothe]

That might be best   Thanks for finding those bugs.

If you leave Advanced off they won't build more hybrid-spawners (just drone spawners and whatnot) so they can't get quite that out of control.  And if only one AI has hybrids, that will halve the overall population cap.  Won't stop them from building fortress systems if given enough time, but less likely to make something like... that

[Rustayne]

Will they build the clusters though?  If so, I imagine that I will run into the problem we have now eventually, just might be later in the game.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, they'll build them, though I think only the mark I and IIs.  So you could still run into the problem if you don't prevent them from building all that stuff up (they'll always do it on a planet adjacent to one of yours, or perhaps one adjacent to a neutral system, though I am planning to change this).

You might better enjoy a game without those death machines, for a change

[Rustayne]

Yea, I think a game without them would probably be best for right now.  I love them, and they really do make things more interesting, but I think with their current issues, it might be best to play one without them.  Otherwise, I'm never going to get my testing done hehe.  Thanks once again keith for all your help, and I hope this has at least been helpful.  I'm going to go start a new game now.

[Diazo]

On the armored warheads, were you actually targeting them on the clusters or just moving close and then detonating them for the aoe effect?

The current incarnation of the Cluster structures seem to be immune to aoe even though they are not tagged as such.

I ran into this on a smaller scale in my game, was only 8 clusters, but they were close enough that one lighting missile should have taken 2 or 3 out if I could detonate it manually in the center of the triangle formed by the 3 clusters. On doing so however, the clusters took no damage, I had to right-click attack the structure with the lighting missile for the missile to do damage and even then it was only to the cluster structure that I actually right-clicked, other clusters close enough to take damage didn't.

As for clearing the structures, right-click target with sieges to only spawn one cluster at a time should probably work with the rest of your fleet positioned to intercept the spawned ships but not close enough to trigger the spawning themselves.

Good luck with this.

D.

[keith.lamothe]

Oh yea, that's right, the aoe-immune thing is actually due to the AIP caused by destroying the structures; it's one of those really tricky things where if you don't want AOE to hit AIP structures you really don't want it, and if you want it to hit AIP structures you often really want it to do so

Honestly I'm just going to take AIP off all the clusters; they're enough of a pain without that, and it introduces really tricky quandries like this.

[TheMachineIsSentient]

Yea, thanks very much for the feedback   These certainly aren't done; they seem to be doing a great job (in single player) of making winning much harder for the player, but I'll want to shift a lot of that into actually making the player lose

This is a great point. Make me lose, don't just prevent me from winning. 

[superking]

Honestly I'm just going to take AIP off all the clusters; they're enough of a pain without that, and it introduces really tricky quandries like this.

that seems best, since they wernt really somthing you might choose to keep alive 

[Tyladhras]

I'd wager it was the only planet on alert if it was such a bottleneck.  Ergo, they AI would pour all of it's available reinforcements into that one planet.  If more planets were on alert it would have split them up.

[Ozymandiaz]

Honestly I'm just going to take AIP off all the clusters; they're enough of a pain without that, and it introduces really tricky quandries like this.

that seems best, since they wernt really somthing you might choose to keep alive 

Indeed

[keith.lamothe]

I'd wager it was the only planet on alert if it was such a bottleneck.  Ergo, they AI would pour all of it's available reinforcements into that one planet.  If more planets were on alert it would have split them up.

In this case it doesn't have much to do with AI reinforcements, as that stops at around 1000 ships nowadays (the AI just reinforces various other planets once all the alerted ones fill up).  This was all Hybrids

[Diazo]

Well, it may have all been hybrids but it was also an cross type map I believe.

This is supposed to be the type of system you go around, not through. I want the game to be able to make a system defended enough that I go "nope, no way" regardless of why I want to take said system.

Having said that, this example is excessive in achieving that, If I really have to, I want to be able to get through the most heavily defended system on the map, though with a huge time/resources cost.

Player preference I suppose, but this is why I prefer realistic maps, they give you options for going around systems and make the game more interesting for me because of said options.

Take that for what it's worth when you tweak the hybrids I guess.

D.

[Rustayne]

I'd wager it was the only planet on alert if it was such a bottleneck.  Ergo, they AI would pour all of it's available reinforcements into that one planet.  If more planets were on alert it would have split them up.

At the time of the posting, yes it was the only one left on alert.  When I moved down there, at hour 6, there was 4 planets on alert.  The hybrids all went for the way into more of the map, and like 5 of each went into the other 3 arms.  It took me about 7-8 hours, but I cleared the other arms, and was ready to move up to the center.  The other systems did reinforce, and 1 of them had 2 barracks by the time I was ready to take care of it.  Though it wasn't exactly 1000, it was more like 1600 or so on each one.  Either way it was a great challenging game.