Over 100 Stealth Spire Battleships in a single cross-planet attack...

[oaks]

This is my first post and basically I don't know if I'm encountering a slight bug, a particularly unfortunate coincidence or just gameplay I think is a bit savage even by AI War's standards. My copy of AI War is up-to-date, no beta running. This is an 80 planet map with two level 7 opponent AIs; one stealth master, one turtle.

State of play is this, AIP is about 400 which is rather higher than I'd like it, I'm about 13 hours in and I've got two slightly cross AI planets with no gates they can warp at, cue cross-planet attacks etc. Now I've been seeing rather a lot of stealth spire battleships but that wasn't a suprise given the oppo. Having fought off some attacks with maybe 20-30 of the damm things in I have then been hit with a 1700 ship attack (which is not unexpected) but it contains ~120 SSBs!

Image below shows the 104 remaining ships (all SSBs as they came along last) after I'd otherwise nailed the attack.




I'm quite prepared to accept that this is anticipated behaviour but if so it is surely hugely unbalanced, I wouldn't expect to see them in these numbers on their own let alone as part of a 1700 strong wave as they're basically starships and us poor humans have a cap of 5!

Any thoughts? I've got the reinforcement logs from after the moment the timer came up if they're any use but I don't know if you need them from before that?

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the forums

I'm quite prepared to accept that this is anticipated behaviour but if so it is surely hugely unbalanced, I wouldn't expect to see them in these numbers on their own let alone as part of a 1700 strong wave as they're basically starships and us poor humans have a cap of 5!

Well, would you have preferred 2000 bombers?   On normal caps, that's the rough equivalent.

The SpecialForcesLogic.txt and MainThreadWaveCalc and AIThreadWaveCalc logs would be of interest here, but I don't think 60 (edit: 24, here) caps worth of a particular ship in a cpa at 400 AIP is terribly out of the ordinary.  Player defenses are often capable of eviscerating far worse at that stage

[Lancefighter]

Well, would you have preferred 2000 bombers?   On normal caps, that's the rough equivalent.

Or 2000 zenith bombards? Totally not equivalent at all, but hilarious.

[zoutzakje]

yeah it does sound about right to me. 400 AIP is a lot after all and CPA's will often get big and dangerous at that stage. And what Keith said, at 400 AIP you should also have the defenses to counter it.

Welcome the the forums btw =)

[Kahuna]

I don't know how much AIP affects on CPA sizes.. but in my current 10/10 game when the first CPA with ~2200 ships hit I had ~22 AIP. Now the second CPA was announced.. it has ~4400 ships and my AIP is 18. So umm.. yeah. Looks like CPAs scale with difficulty level and in-game time.

[keith.lamothe]

It scales up with AIP if your AIP is "ahead of the curve" time-wise.  But if you play low-AIP it's basically scaled by time, yea.  And difficulty, of course.

[KDR_11k]

Is it a CPA or a cross planet wave? CPAs take what the AI has available.

[Bognor]

I thought of a strategy for ameliorating this kind of thing, described here.  It's based on the knowledge that CPAs release a certain number of ships, not a certain amount of ship strength.  I haven't had a chance to find out whether it's actually practical, though.