Superterminal Shenanigans

[beginattackrun]

So I recently got back into AI War. I redid the tutorial since I was rusty and then jumped into a no-frills 80 planet game. I made a number of strategic errors (mainly taking too many planets) but was doing all right--I don't know if I could have won in my circumstances, but I was holding up and I felt like I had a reasonable chance at taking out at least one AI homeworld. However, I encountered a superterminal along the way and thought I would try to exploit it to make up for all that AI progress I had incurred. This was rather experimental, since the superterminal's description left some matters up to interpretation, namely the precise nature of the increases. I fortified the planet to an extreme extent with a mobile builder, positioned my entire fleet of over 2,000 ships, and then built the military station. This was my final moment before unleashing hell.

We held for a long time, and while the AI reinforcements were increasing at a clearly rapid rate, I wasn't prepared for what would come next. The growth of the enemy made them unstoppable, and they finally took out my command station. My fleet continued holding, but attrition was wearing them down and I decided to have the remnant make a break for the adjacent planet I controlled, as I had already prepared some defenses there as a fall back. I had a self-cloaked Raid Starship IV standing down at the edge of the superterminal planet to take down the superterminal, but I hesitated to cast the elimination order, seeing that my AI progress was still falling though my command station was destroyed.

Then the exponential growth of the enemy jumped to insane levels. Suddenly I was in the tens of thousands, in seconds more the hundreds of thousands. And then... behold.



That's right, over a million. Their number continued to climb at a faster and faster rate, and then the game froze so that I had to close it through the task manager. It was mercy at that point.

So yeah... An interesting experience, and a memorable way for my first official return campaign in AI War.

If I were to make a suggestion about the gameplay from this, I would recommend capping the AI reinforcements for 'active' superterminals at some point. No maximum combined with an apparently endless exponential growth (I'm not sure whether this was exacerbated by my command station's destruction or not) seems like it can't be stable, and I think at some point the endless reinforcements are so unstoppable that a cap would not hinder their defeating the player.

[Toranth]

So yeah... An interesting experience, and a memorable way for my first official return campaign in AI War.

If I were to make a suggestion about the gameplay from this, I would recommend capping the AI reinforcements for 'active' superterminals at some point. No maximum combined with an apparently endless exponential growth (I'm not sure whether this was exacerbated by my command station's destruction or not) seems like it can't be stable, and I think at some point the endless reinforcements are so unstoppable that a cap would not hinder their defeating the player.

That's kind of the point.  As it says in the SuperTerminal's description, if you don't stop the hack soon enough, the response will overwhelm you and you will lose the game.  You were hacking with a negative Hacking Progress - a VERY bad thing.  You also ran the hack for a long time.  Now you know better.

More practically, there is no cap on the number on units the SuperTerminal will produce.  It's based on the current Hacking Progress value and the total amount of AIP reduction tick you gotten so far.  As long as HaP is positive, that factor isn't too significant.  You can get 100 AIP reduction with some preparation, but much more than that becomes difficult.  You seem to have tried to go for 150+ reduction.  Not impossible, but you discovered why it wasn't a good idea.
Warheads (especially nukes) can solve many of these problems, though.  Consider having a few sitting around for your next SuperTerminal hack to deal with the response.  Also, you may not have noticed - but there's an ever increasing counter of "response" strength that only comes when the hack completes, aka when you destroy the SuperTerminal.  Dealing with that also needs to be considered.

[Kahuna]

-326 Hacking Points holy shit!
Maybe the SuperTerminal hacking response could use a tweak or two (maybe)..
..but still -326 Hacking Points. It shouldn't be a surprise if you die when you play Russian roulette with a full clip.

[Aklyon]

The hacking response gets Fun if you drag it deep enough into the negatives. But getting that low required gratuitous amounts of cheats and was mostly to see what would show up, it'd kill any normal fleet long before then. Even an FS-augmented one.

[beginattackrun]

I'm not arguing that the AI's response should not grow to become overwhelming--I believe its eventually becoming unstoppable w/ an unloosed superterminal is a great mechanic. I just don't think it should cause so many AI ships to spawn that it crashes my game. There could be some sort of cap on the maximum current number of reinforcement ships that would prevent instability but still not interfere with the AI destroying me.

Also, that warhead idea is a very good one. I'm assuming for that tactic it would be best to pop the superterminal with the Raid Starship, then detonate and blow everything to kingdom come.

[Toranth]

I'm not arguing that the AI's response should not grow to become overwhelming--I believe its eventually becoming unstoppable w/ an unloosed superterminal is a great mechanic. I just don't think it should cause so many AI ships to spawn that it crashes my game. There could be some sort of cap on the maximum current number of reinforcement ships that would prevent instability but still not interfere with the AI destroying me.

Also, that warhead idea is a very good one. I'm assuming for that tactic it would be best to pop the superterminal with the Raid Starship, then detonate and blow everything to kingdom come.

Ah.  Yeah, the "Lost the game because it can't handle that many units" is much less fun than "Lose the game because an endless stream of units washed away my fleet, tore through my defenses, and crushed me beneath the mechanical motivator appendage."
It that sense... Maybe the SuperTerminal should have a cap?  Stop spawning units when the threat goes above, say, 100,000 (maybe times HW count/unit caps)?  Resume when it drops below again.  Or upgrade to Exowaves, or something.

[Aklyon]

Well, the ST does have a sort of cap I mentioned earlier, its just unlikely to be ever reached. if you go massively negative it just drops all the spawn chances and other rolls and murders you with waves of avengers. A more likely to be reached cap might help as well.

[Toranth]

Well, the ST does have a sort of cap I mentioned earlier, its just unlikely to be ever reached. if you go massively negative it just drops all the spawn chances and other rolls and murders you with waves of avengers. A more likely to be reached cap might help as well.

Does it still do that?  I'll admit I haven't hit -9000 in a long time, but I thought that went away... 

Usually when I get that low (after a massive multi-hack), the game just freezes trying to chug through all the computations of generating a response to the hack.  Now that there's been a bunch of improvements to the engine, I may need to try it again.

[Aklyon]

I'd tried it sometime in April, haven't checked since then.

[The Hunter]

Maybe when threat reaches certain value(100k*HW Count*Caps?) ST just should spam bunch of H/Ks instead, less likely for game to crash and still completes the goal of completely murdering the player.