Isn't 'fast && dangerous' unbalancing?

[darke]

Is there a maximum number of ships the AI will station at a planet? If so, what are the factors affecting this number? Also, from their initial starting garrison sizes, how long does it take AI worlds to maximize their defensive forces? Is it likely that by playing extremely aggressively the player would encounter significantly fewer AI ships?

No, there is no limit.  There is no maximum.  I don't think I've ever seen an AI planet with more than 5,000 ships, though, simply because they tend to get spread around.  And once there are more than a certain number of ships in the game, the AI will start scrapping their lower-level ships in exchange for higher-level ships (a slight loss to the AI, but it keeps things moving along).  If you play really aggressively, yes you would encounter fewer ships for a while, but you wouldn't be likely to be able to sustain that.  By the same token, once you capture a lot of their planets with your early aggression, that will make them able to do even more reinforcements, so it would even out at some point in a game of a reasonable size (not 10 planets).

I've been tempted to hook in a memory debugger to get it to log the progress every couple of minutes to a text file for all planets but I've been too lazy. I still think there's a bug somewhere here with planets reinforcing too much when they've got Special Forces bases on them.

I'm not sure I can ever recall attacking a planet that had a surprisingly small/large garrison size, perhaps I'm being too cautious.

If you act fast with the early planets, you can often catch them with 50-150 ships at them.  On the later planets, you can see 5K or potentially even more.

Interestingly, I found rushing to take out the command centers on adjacent planets to quickly clear them out and minimise reinforcing doesn't end up being a particularly good strategy. You don't have time to do a hit-and-clear-and-build-command-center-and-reinforce, so I ended up having to rush in with ships, take out command center, rush back home, defend, then go straight to the next planet, then come back later with ships to finish the job. Even with F&D I couldn't clear more then one or maybe two planets with out building command centers. Plus going back to clear stuff up afterwards was almost as much effort as taking them down fully in the first place since they still repop, just less.

As far as timing goes, I've played almost exclusively with Fast & Dangerous and between all the above my game times are within the expected length for the number of planets.

Yeah, I think my estimates for most players playing at their appropriate difficulty level are really more appropriate for Fast & Dangerous rather than Normal.  It seems like most people on Normal in those circumstances go well over the expected range.

Yeah, my estimates for AI difficulty are based on F&D as well, so it's thrown more then a few of my estimates off. I've tried playing against Special Forces Captains on Normal mode a couple of times and they're an EASIER AI difficulty, whereas on F&D they're HARDER level. It's quite irritating.

[x4000]

I've been tempted to hook in a memory debugger to get it to log the progress every couple of minutes to a text file for all planets but I've been too lazy.

There's an awful lot of data to parse when doing dumps like that, unforunately.  I have some "desync log" dumps that have become all but useless because they get to around 10MB in size with about 5 seconds of activity.  The scale of the game simply makes that sort of thing difficult to interpret after you dump it.

I still think there's a bug somewhere here with planets reinforcing too much when they've got Special Forces bases on them.

I think that's just wishful thinking, but I'll keep an eye out for it.  I still have not observed this, though.   I think it's a confluence of other (valid) events in your specific game.

Interestingly, I found rushing to take out the command centers on adjacent planets to quickly clear them out and minimise reinforcing doesn't end up being a particularly good strategy. You don't have time to do a hit-and-clear-and-build-command-center-and-reinforce, so I ended up having to rush in with ships, take out command center, rush back home, defend, then go straight to the next planet, then come back later with ships to finish the job. Even with F&D I couldn't clear more then one or maybe two planets with out building command centers. Plus going back to clear stuff up afterwards was almost as much effort as taking them down fully in the first place since they still repop, just less.

Good points -- I didn't really mean to rush that fast, just within the first 30 minutes or so.  It's easier with more players if you keep your number of starting hostile wormholes lower, I think.

Yeah, my estimates for AI difficulty are based on F&D as well, so it's thrown more then a few of my estimates off. I've tried playing against Special Forces Captains on Normal mode a couple of times and they're an EASIER AI difficulty, whereas on F&D they're HARDER level. It's quite irritating.

That is interesting.

[darke]

I've been tempted to hook in a memory debugger to get it to log the progress every couple of minutes to a text file for all planets but I've been too lazy.

