Of Eyes, Carriers and the Endgame.

[Goekhan]

They do seem to be much more effective at motivating "scout" and "raid" than they are at de-motivating "blob".  People generally just do what's necessary to restore their ability to blob.

Need to give some feedback here

AI Eyes have 400m HP. Shield Guard Posts, MKI has 300-400ish million, MKIV has 760. Just pointing out that in order to get rid of Eye, minimum damage done required is 400m most of the time (given that there's no Shield Guard Posts). And if I send a fleet, possibly Eye will start spawning. And I'm not a blob guy anyway. If I send all bombers, they have to ignore other stuff, and die while shooting at the eye. I don't know how people plays this game, but I'm 10 hour into my game, and still have single planet (well, this is a first for me though, I choose high-priority targets first, never touch the rest - although, this is the funniest and best game I ever had ). And I cannot use any guerilla tactics, hit and run in other words, due to low resource income. Yes, I can research harvester MKII and such, but military & espionage always comes first for me.

[keith.lamothe]

How many AI Eyes have you found, out of how many planets scouted?  And did you start the game before or after the change to 400m-hp eyes?  They're supposed to be quite rare in new games.

[Goekhan]

I need to load an early savegame. But I think I've found 7 or 8, out of 30 planets scouted. Took down 3 or 4. 4 is remaining. Can't remember exactly as I neutered like 20 planets so far. Is it listed under Message Log? Tried to look up, but too many stuff there, checked a little bit but I don't know if it's there.

[x4000]

Yep, Moo is exactly right -- and the harvesters can be rebuilt, too.  There's really no reason to ever restart if a player dies in multiplayer, that's counter to the goals of the game.  It's rare that all of the players in my 4-player sessions make it to the end with their homes intact, even when we do win.  It's not even that rare for us to be down to our last home planet, for that matter.

Right now, it only gives you the one Home Command Station Core, regardless of how many homeworlds you started with.  So, in the case of multi-planet starts, your economy does actually get significantly worse if one of your homeworlds (and therefore all of your homeworlds) die.

That part actually is intended.

[keith.lamothe]

I need to load an early savegame. But I think I've found 7 or 8, out of 30 planets scouted. Took down 3 or 4. 4 is remaining. Can't remember exactly as I neutered like 20 planets so far. Is it listed under Message Log? Tried to look up, but too many stuff there, checked a little bit but I don't know if it's there.

Oh, goodness, yea, there's not supposed to be that many; it's more like 2-4 or something like that for 80 planets.

You just got the short end of the game-spanning-multiple-beta-versions stick there, I think.

[Goekhan]

Dunno really. This is a 60-planet map. And started with 4.066. Maybe I'm unlucky

[keith.lamothe]

Hrm, that sounds like a bug in mapgen, can you post the save so I can try to start a game with the same setup?

[Goekhan]

Hmm, where save files are located?

Meanwhile

60 planets
Concentric
Conquest
1739257812

Complex - All ships enabled

Starting at the planet with Planes

[Vinraith]

@Goekhan

They're in your AI War game directory (wherever you have it installed) under RuntimeData/Save.

[Goekhan]

Thanks Vinraith.

Here is the savegame.

[keith.lamothe]

Thanks for the save, I've found what I think the problem is.  For one thing I mistook Chris's intentions with the quantity but I think I found why it was producing more than he expected, etc.  I'll check with him.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, checked with him and basically the numbers were correct if only being seeded for one AI player, but since they're seeded for both AIs we had to halve the numbers.  When I did mapgen on your setup I saw 16 eyes spawned on 50 planets (I know your setup was 60 planets, there was a hiccup in the copy), post-fixes I see it spawn 8 eyes, which seems correct.  Still enough to provoke rage and weeping, but hopefully not so many that you frequently run into cases where you _have_ to go through such a planet.