Ideas for making deep AI territory scarier without it being impossible.

[x4000]

Okay, here's what I'm going with for now:

* New behavior for the AI!  When the player goes on distant deepstrike runs -- defined as having any human military ships more than four hops away from any human or neutral planet -- the AIs both goes on high alert and starts spewing out ships from their home planets (or a random planet if their home planets are destroyed).
** The tech level of the spawned ships will be whatever the AI's current tech level is, plus one (obviously between 1-5).  Unless it's an AI home planet that is being deepstruck, or a planet adjacent to an AI home planet (we call these core planets), in which case the tech level is always 5.  Watch out for that: you'll want some sort of launch pad within 4 hops of the AI home planet in order to take it without massive pain.
** The spawned ships will be random fleet ships that the AI is allowed to use in waves, and each AI player will spawn a certain number of ships ship per event-second.
** The event-second interval is defined as ( 11 - Floor(AIDifficultyLevel) ).  So, for difficulty 7 or 7.6, that would be 11 - 7 = 4 seconds per interval.
** The number of ships is defined as Floor(AIDifficultyLevel/2).  So for difficulty 7, it would be 3 ships every 4 seconds, per AI player.  On difficulty 8, it would be 4 ships every 3 seconds, per AI player.
** These spawned ships are in free/threat mode, and will eventually attack the human players in whatever way they think will be most disruptive.  They may engage the deep strikers, but more likely they will try to kill the planets of the players instead.
** Note that all of these numbers are PER PLANET that has a deepstrike on it.  So if you are deepstriking four planets, multiply those numbers by four.  It's best to keep your forces together, and make the deepstrike raids as brief and effective as possible to avoid too strong a retaliation against your forces.
** Thanks to many players for contributing ideas that ultimately led to this.


I went with this instead of an AIP-based solution, because I don't want to kill off all deepstriking completely.  I just want to make it a more "fun" activity (in the DF sense), where the risk of loss goes up linearly (or worse) as you pursue this particular activity more.  And to make the consequences really terrible if you deepstrike the AI home planets.

I suppose I should stop saying "deepstrike," though, as the activity defined in the tutorial is totally okay.  If you're within transport range, this will never kick in (well, unless you make a one-way trip with your transports, which can give you 5 hops -- I sometimes do that).  Planet hopping is totally cool and a central part of the game.

For that matter, this "ultra-deepstriking," as I guess it should be called, is also totally cool and part of the game (though not as central).  What isn't cool is this being just a really easy thing to do.  So I was thinking about GTA and Red Faction: Guerrilla, and I realized that one of the things that really makes you feel like someone underground and secretive in those is how "the law" comes down on you if you stir up certain kinds of trouble.  But it's this temporary thing that you can strategically do, and then you can evade them and eventually get things back to normal if you survive.

I wanted the ultra-deepstriking to be like that.  So here it is: when you go after the AI on most planets, it's like having 4 stars in GTA.  Stuff gets intense until you stop the ultra-deepstrike.  And when you go after the AI on its home planets, or adjacent to its home planets, the stuff gets... very intense.  You can totally win this way, I'm sure, but it's going to take a lot more care and planning, and you're going to need beefier defenses and better launch platforms, etc.  These roving bands of starships heading 14 or whatever hops out will still be just as viable (as desired), but they stir up so much trouble that it's likely to be a kind of hair-raising situation to use them that way.

Which is the goal.

I'll be very curious to see how this changes things for Suzera.  I'm sure she'll still figure out a way to keep to the essence of her strategy, which is fine by me, but hopefully it will fix the exploitativeness of it.  Which, with all her suggestions, I know she's been driving at in order to keep the game interesting, and not being just being a pushover for her.  Should be interesting.

[Lancefighter]

that looks like it will make deep spire shard raids fun...er

[x4000]

Ah -- so it might, so it might.  Keith might need to look at that some in light of the larger mechanic, I'm not sure.  I confess I've yet to do much with the fallen spire myself, I've been tied up in my end of things with the expansion.  Looking forward to playing it, though, and of course I've read walls and walls of text from Keith about it.

[shugyosha]

Seems like a cool solution. Especially the randomness of the spawned ships actions. You will know that you are doing bad things but you need a good scout network to see the retaliation coming. Three quick questions.

1. Will the spawned ships organize in groups or are they just spawning and trickle through the wormholes?
2. Will there be some kind of permanent warning message like "The AI's bring reinforcements due to your military presence behind enemy lines"?
3. Will permacloaked military ships trigger this like they trigger raid engines?

[Lancefighter]

nah i think its good - lowish cost for doing a raid that deep (must do some warp gate raids, but not overly many), but the ai gets mad.

it doesnt seem particularly horrible in terms of difficulty, but well see
edit

or i could move in that direction, costing me aip to take planets for an easier raid

[x4000]

shugyosha:

1. The spawned ships don't organize into groups any more than any other AI ships (well, ignoring hybrids and the like), but with recent AI changes the AI ships also are a lot more self-organizing in general and won't trickly in.  So you'll see them moving around in trickles, but then at various places they'll "bunch up" as they stalk planets.  Then they burst in in a haze of gunfire, overwhelming your forces 2:1 generally.

2. There is a permanent warning message in the upper right, so long as the deepstrike is still ongoing.  You'll know when this is happening, for sure.  But as soon as your ships have stopped deepstriking, the message goes away: but whatever threat that was already created remains!  So even after the deepstrike is done, your odds of a loss have increased somewhat, as there may be hundreds of ships stalking you now.

3. Yes, cloaked ships of any sort -- well, military cloaked ships -- trigger the AI in all ways, including this one.  Same as they trigger you.   You know what planet cloaked stuff is on, and how many, just not what they are or where they are in the planet.  The AI knows the same.

Lancefighter:  Bear in mind that this only kicks in when you're 4+ planets out from your or neutral planets, so I'd imagine that gate raiding wouldn't ever be a factor for this.

I'm not sure it's overly horrible in terms of difficulty -- unless you go near the AI home planets -- but that may need to be tweaked some.  You can definitely get way easier raids by putting down intermediate planets every 4-5 hops, to make your way to the AI.  Which is the idea, really.  But it's also quite viable to attack the AI more head-on this way.

With the new logic where the AI ships don't trickle anymore, this can be like a CPA-sized event simply from raiding one planet deep in enemy territory.  If it takes you 5 minutes to take a planet, and the current tech level is II, and you're playing diff 8, you're looking at 800 mark III ships hitting you somewhere.

Or not.  They may just hang out, waiting for you to make another move.  Then when you go out and deepstrike again, if it's another 5-minute raid, suddenly it's 1600 ships, and then they come bursting in a bit later.  Or as soon as you move your fleet forward somewhere, those 800 take advantage of the weakness and come pouring in, making a mess.  Lots of possibilities.

It may be a bit on the easy side, though, you're right.  We'll see if the numbers need to be adjusted upwards a bit.  Since this isn't a permanent thing (unlike the AIP-increase ideas), perhaps I should have erred harder than I did.

[Sunshine!]

I <3 how this change sounds.

[superking]

* New behavior for the AI!  When the player goes on distant deepstrike runs -- defined as having any human military ships more than four hops away from any human or neutral planet -- the AIs both goes on high alert and starts spewing out ships from their home planets (or a random planet if their home planets are destroyed).

awesome  this sounds like an adaption of http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=1858

[Mithror]

Sounds like an awesome solution to me =)