The AI gets way too many Stealth Battleships to go with

[Nalgas]

I think AI caps/reinforcement limits for individual ship types are per guardpost.  The per planet stuff is only for total number of ships of all types combined, as far as I know, so it might be that they need to get their per guardpost cap bumped down a notch like blade spawners did post-5.0 to make the total number they end up with per planet less crazy insane.  That seems to have evened out with blade spawners at this point, where they're still somewhat of a threat in the sense that they can be like having an extra ion cannon or three at a planet and whittle down your forces while you're dealing with the AI's other ships/guardians/etc., but they don't make the system completely unapproachable anymore.  That might be all the stealth battleships need, too, since the problem mostly seems to be when their numbers get beyond a certain point, which is happening too quickly/easily now.

And yeah, the Spireling is just pure evil to play against at the moment.  I wholeheartedly agree with Keith saying that it should probably be classified as hard instead of medium with the way things are right now.  I generally don't play against any of the AI types above medium, because I'm honestly just not good enough at the game (and maybe a bit too proud to suck it up and turn the difficulty down so I could handle them, heh), but that one is just rough compared to most of the others.  There's never a dull moment when fighting it, though, that's for sure.  With the mix of ships it starts with, there's quite a variety of horrible things it can do to you.

[superking]

one day son, one day we might get AI Reinforcement proportional to shipcaps

[keith.lamothe]

one day son, one day we might get AI Reinforcement proportional to shipcaps

It already is

[superking]

uh?

In mathematics, two variable quantities are proportional if one of them is always the product of the other and a constant quantity, called the coefficient of proportionality or proportionality constant. In other words, x and y are proportional if the ratio \tfrac yx is constant. We also say that one of the quantities is proportional to the other.

Bearing in mind how frequently I have seen multiple full shipcaps of stealth battleships and tractor platforms on planet that has about 30-40 fighters/bombers/cruisers at the start of the game... clearly not the case

[keith.lamothe]

uh?

In mathematics, two variable quantities are proportional if one of them is always the product of the other and a constant quantity, called the coefficient of proportionality or proportionality constant. In other words, x and y are proportional if the ratio \tfrac yx is constant. We also say that one of the quantities is proportional to the other.

if this was true, the AI would reinforce with 10 shipcap=100 ships for every 1 shipcap=10 ship.

^ and this is 100% not the case

I apologize for being ambiguous.  I did not mean that they were proportional in that sense, rather that they are related: if two ship types A and B have ship caps x and y where x < y, and the AI performs two reinforcements under the same circumstances, one of ship type A, and one of ship type B, then the reinforcement of ship type A will be smaller.

And actually it should be pretty close to proportional, allowing for rounding.  Looking at the code just now, it uses the ship cap multiplier as a multiplier on the number of ships to actually "buy" in both the standard "SendGuardPostReinforcements" routine and the "is actually a reinforcement" case of generating a wave.  It does always generate at least one ship regardless of how low the multiplier is, however, so that may cause the appearance of a disproportionately high number of low-ship-cap ships when the individual reinforcements are small.

[Nalgas]

So, proportional in terms of number allotted when reinforcements of a given ship type are calculated, but not in terms of number of ships of each type allowed per planet or anything else distribution-related like that (which is probably a good thing for the most part, or the galaxy would be a pretty homogenous place).  Is the latter affected by anything other than the "per guardpost" limit?

[Cyborg]

I'm thinking we could potentially solve this by giving siege starships or riot ships some purpose in life. I'm attaching a screenshot. currently, the siege starship says that it does 400,000 damage with a 1.4 multiplier against stealth battleship, although looking at the reference sheet, it looks like the statistics are all messed up.

Shots to kill: 230
seconds to kill: 51.11

There is no way a siege starship can fire 230 rounds in 51 seconds. Sometimes I'm confused by this reference page, so please feel free to correct me.

In a game like this, I don't think that the sheer numbers really tell the story, but rather the armor type and weapon type are way more important. Perhaps you should tweak the battleship to have ultralight armor or give the siege dark matter cannons.

Or, allow us to build dark matter guns on riot ships, which would be freaking awesome, and would be a strategic player choice that would have great effect on stealth battleships.

[Nalgas]

I'm thinking we could potentially solve this by giving siege starships or riot ships some purpose in life. I'm attaching a screenshot. currently, the siege starship says that it does 400,000 damage with a 1.4 multiplier against stealth battleship, although looking at the reference sheet, it looks like the statistics are all messed up.

Shots to kill: 230
seconds to kill: 51.11

There is no way a siege starship can fire 230 rounds in 51 seconds. Sometimes I'm confused by this reference page, so please feel free to correct me.

It's the other way around.  Sort of.  The siege starship does 400k damage with no multiplier, and it takes 40 seconds to fire five shots.  The SSB does 10899 damage with its 1.4x multiplier, and it takes 51.11 seconds to fire the 230 shots necessary to kill the siege starship.  Knowing that, one would expect the siege starship to win a one on one fight with a bit more than 20% of its health left, which the "Result" column reflects (read as: SSB vs. Siege Starship results in a loss, with 22% of the Siege Starship's health remaining).

[keith.lamothe]

I'm thinking we could potentially solve this by giving siege starships or riot ships some purpose in life. I'm attaching a screenshot. currently, the siege starship says that it does 400,000 damage with a 1.4 multiplier against stealth battleship, although looking at the reference sheet, it looks like the statistics are all messed up.

Shots to kill: 230
seconds to kill: 51.11

There is no way a siege starship can fire 230 rounds in 51 seconds. Sometimes I'm confused by this reference page, so please feel free to correct me.

