Territorial Expansion

[Velox]

     I've been pondering the "expansion" dilemma some, around which there has been so much discussion.  While the energy changes have increased the Haagenti-tested-and-approved minimum territory size, it seems like the territory vs. AI progress trade-offs might still become too easy after that size has been reached.  Making expansion desirable while also Bad For Your Health is quite a tough nut to crack but strikes me as one of the really unique core mechanics of AI War so I think that no time spent on that dilemma can be considered wasted.  If I had to describe the challenge as it stands currently, I'd say that it is keeping the "start in and conquer a well-defended cluster with sufficient reactor-room, get a sustainable task force behind enemy lines, and make sure the AI never gets any angrier so that it will remain easy prey" strategy from being optimal in all cases.  
    
     I like the drive towards additional structures for the player to capture, and some of the ideas I've seen here are pretty nifty.  I think that if they remain more "bonus" items, though, that they won't really affect the dynamic as much as could be desired.  I would suggest not hesitating to make at least one or two on the order of advanced factories/research stations (i.e., "must-have" rather than "nice-to-have") to really force wider and possibly non-contiguous expansion.  For example, certain "enabler" structures could be required for the production of the mkII/III units, or at least the production times on the higher-level units could be penalized unless the enabler is held.  That way, the "bonus" capturables don't have to shoulder the entire burden of making expansion necessary and can instead serve to make the decisions on placing/shaping captured territorial areas more fun and interesting.

     Some other ideas on motivating expansion:
     - Logarithmically increase the cost of mkII units and mkIII units, and make the output of harvesters multiplicative rather than additive.  This would increase the importance of defending resourcing operations and the stragetic attractiveness of resource-rich systems, and perhaps make for interesting tradeoffs in terms of AI progress from conquering systems vs. the AI progress increase over the extra time required to afford advanced ships with lower incomes.  However, it would make it a lot harder to recover from adverse events, and to be honest I'm really not fond of the timed progress increases, so I'm not so sure what I think of this one.  Food for thought, anyway.  
     - Keep the ratios the same between the caps for different types of ships, but scale the base constant by which they are multiplied with the size of a player's territory: more worlds means bigger fleets, and low-resource systems would have some value still.  Improved command stations could increase the contribution of a system to ship caps, and there could be capturables that would do likewise.  This change could also lead to vicious cycles that would make recovering from a strong AI assault impossible, so it would probably make sense not to reduce caps from the maximum achieved by the player (except for lost capturable structures) as the AI progress cost will have been paid.  Multiplayer values should probably be based on total human territory rather than being done per-player, as well.

     It seems to me that currently planets are significant primarily in economic terms; they are less so tactically, and far less so logistically.  Making the location of conquests in relationship to objectives (and to each other) more relevant could make for more meaningful decisions and motivate players to step out of their choke-point comfort zones.  Some possibilities:

     - Introduce a "coverage area" for reactors.  If available energy were computed per star system, with a reactor's effects diminishing with distance, it would provide a much greater motivation for players to capture and secure forward bases.  Alternately, command stations or specially-purposed structures could act as power relays, making all available reactor power applicable within a certain area (perhaps with special relays which extend power to a larger area as bonus capturable structures.)   Mobile reactors or relays could keep the deep-strike task force viable but make it more risky/challenging.  This would definitely be a major change and could be too computation-intensive, annoying, or complex (are ships unable to enter areas with insufficient power, or are they just forced into low-power mode on arrival, what happens when an area loses energy coverage, etc) but might be interesting, and add to the significance of galactic "geography."
     - Supply lines: degrade the effectiveness of ships as the distance to the nearest friendly command station increases - perhaps a reload time penalty or something similar.  Supply ships (something like the mobile reactor/relay mentioned above) could allow task forces to operate, but at increased risk, and the mechanic could be an interesting basis for new ship attributes or types.  For example, starships, scouts, and potential deep-strikers of some sort could be "self-supplying," certain assault ships could be very powerful but also carry the "adjacent supplier only" attribute, and others could be designed (or repurposed - vampires/cutlasses maybe?) as mobile but still defense-only via a "fixed supplier only" attribute, etc.
     - Give the AI the ability to consider player fleets as weak points to be targeted (like it will target resourcing, etc) as I've seen suggested here, or otherwise make it more adept at destroying forces that have broken through its front lines.  Perhaps cross-planet raids could consider large forces outside human territory as valid objectives, or something similar, so that a fleet without nearby fortifications to withdraw to would be at greater risk of being tracked down and annihilated.
     - Only allow colony ships to be built in systems with command stations, or even only allow them to be built at a player's home station.  Actually, I think this ought to be done no matter what, as colony ships are more or less irrelevant when they can be built by mobile constructors (and where are the colonists coming from, in that case?)

