A cause for Nuking and AI Points and Tractor Beams.

[Nayzablade]

Hi Forum

Great game...just bought it on steam with all expansions.

I have played a few times and I was just curious as to the use of the Galaxy Nuke...The big MkIII Nuke...the only time I could see it being used was as a last laugh type scenario...hehe.  Anyways, if anyone has found a use for it beside that, I would be interested to hear.

Another thing I was interested in was how the AI points ingame actually affect the AI.  For instance the game starts out with 11 AI points...when it gets to 22 points, has that doubled the strenght of the AI or just added a percentage to its awareness.  If so, how many points on average would it take to double the difficulty of a freshly started game...? If you catch my drift   

Finally - Tractor beams - I used them and they are awsome.  I was just wondering how many ships a mkI II or III actually tagets (the turret version) as the item description just says it targets a lot of ships...Is 50 ships a lot or is 1000...?

Anyways, thanks for the great game and the answers! 

[Coppermantis]

As far as I can tell the Mk. III Nuke is only for getting that one achievement for nuking every planet, then winning the game. Never considered using it otherwise.

It's a linear increase, I think, it hasn't doubled in aggressiveness since start, just added 11 extra points. If you went from 500 to 511 it would probably be the same change, unless i'm wrong.

Tractor beam: I think it says in the tooltip "Tractor beam x25 or whatever". I know, for instance, that the spirecraft martyr, which has tractors, labels the number of beams. I haven't checked the turret versions.

Additionally, tractored ships do not hit minefields, so the two should not be combined in a defensive setup unless more ships than are tractorable wind up coming through.

[Nayzablade]

Thanks Coppermantis, that helps a lot.

I was reading in the wiki as well about capturing Advanced research stations.  Is the only way to capture somthing actually to build a command base in the area after wiping out the AI fromt he planet or is there a ship/unit that captures buildings like that...?

[Coppermantis]

You can't capture ARSes in any other way than capturing the planet.You don't have to keep the planet or the ARS even, after you capture it for even a second anything you gained from it is yours for the rest of the game.

Adv. Factories and fabricators also only need to be captured for a second to become yours. Even if the command station is destroyed, you'll retain any capturables. Unlike an ARS, an AdvF must be kept alive to retain the benefit. Same for fabricators.

[Ktoff]

As you might have noticed the AI reinforces its planets (i.e. the number of ships on planets grows). The number of ships it can use for reinforcements each turn depends in a large part on the AI progress. Further things influenced by the progress is the size of the waves that are warped in (and maybe the frequency). Lastly, the AI progress determines the tech-level of the waves (and I think also the reinforcements). This does not play a role very early on, but later it makes a large difference if you have a couple of hundred (couple of thousand) MkI or MkIII ships warping in.

However, the AI progress is not the lone factor for the whole thing. Even at a progress of 0 the AI would have "at least X ships per wave" and "at least X reinforcement points" where X depends on type and difficulty of the AIs.

The AI has a weird pseudo-resource system (it does not get metal and crystal, but reinforcement points and some wave modifiers). Think of the AI-progress of the amount of resources the AI is using to battle you. There is a base resource level and then the AI adds to that.

There is also a wiki article on AI-progress. http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_AI_Progress

Finally, welcome!

[keith.lamothe]

For the "how many ships does each wave/reinforcement get" question, the change from 11 to 22 is actually nearly doubling, iirc (edit: but yes, there is a minimum size for a wave, so you probably won't notice a change from early AIP increases).  The change from 511 to 522 is much lower proportionately, but still (loosely speaking) the same quantity of extra ships.

There are other things caused by AIP, of course, as indicated by the wiki article Ktoff linked