What happened?

[PhilRoi]

yikes,  i started a new game for grins and giggles and got rolled over the coals.......

AI1 mine enthusiast
AI7 Fortress baron

10 planets,  started with munitions booster.....

I thought it would be a friendly game......

just under 3 MINUTES in i get SWARMED!!!!!!

37 Core bombers
30 MkIV fighters
12 Core Cruisers
58 Core RAIDERS!!!!!
(and a handful of lesser ships....)
by 3:04 i was dead.

 

[x4000]

Yeah, those really small maps can be ridiculously brutal at this point.  Larger maps don't have the issue.  I'm not sure why they sent so many high-level ships (I may need to look into that), but I wonder -- did you send any starships or missiles into their territory?  That would really stir them up.  Presumably you didn't have time to send anything like that, though, so I can't imagine that was it.

[PhilRoi]

never touched a wormhole or even made it to the galaxy map.  I just built my resource.  and was starting to produce a handful of ships.  I was getting ready to build some more shipyards when the wave hit.   had yet to touch my scout.....

so no i had done nothing...   the AI just sent in an assualt group unprovoked.  well at least from my perspective.   It's like a couple planets had excessive troops and sent them out as soon as the game started.

I'll restart with the same settings grab a save right away and see if it does it again.  then i can grab a 2nd save and you can compare...

[PhilRoi]

ok it did it again.  i'm not crazy.  I'm not seeing any higher level planets close by.   whats dumping all this on me?

the wave hits at about 1:30 secs into the game and is WAY bigger then you can hope to handle.
tried a couple seeds and got similar results off 3 maps.

[x4000]

It shouldn't do that on larger maps.  It sounds like those are coming from the core/home planets, but I don't know why.  I'll have to look at it.  The really tiny maps (smaller than 40 planets) are still considered kind of experimental to me.

[x4000]

Okay, so this was a global thing after all.  Stinks that I had already done the 1.011 release when you found this.  Oh well, here's a hotfix release of 1.012, which fixes the issue:  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,560.0.html

[darke]

Cool. So I wasn't imaging things when I reported this a while ago after encountering it a few times too?

Always nice to know I'm not completely insane.

[x4000]

Did you report this, too?  Damn.   So much going on, and I kept never seeing any evidence of this in my playtesting, and there's always been some element of this on the really small maps.  My bad assumption!

[darke]

Did you report this, too?  Damn.   So much going on, and I kept never seeing any evidence of this in my playtesting, and there's always been some element of this on the really small maps.  My bad assumption!

Yeah, the main issue was that we were never really sure whether what I was experiencing was a bug, or just the side of effect of the fact I play a little weird. Having a tendency of starting on 6+ wormhole maps, with boosted AI resources, and often with AI types like Special Forces Captains.

[x4000]

Riiiight... now it's coming back to me.  Bleh.  Wish I had figured it out then, and avoided the hotfix, but oh well.  That sort of thing is bound to happen every so often, though I want to minimize that as much as possibly obviously.