Prerelease 3.097 (Perf+, ff bearers+, resistance fight fixes, golem pausability)

[ShadowOTE]

Hmm, not sure if this is a bug or just the devourer golem being in the right place at the right time, but last night I had 2 CPAs disappear right after spawning. That said, I was watching the galaxy map and was at +1 speed, but it happened twice, which was kinda unnerving. I'll keep an eye out in case it happens again and see if I can get a savegame posted tonight if that's the case (assuming I have time to play again tonight), but I was curious if anyone else has run into this?

[Nihilus]

This might be a bug too. I thought you were supposed to be able to surround a wormhole with force fields so that the AI warps into the hole in the middle, and is stuck there. Instead, they're flying at the field and popping right out on the other side. There are also very few ships, the hole isn't getting filled and forcing the extra units out. These are the force field buildings, if that matters, not the ship.

Also, a weird one. I forget what they're called, but the unlimited range heavy artillery unit that gets weaker in numbers, and it says ideally to have only 2 at a time. An AI homeworld spammed them, which at first was no problem due to their drastically reduced damage. Then, at some point and with no visible differences, I started losing maybe 100 ships per second. Is it possible that with too many of them in one system, that weakening effect stops working?

[ShadowOTE]

The forcefield behavior is normal. Unless marked otherwise, hostile ships can't remain inside a forcefield. Forcefields over wormholes work, but only if you're trying to stop the AI on the side they're passing into, not exiting from. As for the AI spamming ships that don't work well in large numbers, that's been known for awhile. Not sure if there is a bug in the effectiveness reduction for large numbers though.

[x4000]

This might be a bug too. I thought you were supposed to be able to surround a wormhole with force fields so that the AI warps into the hole in the middle, and is stuck there. Instead, they're flying at the field and popping right out on the other side. There are also very few ships, the hole isn't getting filled and forcing the extra units out. These are the force field buildings, if that matters, not the ship.

That's actually not supposed to work.  To block a wormhole with a force field, you have to put the forcefield on the other side of it so that the AI ships can't reach the wormhole to try to go through.

Also, a weird one. I forget what they're called, but the unlimited range heavy artillery unit that gets weaker in numbers, and it says ideally to have only 2 at a time. An AI homeworld spammed them, which at first was no problem due to their drastically reduced damage. Then, at some point and with no visible differences, I started losing maybe 100 ships per second. Is it possible that with too many of them in one system, that weakening effect stops working?

Hmm, that is odd -- we'd need a save to verify, for sure.  Once the floor of the damage reduction is hit, past that point the group effectiveness goes up (logically, just if you think about it), so if they got a ton more reinforcements of those types of ships, it could be the compound effect.  But that is odd sounding, yeah -- 100 ships per second is huge.

[Nihilus]

Really? Because it used to work, and now it doesn't.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, that's some sneakiness right there

I think it's related to some changes since 3.060; basically before it wouldn't properly handle some collisions with multiple forcefields at a time, so I've kept tweaking it.  Each time it fixes one bug and opens others, it seems.  Particularly in the case of a circle of forcefields, it might be getting very confused.

[Trezamere]

Really? Because it used to work, and now it doesn't.

Seems like it would be better to just drop 8 shields on the other side and have all the turrets under them... that way its 8*9,000,000 health they have to kill to get through instead of just 9,000,000.

[triggerman602]

ya id like to see forcefields be able to trap units like Nihilus is describing. i used to use that to trap a couple thousand ships in a tight space and then detonate a lightning warhead on them. made clearing crowded systems a breeze if you could time it right.

[WinterBorn]

Forcefields do not block movement any more (they are porous) , a very undesirable recent change IMO. The AI ships "pop" thru to the other side of a FF now when the AI ships used to be blocked by FF and used to have to go around the FF.

Here is another report on this recent behavior from the bug report forum:

They come out of an exo-galaxy wormhole (backdoor hacker), fly not directly at my command station but in a line close to it, and instead of going around the forcefield, they fly right into it and are shunted to the opposite side.

We are not talking about blocking the WH from our side by having the FF's extend over(cover) the WH. We are talking about "fencing" them in on our side of the WH like shown below.

          FF
      ssssssss
FF sss WH sss  FF    AI ships  (ssssss)  coming thru the uncovered WH used to be trapped by the surrounding FF's
       sssssss
          FF

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
on Sentinal Frigates -- thread on AI spamming  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,3432.0.html
depends on how many there were 50 or hundreds, but yes they can get stonger in their attack if there are enough of them

[snip]
Also, a weird one. I forget what they're called, but the unlimited range heavy artillery unit that gets weaker in numbers, and it says ideally to have only 2 at a time. An AI homeworld spammed them, which at first was no problem due to their drastically reduced damage. Then, at some point and with no visible differences, I started losing maybe 100 ships per second. Is it possible that with too many of them in one system, that weakening effect stops working?

[keith.lamothe]

Will be looking into the forcefield thing soon; didn't realize it was that consistently bad.  Thanks for letting me know.

[WinterBorn]

Lots of strange stuff happend on my late game when I updated to 097 just before killing the 2nd AI (26 hrs in)
Some of my Ion cannons seemed to stop firing
Some of my Heavy beam cannons seemed to not fire even after being rebuilt
And my FRD ships and Fortresses insisted on moving right on top of the AI ships trapped by tractor beams at one of my worm holes.

I need to reload my last save and reproduce all of them before I submit official bug reports on these sometime later this weekend.
On the FF being porous I will try both the RAID Star ship and FF bldgs to see how they react. (I sometimes use the RAID to push AI bombers back from my com station after the RAID has killed their engines)


BTW how is the new Beta going?

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, never an end to the bugs, it seems.  The stacking-on-top-of thing is probably related to the changed throttling of collision detection... basically I figured it didn't need to be eating half the sim time (in some cases) just to make the ships spread out quite that quickly; but we can tune that for a better middle ground.

Edit: oh, and the Tidalis beta is going very well; feel free to join us over on that forum, and/or try out the trial version

[FrostyThePyro]

Really? Because it used to work, and now it doesn't.

I've used riot starships to do that

[Doddler]

Maybe it's worth it just to take a stand one way or another?  Like, perhaps forcefield boxing shouldn't be intended?  I mean blocking warps with forcefields makes sense, but I get the impression that literally boxing in warps isn't really intended usage.  Stuff like gravity turrets should probably be used if you want to block an AI from leaving a portal quickly (although the two-sided-ness of gravity turrets and the boost train problems kind of limits their intended usage).

[Nihilus]

Maybe it's worth it just to take a stand one way or another?  Like, perhaps forcefield boxing shouldn't be intended?  I mean blocking warps with forcefields makes sense, but I get the impression that literally boxing in warps isn't really intended usage.  Stuff like gravity turrets should probably be used if you want to block an AI from leaving a portal quickly (although the two-sided-ness of gravity turrets and the boost train problems kind of limits their intended usage).

I think it has its place, strategy-wise. It's the most absolute way to stop enemy forces at the wormhole, but it's also the most expensive and risky, as one FF failing takes the whole system down.