I really hate the new "bottleneck/blob punishment" mechanic

[LintMan]

It seems intended to punish you for building up strong defenses and massive fleets by throwing all sorts of extra stuff at you.  What I *like* about AI War is building up strong defenses and massive fleets. 

Can we make this an optional setting?  Seriously, this is a game-killing issue for me.

[Spikey00]

Mmm... I might have to agree with you there.

[Lancefighter]

Eh not really sure what this change means other than that you are supposed to use deep defenses instead of stronger narrow defenses. of course, this means that you need more defenses to cover all possible 'deep defense' areas.. Which never works well anyway.

Deep defenses lead to more losses.

Meh.

[Vinraith]

I think it's universally acknowledged that the threshold is set too low. The idea is to prevent turtling behind a single system with everything you've got, not to discourage building a sizable fleet. It's supposed to give the AI a means to break an impenetrable defense, not to prevent you building a strong one. At least that's my understanding.

[Wingflier]

It's interesting, because what I'm basically hearing is, "I like being able to use this strategy and win every time".  Every strategy for both the humans, and the AIs, should have a counter

Personally it makes things more challenging, I like it , if it's bothering you, why not just lower the difficulty?

Also, Chris changed it down to a 1:1 Ratio before the AI attacks, that's pretty lenient I'd say.

[Vinraith]

It's interesting, because what I'm basically hearing is, "I like being able to use this strategy and win every time".  Every strategy for both the humans, and the AIs, should have a counter

Personally it makes things more challenging, I like it , if it's bothering you, why not just lower the difficulty?

Also, Chris changed it down to a 1:1 Ratio before the AI attacks, that's pretty lenient I'd say.

Wrong mechanic. He's talking about the new "if force in system > 10,000, then spawn lots of ships" thing.

[Lancefighter]

if I'm understanding how the force/threat stuff works..

It basically means youll be dealing with 'waves'* because you have a defensive point with a lot of defenses.

*The idea being they will spawn and pile up, and then attack when forces are about right.. yes?

[TechSY730]

I think this mechanic will be reasonable once they increase the firepower cutoff (maybe by a factor of 10 or more).

[Giegue]

the worst part is that it renders all map styles where planets only have 2 wormholes unwise to use. I mean, I'm not going to bother defending the planet in the middle of my chain which is safe from harm, when the planet at the end is the one that will be attacked.

[Echo35]

I think this mechanic will be reasonable once they increase the firepower cutoff (maybe by a factor of 10 or more).

^ Yeah, I'm perfectly okay with the mechanic, but at the moment, firepower calculations are WAY off. My game is telling me my Mark V Armor Rotters have a Firepower Rating of 2, which seems to be the exact same rating for a Mk. I Scout. But I do like the idea of it. AI War isn't about Turtling, and it makes perfect sense to me that if you were Turtling, the AI would see that as an issue and punch through.

[LintMan]

It's interesting, because what I'm basically hearing is, "I like being able to use this strategy and win every time".  Every strategy for both the humans, and the AIs, should have a counter

Personally it makes things more challenging, I like it , if it's bothering you, why not just lower the difficulty?

Also, Chris changed it down to a 1:1 Ratio before the AI attacks, that's pretty lenient I'd say.

This isn't about "winning strategy" for me - it's about playing the game the way I enjoyed it.

I thought the difficulty was just fine before this, and having the AI generating threat on overdrive isn't going to be fun even on lower difficulty levels.  Also, note I didn't ask for it to be removed, just to be optional, so if you like it, you can keep it enabled.  

I'm finding this new mechanic has vastly overwhelmed the existing wave/CPA/AIP/Border way of governing AI aggression.  At AIP 386, I was seeing a dozen+ HK's at a time along with streams of MkIV and Core ships attacking.

I'm not sure tweaking the levels will help much, because I am certain the level that would be acceptable for me would result in complaints about it being too easy from others.  There's already a Mantis issue about the HK's being too easy.  That's why I'm requesting a way to disable it.

[Sigma7]

The main issue with this is that it's hard to "hide" forces away from the front lines.  For example, Golems will constantly cause at least 1 extra enemy to appear per second, and you can't move them to the back in order to stop the attacks.  Granted that they can single-handedly wipe out enemy attacks or guarantee a battle if they are escorted, but it may be a little too sensitive.  

Given that the AI gets worried about you deep-striking in their territory (a dangerous tactic to begin with), there shouldn't be much reason for AIs to deep-strike yours (except if they're Neinzul Preservation Commandos, which deepstrike your whole system.)  I propose a quick fix of dividing firepower by the distance between the given system and a non-friendly planet; from here, you can either increase or decrease the blob threshold.  

[Vinraith]

HK's being too weak really has nothing to do with this. The problem with those right now is that they're supposed to replace several thousand ships and they don't remotely do so. The problem you're having is that you shouldn't be getting thousands of ships streaming at you in the first place.

This isn't a "too easy" "too hard" thing, it's a matter of how much turtling the game is willing to allow. At present, again, the threshold is clearly set MUCH too low. That impacts not just the triggering of the effect, but the magnitude. I think with some tuning it should reach a point where it isn't a problem, because fundamentally this is a mechanism that it should be hard to trigger in the first place unless you're somewhat overtly abusing/cheesing the game. AI War has traditionally been a game that tries to discourage excessive turtling, this is simply a continuation of that theme.

[Kemeno]

I'm finding this new mechanic has vastly overwhelmed the existing wave/CPA/AIP/Border way of governing AI aggression.  At AIP 386, I was seeing a dozen+ HK's at a time along with streams of MkIV and Core ships attacking.

Woah, what?! That doesn't sound right at all. What difficulty are you on? I tried this out on my fallen spire campaign save (2 7/7 AI's) and was getting ~50 mk III ships per spawn cycle with ~500 AIP. The AI did accumulate a good number of hunter killers since there were a lot of random ships lying around, but nothing like what you're describing. These waves should only spawn AI ships 1 mark level higher than the current AIP. If you're getting ships at an AIP higher than that, there's probably something else going on.

As an aside, wouldn't a better way to impair bottlenecking just to have a per-planet turret cap? This gives more incentive to upgrade turrets, and should force mobile forces onto defense if there are significant bottlenecks, helping to address death blob problem at the same time. Overwhelming firepower penalties would still be assessed on any planet with AI presence (guard posts/command station/etc), which penalizes death blob usage as long as AI structures are intact, but lets you use them if you want to.

[Echo35]

The main issue with this is that it's hard to "hide" forces away from the front lines.  For example, Golems will constantly cause at least 1 extra enemy to appear per second, and you can't move them to the back in order to stop the attacks.  Granted that they can single-handedly wipe out enemy attacks or guarantee a battle if they are escorted, but it may be a little too sensitive.

I've been keeping my main fleet back a jump or two from my border worlds and bottle neck planets. Far enough away the AI doesn't get too pissed off about my Threat to them and close enough I can jump them in when needed to defend. It's working quite well for me. I have one bottle neck planet (I'm playing on an X map and have taken the center planet while I clean out and capture my branch of the X) and thus far, with almost 300 AIP, the only thing they're sending at me is 400-500 Mk. I ships, and that's even with me being pretty proactive about turrets and defending my center planet. I don't think the current mechanic is too bad at all, maybe even a bit under powered if anything. If you're getting as many Hunter Killers as LintMan is, you're doing something wrong.