Poll: Aim the Nerfbat of Damocles: AI-side (I)

[TechSY730]

My experience with them is that as soon as they get out of range of something like the decloaker or anything with tachyon, it disappears very quickly.

That seems like a straight up bug.
IIRC, it is supposed to be 8 seconds after it last fired a weapon or 8 seconds after it left the tachyon detection range of something with tachyons (assuming the decloaker was able to decloak it, which may not be true for certain forms of cloak boosting), whichever comes last.

[Diazo]

Note that the re-cloaking issue is probably not bugged, but the 8 second decloak timer starts when decloaked or it fires, not when it leaves Tachyon range.

When a Stealth Battleship destroys a structure and turns to leave, the 8 second time starts. It can spend 7 seconds leaving tachyon range and then cloak one second later.

Because ship was not actually cloaked, the tachyon did not de-cloak the ship, the 8 second timer counts from when it stopped firing, not from when it leaves tachyon range.

Working as designed but the attack and radar dampening range on Stealth Battleships seem to be set perfectly to take advantage of this.
D.

[Wanderer]

My experience with them is that as soon as they get out of range of something like the decloaker or anything with tachyon, it disappears very quickly.

That seems like a straight up bug.
IIRC, it is supposed to be 8 seconds after it last fired a weapon or 8 seconds after it left the tachyon detection range of something with tachyons (assuming the decloaker was able to decloak it, which may not be true for certain forms of cloak boosting), whichever comes last.

Adding to Dazio's note above, 8 seconds is very little time.  Good for the player, bad for massive waves.  Most turrets can't even reload in 8 seconds.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Seems like common courtesy to share our votes and why...

Now, while I'm not very like... I'm not much good at AI War. I've only gotten 40 hours of gameplay into it and thus, I know fairly little... But I do know that...

AI Eyes should probably send a tech-level appropriate response for the planet they're on. It might be a tad bit overkill when you only have low tech ships that blunder into and set off a mark III eye. Then again, that could just be bad decision making on the player's part.

And the Deep Strike response. I'm relatively new to these games, so I don't know what that response was originally for. I was just like, oh, I guess I'd better only ever just campaign across the map rather than raiding a few planets deep and keeping AI Progress lower. Because I don't really understand why it exists, I voted that down.

I voted down Superfortresses because I like to play against turtles and it's just too much fun watching my bombers pick away at a superfortress for several minutes without them encountering any real threat. I also haven't gotten to the point of dealing with the smarter AI levels, so it's possibly more exciting to deal with later.
...well, it was exciting when I piloted my earlygame fleet into a mark III fortress camping a wormhole and lost almost all of it except for the bombers.

[_K_]

I also haven't gotten to the point of dealing with the smarter AI levels, so it's possibly more exciting to deal with later.

Nah, its not. Same on any difficulty: clean up rest of the system, then sit there for a few minutes watching your bombers slowly take down the fortress.

[TechSY730]

I also haven't gotten to the point of dealing with the smarter AI levels, so it's possibly more exciting to deal with later.

Nah, its not. Same on any difficulty: clean up rest of the system, then sit there for a few minutes watching your bombers slowly take down the fortress.

Yea, I made a suggestion to adjust fortress damage and damage properties to make the optimal strategy against them not so "boring".

[Kahuna]

I also haven't gotten to the point of dealing with the smarter AI levels, so it's possibly more exciting to deal with later.

Nah, its not. Same on any difficulty: clean up rest of the system, then sit there for a few minutes watching your bombers slowly take down the fortress.

That's when the 10x speed and multitasking comes in/kicks in/whatever

[zoutzakje]

I only voted for the spire stealth battle ships. They're just to painful to deal with early game. I often restart my game when I find out the enemy has them right from the start. A few of those can tear your worlds apart, even if you have a defense that would be enough for anything else the AI might throw at you. They're managable in the mid and late game though.

[LaughingThesaurus]

I also haven't gotten to the point of dealing with the smarter AI levels, so it's possibly more exciting to deal with later.

Nah, its not. Same on any difficulty: clean up rest of the system, then sit there for a few minutes watching your bombers slowly take down the fortress.

Oh.
Well, not to accidentally give Keith any bright ideas, but I kind of expected on higher difficulties, the AI would end up using fortresses as a bit of a time sink. You're attacking the fortress, the AI saves up reinforcements, and attacks you (or maybe your planets) all at once while you're just sitting around wasting your time on a fortress.
...then again that could just end up making multitasking a lot less viable.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, calling the results on this one; winners:

AI Eye (producing ships of planet's mark)
Spire Shield Guard Posts
Spire Stealth Battleship

The second one has already been nerfed since this poll was started (I normally try not to do that to stuff currently in a poll but it happened to be something I was working on) so I'll probably leave it as-is until there's been some more playtesting with it (I've yet to make the AAR rounds today to see if there is such).  The SSB will probably only get a moderate nerf to its radar dampening as that's been a common theme in the thread.  I may also revisit the recloaking-time rules, dunno.  The eye... I'll figure it out; probably just making it produce at most the planet's mark as suggested, instead of at least it (unless it's a core/homeworld, I think, but we'll see).

[TechSY730]

Ok, calling the results on this one; winners:

AI Eye (producing ships of planet's mark)
Spire Shield Guard Posts
Spire Stealth Battleship

The second one has already been nerfed since this poll was started (I normally try not to do that to stuff currently in a poll but it happened to be something I was working on) so I'll probably leave it as-is until there's been some more playtesting with it (I've yet to make the AAR rounds today to see if there is such).

The Core Spire Shield Guard Post was nerfed, but I didn't see anything about the normal Spire Shield Guard Posts in the release notes.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, calling the results on this one; winners:

AI Eye (producing ships of planet's mark)
Spire Shield Guard Posts
Spire Stealth Battleship

The second one has already been nerfed since this poll was started (I normally try not to do that to stuff currently in a poll but it happened to be something I was working on) so I'll probably leave it as-is until there's been some more playtesting with it (I've yet to make the AAR rounds today to see if there is such).

The Core Spire Shield Guard Post was nerfed, but I didn't see anything about the normal Spire Shield Guard Posts in the release notes.

Oh, right.  Here I was thinking folks were just talking about the core ones

[Hearteater]

Nothing says an AI Eye needs to produce only a single Mark of ships.  Much like you changed high difficulty waves to spawn a range of Marks, AI Eyes could do that as well.  Maybe randomly from AIP mark to planet mark?

[Cinth]

What if the AI Eye wasn't protected by all the guard posts on a planet? Maybe kill off 3/4 the guard posts and the AI Eye goes poof? I think that might work just as well as changing what mark ships it produces.

[Mánagarmr]

What if the AI Eye wasn't protected by all the guard posts on a planet? Maybe kill off 3/4 the guard posts and the AI Eye goes poof? I think that might work just as well as changing what mark ships it produces.

I'm not sure. That's a lot more arbitrary than killing all posts. "Kill all the guardposts" are easier to naturally understand than "kill most of them".