Intro and beginning notes/bugs from a new player.

[topper]

Intro:
I have always been a fan of RTS games, video games in general have always been a way to relax and refocus for me. The problem in most games before finding this one is that there is no real user control of the game style and difficulty. I often played multiplayer or coop, and with all of them, the AI is either overwhelmingly powerful or pathetically stupid. That opinion changed after I purchased AI War a few months ago. Thanks to the devs for creating an awesome game that really caters to the user preferences!

The games I describe next seem to be easier than what other people talk about on these forums, but they are exactly what I was looking for in learning a game and I plan on ramping up the difficulty once I have a better handle on all the different types of units. The following games show everything that I have seen in the game so far, but spoilers/strategy tips are very welcome. Sorry to disappoint the devs by playing against their AI at low levels, it has not put up much of challenge so far.

If the wall of text is too imposing, skip to my third post where I make a few short summarizing notes and bugs.

[topper]

Games completed:

3/3  two-player co-op game. Random easy types: Sledge Hammer and Fortress Baron. Bonus ships: lightning shuttles and bulletproof fighters, neither seemed too useful in this game.  First intro to the game for both of us, so no expansions on and simple ship types. Really easy play through, end game was basically FRDing the fleet ball into the second homeworld after wiping out the first. We kept a fairly low AIP with only about 15 planets taken on an 80 planet map. This took longer than it should have (due to rebuilding times) since we did not initially realize that you should only use bombers when taking a fortress, and there were a lot of them…

5/5 two-player co-op game, Random easy types: Support Corps and Mine Enthusiast. Zenith Remnant enabled with Easy Golems and Dyson Sphere, and normal ship types. Several things combined to make this one even easier than the first. The AI types were randomized, and we did not realize that there is such a large difference in difficulty between the types, even though they are all listed as easier. We never were really threatened after we found a botnet golem not too far away and soon had thousands of zombies patrolling our back worlds and responding in overwhelming force to any attacks on those planets. Near the center of the map was the Dyson Sphere, which when freed, patrolled around the central choke point where there also happened to be a bunch of fabricators and an Advanced Factory. With the backfield locked down, we had complete freedom to run around and take whatever we wanted. On the front two arms which each led to a homeworld. It got a little interesting after we popped the first homeworld, the AI response was pretty strong as we slowly moved the fleet and golems toward the second homeworld. Without any fleet help, we lost almost all of our forward planets, but the Dyson-backed central chokepoint held without any intervention from us. The Dyson and the botnet golem in particular made this particular game very free-flowing and easy since the defense side was taken care of for us. We finished the game with trying out 7 golems (in particular two artillery golems, and one fully charged hive golem), which made the second homeworld a piece of cake even if we had not brought the huge fleet ball along.


Current games:

6/6 solo game, Random easy types: Gravity Driller and Tank. This was my second try on a 6/6 solo game, with similar settings to the 5/5 mulitplayer game above. The first time the AI had Zenith Bombardment ships and I had Laser Gatlings (not sure which AI types). The out-ranging effect was really annoying and I had a mark 3 planet with two fortresses (a mark 1 and a mark 3 with overlapping ranges and the mark 3 under a forcefield) right next to my homeworld. After banging my head against that for a while and finally taking it, I decided that I did not want to deal with the bombards for an entire game, so I restarted. The second one is going well, but the gravity driller means that this game is going to take a bunch of extra time just waiting around for ships to travel between worlds, and there are a couple of them near my homeworld that have a really long distance between the wormholes, which is good for defense, but really bad for game time. Can I scrap the gravity drill at no AIP cost after I own the planet?

4/4 two-player co-op game, Chose Vanilla AI and Tank to avoid some annoying things for this game. Bonus ships: Gravity ripper and Shield Bearers (for protecting the shards). Goal is to try the Fallen Spire campaign on a 120 planet snake map, to get the 110 planet achievement, as well as try some new stuff (Spirecraft easy, Golems easy, Spire Civilian leaders, Human rebels, Astro trains). This seems like the perfect combo, since Fallen Spire seems to make high AIP less damaging, and the snake map is perfect for defending against a strong AI response to our actions. Since high AIP could be a problem, we are taking a step back in difficulty after seeing this awesome AAR which I saw after I started thinking about trying this and looked around for what others have done. (http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9517.0.html).
Currently just under three hours in and we have one spire city hub, the first 12 planets on the snake, a spire fleet of 8 frigates each, and the second shard is located. First regular exo-wave was just repelled without a problem.

