2. Not really, they sounded really hard (in a passive way) and i don't care for really hard 
Does killing experienced players in under 2 hours sound passive to you?
They aren't nearly that hard any more (particularly if you only enable non-advanced hybrids for one AI player and none for the other), but they do pose an active threat as well. Currently not nearly as much as intended, due to the high proportion of hybrids that mature into "defender" and "builder" classes, but we'll be addressing that fairly soon.
And, actually, I think I'm pretty similar in the "don't care for really hard"; in my own gaming I want
interesting challenges, not necessarily
overwhelming ones. AI War can fairly easily provide an overwhelming challenge on the right settings, and that's good for folks who like that kind of thing, but that's not what I (or you) want.
I think Dazio's recent beta-AAR gives a number of good examples of how the game can be interestingly-hard without jacking the difficulty up to 10 (he played on 7/7 and it was a wild ride). Of course, turning on every single minor faction is pretty crazy and overwhelming in it's own right. It's fun reading, anyhow
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,6741.0.htmlAnyway, here's what I suggest: when the 4.0 official comes out, try it again, against 2 diff 7 easy-type AIs with both of them having non-advanced hybrids enabled, and a smattering of minor factions.
---
even on higher difficulties though, taking planets quickly and efficently is best acheived by unloading your entire fleet on the planet and just laying waste to everything in one fell swoop...
On the "entire fleet" thing, have you ever run into a situation where you lost planets/stuff to the AI because it attacked you somewhere else while your entire mobile fleet was tied up? Or:
- Is the time to take the planet too short?
- Can your fleet get anywhere it needs to fast enough to stop the AI?
- Do you get too much warning of what the AI is going to do?
- Are your non-mobile defenses (and/or chokepointing) strong enough that involving your mobile fleet is not necessary?
the regenerative properties of AI worlds mean fighting upon them to any effect except complete eradication is usually needless,
It is perhaps usually needless now, but one of the points behind the guard posts is to give optional (sometimes mandatory) sub-goals that can be accomplished short of the "take the whole planet", and materially improve your situation on that planet for future attempts to take or traverse it. But I'm guessing that in your experience the "texture" provided by said guard posts is more like pebbles on a gravel road than boulders on a mountain path?
and that the more AI worlds you fight at once the greater your overall casualities and you struggle against the reinforcement of multiple worlds at once. the most efficent strategy IS to focus you whole fleet against one world at time.
Yes, the "concentration of force" doctrine is almost inevitable in the absence of fairly draconian mechanics to penalize it, I've thought a lot about that. And indeed, as you say, the AI's reinforcement mechanics further encourage that concentration. Ultimately, while I can think of interesting ways to make it more advantageous to (for example) attack two separate planets with half your fleet each instead of attacking one with your whole fleet, most of those don't really have a place within the scope of the game's design.
What it should do, on appropriate settings, is make it
really hazardous to not retain uncommitted reserves. That way even if your ball-of-death will overwhelm the enemy planet, you have the thrill of wondering if you'll actually get away with the maneuver in the overall scheme
No-wave-warnings and Hybrids go a long way towards that, I think, but more needs to be done.
microing your various shiptypes on that world is important, but I have rarely felt a need to use slower or sneaky tactics (seiges or cloaking) when I could just gogo gadget 400 zenith polarisers and roll right over anything.
You rather like polarizers, I've noticed
But yea, this is one of those points of tension in the design: one man's interesting-tactical-battle is another's frustrating-micro-management.
- One of the side-effects of AI War's fairly-awesome auto-targeting logic is that you don't really have to choose targets for most of your ships, you can just move them through the general direction and they will use their weapons in a rather efficient way. In general, the auto-behavior of most ships is good enough that you may never need to even given them a specific order outside of movement (and in the case of FRD, not even that). Of course, these are good things, but if the need for micro is reduced to the point that the player doesn't feel they need to do anything, well... That said, proper difficulty should make sure they have something to do
- There are micro-heavy tactics that can be very effective, like a cloaker starship covering a transport's approach so it can unload some Riots and Sieges so the sieges have the Riot ff's to hide behind. But those tactics are by no means mandatory unless you're playing a pretty difficult opponent or some other special situation is in play. But to a large extent many players would get frustrated if they had to constantly apply that level of control in order to succeed. Another place where players who want to have to do stuff like that should have game-setup-options that provide that level of challenge.
I'm not criticising in the sense that I still love AI war, but its the strategic map (choosing where to go next), long term economic decisions (jammers? which merc to build/how many to build over time? golems? research choices?) that most hold my attention, not the battles (which, once fleets get over a certain size, become rather simple)
I think that general "ratio" is intended, in that if your strategy is good, you truly know the extent of enemy presence on a planet, and you know your own forces, the only reason you should lose that individual battle is if you made a mistake. I think many (most?) players enjoy it that way. But I also hope to offer options where the AI is more likely to surprise either your attacking force or your defenses somewhere else, or both