     Anyway, I know that Wall of Text hits harder than a super fortress so I beg forgiveness for being so prolix, and hope that there might be something of use (or at least passing interest) buried somewhere in here.

[liq3]

I like the colony ship suggestion. It'd make capturing deep adv research and such much much harder, where atm it's very easy.

The ship cap idea will make the start much much harder, and only increase the minimum planets needed to achieve the "defense/deep raid" state.

[Valarauka]

I've been thinking about the same things, and you've already covered much of my thought in your post.

I think the core problem here is that there is no concept of resource "location" - once you have a resource, be it metal, crystal, or energy, it's available to you anywhere in the galaxy - which makes it trivial to support self-sustaining deep-strike fleets from a well-defended corner somewhere. If your mobile builders and temporary space docks have unfettered access to the resources you mined sixteen hostile wormholes away, there's no real need to take and hold anything beyond the bare minimum. Same goes for the reactors that are supposedly powering your ships from across the galaxy...

If there were limitations imposed on resource / energy access, I think it'd make the game a lot more interesting in terms of having to take territory to support your invasion.

For energy, I'm not quite sure what to do, or even if anything should be done - limiting fleet access to energy far from the reactors will pretty much entirely eliminate deep-strikes, unless someone can come up with a cleverer way to do it than any I've thought of yet.

For resources, I had a neat idea that might be feasible: instead of mobile builders having access to the "common pool", let them actually carry their resources with them. Add, say, 20k metal and 20k crystal to the cost of building one, and then have anything built by a mobile builder deduct from that pool. Once it's empty, no more construction. In addition, any docks built in hostile territory will need to be "fed" by a mobile builder's supply, made available by having the mobile builder assist that dock (similar to an engineer). Let the mobile builders resupply themselves by "assisting" any friendly orbital, so depleted ones can be re-used. This way, any deep-raiding fleet will have a leash on what they can do without having to come home to re-equip. Also, any builder you lose will lose you its carried resources, making protecting them all the more important.

Finally, I think your "Colony Ships from Orbitals only" is a brilliant suggestion. It makes perfect sense for colonists to have to come from an inhabited planet, and escorting vulnerable colony ships along with deep-striking fleets will be a fun exercise. In addition, if you combine this with the mobile builders suggestion, it'll be that much harder to just pop out a friendly orbital somewhere to refill your mobile builders. Works perfect together!

[liq3]

I've been thinking about the same things, and you've already covered much of my thought in your post.

I think the core problem here is that there is no concept of resource "location" - once you have a resource, be it metal, crystal, or energy, it's available to you anywhere in the galaxy - which makes it trivial to support self-sustaining deep-strike fleets from a well-defended corner somewhere. If your mobile builders and temporary space docks have unfettered access to the resources you mined sixteen hostile wormholes away, there's no real need to take and hold anything beyond the bare minimum.

Omg. You just inspired an epic idea.

Ok, how about we have supply lines, but they only affect construction? This means your deep strike fleet can't rebuild itself by magically using resources 10 wormholes away. Adding this in means stuff like cargo ships (carrying resources) and salvage ships could be added, and be very very useful. It'd also mean if you want to sustain a long long campaign (say against the enemy homeworld), you'd need a supply line of planets or something similar.

[Valarauka]

Yeah, that's pretty much what I was going for. My thought was that it'd be too complicated to keep track of exactly where each resource was mined (for a full "supply line" setup), but a simple first approximation would be that any planet with a friendly Orbital Command Station is "connected", so you can access the common pool there, but once you enter neutral / enemy territory you only have the resources you carry with you. Having separate cargo ships and being able to salvage enemy wreckage / etc. would be a neat idea. You could even have mobile harvesters, that can feed off of unoccupied metal/crystal mines in hostile territory and refill your cargoships - then you could resource-raid to supply your deep-strike fleet as well!

[Haagenti]

While the energy changes have increased the Haagenti-tested-and-approved minimum territory size, it seems like the territory vs. AI progress trade-offs might still become too easy after that size has been reached.  

My name is Barack Obama Haagenti, and I approve this message. There, I always wanted to say that.

If I had to describe the challenge as it stands currently, I'd say that it is keeping the "start in and conquer a well-defended cluster with sufficient reactor-room, get a sustainable task force behind enemy lines, and make sure the AI never gets any angrier so that it will remain easy prey" strategy from being optimal in all cases.  

I agree with this problem statement (though I wouldn't use optimal: there may well be even better ones which we haven't thought of).

