Threat working differently these days?

[Andyroo]

Hello, long time player, just finished a nice 42 hour campaign with my brother and we noticed a few things that didn't match up with previous games with regards to threat.

Mostly that it doesnt seem to do anything anymore, we were at 52,000 by the end. It just grew and grew with each CPA, raid engine, or wave. I am wanting to know if this is intentional or not. It looks tied into the behaviour where the AI doesnt want to attack if it doesnt think it can win to me, with these varied attacks coming up to our wormholes then just flying off and going and sitting in a far corner of the map, or loitering on our borders. Lots of the time on fairly undefended systems. It just built up and up galaxy-wide and never came at us.

It got a bit annoying in the end. I miss the days when attacks would attack.

[keith.lamothe]

There could be a bug, not sure.  If you want me to check, please post a save where there's threat you think should be committing to an attack but isn't

You can attach a save to a post using the "Additional Options..." thing under the post textbox.  Alternatively you can report the issue in Mantis (see my sig) and attach the save to that report.

Thanks

[RockyBst]

There's been two changes recently. Firstly the threat now takes mobile fleet strength within 3 hops into account so is less likely to attack. Then up until the 7.021 release yesterday there was a bug that made threat not really do anything. Be interesting to load up that save now and see if you get 50,000 ships all attack at once

[Faulty Logic]

Oh, right. I've been meaning to tell you about this.

Threat has been basically frozen in my game (not that 2000-odd fleetships would make much difference).

Here. Specifically, the threat on the P9 worlds has been stuck for a long time. It should definitely have joined the threatfleet by now. Even normal threat logic should get it to move.

[keith.lamothe]

Ah, ok, can take a look sometime soon, then

[Andyroo]

Added it to the bug tracker, plus another save from a new game we tried tonight. Definitly seems a bit more broken in that one.

In retrospect I'm glad it was broken. We havent beaten diff 8 before.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, I"ve tested Faulty's save and the one Andyroo mantis'd.  I definitely see where the threat had been stuck, but thankfully a bugfix I did earlier in the week while testing some other AI changes resolved the matter.  Basically the second AI player's threat/SF/TF was just never doing the "there's no enemies here, find somewhere else to make trouble" logic.  Probably for the last month or so.

[Andyroo]

Thanks for the fix, sounds like it will really help with the buildup - however I'm unsure it was what was bugging me to begin with. Our issue in that game was not just that the threat didn't seem to go down, it was that every indirect-type wave (I'm not sure if theres a term for them, I mean CPA/raid engine/normal wave without neighbouring warpgate types) seemed to instantly join the threat pile without ever trying to attack.

It seems to me that if it is in the top left corner with a timer going down, it should have to at least attempt to attack no matter the odds, just as waves and strikeforces do. If not, as soon as a halfway decent defensive line is established, then each of these indirect waves sent is a defensive boon for the AI rather than offensive. It makes it a bit more stalematey for a while, or at least it did for us, with every border planet filling up with thousands of threat and many starships with each CPA.

I expect this next patch will help with a lot of this, but I do wonder if its not the cause of the issue. Of course, this could all be an intentional thing, which is what I think caused me to post about it in the first place.

Anyway, thanks for all the continued support, it is stellar as always.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, waves (whether normal, raid engine, or whatever) that aren't launched directly at a human planet are just threat.  CPAs are just threat.

Threat doesn't attack unless it thinks it has some kind of chance of victory.  I understand that this may be frustrating at times, but ultimately it's just really stupid for the AI to throw units into defenses that are just going to maul it, and having the AI make lots of really stupid plays isn't really going to help the game be more fun.

So there's the waves as probing attacks, which (so long as you have an AI warp gate somewhere on your border) go directly into the teeth of your defenses.  Nobody on either side expects those to win a game, they're just there to probe your defenses at different points with different unit combinations and maybe cause a ruckus if you've made a mistake or it lands in the middle of general chaos, etc.

And there's the exo strikeforces, which ARE intended to potentially win games, or at least knock out an irreplaceable or two.  So they go in regardless, and hope that the rest of the galaxy can provide the necessary backup.  They're also only launched in response to superweapons (FS, etc), so it's one of those "if we can't hurt the guy with the really big guns we're going to lose anyway" situations.

But the rest of the threat is very much supposed to just bide its time if your defenses are too strong for it.  To do otherwise is for the AI to just throw away a strategic advantage.  And if you're playing an FS game like the save you posted, then frankly it takes an enormous amount of forces to even pose a credible threat at all. As can be seen in the fact that the 20,000+ ships that (after I fixed the bug) balled up and tried to punch through Fiha failed to do so.  And that was against your unattended defenses; I just watched.

[Andyroo]

Understood, it was mostly my memories of CPA attackers flooding in from everywhere that didn't match up with it, well, not doing anymore.

Glad to hear Fiha survived, it sure didn't when we hit the end of FS.

[keith.lamothe]

Glad to hear Fiha survived, it sure didn't when we hit the end of FS.

Not much does