[topper]

Notes/suggestions from a new player:

1. Overall, awesome game. Gradually turning on the options has been really fun and it seems like the variety will continue even after we have tried everything once. Having a few suggested beginner settings might be nice, that way we could have started on a slightly higher difficulty.

2. Spire campaign: I glanced over the spoiler page, so nobody need to feel bad about spoiling anything to me. The shards are so slow! Is there any way to speed up the movement? We put up logistics stations on the path (my homeworld is on planet 4 of the snake, and we are retrieving the next shard from planet 15). The stations do not seem to make any difference on shard speed and we will have to slow down our expansion until we complete the campaign if there is no other way to get them home faster. Would it be possible to have the shards slowly increase in speed based on how long it has been since they (or a shield they are under) took damage? That way, once you got the shard behind your main line, it could get back to my homeworld pretty quickly as long as you had the entire path defended and nothing was continually harassing the shard.

3. The harvesters do not feel OP in our current spire game. I fully upgraded both types of harvesters from the beginning and my teammate gifted me all of his, so we have 12 planets of harvesters fully upgraded and working on any spire city stuff is killing our combined economy.

4. About difficulty in our fallen spire game. My teammate started on planet 2 of the snake and I was on planet 4. Even on our low difficulty of 4/4, we started up with a mark 4 planet right between us. The game beginning might feel more open if they were less likely to spawn within two hops of a homeworld on low difficulties.


Bugs:
Both relate to the current fallen spire multiplayer game.

A. I am hosting and my teammate is player 2. In the last two games he has been the one who reorganized the galaxy map. This worked great in the previous game, but on the snake it did not work so well from the start. It turns out that we are not actually seeing the exact same thing even when I view “Player 2 map”. For a while, his snake map was perfectly untangled while from my view it was crazy looking. We fixed this by him just slightly moving the planets that seemed out of line in my view. I would flare the planet and he would just bump it in his view. This would usually snap the planet back to where it was supposed to be so that we were seeing the same thing. I should have a save game that shows my end of it before we started fixing it, if that helps. My guess is that it relates to screen resolutions, but maybe have a better way of doing this that is standard across resolutions would help? The reorganized galaxy is a great feature!

B. Just my 5th game, and I already caused an unhandled exception error :-). I do quite a bit of programming, so the presence of this kind of error does not reduce my opinion of the devs at all. I caused it by attempting to gift one of my spirecraft asteroid constructors to my teammate while it was still under construction. This created a duplicate constructor that belonged to him, but it also flashed the unhandled exception error and kicked him out of the game. He was able to hop back in and the duplicate constructor vanished and the game continued as normal. I saved right after he was kicked out, but the save might not have the duplicate constructor. I hope this is specific enough for you guys to find this bug. Do you think our saved game might have corruption issues later on caused by this error?

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the game and to the forums   Very glad to hear you're having fun with it.  And the low difficulty levels are there for a reason; a lot of players start out well below 7, 7 is just the main "where you'll probably be after you learn the game, unless you want a stiffer challenge" setting.

Can I scrap the gravity drill at no AIP cost after I own the planet?

I honestly don't remember.  One way to find out

Having a few suggested beginner settings might be nice, that way we could have started on a slightly higher difficulty.

Yea, some way of having "lobby presets" really does seem more and more attractive as the game has become more and more fleshed out.  Just haven't figured out a way of doing it that seems quite right

The shards are so slow! Is there any way to speed up the movement?

No, it's glacial   I may speed them up, and adjust the threat of the situation to balance it.  It's obviously going to have a greater potential for pain on a snake map, either way.

A. I am hosting and my teammate is player 2. In the last two games he has been the one who reorganized the galaxy map. This worked great in the previous game, but on the snake it did not work so well from the start. It turns out that we are not actually seeing the exact same thing even when I view “Player 2 map”. For a while, his snake map was perfectly untangled while from my view it was crazy looking. We fixed this by him just slightly moving the planets that seemed out of line in my view. I would flare the planet and he would just bump it in his view. This would usually snap the planet back to where it was supposed to be so that we were seeing the same thing. I should have a save game that shows my end of it before we started fixing it, if that helps. My guess is that it relates to screen resolutions, but maybe have a better way of doing this that is standard across resolutions would help? The reorganized galaxy is a great feature!

