Ion Cannons: When there's three or so Ion Cannons on a world, there really isn't a difference between the Tech II ones, and the Tech III ones. 25% more shielding is nothing, 100% extra damage is unimportant given that it's an insta-kill, and given you'll be encountering Tech III ones about the same time as you get Tech II ships, (like you encounter the Tech II Ion Cannons about the same time as you only have Tech I ships), they play pretty much the same way: Take 'em out as fast as possible.
There is a huge difference in the different levels of ion cannons. Ion cannons can only insta-kill ships with a difficulty level less than themselves; everything else is window dressing. So for instance, an Ion Cannon III can insta-kill anything that is Mark II or down, whereas Ion Cannon II can only insta-kill stuff that is Mark I.
The problem is in AI10 games (and to a certain extent, even AI7 games when you've got lots of Tech III/IV worlds near your home world), when you encounter Mark II Ion Cannons, you don't tend to have many Tech II ships. As there's a ton of ships in the area you have to use your Tech I ships to take them out. So at the end of the day it doesn't matter if the Mark II Ion Cannons can potentially kill 100% of your fleet of ships, or potentially kill 80% of your fleet of ships, the result is the same. This also applies to the Tech III Ion Cannons and Tech III ships.
Having three of them in a world just makes them kill you three times faster, it doesn't change the fact you have to use the ships anyway, it just means you have to rebuild more of them. And with Tech III, you basically just want to churn out tons of Tech I ships and let them be sacrificed to the Ion Cannon rather then the Tech II's. (Not that I can tell if the Tech III's deliberately target Tech II's over Tech I's though.)
As a result, taking down a Tech III or Tech IV world is essentially identical:
* Lightning missile the entrance wormhole.
* Wait for the backlash of half the remaining ships.
* Send your scout through and move it into a safe area.
* Look around for the Ion Cannons, and find the closest one.
* Toss another lightning missile through and move it to a safe-ish area on the way to the Ion Cannon you've picked.
* Toss your ships through, wipe out the remainder of the forces at the wormhole.
* Send ships in the direction of Ion Cannon.
* Send lightning missile in direction of Ion Cannon and blow away the defensive forces just before your's arrive.
* Take out Ion Cannon.
* Send ships back through wormhole to rest/repair/rebuild safely if they've had too many losses, otherwise (or if there's another Ion Cannon close and you've got a fairly damaged force anyway), send another Lightning Missile in to do it's dirty work on the ships around the next Ion Cannon , then whack it with your ships.
* Rinse, repeat.
There's minor variations on the tactics (I like trying to empty as many ships from the world with Armoured Missiles, then taking out any large remaining batches around wormholes with Lightning missiles, then taking out the Command Center, surviving the backlash, then building a sacrificial Command Center of your own to take over the Ion Cannons, at which point you let the AI take out their former Ion Cannons and your Command Center whilst feeling smug
), but they all end up playing pretty similar. And there's no real tactical difference between having to deal with the difference in Tech Level. (The suggestion below to add extra abilities to higher tech level ones would force you to actually try different tactics such as drag scouts/etc in to highlight the cloaked ones for instance.)
I guess the main issue is that at this difficulty level, there's no reason to take over the Ion Cannons, since the AI doesn't use Tech I ships, and by the time you can comfortably take over the Tech III Ion Cannons without losses, the AI's running around with mostly Tech III ships anyway...
Unsure how lethal these are supposed to be in a regular game, since I tend to find them more of an annoyance then a threat when I play, but at least in AI10 (or at least games above AI7 anyway), they should be considerably more annoying then they are. Tech III really should fire faster then Tech II, so there's a reason to pick and choose one over another since currently if I'm taking them out I'll just kill whichever is closest first, rather then applying some form of tactics.
There is so much already that is against the players in the AI 10 games, I didn't want to make this too much harder. They often have triple ion cannons in their big worlds on AI 10, which means that any lower-level ships get insta-killed out pretty darn fast. Anything higher level is always safe from ion cannons. Ion cannons are meant to be a "you must be this tall to fight here" kind of limiter, more than anything else.
