Prerelease 3.039 (Bugfixes, Astro Train Nerfs, K-Free Rally Posts)

[CPTKOOL]

I'm not sure if anyone else is having the same problem, but Remains Re-builders no-longer have the R on their tile on the side menu thing (forgot it's name). This has only occured with the latest patch.

[Fiskbit]

That's a good point about the warp gates. If someone just wants the capturable on a planet, they perhaps shouldn't need to have to destroy the warp gate. I like the idea of warp gates reinforcing with tons of enemy ships if you take the world, which gives you incentive to destroy it because it may be very difficult to defend against.

Also, yay for free rally posts. I think this really benefits the game's usability. Glad to see it made it in.

[HellishFiend]

That's a good point about the warp gates. If someone just wants the capturable on a planet, they perhaps shouldn't need to have to destroy the warp gate. I like the idea of warp gates reinforcing with tons of enemy ships if you take the world, which gives you incentive to destroy it because it may be very difficult to defend against.

I agree. This decision should be in the hands of the player. Perhaps give the AI free reinforcements to an undestroyed gate that dont come out of their normal pool of reinforcements, or something, but leave us the decision of whether to leave the gate alone or destroy it!

[Kordy]

Problem is, with non-raiding AI, leaving the warp-gates intact is greatly beneficial if you're doing it not on a few but a LOT of planets. Not only you dodge the AIP, you also dodge the increased reinforcements at other planets, because the AI desperately tries to reinforce systems under 'heavy attack', as far as I know.

Oewyn, Goekhan and I experienced that in a game with two turtles, and in the end we abused it for so long that the game was just a bore, but we expected those systems to be reinforced heavily, and lose control in a few minutes (like a super processor). Didn't turn out that way, in the end, though.

This change means that killing a command station is committing yourself to that system fully, not dodging the AIP. A 10 minute grace period before the gate is destroyed might be what's needed for raiding ARS's, indeed.

However, there's the other end of the spectrum - you do need to keep some systems intact and reinforced to be able to actually kill the AI core systems at points (say, AIP around 500). The AI core reinforcement amounts may need a balance in the future if things are too desperate for a single player to kill those, because frankly while I love the concept of 'Losing is Fun', I'd like to 'win' a few games once in a while as well

Though apparently the warp-gates are not getting killed automatically yet.

[MaxAstro]

Having a strange bug with the new version.  Or, several strange bugs I guess.  When I reloaded a save game that I had started before the newest patch, I noticed some things had... changed.  A couple of my systems had different amounts of resources than they did before, although I had the same amount of harvesters.  This led to odd things like one of my systems having 0/4 metal harvesters.

Also I saw at least one AI planet where all the wormholes were completely undefended, but there were packs of AI ships in the middle of empty space that looked like wormhole defenders - I assume the wormholes moved somehow.

This bug doesn't seem to occur when starting a new game, just with loading this game (which as I mentioned was created before adding this patch).

[keith.lamothe]

That's very... odd.  I'll need to look into that fairly fast

And on the warp gate thing, maybe the AI could say "ok, you're going to leave the warp gate but take the planet, I'll just warp in a lot of nukes"

[HellishFiend]

That's very... odd.  I'll need to look into that fairly fast

And on the warp gate thing, maybe the AI could say "ok, you're going to leave the warp gate but take the planet, I'll just warp in a lot of nukes"

Nice try, but the AI doesn't use missles. 

[Ozymandiaz]

That's very... odd.  I'll need to look into that fairly fast

And on the warp gate thing, maybe the AI could say "ok, you're going to leave the warp gate but take the planet, I'll just warp in a lot of nukes"

Nice try, but the AI doesn't use missles. 

yet ...

[keith.lamothe]

That's very... odd.  I'll need to look into that fairly fast

And on the warp gate thing, maybe the AI could say "ok, you're going to leave the warp gate but take the planet, I'll just warp in a lot of nukes"

Nice try, but the AI doesn't use missles. 

yet ...

[Lancefighter]

That will finally give captured warhead interceptors a use! yay!

