The AI gets way too many Stealth Battleships to go with

[Philo]

I think there's a bug or something to do with how many Stealth Battleships the AI gets. In our current game we have an AI Progress of 340 and the AI has about 5-20 Stealth Battleships on each planet. I think it's a bit too much. Since the cap for human player is like 4 per mark level and they're very expensive I don't think the AI should get that many.

It's getting pretty hard to get through anywhere since these monsters are so effective at destroying anything they come by.

[x4000]

Are you playing on the latest beta?  I think that's one of the things that Keith had addressed as part of them.

[Philo]

Yeah I'm playing on the 5.011 I think. Latest one anyway. And there are still too many. I think neither of the AI's is a cloaking AI but one of them just unlocked that tech. Maybe you guys fixed the cloaking AI but not the regular AI having too many Stealth Battleships?

[x4000]

Actually, 5-20 sounds much reduced from what the hundreds were before.  I'm not sure, Keith has been shepherding this one so he'll need to respond on that.

[Philo]

Yeah 20 is less than a hundred but considering it has almost the firepower of a starship it's still far too many.

[keith.lamothe]

It varies based on the number of guard posts on the planet, so if a planet has 6 wormholes and 2 wormhole guard posts on each one plus a bunch of other guard posts... yea, it gets up there.  I can look at the caps again sometime but in general to my knowledge the ship-cap-multiplier is being properly applied to the rate at which the AI reinforces SSB's (if they have 4 human-caps worth of SSBs on a planet, they could have had 4 human-caps worth of some other ship if they hadn't had SSBs) and the ai-specific per-guard-post-cap is also working.  The ships themselves are somewhat OP due (for both humans and AI) due to the nature of concentrating a cap's worth of firepower into so few ships, and I hope to address that and other imbalances when we get back to focusing on AIW.

[Philo]

K, glad to hear. But I'd rather keep them unbalanced and just increase their cost for the AI.

[Nalgas]

Heh.  Yeah, when I was playing against a Spireling before, those got pretty brutal.  It actually kept things exciting while doing the Fallen Spire campaign, but without the extra Spire firepower to back me up, like in a normal game, I have a feeling that would've been thoroughly impossible for me.  They're fun but thoroughly evil ships.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, the Spireling's a medium AI, right?  It really should be Hard, right now, but Medium will probably be a better fit after more balancing.

[Philo]

I need to bump this up since Stealth Battleships completely owned one long running game from us. The AI gets far too many of them really. 20 Mark III's Stealth Battleships will almost destroy a whole Mark I and II cap of your fleet. And they get this very quickly in any adjacent planet.

You can guess what the cross planet attack looked like that  finally ended the game for us. Hundreds of Stealth Battleships coming and there's nothing to stop em.

[Nalgas]

You can guess what the cross planet attack looked like that  finally ended the game for us.

Probably nothing at all, because they're invisible, at least until they got where they were going and suddenly appeared out of nowhere and destroyed everything in their path, and then they were pretty terrifying.  I fear them, but not quite as much as the wave of thousands of sentinel frigates I got from whichever beta they accidentally didn't have a cap in.  That was pretty scary, too.  Heh.

[Philo]

Yeah, but they fixed the frigates too. The latest patches are awesome but this really should be checked. It's the only clear unbalance in the game I've seen so far.

[Nalgas]

Yeah, but they fixed the frigates too. The latest patches are awesome but this really should be checked. It's the only clear unbalance in the game I've seen so far.

Yeah, after the other stuff that's been done post-5.0, most things are pretty reasonable.  I actually kind of like fighting against the SSBs in some ways, because they're a different kind of evil from most other ships, but they can get to be pretty overwhelming in their current state.

[Philo]

I like the way the SSB's are right now, but the AI gets too many of them. Since the human cap is like 4 SSB's it would be reasonable the AI gets around that number per planet too. Or at least having 20 on a planet would be the exception not the rule.

I'm not completely sure but the AI buys the reinforcements by "reinforcement points" right? So just make SSB's more expensive for the AI.

[zoutzakje]

having trouble with SSB as well. Currently playing a game against Alarmist and Spireling, both 7.6. The Alarmist isn't giving me any trouble at all. Always try to only trigger one alarm at a time, which is working out great. But the Spireling is tearing me apart. Gravity drains are annoying, Blade spawners are deadly, and the SSB's are just rampaging through everything. If I didn't heavily fortify my homeworld right from the start, I would have lost within the first 30 mins. I'm 1 hour and 30 mins in the game now, owning 4 worlds and I think I'm holding them now. But I'm defenitely not looking forward to the first CPA.