The problem is it intersects oddly with the other design goal of wanting to have all the ship tech levels being "useful".
I can get away with using only Tech II ships in a AI7 game, since by the time I seriously encounter these I've usually got a decent enough force that they can survive in a world without support of the other ships long enough for me to fly out, whack the Ion Cannon, then retreat for healing, in AI10 I don't have that luxury. This AI10 game of the 6 planets I "needed" to take over to get a stable defensive base and to grab an Advanced Research ship, I had three Tech III's and a Tech IV (which I technically didn't have to take out, but was easier doing it now then having to worry about being flooded with 500+ ships from it a few hours later
), but I only had Tech II of bombers and parasites since I decided to try out the new starships to see if they're worth getting.
And in a totally unrelated note: If you ever decide to create some form of parasite-turret, I heartily recommend disabling it on any AI above AI7. By the time I'd cleared out the 6 worlds, I had an attack force of close to 4000 ships, of which about 2000 were Tech III/IV, or Tech II that I didn't actually have access to.
After one particularly badly botched defense after I detonated an AI command center, I had to retreat all the way back to my home world. When I was cleaning up/repairing afterwards I discovered I'd lost about a thousand of my ships (mostly Tech I/II) and gained 500+ Tech III/IV ships, mostly bombers and cruisers. I think that was probably my most successful failure of a defense in the whole game so far.
Also, Tech III worlds should drop down Tech III Ion Cannons (not Tech II), and Tech IV worlds Tech IV Ion Cannons (not Tech III), and for that matter there should be Tech IV Ion Cannons. It should work similar to the way that the AI Progress meter starts them off with Tech II wandering ships rather then Tech I.
With the added notes about how Ion Cannons work (killing anything lower than their level), are you sure you still want this? I have concerns over people crying foul with this, since it's a pretty devastating advantage for the AI.
I don't mind it still, but upon consideration it's probably going to be way too nasty for people who play on Normal, since Ion Cannons seem to be actually a threat them (whereas snipers are the bane of my F&D existence at the moment... *grr*).
Really though, it would level the difficulty of the Ion Cannons up the same way the base-tech-level gets an upgrade as well, without having to go nuts with the number of Ion Cannons per map. Simply because when you're hitting a Tech IV world suddenly you have a choice: Do I use my Tech III ships to make my life faster/easier, or do I leave them out of this assault and just rely on Tech I/II ships to try and defeat Tech IV ships, so I can spare my more expensive ships from being lost? It's especially nasty if the Ion Cannons deliberately target the highest tech-level they can kill...
Though have you considered renaming the Ion Cannons so they actually start at Ion Cannon I? That way Ion Cannon I will kill Mark I ships, and I will not continually get confused that Mark I and II ships get killed by Ion Cannon III.
Also if, say, Tech III had an in-built Tech III class forcefield, and Tech IV was cloaked (and could fire cloaked), they would be of a considerable higher annoyance factor.
I would probably hold off on that, since a Mark IV or V ion cannon would be so deadly in general already. No need to make it impossible!
There's no need, but I'm sure you will anyway at some point.
(Also Tech V Ion Cannons should be randomly scattered around at conveniently obnoxious choke points. Of course they'd be cloaked, shielded, operate with gatling-gun-multi-shot speed and be unable to be captured at planet ownership change. Of course the sound of each shot would be an audio file of War-X-ter 4K laughing maniacly. >.> <.< )
Mwahahaha!
On that note, have you considered adding something like a multi-shot sniper effect to Ion Cannons as well?
Something like 3x shots per Tech Level would do the trick. It will cause people to worry about just throwing Tech I ships against a Tech III Ion Cannon in the hope of saving Tech II ships, plus it'll mean it's actually worth trying to capture Tech II Ion Cannons as a player since by the time you can do it relatively reliably, the Ion Cannons are pretty useless since the AI stops using the Tech I ships. And I would actually bother trying to capture Tech III Ion Cannons in the AI10 game since they will actually have a use then.