There's an awful lot of data to parse when doing dumps like that, unforunately.  I have some "desync log" dumps that have become all but useless because they get to around 10MB in size with about 5 seconds of activity.  The scale of the game simply makes that sort of thing difficult to interpret after you dump it.

I must admit large volumes of log files is one of the few things that doesn't scare me. At one point where I was writing a byte code decompiler for one old game I was dumping out each transformation run for each different type of transformation into it's own file. Each run of the decompiler would generate about a gig of files, which I then had I program I'd written in perl to extract meaningful stuff out of it.

The amount of effort I put into something that has absolutely no use whatsoever amazes even myself sometimes.

Yeah, my estimates for AI difficulty are based on F&D as well, so it's thrown more then a few of my estimates off. I've tried playing against Special Forces Captains on Normal mode a couple of times and they're an EASIER AI difficulty, whereas on F&D they're HARDER level. It's quite irritating.

That is interesting.

It's part of that other massive Normal vs F&D thread. I got to the point where I started mocking the AI for being so easy when it couldn't bunch up it's forces properly like it does in F&D.

I was able to do neat tricks like dance my ships around in a pair of interlocking infinity signs and pepper them to death via cruisers without really taking any damage. Or sticking my ships in the middle of a giant triangle of wormholes, each side of which had ships streaming both ways through it. I carved out the middle of my ship circle and tossed a couple of engineers in there (the rest of the ships I sent back to camp my wormhole), and watched as these beautiful arcs of ships flowed towards my central defensive point, only to get slaughtered. Because they'd keep attacking a different ship each time, and none of them lasted long enough to sit there and concentrate fire on any front, I lost, maybe, one ship a minute due to the continual repairing.

Oh, and I noticed you increased the health of lightning turrets to make them even more lethal in F&D. I already can't assault a difficult-ish wormhole with less then 2k ships without them being completely eliminated, this is only going to force me to use even more silly numbers of Lightning Missiles.

[x4000]

I must admit large volumes of log files is one of the few things that doesn't scare me. At one point where I was writing a byte code decompiler for one old game I was dumping out each transformation run for each different type of transformation into it's own file. Each run of the decompiler would generate about a gig of files, which I then had I program I'd written in perl to extract meaningful stuff out of it.

The amount of effort I put into something that has absolutely no use whatsoever amazes even myself sometimes.

Goodness!

I was able to do neat tricks like dance my ships around in a pair of interlocking infinity signs and pepper them to death via cruisers without really taking any damage. Or sticking my ships in the middle of a giant triangle of wormholes, each side of which had ships streaming both ways through it. I carved out the middle of my ship circle and tossed a couple of engineers in there (the rest of the ships I sent back to camp my wormhole), and watched as these beautiful arcs of ships flowed towards my central defensive point, only to get slaughtered. Because they'd keep attacking a different ship each time, and none of them lasted long enough to sit there and concentrate fire on any front, I lost, maybe, one ship a minute due to the continual repairing.

The upcoming prerelease should fix that, with how the AI will then respond to being attacked while it is in "waiting" mode.

Oh, and I noticed you increased the health of lightning turrets to make them even more lethal in F&D. I already can't assault a difficult-ish wormhole with less then 2k ships without them being completely eliminated, this is only going to force me to use even more silly numbers of Lightning Missiles.

Yeah, but it will also help you on defense if you unlock lightning turrets.  And there are other tactics you can use, too, like a single EMP or something.  Or just sending through a single ship, and then all of your ships in a bunch.

[Admiral]

But I am familiar with LaTeX from my time in a computer science curriculum. 

*eats his LaTeX equations*

I use it mostly these days for software requirements/specifications. So much nicer than Word (ugh).

[Admiral]

I am wondering why the fact that you can speed up the simulation hasn't come up before in this thread. Although I don't play on F&D mode, I do regularly hit the speed up. Sometimes I even just play on speed 2 for extended times.

Next... Is there a way you can do speed 90%, 80%, 70%, etc., to slow down the game? Not usually relevant, but larger battles I have to pause, order, play, pause, order, play, when running at, say, 50% or 25% speed the whole time would be just as easy.

[Revenantus]

I agree with you - I regularly adjust the simulation speed depending on the amount of action taking place.

What about a complete simulation speed control panel? Including;

- Pause/Play.
- Set Normal Speed Button.
- Logarithmic slider that goes to anywhere from 0.1x to 10x simulation speed.

[x4000]

Added to the future DLC list:  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,491.msg2753.html#msg2753