Yea, I've really got to find some way of making it resolution-independent; there's a bunch of issues related to it not being so.

B. Just my 5th game, and I already caused an unhandled exception error :-). I do quite a bit of programming, so the presence of this kind of error does not reduce my opinion of the devs at all. I caused it by attempting to gift one of my spirecraft asteroid constructors to my teammate while it was still under construction. This created a duplicate constructor that belonged to him, but it also flashed the unhandled exception error and kicked him out of the game. He was able to hop back in and the duplicate constructor vanished and the game continued as normal. I saved right after he was kicked out, but the save might not have the duplicate constructor. I hope this is specific enough for you guys to find this bug. Do you think our saved game might have corruption issues later on caused by this error?

Oh, good catch   If you can post a save (here or on our mantis) where those steps-to-reproduce will work, that will be a great help

[PokerChen]

On a side note about difficulty: it's almost entirely due to your Botnet golem.  
There's also some subjective influence on the general difficulty of AI types. Fortress Barons are usually more medium than easy (mainly due to Super Fortresses and unlucky placements) unless you have a second Fortress killer, Grav Drillers can be a real pain if the AI also have Snipers, Sledge Hammers in very high difficulties can catch you at the wrong time, etc.

Can I scrap the gravity drill at no AIP cost after I own the planet?

I honestly don't remember.  One way to find out

Wiki to the rescue!

Scraps at no cost to humanity, +5 AIP only if AI controls it.

[zoutzakje]

welcome to the forums =)
and yeah, the botnet golem or the dyson sphere can pretty much handle your entire defense if you use them right. Combined they are usually an unstoppable force, at least on 7/7.
I do hope that you do not have Core Shield Generators on in your current snake map game. they could prove to be quite... painful. Also, playing fallen spire on a 120 planet snake map means you will eventually have to take those shards back an extreme distance to your homeworld. And the defense of the spire cities will be less useful in snake maps as well (unless you have trouble holding your frontlines, but I doubt that is the case). Fallen spire could perhaps be tried out best with a simple or realistic map type.
Before you make the jump to 7/7, perhaps it would be a good idea to try out some of the moderate and harder AI types (maybe even the techno's). You may have noticed yourself as well, but the AI types influence the difficulty much more than the difficulty itself.
for beginners options, I think you have discovered most of them yourself. golems easy, spirecraft easy, dyson sphere and resistance fighters are my recommendations. They don't add some nasty stuff like the neinzul roaming enclaves for example. Also be careful with AI plots. Don't mess with the hybrids, they'll mess with you.

[topper]

Yea, some way of having "lobby presets" really does seem more and more attractive as the game has become more and more fleshed out.  Just haven't figured out a way of doing it that seems quite right

Adding in "scenarios" or something would be nice, this could include map seed and starting ship selection (for instance, neinzul, zenith, or spire themed setups). Choose a scenario from the main page and it sets all of the options to that scenario, then users could customize from there. The available scenarios could include user submitted settings and map choices along with a difficulty rating and suggested playing style.

No, it's glacial   I may speed them up, and adjust the threat of the situation to balance it.  It's obviously going to have a greater potential for pain on a snake map, either way.

We may have to just hold at our current position then as we recover the shards.

Oh, good catch   If you can post a save (here or on our mantis) where those steps-to-reproduce will work, that will be a great help

I will see what I have in the way of saves, probably only the one from right after it happened. I will post it later if I have it, but I think it should be reproducible if you can simulate multiple players.

On a side note about difficulty: it's almost entirely due to your Botnet golem.  

and yeah, the botnet golem or the dyson sphere can pretty much handle your entire defense if you use them right. Combined they are usually an unstoppable force, at least on 7/7.
I do hope that you do not have Core Shield Generators on in your current snake map game. they could prove to be quite... painful. Also, playing fallen spire on a 120 planet snake map means you will eventually have to take those shards back an extreme distance to your homeworld.

Yeah, having a botnet in this one would be nice just to have the patrolling forces in the backfield along the entire stretch of my up to 120 planet snake. The feasibility of some maps is probably determined by botnet and dyson placement. If you play the same (challenging) map a whole bunch of times with the same settings, the variance in actual difficulty is going to be pretty high just based on placement of some useful things.
Also, CSGs are turned off, I have actually been playing with them off since the first game, I would use them in a normal game except for the requirement of the CSG-A. That one seems a little to constrictive in telling me I have to take all but one of those planets. From my understanding of homeworld placement, I turned them off for this one since I might meet the first homeworld before I find all the CSGs. Am I right in saying that one AI homeworld will be at approximately planet 120, and the other one will be around planet 60 of the snake?

