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

[keith.lamothe]

You would take +50AIP just to kill the SF fleet? 

Have you seen my signature?

Yes, but I've also seen you win high-difficulty games.  That usually doesn't coincide with using a nuke in a non-absolutely-crucial situation.

Only during the endgame, though.

Ah, that makes sense.  In that 5-minute "I either win or I lose" gambit, just nuke all resistance

[chemical_art]

The ai sends 10k fleetships at your fleet.

Would you expect your fleet to survive intact?

"Surviving intact" isn't his problem.  His problem was that his fleet didn't exist post-alpha-strike to even fire a single shot at the bombards.

As Tech mentioned, if your fleet is very heavily tilted toward one hull type, and the hull type is countered by a favored unit of the ai, does that mean the counter unit is strong, or that tactics should be changed?

Not every fight should be "lob whole fleet at X, and win". It should take some finesse if you somehow caused a wave the equivalent of 10k ships to come at you, and if that wave is a hard counter to most of your fleet, then I think yes, you should be wiped I think.

Keep your fleet well away from the wormhole. Lead with your non FS fleetball to take the alpha, then using that 30 second window to engage the wave with your FS fleet would help do it. Bombards suffer from "overkill" to the extreme, and in your stage of the game I'm sure you have at least a 1k ship fleetball, and that will take the majority of that wave if you keep the FS fleet away from the wormhole.

It won't be easy, but a 10k fleetball should never be easy to begin with.

[Lancefighter]

"non fs fleetball".

Maybe you dont quite understand the level of singlemindedness that goes into the Fallen Spire fleet.
I have spent ALL of my knowledge to support this fleet.

I have no non fallen spire ships.

additionally, as I mentioned earlier, 2k mk2 bombards has a burst damage nearing the billions without bonuses - What exactly has that much hp? Even my entire fallen spire fleet couldnt stand up to a SINGLE VOLLEY of it. And I generally never lose spire capships.

I didn't have the adv logging stuff on before, but ill turn it on and try to run a few more hours of campaign to see whats going on.

I seriously am of the opinion that there is no reason for 2k of each shiptype to exist in special forces. Why did the Ai bother sending 2k microfighters/bulletproof/fighters/bombers at me? I dunno. They did basically nothing. (even all at once, they werent particularly scary. Spire lances are beautiful.)

I honestly see no reason for the AI to reinforce with anything OTHER than bombards. Why is it not doing that? I dunno. it really loves its microfighters.. for all the stealthed units I am not using.

[KDR_11k]

Maybe it's worried about cloaker + warhead/martyr?

I don't think 2k Zombards are much of a data point for balancing purposes.

FWIW I guess running an Enclave starship with some engies to make a fighter machinegun wouldn't have worked?

[chemical_art]

"non fs fleetball".

Maybe you dont quite understand the level of singlemindedness that goes into the Fallen Spire fleet.
I have spent ALL of my knowledge to support this fleet.

I have no non fallen spire ships.

There you have it. It would be like putting all your resources into missile frigates, then getting unhappy that a bomber wave wiped out your fleet. You did an all or nothing gamble, and you lost.

You are not even handling a wave, you are handling SF I see. Why are you trying to engage the AI where it is strongest? The whole point of AI war is surgical strikes.


If you are doing FS why aren't you sniping the special forces posts to counter SF in general? You have that massive numbers of SF because you left them alone on an high aip game. Then you try to proceed to take them all on at once?

Let the bloody SF ball disperse, and engage them in groups of hundreds, not thousands. You've found a bug where the max number of SF posts don't scale with caps I think, but  your tactics should change regardless.

Don't try to engage a force that has 10:1 power over you and in addition counters you silly.

[TechSY730]

"non fs fleetball".

Maybe you dont quite understand the level of singlemindedness that goes into the Fallen Spire fleet.
I have spent ALL of my knowledge to support this fleet.

I have no non fallen spire ships.

Even in my FS games, I still make sure I have some other stuff to prevent such worst case scenarios like this.
But yea, FS stuff is so expensive, you often times can't afford to diversify without either taking tons of planets or slowing your overall build rate to a crawl. (hmm, a reason to buff Spire habitation centers, maybe?)

additionally, as I mentioned earlier, 2k mk2 bombards has a burst damage nearing the billions without bonuses - What exactly has that much hp? Even my entire fallen spire fleet couldnt stand up to a SINGLE VOLLEY of it. And I generally never lose spire capships.

The point is that the initial fleet does not have to survive, only trigger the 30 second countdown for most of the bombards. This will put enough bombards into reload time to bring your real damage dealers in and take some of them out. Yes, this will be tricky (and depending on how much you hate micro, annoying), but as mentioned, dealing with an effective 10k ship strength attack will always be.

Though it is pretty lolz worthy how you took a large portion of the effective 20k ships coming after you abusing the spire lances, abusing the AOE to get absurd DPS. Why didn't the zombards suffer a similar fate (at least enough to take a considerable portion of them out)? Weren't your units in place to alpha them as they were alphaing you, so you could both inflict severe losses on each other?

I seriously am of the opinion that there is no reason for 2k of each shiptype to exist in special forces. Why did the Ai bother sending 2k microfighters/bulletproof/fighters/bombers at me? I dunno. They did basically nothing. (even all at once, they werent particularly scary. Spire lances are beautiful.)

I honestly see no reason for the AI to reinforce with anything OTHER than bombards. Why is it not doing that? I dunno. it really loves its microfighters.. for all the stealthed units I am not using.

Bombards do have counters, especially when you abuse that 30 second reload time. That is why it isn't always reinforcing with it. That, and with their antimatter bombs, anything under a regular or armored forcefield is completely safe from it. They will need support successfully take out a planet or a good beachead or whatever.

