So far: At 100 AIP reduction (50 tics) I already got a Mk V surge spawn. That's a bit overkill, but it was handled. That really needs to be more in-line with current spawns, which were MK IIs.
The surges are pretty hardcore, yea. I agree with Hearteater's later suggestion of how to determine the "cost" of "promoting" to a higher tech level.
In general, though, my hope for the surges was to make it so that you would have a very significant motive to shut the thing down even when you can "handle" the normal stuff. Basically you never know which tick will be your last
But yea, it may be over-done right now.
I'd really like the ability to turn off the Mil station's translocator so I don't have to place it halfway across a planet to NOT screw up my strategies...
Haha, yea, the translocation is pretty funny but of dubious usefulness in many circumstances. One of many things in the game that calls for more granularity than "on/off" (particularly for units that don't _have_ a low-power mode, like command stations).
It appears that boosting will not compound. My Mil I is basically ignored due to the munitions boosters 1.8x for anything they touch, and the 1.4 off the light starships complete it. I'd expect anything the munitions boosters were boosting to be 2.0x.
Right, it always takes the highest boost. It used to be possible to stack boosts, all the way up to 5.0. Waaaaay OP.
It'd be nice if the first 20 tics of the ST were 'free' for hacking, though, so at the least you could count it as a Data Center.
Yea, I could make it make the ST factor for non-ST purposes be based on max(0,STTicks-20); so those first 20 would still make ST hacking harder, but wouldn't impact k-hacking or sd-hacking.
Coming on top of an existing wave at 1 second behind it that should add plenty of 'additional' firepower.
Yea, its shortening of recharge time to 1 is a pretty big deal already; I may remove that part and have the "trade strength-over-cap for tech" and "trade strength-over-cap for lower recharge" steps interleave randomly.
That they can chain like that goes from "I'm fine" to "*Blink* Dude, where's my car?"
There is no car.
AI needs to chill at 3000 K gained while you move your K-Raider off planet. I was at 3000 gained on first of test planets when it set off another tachyon charge, and it appeared to still be cranky about me 'hacking the planet', when there's nothing left to hack. I would hope that the counter is no longer increasing because of a lack of K gain, but still.
I kinda liked that it motivate you to get the hacker off the planet quick-like
But will consider having it react specifically to the hacking, rather than the mere presence of the hacker.
Side note: Wild Mage rolls + Zenith Bombards = Annoying. Blade spawners are probably worse.
Ah, Emergent Annoyance, gotta love it
wild-roll:SuperterminalSurge, spawnStrength = 1195.52
Boot-to-the-head!
It appears surges are a 3.5 multiplier to the base strength going into the wild-roll phase.
Diff/2, actually.
This is probably a bit high. Simply adding 150 would bring you up a tech level, and you've got another spawn riding in behind it in 2 seconds or less. Add to that the possibility of multiple surges and you've got a recipe for disaster.
That's what's on the menu!
This isn't so much 'riding the bronco' as it is 'petting the nuclear bomb'. 
I prefer to think of it as riding the nuclear bronco, but point taken.
1: Bring Wild Surge to only a 150 increase off existing strength. That will simply bump it up a tech level instead of being floored at MK V from a Mk 1 strength.
That would help, but I'm leaning more towards:
- Changing the math involved in "buying" a tech upgrade along the lines of what Hearteater suggested.
- Removing the automatic "set recharge time to 1" rule from surges, which basically removes the possibility of "chain" surges as they currently exist. On one hand I like how it can steal your car with back-to-back-to-back spawns, but overall having the ticks speed up quite like that is difficult to balance (even in the loose sense of "balance" that applies here).
2: Wild Surge should halve (at least) the chance of another wild surge on the next spawn. Chances of infinite surging should be negated. 4 spawns basically simultaneously should be right out when you're facing Tech II!
It's never safe
Maybe should stick a surgeon general's warning sticker on the side of the ST. But yea, what I'm thinking of doing will at least relegate chain-surges to a later thing.
3: Halve the tick multiplier and double the hacking effect. Earlier hacking should have a more drastic effect on the ST. You might look to a pure hacking effect to strength, since ST ticks increase both hacking and ST strength
Ok, so have totalHackingAntagonism feed into the first step of computing spawnStrength, instead of only counting ticks there? And yea, if I do that I don't need a base and a multiplier, can just compute straight to what base*multiplier is now.
4: Guardian spawns?! Ow. Right right, nasty, but still, ow ow.