[Eternaly_Lost]

Am I right in saying that one AI homeworld will be at approximately planet 120, and the other one will be around planet 60 of the snake?

If you play a snake map. The first AI homeworld will be placed at exactly the other end of the snake that you are at, and the second one will be placed as close to the middle (namely equal number of planets to your Homeworld and the other AI homeword) as can be done.

The only exception in this is if you play a small enough game to take one in the middle, then it places the AI homeworlds on either end of the snake, but I think you can't do more then 15 or so worlds before that stops being possible.

[TechSY730]

Suprised you didn't complain about the glut of UI bugs (especially textboxes) that are still floating around. I seems like to me that e it would scare off many new players.
Don't worry though, these are already known, and if understand the devs correctly, they are going to be addressed when AI war becomes the focus again.

4. About difficulty in our fallen spire game. My teammate started on planet 2 of the snake and I was on planet 4. Even on our low difficulty of 4/4, we started up with a mark 4 planet right between us. The game beginning might feel more open if they were less likely to spawn within two hops of a homeworld on low difficulties.

I approve of this idea. Restricting Mk. IV planets near human homeworlds (within two hops seems reasonable) is a great idea, FOR LOWER DIFFICULTIES. On "normal-ish" difficulties and up, you should expect the AI or the map generator to not be nice to you
Maybe this could be expanded and on like difficulties 1 and 2, Mk. III worlds would not be allowed to spawn within two hops, and Mk. IV not allowed to spawn within three hops maybe a good idea.

The shards are so slow! Is there any way to speed up the movement?

No, it's glacial   I may speed them up, and adjust the threat of the situation to balance it.  It's obviously going to have a greater potential for pain on a snake map, either way.

YES PLEASE! Speeding them up but also increasing AI response rate would make the spire campaign feel FAR less grindy.

Yea, some way of having "lobby presets" really does seem more and more attractive as the game has become more and more fleshed out.  Just haven't figured out a way of doing it that seems quite right

Adding in "scenarios" or something would be nice, this could include map seed and starting ship selection (for instance, neinzul, zenith, or spire themed setups). Choose a scenario from the main page and it sets all of the options to that scenario, then users could customize from there. The available scenarios could include user submitted settings and map choices along with a difficulty rating and suggested playing style.

Awesome idea! I would support that feature.
The whole user submitted thing would make a nice new subforum (like the custom puzzles subforum we have for Tidalis), and if it gets very popular, an in-game interface could be added as well.

[zoutzakje]

keep in mind topper, that CSG-A's are ALL on planets with an Advanced Research Station, planets you will want to capture anyways. The CSG-A merely forces you to capture at least 4 of the 5 ARS before you can attack the homeworlds.

[topper]

B. Just my 5th game, and I already caused an unhandled exception error :-). I do quite a bit of programming, so the presence of this kind of error does not reduce my opinion of the devs at all. I caused it by attempting to gift one of my spirecraft asteroid constructors to my teammate while it was still under construction. This created a duplicate constructor that belonged to him, but it also flashed the unhandled exception error and kicked him out of the game. He was able to hop back in and the duplicate constructor vanished and the game continued as normal. I saved right after he was kicked out, but the save might not have the duplicate constructor. I hope this is specific enough for you guys to find this bug. Do you think our saved game might have corruption issues later on caused by this error?

Oh, good catch   If you can post a save (here or on our mantis) where those steps-to-reproduce will work, that will be a great help

Found it. There is a spire mining ship on planet 7 near the asteroids. Build any spirecraft ship mining enclosure and before it finishes try to give it to player 2. This should create the duplicate constructor, drop the error message, and kick any other players out of the game.

Yea, some way of having "lobby presets" really does seem more and more attractive as the game has become more and more fleshed out.  Just haven't figured out a way of doing it that seems quite right

Adding in "scenarios" or something would be nice, this could include map seed and starting ship selection (for instance, neinzul, zenith, or spire themed setups). Choose a scenario from the main page and it sets all of the options to that scenario, then users could customize from there. The available scenarios could include user submitted settings and map choices along with a difficulty rating and suggested playing style.

Awesome idea! I would support that feature.
The whole user submitted thing would make a nice new subforum (like the custom puzzles subforum we have for Tidalis), and if it gets very popular, an in-game interface could be added as well.