That said, I think the "which ship should I choose and should I choose one with a specialization?" chances need to be tweaked some (not only for special forces, but everything that uses this logic). Right now, if the AI gets a "specialization ship", it chooses it a bit too frequently for all of its various ship picks, thus making countering it too easy and/or too annoying (like the micro heavy way required to take on zombards without severe losses).

[Lancefighter]

For that particular instance, I had my fleet busy idling as I was preparing to engage a nuclear eye, so I could progress.

I cant abuse the '2k bombards shoot at a single fighter', because thats not how the game works. If ships dont hit anything, they get an instant reload. (which, by the way, is still broken on spire lances. Id report it, but it makes clearing wh guard posts so much easier..)

Dont get me wrong - I could be building fighters and bombers and the like.. But they just plain arent relevant at this point in the game.

Id love to write another wall of text, but I'm late to my class already

[TechSY730]

I cant abuse the '2k bombards shoot at a single fighter', because thats not how the game works. If ships dont hit anything, they get an instant reload. (which, by the way, is still broken on spire lances. Id report it, but it makes clearing wh guard posts so much easier..)

You don't send in a single ship, but several hundred ships. This puts several hundred zombards out of commission for 30 seconds. Now, your main force has to only deal with a portion of the zombard alpha, instead of all of it. Annoying to do? Probably, but that is what long range units (of any sort) tends to do to a game (especially one without terrain effects or sophisticated "is this specific block/segment/pixel on the playfield visible" visibility mechanics)


EDIT: Again, I would like to point out that I agree that zombards need some sort of nerf (and not just AI usage of zombards), for reasons I have already given in previous posts.

[Hearteater]

Also on Bombards, fighting them right on the wormhole is optimal.  At least both sides get to fire.  If you are assaulting their wormhole, using a Space Dock to repeat-build Mark I Fighters through the Wormhole for a bit can get a large chunk of them reloading to the point that only a small percentage of the Bombards are ready to fire when you put your main fleet through.

[keith.lamothe]

@Lancefighter: If it comes right down to it and you don't have enough non-fs-fleet-ships (everyone has some, even with no K spent on them) to soak the zombard alpha strike, just build 2000 mkI science ships or something like that with a non-capped unit.  Then send them through, for science.  With that kind of FS fleet, the zombards won't get a second volley.  There's probably something cheaper than the science ships, I just haven't checked.

Between their immense reload time, relatively slow speed, and antimatter ammo, there's a lot of things that keep the zombard from being an unbeatable unit.  Not that they don't need some kind of nerf, but your situation isn't what I'd take as an argument for it.

Actually, iirc zombards are not immune to EMP.  Just drop an MkI/MkII emp on the SF ball, bring the fleet in, and kill everything before the paralysis wears off.

[Toranth]

additionally, as I mentioned earlier, 2k mk2 bombards has a burst damage nearing the billions without bonuses - What exactly has that much hp? Even my entire fallen spire fleet couldnt stand up to a SINGLE VOLLEY of it. And I generally never lose spire capships.

You're facing a massive amount of firepower.  Those bombards have almost 800,000,000 damage before multipliers.  That's roughly 20 Mk III Hunter/Killers.  Fortunately for you, they only have only 25% of the hitpoints (and massive damage degredation).  Other people have posted some suggestions, I'll add one more:

Try to park your fleet over the wormhole that the bombards are going to be entering the system through, and engage them at point blank as they enter.

Finally, 2000 Bombards is nasty.  So is 2000 SSBs, or Blade Spawners, or Mini Rams, or Corvettes, or Maws, or Sentinal Frigates, or Vampires, or Zelecs.  There may be a few other types that could hurt your Spire fleet badly, too, that I'm not thinking of right now.  The Bombard is not unique, it's just good at its job.

I think Bombards need to have their AI strength adjusted.  I do not think their stats need to be changed at all.

2000 Raid Starships... 

[TechSY730]

I think Bombards need to have their AI strength adjusted.  I do not think their stats need to be changed at all.

How do you mean? You mean like applying a slight to modest penalty to how many they get in waves or something like that?

[chemical_art]

I think Bombards need to have their AI strength adjusted.  I do not think their stats need to be changed at all.

How do you mean? You mean like applying a slight to modest penalty to how many they get in waves or something like that?

That's what I was thinking when I said they need to be nerfed in ai hands, but not in stats.

Bombards are fine when they are within a semblance of their cap amount. However the AI regularly uses 10x the caps of things toward mid game, and certain units like bombers (and in my opinion bombards) start to tactically make more of an impact.

So by adjusting the ai cost multiplier, whether it be simply their ai usefulness modifier for waves or overall, you make it less common you get massive amounts of bombards.

A cap of bombards from I - III doesn't break the game on the human player side. 200 bombards in a wave tends to make more of an impact on the game as a whole...

[Lancefighter]

odd that you mention raid starships. I find watching them yoyo around against military commands hilarious

And I definitely will say I had not considered thousands upon thousands of science ships. if only I could set a spacedock or 50 to repeat build science ships..

edit - I had considered doing silly spire railgun turret shenanigans, but they seem to be immune to sniper shots, and I believe that extends to spire railguns. Right?

[keith.lamothe]

edit - I had considered doing silly spire railgun turret shenanigans, but they seem to be immune to sniper shots, and I believe that extends to spire railguns. Right?

No, immune to sniper != immune to railgun.  Iirc nothing is immune to railgun per se.  Only if the railgun is also a sniper shot.

Have you tried the emp-warhead approach?  For 1 AIP you basically get full alpha (and probably a few more salvos) with your full FS fleet.  If that can't kill it, I don't know what would.