Prerelease 3.088 (Efficiency/RAM improvements, auto-explore mode, bugfixes)

[vonduus]

I apologize for using threats in my post. My only excuse is that I was pretty angry at the time I wrote it, but that is not a valid excuse. And of course I wanted your attention, but that is still no excuse. Also I was frustrated because no one else seemed to have anything to say on the heavies, which made me fear that heavy turrets would just stay forever in the condition they were in at the time of writing. All in all these factors added up to a melodramatic desire to write my post in all caps. This is still not an excuse, rather I am attempting to come up with something like an explanation. 

I feel privileged that you and Chris actually listen to what I and others have to say, so that the final cuts tend to conform with consensus in this forum. But don't forget that the power to decide what this consensus actually looks like in real life, rest in your hands alone. There is an unavoidable asymmetry here, and this will inevitably create certain problems with communication. Like me feeling left out (knowing that the final decision is not in my hands), and you feeling you are a victim of pointless abuse (knowing that no design decision is really final). Still, I apologize for my words, they were not intended as abuse, but if that is how they got through, then this is all my fault; I am old enough to have known better.

I am aware that you already changed the rules for the ai's deployment of heavies in 3.088, and it has helped quite a lot, but still not enough, so please carry on.

Ok, I went back a set it so that III and IV planets can have at most 1 MkI cannon, and Core/Home planets can have at most 1 MkII cannon.

Does this mean that no-mark planets are intended to have no heavy turrets? This, and not the number of turrets, is what I think is most important: The existence of a number of planets without heavies.

Honestly I'd rather there be more of them,

And here you touch the weak spot, where I tend to become too full of words: I agree with your statement, but then I don't.

This seems rather extreme to me.  I've gone up against 2 or 3 mark I beam cannons without any severe casualties.

In the early game I don't want too many heavy turrets as I tend to get stuck. In the middle and end game I would like there to be a lot of heavy turrets, because at this time they are a challenge, a source of attrition, and not something that you get stuck on. Therefore my comparison with Ion Cannons: In the very early game I leave those alone and go elsewhere, until I have built a decent fleet, then I return to take them out.

I believe most of my problems with heavies could be solved if there were some 'elsewhere' to go to, somewhere that was guaranteed not to have heavies installed. If the map had this kind of layout of weapons, with turret-free planets, I believe I would not mind at all if the planets that had heavies had more than one, perhaps evolving over time, up to four or five

[RCIX]

Ok, I went back a set it so that III and IV planets can have at most 1 MkI cannon, and Core/Home planets can have at most 1 MkII cannon.  I also saw that there were some oddities in the code for enforcing the per-planet cap... though they were the sort of oddities that for all right should have made mapgen an infinite loop, so not real sure what was actually going on.  Anyway, that's fixed up and I've tested map gen to make sure it doesn't plop more than 1 of these beasties on any AI planet.  This game adds AI units in a surprising number of places...

This seems rather extreme to me.  I've gone up against 2 or 3 mark I beam cannons without any severe casualties. Of course, I tend to chew through 20-30k ships each game, often losing whole batches of 2800 ships to the 47 some-odd mark III lightning turrets defending one wormhole, so maybe I'm a little desensitized. 

Have you gotten the "Why do you even build them" achievement yet?

[Kalzarius]

Have you gotten the "Why do you even build them" achievement yet?

October 5, 2009 -- 36 Hours - Epic Struggle

January 11, 2010 -- Scrap: Why Do You Even Build Them?

March 8, 2010 -- Losses: For The Greater Good, 75,000 losses.  Haven't reached 'What have we done?' yet at 200,000, but I suspect it won't be long now.

I think we're nearing 70 hours now, AI progress is at 2300 something.  It's gotten rather interesting, particularly with the sudden appearance of cross-planet attacks. The trick was learning how to deal with the 4000 Mk IV teleport raiders.  Our gate defense networks are pretty good, we can usually stave off most of them without having to rebuild much.  But those teleport raiders are the main nasties.  A couple hundred of them get loose and you lose about 10-12 planets in 2-3 minutes, and then it's hard to round them all up (thankfully, we both have teleport battle stations).  After a lengthy hunt and then rebuild, handling the next raids, we move on to capture the next few planets.  I think we hold 84 planets now, out of 100.  Could be 86.  I figure we should be able to finish this campaign by the end of April, which means we'll have taken roughly 9 months to finish it.

But we're on new, faster hardware, so with all of the performance enhancements of late, we can actually play nearly real-time even during battles (save for the 6000+ ship battles).  Before the new hardware, it was around half-time, and before the performance enhancements, sixteenth-time.  That was just nasty.

[orzelek]

As for Heavy Beam turrets - game I'm currently playing has few of Mk'III on some planets even since I was playing it when no caps at all were present.
I also have bombardment ships which make the Heavies quite much less dangerous by out ranging them when possible. I didn't try to field tractor ether jets and attack one of the cannons with fleet containing these.

So for now I'm actually unable to take a look at limiters for these on AI planets since most of planets in my game already has Heavies and quite often it's more than few.

