Could this at least pave the way for some non-AI "big guns" that could be purchasable from the Trader? Maybe something that doesn't auto-kill like an Ion Cannon, but a fast-firing, relatively high damage projectile...
Well, there's the Heavy Beam Cannon Mk IV that you can get via knowledge; it's insta-fire with a fairly long range that does a total of 2,000,000 damage per firing, albeit split over 40 beams in a fan.
The very last post of the 3.177 thread also pointed out that somehow AI ships are ending up way outside of the gravity well
Yea, some of them get waaay-the-waaaaaay out there. That was fixed in this release:
* Fixed a bug from the last couple of prereleases that could cause odd AI behavior such as its ships shooting off into the ether. It was a funny and unintended occasional side-effect of one of the recent performance improvements.
Is there any possibility we might get a little notification pop up? Something along the lines of "Urist Mcplanet is under attack from a Hybrid Hive!"
Maybe a popup that says "SIEGE!"
Yea, I'm planning on adding warnings when they're actually on your planets, just been thinkering about a more scalable system of handling these kinds of "ongoing events the player has intel on and should be told about" because honestly there's going to be a fairly large number of them when all's said and done.
Oddly enough I was playing against 2 Nester AI's but I never saw a 'Nest', unless the Regenerator is the Nest structure?
Out of a rare sense of mercy, the mapgen doesn't seed the nests on all the ai worlds (roughly half at diff 10, scaling down from there), and doesn't place them within 2 or 3 (I forget) of a human homeworld. Just so you know, if the testing variable bug wasn't fixed (and I don't think it was; is for 3.179), killing a single AI ship on a planet next to a nest on a MkIV world will result in roughly 800 MkIV Neinzul ships spawning within the first 10 seconds. If you keep killing AI ships (at least one every 10 seconds) the spawning will continue at 50/second. And that's if you're only adjacent to one nest. Just saying
When the testing variable is off it'll be between 1/50th and 1/100th of that rate, iirc.
Oh god I broke something. Accidentally made a group of 3000+, then tried to de-group. It's stuck at "waiting for players" now.
You know, yesterday I was looking through the game command creating code for various input events, and noticed that a number of the rarer cases (like control group assignment) were still using the normal string.concat method of building the comma-delimited list of ship object numbers rather than the StringBuilder.Append method. I thought "ah, they won't do those very often, and shouldn't hit any limits". Why do I still think things like that? Anyway, thanks for letting me know, I can put the preventative measures in place.
lool, why on earth is viral swarmer AI considered Easier
I did those, and this is the first balance pass for them. To restate: "something Keith did" and "first balance pass". You know where this is going, right?
Will look at their stats later, and will particularly make sure the flaks are getting the appropriate bonuses against the swarmers (which should mean 1-shot kill, so that a cluster of flaks will eat them with a vengeance). But also at the more general stats like spawn rate, etc. Also will reduce the viral cluster-itself attack, I just used the normal cluster attack which is ok for those but the every-wormhole part is a bit much for the virals.
