I love AI War because there has always been a plethora of different strategies i could pursue to topple the AI
Recently i've become aware of a few new mechanics coming into play that actively seek to limit and or punish certain strategies, deep raiding and now this 'bottleneck/blob punishment' are probably the best examples. Frankly it worries me. Its almost as though ' the game should be played like this, if it's not, prepare to be punished' --- maybe i like being a turtle strategist in my games (i dont, but some presumably do) Also its not a question of don't limit this strategy because it lets me win, its about what i find to be the most enjoyable gameplay experience.
I was never a fan of deep striking and thats largely been resolved anyway, but its the principal behind these changes that concerns me. Basically i don't want to be coerced into playing the game in a certain way when ideally i'd prefer to play it another.
Whenever a strategy is more effective than is good for the game and we put in something to bring that back into balance, it will feel like we're constraining choice. I don't think there's any fundamental alternative to that other than simply not _trying_ to achieve such a balance. But it may help you to know this isn't at all a recent trend though perhaps there was less-than-average over the past two months and more-than-average now that we actually have time to revisit core balance. For kicks, off the top of my head I can think of this from the past year+ :
- Adding inefficiency to stacking energy reactors.
- Adding "supply" (which stopped a lot of stuff, including knowledge-raiding-across-the-galaxy).
- Limiting the effective deepstrike range of transports.
- Restricting knowledge-raiding to mkIII science labs.
- Core guard posts providing external invincibility to the AI home command stations.
- AI Eyes.
- Making it harder to "ride the AIP floor".
I'm sure I could dig up more, but that's not really the point
Anyway, it's really clear that the existing numbers for the firepower-concentration-causing-AI-spawns need adjusting, it just so happens that this change happened right before the weekend and so there's a longer-than-usual pause between releases and it probably feels worse as a result of that (hmm, maybe we should refrain from breaking the game on Fridays...).
The "turtling on a bottleneck" thing is one of the longest standing problems in this game where the AI just hasn't been able to challenge a player once they execute a particular strategy. Not that there aren't ways that the AI can still provide challenge in that case, but in a ton of game setups that's basically it: you could call the game won, unless the human makes some big mistake. This new mechanic is an attempt to solve that problem. Certainly not perfect, it just takes iteration to figure out if we're on the right road and (if so) what adjustments need to be made.
But if Chris does decide to stick with this mechanic (and it does seem fundamentally sound, just in need of a lot of adjustment), I'd be more than happy to implement a "Pay No Attention To The Player Behind The Curtain" cheat that disables the bottleneck-busting spawns. That way people who simply find it more entertaining to play the game that way can continue to do so
