Prerelease 3.111 (Border aggression changes, science labs+, bugfixes)

[Draxis]

So long as you put a huge neon warning on the broken golems stating the danger :p

[keith.lamothe]

Posted in front of each wormhole:

"EMP'ers will be shot.  Survivors will be shot again.  By a golem."

[x4000]

Heh.

[Kjara]

We may have gone a bit too far on MRLS buffs .  Nothing like having a game show up where the MLRS at marks I-III has no weak against entries(and the mkII wins against its worst opponent with 38% left).

At least one of the main three(bomber's?--they seem closest to frigates) needs to be able to beat them.

[ShadowOTE]

Yeah, they are really, really good. In one of my games they've got around 24000 kills (which is maybe 1/4 of my total kills, but still pretty absurd since I haven't had any on the front lines for over half the game).

[x4000]

Just a little one, but the Tooltip for Science Lab 2's still states them as collecting research at half-rate

Thanks, fixed in the next version.

We may have gone a bit too far on MRLS buffs .  Nothing like having a game show up where the MLRS at marks I-III has no weak against entries(and the mkII wins against its worst opponent with 38% left).

At least one of the main three(bomber's?--they seem closest to frigates) needs to be able to beat them.

Actually, they are only strong against around 75% of the ships in the game.  Remember that the strong/weak data only shows the ships that are present in your current game, so if a ship is in a game where there are only things off its strong or weak list, it will look really skewed.  This is a strong unit, though, and a bit too strong -- you're right that it needs a better counter from the base units in particular, and so I've made the following changes:

-Bombers now have a 12x instead of a 6x bonus against MLRS.

-MLRS now have an 80% penalty against all starships and turrets.

-Missile Turrets now have a 6x bonus against MLRS ships.

[x4000]

New version: http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,5008.0.html

[x4000]

I just don't see why he would be reinforcing his homeworld, it's not on alert or anything right now.  Here's a save I was going to use to report a different issue (Teleport Raiders after destroying a command station would sometimes become completely inert and not move).  It's at a point where the AI is sending core raiders at me.  All the on-alert worlds have no more than 400-500 ships, but the AI is constantly reinforcing his homeworld.  While I don't have sight of the homeworld in the save, a quick suiciding to reveal the map shows that the AI homeworld, Yed Posterior, has 3408 AI ships, and most of the core worlds have 1500-2500 ships as well.  It's worth mentioning that 700 of those are permamines, its interesting that mines count towards the border aggression counter!

So I looked into this, by the way -- the first thing I notice upon loading this savegame is that there are huge clusters of their planets on alert, including their homeworld.  So that solves the mystery right there -- they are reinforcing there because they are on alert there.  You can easily tell which planets are on alert by seeing if their borders (or, for the unexplored planets, their whole graphic) shows as yellow instead of white.  If that is hard to see (color blindness or just monitor contrast or whatever), then you can also hover over planets to see which are on alert and which are not.

That said, of course the second question is why those planets were on alert.  When I cheat and enable visibility, I see the devourer golem is on a planet right next to the AI homeworld, and is duking it out with a bunch of core ships.  Looks like he must have been hanging around in that corner of the galaxy for a while, and so that's what is resulting in the strangeness you were seeing.

I'm actually pretty pleased with that sort of functionality at present, because normally the devourer golem just makes things so much easier -- now there is more of a consequence to him, as well, which seems like it will make him more attractive for more people to use.

[keith.lamothe]

So it's a bug if he busts up a guard post and frees a bunch of Core ships, but not a bug if he pumps up the alert reinforcements til there are Core border-aggresssion attacks?

Personally, I can live with that

[x4000]

Well, sure -- the guard post thing weakens the ai planets, as well as being able to cause those sort of ingresses to happen extremely early in a game. With the new thing, it is a bit of a different dynamic, and doesn't feel like a bug in the same fashion to me.

[Doddler]

The AI homeworlds being ship capped and releasing core ships at 3 hours sounds a bit harsh.  At very least, it's made most of the game easy because the AI is not reinforcing border worlds, and it means that the final confrontation is an incredible drag.  Maybe I should just turn off Devourer though, he doesn't add much other than being kind of annoying. :p

[x4000]

The AI homeworlds being ship capped and releasing core ships at 3 hours sounds a bit harsh.  At very least, it's made most of the game easy because the AI is not reinforcing border worlds, and it means that the final confrontation is an incredible drag.  Maybe I should just turn off Devourer though, he doesn't add much other than being kind of annoying. :p

Well, but it's not like he's going to hang out there forever, though, is the thing.  This influx of core ships is to be a limited time thing, then he'll move on and that will be that.  I'd expect it to last 10-30 minutes at most on average, and no earlier than 2-3 hours into the game, if even then.  Seems like an "event" that might come up some times and provide a unique challenge, then shift and stop causing such a challenge.  Everybody has been complaining about how much easier the devourer makes it recently, so I thought this seemed like at least one part of a logical counter. 

[keith.lamothe]

Yea,  it makes good sense to me.  A huge part of the desire between minor factions is "something is going on other than me vs. the AI".  Well, in this case, the AI is being _seriously_ distracted by this large unstoppable Juggernaut of destruction that happens to be in the neighborhood, and this provides a significant opportunity to the player in terms of the diffused reinforcements.

The part that seems strange to me is that the homeworld reinforcements riled up by the devourer would decide that they should go attack the human.  I mean, I know exactly why it works that way, but it seems a non-sequitur from a conceptual standpoint.  But it's fun

[x4000]

if ( yellowbellied )
  Run coward_routine();

?

[keith.lamothe]

Ah, "this guy's too tough, I'll go pick on someone I can kick around"