[Draxis]

I havnt complained about heavy beam cannons so far, because I havnt had a problem with them. Like any unit, some approaches work better against them than others - If you try and roll an infiltrator blob up to a wormhole defended by 3 beam cannons, you will soon get a steam achievement.  If you send a group of T3 bombers towards the same defences, you lose very little, and by the time the defences are destroyed, the losses have already been replaced.  A system in a game I was playing last night had 27 heavy beam cannons, about 12 of them clustered within range of each other.  That needed an EMP, but the same can be said for many worlds left to build up for too long.  I feel the previous limits (a few beams per planet) were fine.  The new limits Keith mentions (1 Mk1 cannon on 3's and 4's, 1 Mk2 on a homeworld) basically takes beams out the game for the AI.

[Kjara]

As could be guessed from my previous posts, I'm a fan of the fact that mkII planets won't have heavies anymore.  However, I agree with the previous posters that a hard cap of 1 per planet is probably too harsh.

[Draxis]

Just had another 2K ship CPA do nothing in a game

[keith.lamothe]

This is still not an excuse, rather I am attempting to come up with something like an explanation.   

No worries, I think we're in agreement on the proper way to hold these discussions, we just both sometimes deviate from our own principles

And yes, you are on the "short end" of the "who makes the call" stick, not much to be done about that (though modding can go a long way, but that has other issues for this game).  On the other hand, in all honesty, I've never seen a commercial game with more dev responsiveness both in terms of latency and throughput.  Not saying such a game isn't out there, I'm just unaware of it

But now we've gotten into the tricky part, where I've responded to one players input, and now a bunch of others pile on and think the change is too drastic   To answer a few points:

- yes, AI level I and II planets (IIs are all the unlabeled ones, Is are those adjacent to a human homeworld, that weren't upgraded during mapgen) will never get heavy beam cannons in this setup.  The way turrets are populated it's pretty likely that most III and IV planets will have their 1 cannon before long into the game, though I can't be sure.

- no one asked, but this time around the caps will be applied retroactively when you load a save, so excess AI cannons on a planet will be removed during load. (coincidentally, it will probably also cull some of the sentinel-frigate/electric-bomber hordes since they also had non-functional ai-per-planet caps; may need to look at that)

- I can easily tune it back up in terms of how many cannons and which mark level(s) of cannon for a given planet level, but I'm looking for a consensus among the interested players here.

- as far as tactics I would suggest:
-- use high hp ships, or at least put high hp ships *between* the cannon and your "clothies", as a ship on a line will actually block the shot if it survives it (and will take that much out of the beam strength otherwise)
-- if necessary and possible (i.e. attacking via open space instead of wormhole traversal), set up your formation using arc-move (probably splitting it into half-circles or third-of-a-circles) and approach so that the cannon can't draw a line through very many of your ships at once
-- use ships normally good against turrets so the thing dies fast.  MkI cannons in particular are pretty easy to destroy.
-- if you have them, outranging units are a *wonderful* thing.  Iirc, a zenith bombard swarm could eat these things for breakfast and still feel hungry.

Just had another 2K ship CPA do nothing in a game

Sigh, those CPAs... thanks for the save

[Draxis]

A thought, on the heavy cannons - Could they be restricted based on AI type?  So Entrenched Homeworlders and other heavy defenders would get quite a few cannons (even a T3 on their homeworlds at higher difficulties), whereas the more aggressive AIs would probably never build them at all.

[x4000]

Yep, that can be done, and I think that would be a great idea.  Keith, if you need me to show you how to set that up (there are not a huge amount of examples, but it is in Buy.cs), then let me know.

[Doddler]

I guess a lot of the problem is that a lot of people might be playing games from when the AI built Mk III turrets, even though they don't do that any more they'd still be in those games.

[keith.lamothe]

Chris, thanks; I think it will be somewhat harder to interface the ai type modifiers with the new AI-per-planet-ship-cap property (which was a variable introduced sometime before me for getting the AI to not have excessive cluster-attack-penalty ship counts, but never actually applied to the ship population code).  I'd like to make this more robust in that direction, just have lots of other stuff going on too, so was taking initial steps for now.

[keith.lamothe]

I guess a lot of the problem is that a lot of people might be playing games from when the AI built Mk III turrets, even though they don't do that any more they'd still be in those games.

Yes, early on you could get like 14 MkIIIs on a single planet which was just ridiculous.  The changes I've made for 3.089 will actually remove all AI MkIIIs during load, since they now have an AI-per-planet-ship-cap of 0.

[orzelek]

This removal part will be actually very welcome

As for balancing of heavies - I think that removing them from Mk II's is very good idea. They can remain on higher marks but maybe small thing if you can add - please verify that they won't land under forcefields.. especially core or other high level ones. This will make them a bit OP I think given the hp boost from forcefield.

I think that for some AI Types (like entrenched one or other turtle types) caps could be a bit larger (like maybe up to 2-3  Mk I per Mk III planet and similar for Mk IV planets).


PS A bit off topic - is it normal to have raid engine on Core planet and planetary cloaker on one next to it or I'm just very unlucky with map gen?

[x4000]

Keith -- all good, I know there is tons going on.

orzelek -- sounds like you're just unlucky, that is completely randomly seeded.