This would be a really nice way for fun scenarios to be played by many different players. It would be sweet to compare the different strategies people use to crack the same basic problem (probably would have to have everyone play starting from a time=0 save game, otherwise the RNG noise would corrupt the experiment  ). Actually, this is exactly how the scenarios could work, it can just access a list of save files from the start of a set of saved games. Just add a "Start Scenario" button to the main page ).

[keith.lamothe]

Found it. There is a spire mining ship on planet 7 near the asteroids. Build any spirecraft ship mining enclosure and before it finishes try to give it to player 2. This should create the duplicate constructor, drop the error message, and kick any other players out of the game.

This has been fixed for 5.033, thanks

[topper]

You guys are awesome! Just when I had played at least one game with almost all of the available options then you go ahead an create a ridiculous number of new ones for 5.034.    The patch looks really good and this opens up a ton of new combinations to play the game. ...Unfortunately, I also just beat the overlord and arrived at Continent 2 in AVWW for the first time.  Now what am I going to do?

The Dyson options especially should help balance (or unbalance by choice) things again. In my Spire campaign 120 planet snake map, we started near one end with the Dyson at planet 31 in the snake. By the end of the game we had tons of friendly Dysons and resistance fighters patrolling from planet 1 through about planet 62 in the snake where they would often get distracted by the waves and exo-waves coming from the first AI homeworld.

Another note on how that game ended up. We beat it twice actually. The first time was after building the galactic capitol. We owned about 20 planets and after unlocking and fully upgrading our Spire fleet, and realizing how powerful it was, I attack moved them to the first AI homeworld. After much waiting, they arrived there only losing a couple Spire Frigates to a fortress along the way. After blowing the first homeworld, I attack-moved to the end of the snake and blew the second one with about 30/60 of my original Spire fleet remaining. Easy!
The second time we decided to actually get the "own 110" achievement. This turned out to be quite a bit harder despite building three more spire cities (I also recovered the core shard on planet 33, we were really patient with our conquests until we found it there. This way I can complete the alternate ending at some point.) I glassed over planets one at a time while the other player built up command stations behind me. The mothership spawn at the first homeworld was also pretty fun when we first stepped in. By the end of the snake, we had AIP well over 2000 and the stuff coming out of the exo-wormhole on the first AI homeworld was pretty cool (a few dozen golems at a time, but none of these Hunter-Killers that people speak of due to our low difficulty level) it took pretty much a full cap of all turrets from one of us and a bunch of fortresses to hold that system.

Overall, the Spire campaign was a lot of fun, and I especially recommend it to anyone trying to get one of the larger "own XX planets" achievements. My only gripe would be that it feels repetitive in the shard recovery phase and the strength of the spire fleet makes the rest of the ships feel unneeded(we had all of our lower mark stuff powered down and sitting in transports). This was also partly contributed to because the first Advanced Factory was at about planet 55 of the snake.

Thanks for a couple of awesome games! This and AVWW are taking up pretty much all of my gaming time these days  .

[Tridus]

Hi there.

The Spire Shards are immune to speed boosts, so the logistics stations don't help them. They do help your fleet get around though, and as you progress the fallen spire campaign you may find you have two fleets, though on a snake map that might be less true. On a smiple or realistic map once you get two cities and you have multiple cruisers, you'll start to find the Spire ships so powerful that they can comprise a fleet on their own. I wound up using my Spire fleet & Golems as my offensive fleet (with Raider Starships when I needed to raid something), and every other ship I had back in defense. When that's the case, being able to rapidly move around is a huge boon to your defensive capability. You can almost ignore economic stations for that gain, since you have the harvester upgrades. (Millitary command stations are worth it at places you really want to defend, because the damage boost and tachyon coverage is awesome and they can actually teleport enemies away which greatly extends the life of forcefields against bombers.)

Also be sure to unlock Spider Turrets, the shield upgrades, the laser upgrades, and the heavy beam cannons. Since you Spire ships and cities can equip those, they will really help you out. It's possible to upgrade the modules later, but I found it a real pain compared to just building the higher tier stuff in the first place (removing modules from the city I found really clumbsy and more then once I accidentally removed a reactor instead of the shield generator on the reactor). Is there a better way to reset the modules then just trying to select and delete them while zoomed really far in?

Sounds like you're right into it, so good luck with the campaign.