[x4000]

That will finally give captured warhead interceptors a use! yay!

It was just a joke -- AI likely won't ever have warheads.  Sorry!

[x4000]

New version: http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,4010.0.html

Other notes:

- MaxAstro, your issue with the stuff moving around should be fixed.  If you see it again, please post a savegame if you don't mind.

- Fiskbit and kjara, the issue with "if you just want the capturable on the planet, you should be able to duck part of the cost" is precisely a big part of what I am... uh... intentionally fixing.  It hadn't occurred to me that people would duck half the AIP cost for doing those captures, 10 AIP was far cheaper than I'd intended.

- At any rate, I also decided to go with kjara's change for the cost of the warp gate being partially transferred to the command station.  The primary goal for that is that I think it was previously too expensive to do much gate-raiding if you were hopping planets a lot.  This change should make it easier to hop around a lot, which is a must with some of the new maps.  And it should make playing Grid and some of the others like that a bit easier, too.  And I guess a side benefit is that having the warp gate explode (for 5 instead of 10) after you destroy the command station (for 15 instead of 10) now should seem like less of a big thing.

In summary, I am all for players being able to make a wide variety of strategic decisions, but I'm not for players being able to duck the minimum opportunity cost for a decision (taking a planet).  I look at destroying a planet as sort of like making a move in chess, and the cost of making that move is 20 AIP, has always intended to be.  Destroying the command station comes with all sorts of benefits (spreading out alert level to make reinforcements more disperse, clearing travel lanes by destroying the wormhole guard posts, possibly cutting off supply, etc), that it really can't be any cheaper than 20 AIP.  The supposed drawback of having a warp gate sitting there and occasionally getting reinforcements is not nearly enough of a cost, because as players have noted you can simply plunk down some turrets and not worry about it any more.

[January]

I'm pretty new, so I could be off base with this, but I'm not seeing how leaving warp gates alive is exploitative.  Could it be a problem with the targeting of warp waves?

If you leave all the warp gates intact, it would seem like any planet is then vulnerable to having a wave dropped on it, which would seem to be a problem. (And not something a few turrets can deal with). Am I missing something here?  Do waves get spread out or something?  How waves work is really confusing to me so far. I apologize in advance if this is a stupid question.


I do like the rally posts though.  Having to pay for something that seemed like it should be an interface feature is nice.

[x4000]

Hi January, welcome to the forums!

The reason that the warp gates are exploitative is that their continued presence doesn't offset the lack of AIP increase, really.  If players are able to keep AIP really low, then they are able to withstand the waves from warp gates left scattered around.  Leaving warp gates scattered around helps keep the AIP low, so then that becomes a self-fulfilling cycle: you're able to withstand the waves from anywhere, and the waves are boring, because you left the warp gates on all the planets you took.

That then provides a markedly easier game experience, because players are able to trick the game into having too low of an AIP compared to what benefit they derive from capturing planets, which is basically the nature of an exploit compared to simply a clever and unusual strategy.

That's my feeling on it, anyway.  Glad you like the rally posts change!

[January]

Hi January, welcome to the forums!

The reason that the warp gates are exploitative is that their continued presence doesn't offset the lack of AIP increase, really.  If players are able to keep AIP really low, then they are able to withstand the waves from warp gates left scattered around.  Leaving warp gates scattered around helps keep the AIP low, so then that becomes a self-fulfilling cycle: you're able to withstand the waves from anywhere, and the waves are boring, because you left the warp gates on all the planets you took.

That then provides a markedly easier game experience, because players are able to trick the game into having too low of an AIP compared to what benefit they derive from capturing planets, which is basically the nature of an exploit compared to simply a clever and unusual strategy.

Thanks for the answer.

I must be doing something wrong then.  I'm playing on normal(7, 80 planets,realistic layout, 5 minute increase,  random easy AI's(I' was trying for as normal as possible))  , and that seems like a difficult strategy.   Within half an hour(~50 AIP) the waves reach a point where it doesn't seem practical to maintain defenses at each planet enough to fend them off and still be able to attack.