Low ship cap ships' ship cap is only low for the player

[Kahuna]

The low ship cap ships could use some balancing when used by the AI. For players MarkIV Spire Stealth Battleships ship cap is 4 while on one of the AIs planets in my current game (which I decided to abandon as soon I saw the SSBs) there was 43 MarkIV SSBs. That planet wasn't even on alert AND it was owned by 10diff GravDriller which is an offensive AI type and has reinforcement multiplier of 0,4.



43 MarkIV SSBs is more than 10 times the ship cap. And then there was 26 Bombers and Missile Frigates and 39 Fighters? LOL. 43 MarkIV SSBs would be equal to 731 MarkIV Fighters, Bombers or Missile Frigates. I've never seen that many Fighters Bombers or Missile Frigates on a random non alerted planet held by a non defensive AI type. 43 SSBs have 6192000 dps. They destroy everything.

Now you might think "oh my but all 43 SSBs wont attack at the same time" yeah you're right. "only" 18 attacked me when I attacked the planet. 18 MarkIV SSBs is still equal to 306 MarkIV Fighters Bombers or Missile Frigates or 102 each. 18 SSBs have 2592000 dps. They destroy almost everything.

And now the GravDriller attacked me with 127 ships. There was 4 MarkII SSBs. Though Mad Bomber once sent ~126 Zombards and ZElectricBombers (in another game) so the ship caps seem to be messed up in waves too. Sure the Mad Bomber has wave multiplier of 2.. but even 60 Zombards and ZElectricBombers would be insane.. Zombards have 24 ship cap and ZElectricBombers 19.

That's not hard. That's just cheap hard so please fix this. 

[Kahuna]

Am I the only one who's bothered by 43 MarkIV SSBs? Has anyone else seen something like this and how did you handle the ships?
I handled (and will handle) them by starting a new game.

[Minotaar]

Whoa, I'm not sure where that came from at 1:52 gametime. This needs to be checked out.

[Kahuna]

Yeah that's insane

[_K_]

Turn on the reinforcement logging and try to find out how the AI got so many.

[keith.lamothe]

SSBs are not impacted by unit-cap-scale for either the humans or AIs (because their cap is so low to begin with), so something else is going on.  If you have the reinforcement logs for a time in which the AI is producing obviously more SSBs than is appropriate, I can use those to investigate

[TechSY730]

What is supposed to happen is if a ship type A has, say .1x the cap of ship type B, then if the AI chose to reinforce with ship type A, it would only get only .1x the number of them as they would of gotten if they chose ship type B. So what could of happened is that the AI may have chosen SSB for each of it's reinforcement cycles, thus, even though they don't get many (often times, only 1, or less if it had to spread the "reinforcement points" around) per reinforcement "pulse" to that planet, over time, that could add up. If they had chosen, say, missile frigates for all those times, you would of seen that 700 or so missile frigates on that planet.

However, there have been bugs and oversights in the past that let the AI violate this tradeoff of numbers.
Even if the logic is working properly, it may be that the cap per planet and/or the cap per guard post for certain ship types needs to come back, to prevent alerted planet to just "sidestep" the max defending ships total (across all ship types) per planet rules by just always choosing the low ship cap ships.

[Kahuna]

I don't have the logs from the game where I took that screenshot but I made a new game with the same seed, starting position etc. Now the GravDriller had "only" ~35 SSBs.

Also.. could it be possible the SSBs were there since the beginning? They were there already when I started the game? (not reinforcements)

Here are the logs

[Kahuna]

I tried again and scouted immediately when the game started and there was 38 MarkIV SSBs
So I guess they're not reinforcements.

[keith.lamothe]

I don't have the logs from the game where I took that screenshot but I made a new game with the same seed, starting position etc. Now the GravDriller had "only" ~35 SSBs.

Also.. could it be possible the SSBs were there since the beginning? They were there already when I started the game? (not reinforcements)

Here are the logs

Yea, there are 17 SSBs total in those reinforcements (for all reinforced planets), so as you found with the scouting, they were there from the beginning.

It's possible the AI isn't paying normal price during that initial seeding since it's almost certainly a different code path that I've never actually looked directly at, but at least you don't have to worry about it replenishing at that kind of rate

[Minotaar]

they were there from the beginning

Oh, so THAT was how the humans lost the war in the first place. Now I get it. 

[Toranth]

I don't have the logs from the game where I took that screenshot but I made a new game with the same seed, starting position etc. Now the GravDriller had "only" ~35 SSBs.