First of all, the strategy is somewhat fragile (at AI-8): there is a small time window where you can grab planets, construct defenses and make a clean getaway. All of this has to be accomplished before:
- the AI hits level II: if your defenses are not up by then, two good AI waves will kill you, as II ships are much better than Is
- 6000 ships or so lie in wait for your fleet, which is still weak as you had to use most research to construct defenses.
So it may require only minor tweaking to make this much more difficult. If your force me to take 8-9 planets instead of 6, I will hit the magic II before getting away and life becomes much harder.

My thoughts on the many ideas in this message and this thread.

• Additional capturable structures: Currently I could win on AI-8 without capturing any structures. Libraries are nice, but they rarely give me something I really need. I capture them because I can take them with me. Factories are better, but but immobile and must continually be defended. After a while there is no good way to get the IV ships to your main fleet anymore. So there are times I just leave the Advanced Factories for what they are. So new capturable structures would have to be better than Advanced Factories......
• Restricting building of colony ships: I only need colony ships to capture stuff. See the above. No colony ships does not stop me at all: I would simply not capture anything.
• Tying ship cap to # of planets: I agree with liq3: at start you need all the ships you can get, and decreasing what is available will make the start very hard. And the point is that (at least at AI8) that the start is hard enough, it's the middle game that is too easy.
• Mobile units carrying supply/cargo units It all sounds very complex, in a game that is complex already. It may well work, and I would work with it, but it will also work for new players? The next suggestion will work better.
• Degrading ship effectiveness based on distance This may well work. Lowering all of its stats, based on how far it is away from the nearest orbital. It would be easy to compute as well. See my possible improvement in the other list.
• Targeting "deep" fleets: May work, will be hard to implement. At this moment cross-planet raids from more than one planet away do not work very well, and arrive in penny packets to be killed like sheep. So the AI would have to improve its big-fleet battles first.

My own ideas:

• Further nerfing energy per planet. A player should be able to build only one type of each energy plant per planet (removes complexity as well). And probably you need slightly less per plant as well.
• Restricting the building of factories: Whereas colony ships are not absolutely needed (see above) for my strategy, factories are. The fact that I can construct everything I need on the move (units, starships and even missiles) allows me to completely untie my fleet from my home base. Disallowing mobile builders to build all other constructors would help a lot. So eventually, you HAVE to build that dreaded orbital.
• De-Neumannizing of mobile builders: A weaker variant of the above: mobile builders can only be built at an orbital. This may also require that mobile builders are even more aggressively targeted by AI ships and/or reduction in ship cap of mobile builders. This means that a fleet will eventually run out of mobile builders and HAS to build an orbital.
• Defense is much too cheap: A level II+III forcefield with 300 III turrets, costs about 30000 energy to maintain (about 15 metal and crystal per second) while almost completely shutting down a wormhole (except for cutlasses). One planet can deliver about 140.000 energy efficiently, enough to almost maintain 5 wormholes....
• Defense is much too lethal: Turrets under forcefields are extremely powerful. They pack a punch and are never damaged due to the forcefield. You can fit 2000 or so turrets under a single III forcefield. Perhaps turrets should take much more "space" when placing them, so you can't cluster them so close together under a single forcefield.
• Change balance between time and conquest Make orbitals and warp gates cheaper to kill (+7 or so). Increase the AI modifier for elapsed time to balance (to 1 per 3 minutes or so). This encourages conquest and discourages dawdling in the background.

After more thought, my preferred solution would be Reactor Coverage (my take) Basically, the more hops away you are from a friendly orbital, the more energy you cost to maintain. Possibly linear, possible quadratic/low-exponential.  To supply a large fleet far away, you need a lot of energy and therefore a big homebase. Easy to compute, easy to play, and gives more sense to the "energy concept" (how does energy get to far away ships? answer: it gets beamed, but this beam weakens over distance). For added fun, whenever the AI has more than X (5000) or so active ships, it will combine Y (2000 or so) ships into a Jamming Tower. The Jamming Tower is a new structure that interferes with the long-distance energy transfer even further. This would address the siege problem as well: either you come out and do something about the Jamming Towers, or your away fleet slowly becomes impossibly expensive. And the lag from all these active ships goes away as well. 

Thanks for moving this thread to the main board, where it is easier to find, as it touches many important points.

[x4000]

Supply, as implemented in this version, should hopefully pretty much solve all of these problems:  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,1364.msg8701.html#msg8701

There were some really cool points here about the need for strategic positioning for players, and I think this release adds that without being to onerous to players.  It affects knowledge raiding and deep raiding in a negative way, and the ability to build beachheads deep in enemy territory without first taking a planet somewhere in that area you want to make a beachhead with, but otherwise for bog-standard beginner player there isn't a lot of differences.  Should make for more interesting strategies in general, without increasing complexity on the lower end of things, which I like.

