Tutorials most wished for.

[keith.lamothe]

I'm sure Diazo would appreciate not being call upon to run his megascript again, applying the 100x down scaling of stats and then doing the mass upload.

If there's something we can do to make the process of keeping the wiki up to date easier, let me know.  I know very little about wiki manipulation beyond the basic hand-editing stuff I do regularly.

Although a series of defense articles would be nice, I don't believe choke-point games are meant to be forever. That is, planet-caps on turrets have gone a long way in making defense-in-depth and divide-and-conquer strategies competitive, which warrant their own sub-sections on the topic of defense.
I'm inclined to restrict the first linked topics to ones general enough, dumb enough, to apply to every player.

I think chokepoint defense will always be a thing in the sense of "if I really want to prevent enemies from getting past planet X, what do I do?" always being something a new player would do well to learn soon.

But yes, there are more alternatives now.

[Nodor]

I have learned a lot over the years from looking at the screenshots on the AAR's about turret placement.

I've also had to teach people not to put sniper turrets on top of wormholes.  Contemplating what players struggling with 5/5 difficulty need has made me wish for a "how to set up turrets and forts to effectively defend a system" tutorial, as not dying is the first critical AI War skill players need to learn. 

Getting better at fixed defense placement has been one of the key critical skills I have needed - and after 5+ years I still don't feel nearly as adept with mines as I would like.   

To be a proper 10/10 player in 7.035 I probably need to figure out how to do things like get 500 AIP reduction out of Hacking a Superterminal.  Currently, that is beyond my ability to manage.   That is what I would call an "advanced tactics" video.

[keith.lamothe]

To be a proper 10/10 player in 7.035 I probably need to figure out how to do things like get 500 AIP reduction out of Hacking a Superterminal.  Currently, that is beyond my ability to manage.

I don't think it's still feasible to do a 500 AIP reduction via superterminal on 10/10, or even on 7/7, in any remotely normal scenario.

80 is a decent target nowadays, iirc, though I'm sure the determined can squeeze out significantly more than that.

Either way, "effective superterminal exploitation" is certainly a worthwhile advanced topic.

[Toranth]

I'm sure Diazo would appreciate not being call upon to run his megascript again, applying the 100x down scaling of stats and then doing the mass upload.

If there's something we can do to make the process of keeping the wiki up to date easier, let me know.  I know very little about wiki manipulation beyond the basic hand-editing stuff I do regularly.

Is there any way to get a more complete export of current unit stats out of the game?
Right now, you can get a mostly complete export of the mobile ship stats, but it lacks some fields (like immunities, IIRC).  I think it is also missing a bunch of stuff, like non-combat structures.

[keith.lamothe]

Is there any way to get a more complete export of current unit stats out of the game?
Right now, you can get a mostly complete export of the mobile ship stats, but it lacks some fields (like immunities, IIRC).  I think it is also missing a bunch of stuff, like non-combat structures.

If you mean the reference-tab export you can get it to export all the units (clear all the filters first).

For the other fields like immunities I can add those, it depends on how they should be formatted to be useful.  Just the string containing all the immunities, etc?

But that "balance export" is probably not the best for everything and the cooking-chamber-sink.  I'd probably have this be a separate export function that doesn't necessarily require that every record be its own line (unless that's helpful).

Basically tell me the format (including all fields desired, etc) that would be most helpful for updating the wiki, and I can look into it

[PokerChen]

It's not really difficult to feed in a large file into some sort of a stream editor. The main thing I think will help the wiki upkeep is some method of automatic the unit stat updates, since we (human users) have to do this individually - and AFAIK Diazo also did it individually. His automation was converting the big file into a copy-pastable text formatted for the wiki.

One could set up bots or do some Perl magic, although I imagine it'll be the admins/devs who will run them when a patch note changes the unit stats. This way, no one has to take care of the data itself (when the bugs have been ironed out) and volunteers can worry about updating the topics.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Perl

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/mediawiki/190367
= = = =

The other problem we'd bump into is finding the right context to make the images and videos, regardless of tutorial. Real games are usually filled with clutter that's not really to the point, so without a toolset we can't easily recreate things like the lone sad leech starship bumping against a Mil-I under a shield bubble.
I think people will generally manage though, they don't have to be the neatest tutorials in the world.

NB: I presume there's no inherent risk with uploading a save file for download on the wiki?

[Burnstreet]

I think the easiest way in the longterm would be to fully automate this
1. add a step to the release process that exports the data to some location on the web server as xml csv whatever - one file per unit
2. build a mediawiki plugin that can read these files and formats them nicely
3. profit

if you then put files for each version in their own directory and just symlink the latest you could even look at historical data via the plugin

[Histidine]

Bear in mind that the version of Mediawiki that Arcen wiki uses is pretty seriously out of date, and the last time I asked about it it was reportedly too much trouble to update (this was a bit after Bionic Dues came out).

[PokerChen]

 In terms of updating the unit pages, I guess it comes down to finding the time to bite the bullet and upgrade mediawiki.
 The ancient version shouldn't affect the writing of reference manuals and linking them into the game.

[Nodor]

To be a proper 10/10 player in 7.035 I probably need to figure out how to do things like get 500 AIP reduction out of Hacking a Superterminal.  Currently, that is beyond my ability to manage.

I don't think it's still feasible to do a 500 AIP reduction via superterminal on 10/10, or even on 7/7, in any remotely normal scenario.

80 is a decent target nowadays, iirc, though I'm sure the determined can squeeze out significantly more than that.

Either way, "effective superterminal exploitation" is certainly a worthwhile advanced topic.

There might be a "slight" gap between what I would need and what is possible.