First, due to the length of the post and me not wanting to sound all negative. I really love this game. It's generally fun, vast and immersive. I like a lot of the mechanics in the game and the support from the developpers is really amazing. That's why I hope you'll take my upcoming criticism not as a must (they're mainly personal opions), but rather as some feedback I'd like to provide. It's up to you guys to decide what to do with it
Basically, I wanted to start a thread one some aspects that I personally feel take away from some of the fun (not the dwarven fortess kind of fun, but actual fun) in this otherwise great game.
Having now played a couple of games, I feel that some mechanics in this game are a little off. In essence, they don't really contribute a lot besides - unnecessarily - slowing down an already relative slow game. The first one is the AI Eye. The AI Eye is meant to stop blobbing on the planet, but it really fails at doing so, because all it takes is one raid (the action, not the ship) to take it out. Honestly, who here doesn't just raids these things prior to attacking the planet? There's just no incentive not to do it. I also don't quite understand why you'd want to prevent blobbing.
Instead of blobbing and capturing a planet in one or two attacks, we would just have to use surgical strikes to slowly, but surely, drain the planet from enemy forces until it becomes capturable. This can become boring fairly quickly, in my opinion. When I know I'm going to capture a planet I don't want to spend hours capturing it. Sure, if the game revolved around only capturing one planet, I would probably enjoy capturing a planet said way. But with AI War you have to capture 15-20 planets and having to capture even half of them without blobbing feels too much like artificially stretching the game to me. The strategy in AI War comes more from chosing
which planets to capture and not so much from
how you capture the planets. Capturing a planet should be relatively swift action with this mechanic. Having AI Eyes in there only deters from that.
Another issue with preventing blobbing is that blobbing is exactly what the AI is doing. Why doesn't he get restrictions? Isn't it so that the AI will also build up forces and when he finds he has enough, to attack you with those forces? He's basically waiting until he thinks his blob is large enough to take your blob. Just like we are. Ok, granted, with the new patches, the AI will hardly ever attack you with more than double the number of units, but that sure doesn't mean he's attacking you with superior force. But the thing is, we, the players often need superior numbers to make up for inferior strength. Frankly, if I had 500 Mk V forces to attack 1000 Mk II forces, I'd attack sooner too
All I'm really trying to say with this wall of of text is that I'm not really a fan of preventing blobbing in this game, but more so, I don't like how AI Eyes go about and fail to enforce this. I mean, the idea is cool, but does it really make for interesting gameplay?
On to Carriers. First, could someone explain how they get created? It seems to me that once the AI no longer has anything to reinforce, he creates carriers with units he has so he then has room to reinforce again. I'm sure I'm not too far off the real implementation...
What bother me and my friend about this mechanic is twofold, but perhaps I should start with how it started to matter. We're playing on a 40 planet galaxy. We took one AI Homeworld around which time I took the planet near the other homeworld, only seperated from it by two core planets (triangle formation). We wanted to lower the AIP so took the planet with the Super Terminal and waited till the AIP reached the floor and then blew it up. In the meantime (and this was pre the health change in firepower) the core world were gathering up forces on wormholes adjacent to mine. This included over 30(!) carriers, all stuffed with 200 Mk V ships. Of course, there were regular ships as well (both planets had like 500-1000 Mk V ships each). We then proceeded to updade our game. Woops.
Suddenly we get attack by a bazillion ships and carriers. We had a battle that lasted maybe 2 hours on that planet and the only things that kept us alive were the black hole machine, the armor booster, the armor inhibitor and the masses of graviton turrets and other turrets. That and the fact that carriers seemed to be following my ships, so I tried to keep them in the back, while the sniper turrets and my ally cleaned the rest of the ships up. My looping pattern allowed me to take some ships down on some flybys. (I'll try to find a save from around that time. If you're a fan of a prolonged fight for survival, this is certainly one of those!). This was fun and boring at the same time. Once the 'holy crap, how cool is this? All those ships attacking us!'-feeling dissipated, we had to face reality and started to quite tedious defense.
We managed to defeat them all, but felt sort of dissapointed because for each 2 carriers we popped, two more come into our system. It was only until we also managed to significantly reduce the number of ships that we managed to kill more carriers than could reinforce to our planet. On top of that it involved a lot of micromanagement to avoid shooting those carriers. Forget attack move or FRD. We had to manually target all of our ships/turrest such that they would not hit the carrier (much). This right there is one of the main reasons I don't like carriers. Why would your ships want to kill something that will create more danger? The AI of your ships should avoid shooting these unless ordered to by the player. It makes no tactical sense to do otherwise. I'm sure the purpose of the Carriers is to prevent too many ships to be on the screen at once, but honestly, if your ships just pop all of them, you're in the exact same situation.
Now, granted. Our situation was due to weird patch timings. We started to built up a large threat on the core planets that wouldn't attack due to harsh firepower calculation, but we couldn't clear it - at the time - either, and the next patch made them attack us all at once (and rightfully so). It doesn't really matter that it's 30+ carriers though, the point, in my opinion, is still valid. There's no tactical sense to destroy these things prior to having destroyed the other ships. At the very least I'd like to see an option to have your ships (and turrets) avoid shooting Carriers.
Another thing that kind of bothers us with regards to carriers is that the AI uses these carriers to circumvent his per planet cap. A carrier apparently only counts as one unit and the number of ships inside it are not counted. I find this a bit cheating to be honest. If the AI has reached his cap, then he shouldn't be able to send in any more ships. Just like we are stuck with our ship caps. I honestly don't know what he should be doing when he's at full cap though. Maybe have him automatically free a certain percentage of all his ships to attack you with, leaving him room to reinforce again. The current situation is generally not that interesting. Basically what happens is the following:
AI has threat around wormholes. We clean them up and take down a few guard posts. AI again has some threat around wormholes and we clean them up again, taking a few other guard posts with us. This got repeated until we had completely neutered both the AI coreworlds. We are now left with a clear pass to the AI Homeworld and will probably finish the game pretty soon. Taking the guard posts down was actually fun (we absolutely love speed booster and cloaker starships
, but clearing the threat each time right before that just became boring. In our opinion it just serves to slow down an already lost war. (The remarks on carriers is mostly of importance on core and homeworlds. Threat from lower level planets are annoying, but easier to manage.)
To summarize
We don't like that Carriers are targetted without our wanting to.
We don't like that the AI can circumvent his per planet cap via these carriers.
One extra thing I maybe wanted to throw in here was that I find that the endgame in AI War is mostly just a slower mid/early game. Partly to due the above mentioned concerns, but there are other factors too. I would love to see the endgame in AI War become something different. More of scenario where the AI realizes that he's about to possibly lose his domination over the galaxy and initiates one large all-or-nothing battle against the now more powerfull human(s). A battle where tactical prowess determines the victor. If he loses the battle, his position in the galaxy is quite weak and the player can boot him out of it quite easily. If the player loses then he'll have to either give up or retreat depending on how severly he lost. Just a thought that sprang to me while writing this. Generally I'd like to see more of difference in playstyle between the various stages in the game.
tl;dr
- Blobbing isn't such a bad thing.
- AI Eyes don't do their jobs properly and clearing them is too repetitive
- Carriers should not be targetted unless explicitely told to.
- The AI should not reinforce any more once it reached its cap. Instead it could perhaps use it ships and attack in order to free his cap.
- It would be nice to have more difference between early/mid and endgame, whereas now it's generally more of the same, just slower and slower as the game goes on.
Boy, definitely too much text, sorry 'bout that!