In context of that window, the unit selected in the dropdown at the top is "Me", and the unit in the leftmost column of each row in the table is "Them".

So the "Me > Them" columns are saying that an SSB firing on Siege Starship would take 230 shots to kill the Siege, which would take a bit over 51 seconds.  The "Them > Me" columns are saying that a Siege Starship would take 5 shots to kill a SSB, which would take about 40 seconds.  If the fight was stopped at exactly 40 seconds (which isn't likely unless it's really point-blank range, due to shot travel time), the SSB would be dead-when-shot-hits and the Siege would be at 22% health.

In a game like this, I don't think that the sheer numbers really tell the story, but rather the armor type and weapon type are way more important.

That's _very_ true.  We do try to make the numbers accessible, but there's no way they can be used in isolation for... much of anything.  But they do help when used in conjunction with more holistic analysis.

Perhaps you should tweak the battleship to have ultralight armor

That's possible.  I think the first thing is to put a per-planet cap of maybe 8-10 (in addition to the per-guard-post cap) on SSBs for the AI.  Then actually balancing the unit stats a bit more can be looked at; I'm not sure that they're really all that OP in human hands, for instance.

or give the siege dark matter cannons.

I... honestly don't know what you mean   Do you mean give it the same kind of ammo as standard astro trains have?  It used to be negative energy, then was renamed (iirc) to dark matter.  Anyway, how would that change things here?

Or, allow us to build dark matter guns on riot ships, which would be freaking awesome, and would be a strategic player choice that would have great effect on stealth battleships.

Is there a general feeling that riots are lacking or something like that?  I mean, I know the IIs are pretty popular due to the tazers, but Is and IIIs?  I still find them pretty radically useful, if not overly so, but perhaps that impression's outdated.  One thing is that the Riots are really not supposed to be able to do any decent kind of DPS to much of anything (the main guns used to be able to kill fleet ships mildly quickly, and that's ok if that's still true), it's more of a "support caster" type of role.  But that used to mean wide swaths of crippled AI ships, among other things

[superking]

isn't 8-10 still 2-3 shipcaps worth, for each AI player? the equivalent of 4-6 shipcaps of stealth battleships per planet  and which reinforce much faster than high shipcap ships so quickly max/ rebuild?

[chemical_art]

Is there a general feeling that riots are lacking or something like that?  I mean, I know the IIs are pretty popular due to the tazers, but Is and IIIs?  I still find them pretty radically useful, if not overly so, but perhaps that impression's outdated.  One thing is that the Riots are really not supposed to be able to do any decent kind of DPS to much of anything (the main guns used to be able to kill fleet ships mildly quickly, and that's ok if that's still true), it's more of a "support caster" type of role.  But that used to mean wide swaths of crippled AI ships, among other things

I must admit to not using them. I have tried to dabble with them but I find there are too few for the knowledge cost to be justifiable. For offense I simply don't need to blow up enemy engines, I need to kill them. For defense, if I need to blow out engines, I'll spend the 3k on spiders and have many, many more units that shoot infinite range insta blowouts. With the power of spiders, I simply don't need riots: If the spiders can't stop the enemy, the 7 riot ships from a full research cap certainly can't.
There are so very, very few riots. And they are almost required to engage in overwhelming odds because that is the only time you need the engine damage, resulting in faster deaths and wasted resources as compared to spiders.
As of right now, I find the cost-power ratio for spiders to be much, much better then riots, hence why I use the first.

[Entrenched Homperson]

I think the best way to deal with this is make sure you're main fleet ships are always at least equal mark in standard fleet battles and you'll do okay. The better ships should have no problem dealing with them, and a little micro goes along way. Suicide units are very effective against them. If they are higher mark then you then your probably hitting a higher mark world, and there's always going to be something complicated about those, so yea

Ships that I've found do well V them: Autobombs (But the pwnt everything so), Chameleons, Yng Tiger, Schredders (As cannon fodder. These guys have sooo much health). These make the engagements a little simpler. In our 5 player games we get them ALOT. There really only IMBA on the waves from what I've seen. In large multiplayer groups the waves are calculated for 5 players and when they zerg a home CC on the first wave it's. Well it's not easily diverted, even by our best players working together. Mark III Grav Turrets, Mark II Tractor Turrets, and a whole lot of firepower, 13 shields about. They still get through that. There is alot of little IMBA things when you get up there in players, and I don't think that's really been addressed as much. (I wouldn't know to be honest, I came in around the end of 4.0) Our strategy has been agressive bottlenecking, but when you have 5 players spread out it gets pretty intense.

Devs should join us for a game, there pretty crazy.

[Nalgas]

In our 5 player games we get them ALOT. There really only IMBA on the waves from what I've seen. In large multiplayer groups the waves are calculated for 5 players and when they zerg a home CC on the first wave it's. Well it's not easily diverted, even by our best players working together.

You know, this makes me realize how lucky we are to never have gotten them in our multiplayer games.  I've only run into them in single player so far.  Our MP games are always 4-6 players, so I'm used to the massive, massive numbers of things it throws at you when you play like that, and just imagining that with SSBs is scaring me.  Given that we're generally playing for fun to blow off steam at the end of a long day when we're in multiplayer, and not playing in super Serious Business hardcore gamer mode like in single player, getting those in the first wave would probably be a GG right there.  Heh.

I would totally like to be able to spectate a highlight reel of people playing a game of that size more seriously/aggressively on a higher difficulty than we do, though.  I bet it would be tons of fun seeing how that goes.