Also.. could it be possible the SSBs were there since the beginning? They were there already when I started the game? (not reinforcements)

Here are the logs

Yea, there are 17 SSBs total in those reinforcements (for all reinforced planets), so as you found with the scouting, they were there from the beginning.

It's possible the AI isn't paying normal price during that initial seeding since it's almost certainly a different code path that I've never actually looked directly at, but at least you don't have to worry about it replenishing at that kind of rate :)

Question about
Does the "StrengthBudget" used in buying AI ships carry over from one reinforce into the next reinforce cycle?  (Both AI's start at 0 in the logs, but I think this is the very first reinforce cycle for this game)

Looking at it here, the problem is with the planet Varg:  It has 15 guard posts, so each reinforce should be 15 points, plus the command station pulse.
Both AI players do two reinforcements on Varg, for a total of 4*15 + 10 (3+3 from Player 9, 2+2 from Player 8) = 70 strength points.
However, because of the massive negative budgeting allowed by the purchase process, the AIs end up spending a total of 134.72 strength points reinforcing the planet - Almost twice the strength it should have received.

If the StrengthBudget carries over from cycle to cycle, then obviously this is no problem because the AI pays back the debt by getting nothing in later reinforcements.  But if the budget resets, then in a few minutes when the next cycle comes, the AI will have magically gained 37.72 strength it didn't pay for.


Edit:  I took a look at the mid-game logs from my current game, and it seems like the StrengthBudget is being reset every reinforcement cycle.  For AI's with negative defensive modifiers and expensive fleetships, this is a huge advantage.

[TechSY730]

I don't have the logs from the game where I took that screenshot but I made a new game with the same seed, starting position etc. Now the GravDriller had "only" ~35 SSBs.

Also.. could it be possible the SSBs were there since the beginning? They were there already when I started the game? (not reinforcements)

Here are the logs

Yea, there are 17 SSBs total in those reinforcements (for all reinforced planets), so as you found with the scouting, they were there from the beginning.

It's possible the AI isn't paying normal price during that initial seeding since it's almost certainly a different code path that I've never actually looked directly at, but at least you don't have to worry about it replenishing at that kind of rate

Question about
Does the "StrengthBudget" used in buying AI ships carry over from one reinforce into the next reinforce cycle?  (Both AI's start at 0 in the logs, but I think this is the very first reinforce cycle for this game)

Looking at it here, the problem is with the planet Varg:  It has 15 guard posts, so each reinforce should be 15 points, plus the command station pulse.
Both AI players do two reinforcements on Varg, for a total of 4*15 + 10 (3+3 from Player 9, 2+2 from Player = 70 strength points.
However, because of the massive negative budgeting allowed by the purchase process, the AIs end up spending a total of 134.72 strength points reinforcing the planet - Almost twice the strength it should have received.

If the StrengthBudget carries over from cycle to cycle, then obviously this is no problem because the AI pays back the debt by getting nothing in later reinforcements.  But if the budget resets, then in a few minutes when the next cycle comes, the AI will have magically gained 37.72 strength it didn't pay for.

Yep, one of the changes Kieth put in earlier is that negative StrengthBudgets are carried over to the next "phase" of reinforcements. So thankfully, if they overspent to get the low cap ship, they will have to give up how much they overspent later (possibly meaning no reinforcements for several additional posts)

However, this is only for reinforcement. As Kieth mentioned, the initial game seeding logic might not be considering this.

[keith.lamothe]

Question about
Does the "StrengthBudget" used in buying AI ships carry over from one reinforce into the next reinforce cycle?  (Both AI's start at 0 in the logs, but I think this is the very first reinforce cycle for this game)

Every overall reinforcement (each AI player only gets one every reinforcement interval) starts at zero.  So if the AI has a tiny budget left over at the end and it buys some low-cap ship it will come out slightly ahead but the actual averaged effect is not significant enough to really worry about.

[TechSY730]

Question about
Does the "StrengthBudget" used in buying AI ships carry over from one reinforce into the next reinforce cycle?  (Both AI's start at 0 in the logs, but I think this is the very first reinforce cycle for this game)

Every overall reinforcement (each AI player only gets one every reinforcement interval) starts at zero.  So if the AI has a tiny budget left over at the end and it buys some low-cap ship it will come out slightly ahead but the actual averaged effect is not significant enough to really worry about.

This is for the overall, galactic reinforcement "pulse" right? The per guard post/per planet while figuring out what to "buy" during the "galactic pulse" properly accounts overspending, right?