Just how hard is the level 10 AI? (Answer: Apocalyptically hard)

[darke]

Don't you play against teleport turtles? When I started on AI-10, I considered playing against turtles or teleport turtles, but my strategy would be fairly trivial:
- Get a few planets (this is harder than it sounds)
- Defend the wormholes
- Nuke ALL other planets one by one.

If the enemy doesn't raid, it *was* quite irrelevant what their AI level is (the new fixes with raiding AIs may have changed this). Or am I, once again, totally mistaken?

I don't get raids, I just get sporadic troops sent through without warning. And they teleport. Pretty much all of them. Trust me, you don't want to get the AI progress up too much. A random sporadic troop collection of Tech II ships is reasonable, a random sporadic troop collection of around 100+ Tech IV/V ships (note: not a wave, just a random bunch wandering through), is somewhat harder to slice through. You tend to find your space docks don't exist after the first bamf.

Besides, I play F&D, so defending is actually much easier then Normal. Even more so now that The Developer Formerly Known As Not-X just bumped up the health, and stuff on pretty much every turret he could get his evil hands on. Whereas wormhole assaults are lethal (and even more so now with the damned electric turrets with even more health!), so therefore it makes sense to actually play to the difficulty curve.

#include <everything-x4000-said-here-as-well>

Except with the addendum that from memory the last Tech IV planet I wiped out actually had a pile of Tech V ships on it, about a third of them from memory, so even a Nuke wouldn't help much with that one.

EDIT: I should also add that's a cheap and nasty and awfully boring tactic anyway, even if it worked, so there's little point in my trying it.

[Haagenti]

Ah, I forgot that starships cannot be nuked.

[Admiral]

I can only hope (beg, beg) that X will name a planet after me for this strategy.

I had been thinking about this for a while but now seems like a reasonable time to mention it.

I'd love to have a planets.txt file that I could create that would be used to name all the planets in a map. I seem always to use the same set of planet names (mostly from Sci Fi books and movies) because it makes remembering what is where much easier for me. My home planet is almost always called Earth, the important planets get names like Vulcan or Ringworld or Coruscant or whatever.

We players could post our own planets.txt files, because I think X would want to avoid distributing ones with names that might get him in trouble (IANAL) like the examples above.

Cheers!

[x4000]

I can only hope (beg, beg) that X will name a planet after me for this strategy.

I had been thinking about this for a while but now seems like a reasonable time to mention it.

I'd love to have a planets.txt file that I could create that would be used to name all the planets in a map. I seem always to use the same set of planet names (mostly from Sci Fi books and movies) because it makes remembering what is where much easier for me. My home planet is almost always called Earth, the important planets get names like Vulcan or Ringworld or Coruscant or whatever.

We players could post our own planets.txt files, because I think X would want to avoid distributing ones with names that might get him in trouble (IANAL) like the examples above.

Cheers!

I've added a feature for this here:  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,489.0.html

I think this is a cool idea, although the names of planets aside from the player start planets would need to be randomized, because if I told you where "important" other planets were, that would be pretty harmful to scouting.

[Haagenti]

I gave up on the level 10. I think I had a good chance of winning (I'll never know how I'd fare against the 3 Ion Cannon lvl IV planets), but it got too tedious.

Go to a planet. 5000 ships.

Grab 100 ships, sort out the electric shuttles and park them, drag the remainder to the killzone. Once in a while, drag 100 shuttles to a bunch of cruisers and baste them from a distance. Rinse and repeat. Once all grabbable ships have been destroyed, send in the main fleet. This will kill a few 100 cloaked ships and get some other previously ungrabbed ships moving. Grab and destroy them. Repeat. Sail to command station and destroy it and warp gate. Then clean the system. Thousands and thousands of cloaked ships will kill themselves against your massed fleet like bugs trying to stop a Hummer by hitting the windshields. None of them will actually do any damage that is not repaired inside ten seconds. Move all the trash (Space Planes, Raptors and Autocannons) to a safe place until you have a good idea on what to do with them. Wonder what happens if you ever get to 65537 Autocannons.

Go to next planet. 6000 ships. Repeat.

[x4000]

I gave up on the level 10. I think I had a good chance of winning (I'll never know how I'd fare against the 3 Ion Cannon lvl IV planets), but it got too tedious.

That makes sense.  Don't worry -- in the next version it will probably kill players too fast for it to become tedious.

Good show, though!

[Revenantus]

That makes sense.  Don't worry -- in the next version it will probably kill players too fast for it to become tedious.

Thanks for that morbidly comforting revelation, Dr X.

[x4000]

My specialty!

[Haagenti]

Gone back to a 1.11E vs AI7 Vicious Raider and Counterspy with Schizo. A nice and comforting easy game. Everytime I get raided, I'm worriedly checking my displays to find out where the other 250 ships have gone to 

[x4000]

Gone back to a 1.11E vs AI7 Vicious Raider and Counterspy with Schizo. A nice and comforting easy game. Everytime I get raided, I'm worriedly checking my displays to find out where the other 250 ships have gone to 

[Admiral]

I think this is a cool idea, although the names of planets aside from the player start planets would need to be randomized, because if I told you where "important" other planets were, that would be pretty harmful to scouting.

I was under the impression that unused homeworlds did not have any advantage to them, or am I wrong? If you start a 1-player game, can you take over seven other highly resourced, nearby worlds that would have been homeworlds? (I have clearly not been paying attention if so!)

[Revenantus]

I think this is a cool idea, although the names of planets aside from the player start planets would need to be randomized, because if I told you where "important" other planets were, that would be pretty harmful to scouting.

I was under the impression that unused homeworlds did not have any advantage to them, or am I wrong? If you start a 1-player game, can you take over seven other highly resourced, nearby worlds that would have been homeworlds? (I have clearly not been paying attention if so!)

You're right, there's no advantage. Only the planets specifically selected as homeworlds prior to the game starting are modified to be highly resourced.

[x4000]

Yep, exactly.  My point was that those are the only "known quantity" planets at the start of the game, whereas everything else is should have to be discovered along the way (and in fact, all the non-selected starting planets become unknown quantities like any other planet, too).