[RCIX]

I have to really disagree with some of the points you made, as it is i struggle for energy and sometimes have to put up energy reactors on planets i haven't conquered just to maintain a fleet + bases... In fact, i established a beach head on an enemy planet then shortly thereafter had to build a couple of energy reactors. It took me like half an hour to come around to attacking that planet.

[Echo35]

I have to really disagree with some of the points you made, as it is i struggle for energy and sometimes have to put up energy reactors on planets i haven't conquered just to maintain a fleet + bases... In fact, i established a beach head on an enemy planet then shortly thereafter had to build a couple of energy reactors. It took me like half an hour to come around to attacking that planet.

What you said. I'm always in favor of more capturable stuff, but the economy is fun enough to manage as is. Of course I was a fan of the eceonomy even before the whole power plant rework in 1.014 1.201 so my point may be moot.

[Kjara]

This is all theory crafting at the moment, but it seems like both raiding and knowledge raiding are still alive with this, just slightly more expensive in terms of progress.  All you need to do is every 3 systems(2 if the 2nd is a good hub) to take out the command post(don't touch the gate unless you have to) and make sure you have a decent number of colony ships with you. Then knowledge raid in all adjacent systems that you can, repair/replace units in that system, then move on, and accept the loss of the system unless its vital along your supply chain or is something like an advanced factory.  Thus you get to knowledge raid a system and all of its adjacent systems and resupply for a cost of 10 + (guard posts if you need to take some out).  This will take a few turrets while you are rebuilding, but you have your main raiding force to defend it while you are using it, so it should be viable. The other plus to this is that opening set of systems in the middle, will cause the ai to reinforce a bunch of different systems, and spread their forces thinner.

I think it should help some, and at least forces a bit more in terms of ai progress for these types of raids but I think its still possible to avoid much of the cost of expansion while still getting the knowledge/doing the damage that raids allow.  We will have to see if its still too powerful from testing.

The one big minus I see, is that this makes it much harder to skip a system and build up to take next system(as before you could use a mobile builder to build up some turrets and a stardock and use those to build the force you take the system, just using the transport for the guarding force, now you have to take out at least the command center, and have enough forces left/send another wave(and protect at least one colony ship) before you can build anything in the system.  I'd almost suggest a supply range of 2 for this reason.

The only other minus I see is it makes mobile repair centers a bit less worth it, since all they do now is repair things quicker, which is pretty darned expensive for much of the game at 2k knowledge.  Before being able to have them travel with the army was a nice perk that made them more valuable.  Perhaps the repair centers need a slight boost (perhaps in their repair range?--its sometimes a pain to get a large swarm repaired, since you can repeatedly tell the units to move to the repair center and make them all stack and get repaired at once, but this feels rather exploity).

Edit: I think the best fix will be more things that are worth capturing and holding(currently all we have are advanced factories).

[Haagenti]

I have to really disagree with some of the points you made, as it is i struggle for energy and sometimes have to put up energy reactors on planets i haven't conquered just to maintain a fleet + bases... In fact, i established a beach head on an enemy planet then shortly thereafter had to build a couple of energy reactors. It took me like half an hour to come around to attacking that planet.

I'd suggest to look at your energy use very strongly.

Some Energy-Saving tips:
- You don't need many Engineers.
- You can do with one Factory.
- A Missile Silo is a complete drain even when its off. Missiles too. Use them or don't build them.
- If you use Parasites, never build all of them.

The current system gives plenty of energy.

[RCIX]

I build 1 factory per planet, is that a bad thing? i like to have ship production wherever i am....
Other than that, i use lots of engineeers so i can speed-build things like ships and starships.

[liq3]

I build 1 factory per planet, is that a bad thing? i like to have ship production wherever i am....
Other than that, i use lots of engineeers so i can speed-build things like ships and starships.

And power problems is the result of your strategy. :]

Either deal with the power issues, or build less engis/docks.

[Valarauka]

If you pause any dock that's not currently in use it'll use a lot less power. Also, get level 2 engineers and you don't need nearly as many of them; they teleport around so as long as you have a connected wormhole network they can be anywhere in it nearly instantly.

[x4000]

I have to really disagree with some of the points you made, as it is i struggle for energy and sometimes have to put up energy reactors on planets i haven't conquered just to maintain a fleet + bases... In fact, i established a beach head on an enemy planet then shortly thereafter had to build a couple of energy reactors. It took me like half an hour to come around to attacking that planet.

Your ability to do this is 100% unaffected by these changes, unless you are building these beachheads with reactors on planets that are not adjacent to your planets.  If that's the case, then you're in a tight spot, but that happens.  Your interactions with planets adjacent to your own are completely unaffected by the supply changes, it's only affecting how you deal with planets that are further away.