Your friendly neighborhood pain inflictors
I'm interested in suggestions on other spawn patterns to throw into the mix that would also be interesting
There's a lot of variety among the different guardian and starship types, etc. Having the occasional deliberate homogenous, or perhaps premade-two-type-combo, spawns shakes things up nicely, I think.
5: Add in a paralytic roll, 1 second. Let them compound. Similar to the tachyon pulse.
Yea, that would be interesting. But with current mechanics that would mean paralyzing everything like an EMP. I just used the same function that a tachyon warhead calls for the tachyon pulse, just a different number of seconds, and here I would presumably be doing the same but like the EMP warhead, which doesn't care much for IFF codes. Still, having some rolls that aren't unambiguously advantageous to the AI isn't a bad thing.
wild-roll:RaidStarshipSpawn, spawnStrength = 21
That's just mean. 
I thought it was median
21 strength worth of raids is just one, I think; maybe 2 because it keeps spawning as long as leftovers > 0. 21 Raid Starships would be rather brutal.
maximumNumberOfWildRolls = 1 + (totalHackingAntagonism/40000) = 2
wild-roll:PickNeighboringAIPlanet, spawnStrength = 17.5
wild-roll:MultiplySpawnSizeByTwo, spawnStrength = 35
Does this mean they simply become threat, or are they coming via wormhole to defend the planet like most zombies will go after the nearest target? In this case, they probably should be non-zombie free-threat.
They're just zombies. It would make sense to make them non-zombie if spawned elsewhere, yea. That will actually make them harder to deal with, of course.
wild-roll:MultiplySpawnSizeByTwo, spawnStrength = 35
wild-roll:MultiplySpawnSizeByTwo, spawnStrength = 70
I didn't particularly notice this wave being 'special'. You might want to throw in a ByThree roll as well.
As you discovered, x2 for a single roll is quite enough to enable potential extreme pain
Edit 2: I also upgraded Missile Frigs to III with Bomber/Fighters at II. Why Frigs? Longest range as the warp jumpers close in on me.
Whenever something new actually motivates someone to upgrade frigs before bombers, I know it did a good job of motivating alternative strategy
Edit 2: Nevermind, I just noticed this line: spawnStrength *= numberOfSaboteurs = 35
Bwahahaha.
wild-roll:ShortRangeWarpJump, spawnStrength = 70
wild-roll:InnocuousRoll, spawnStrength = 70
wild-roll:MultiplySpawnSizeByOneAndAHalf, spawnStrength = 105
wild-roll:ShortRangeWarpJump, spawnStrength = 157.5
wild-roll:MultiplySpawnSizeByOneAndAHalf, spawnStrength = 236.25
wild-roll:InnocuousRoll, spawnStrength = 236.25
wild-roll:ShortRangeWarpJump, spawnStrength = 354.38
Hahaha. And that's with two of them rolling innocuous and with no x2 rolls. Imagine the potential
Reminds me of the inspiration for this: a Baldur's Gate 2 LP where the last boss fight's dramatic tension was rather shortcircuited by a stray multiply-effect wild surge when the main character cast his main summon. Overlord < 8 Astral Devas (or whatever it was).
Why -150 strength for +1 Mark? Why not use the same multipliers as normal waves? So the wave strength multipliers for going up one mark would be:
Mark I -> II = 0.9 / 1.5
Mark II -> III = 0.7 / 0.9
Mark III -> IV = 0.6 / 0.7
Mark IV -> V = 0.5 / 0.6
In GUDare's 1195.52 wave strength case, that would have gone as follows:
Mark I: 1195.52 * 0.9 / 1.5 = 717.312 (still over cap of 500 so continue)
Mark II: 717.312 * 0.7 / 0.9 = 557.909 (still over cap of 500 so continue)
Mark III: 557.909 * 0.6 / 0.7 = 478.208 (done)
Yea, that's a good point in general. What I'm thinking is:
spawnSize *= (mark/mark+1)
(since numerical power increases linearly with mark)
potentially, spawnSize *= (standard_cap_for_this_mark / standard_cap_for_next_mark)
which will actually increase it, but I'll probably leave this step out because 2xHP and 2xDamage is actually more than 2x-as-dangerous in general.
mark++
That's basically a huge nerf to ST spawns, but I think it would work fine considering the other stuff they have now. I would have given them more "crazy" rolls and such (they have much less wild-roll variety than the other hacking response logic), but their sheer numerical power made me shy away from that. We'll see if there's room for more after this
