About AI Homeworlds

[TechSY730]

What can be done about AI homeworlds (and Mk. IV and "core" planets to a lesser extent)?
Now, the idea that the AI goes heavy in defending its most important stuff, and "all-out" in defending its home, IMO, should be a thing that stays. But the problem is that, due to the simplistic nature of the combat model, there wasn't much you could do in terms of dealing with heavily defended areas beyond "throw more ships at it". (Well, later mechanics made it "do fancy thing, and then throw more ships at it" (tactical warhead use, transports, splitting armies based on bonuses), but you never got rid of the "throw more ships at it" part of it).
This often made the AI homeworld degenerate into an unfun grind to deal with, building and rebuilding entire armies, doing a "fancy thing" to make only a small-ish amount of progress, rince; repeat.

Are there any ideas about how this situation could be improved, without making AI homeworlds any easier or less menacing? Again, I feel that some level of grind should be required; this is the AI going "all-out" in defense. But the current situation seems to get excessive, especially if the RNG arranges things in just the wrong ways.

[tadrinth]

I just did a HW assault on Diff 9 and did not feel there was any grind at all; only superweapon was a not-fully-leveled champion.

I just needed to:
* Get an armored warhead to the wrath lance past the core warhead interceptor
* Use speed boosters to get it there faster
* Also use the speed boosters as bait for grav reactor drones
* Use sentinel frigates to shoot down the OMD
* Use tigers to distract the various starships and nemesis champions from the sentinel frigates
* Lure the Strategic Reserve toward my wormhole, then send in and manually detonate a MkIII lightning warhead
* Kill off a horde of reprocessors from the SF so I could kill the disassembler guard post using my tigers

Then two more warheads took out the remaining guard posts and the FFs covering the home command station. 

Granted, it was 7-10 evenings of playing over 3 months of realtime and probably 30+ reloads to get the farking Wrath Lance down. 

I didn't have to refleet in the middle of either homeworld. You're really not supposed to have to refleet in the middle anymore; if you take more than 10 minutes you have an exo to deal with, but if you kill the home command station it cancels the exo. I was able to do that on both HW assaults.

Are you perhaps used to the old 'spawn exo whenever a core guard post dies' behavior? Because that doesn't happen anymore.

Or are you iron-manning it rather than reloading? Because that would be a bajillion times harder.

[Pumpkin]

I agree with Tadrinth. I'm just below 9/9 (Actually, I'm currently at the doorstep of a coreworld at 9/9, no CSG) and I already feel that grinding won't be an option. At 7/7 it was easy enough for the "(subtly) throw fleet at it" strategy to work, so no grinding neither.

Also, I feel that "just big final fleet battle" is important for a sense of achievement and, let's say the word: fun. There are already the very interesting (most of them) Core Guard Posts and few Brutal ones, and their ability to protect the Command Station for "fun things to do" in that last bits. Then the exowaves, reprisal and AIP bump kinda deny grinding, IMO, so I feel the endgame is fine as it currently is.

[kasnavada]

I just needed to:
* Get an armored warhead to the wrath lance past the core warhead interceptor
* Use speed boosters to get it there faster
* Also use the speed boosters as bait for grav reactor drones
* Use sentinel frigates to shoot down the OMD
* Use tigers to distract the various starships and nemesis champions from the sentinel frigates
* Lure the Strategic Reserve toward my wormhole, then send in and manually detonate a MkIII lightning warhead
* Kill off a horde of reprocessors from the SF so I could kill the disassembler guard post using my tigers

Then two more warheads took out the remaining guard posts and the FFs covering the home command station.

Granted, it was about 3 months of realtime and probably 30+ reloads to get the farking Wrath Lance down.

I didn't have to refleet in the middle of either homeworld. You're really not supposed to have to refleet in the middle anymore; if you take more than 10 minutes you have an exo to deal with, but if you kill the home command station it cancels the exo. I was able to do that on both HW assaults.

You're being ironic, right ?


Anyway, the "upgrady" part of what is envisionned as the research now should enable a major power-up of the player toward finishing the AI home worlds worlds without those issues.

What can be done about AI homeworlds (and Mk. IV and "core" planets to a lesser extent)?
Now, the idea that the AI goes heavy in defending its most important stuff, and "all-out" in defending its home, IMO, should be a thing that stays. But the problem is that, due to the simplistic nature of the combat model, there wasn't much you could do in terms of dealing with heavily defended areas beyond "throw more ships at it". (Well, later mechanics made it "do fancy thing, and then throw more ships at it" (tactical warhead use, transports, splitting armies based on bonuses), but you never got rid of the "throw more ships at it" part of it).
This often made the AI homeworld degenerate into an unfun grind to deal with, building and rebuilding entire armies, doing a "fancy thing" to make only a small-ish amount of progress, rince; repeat.

Are there any ideas about how this situation could be improved, without making AI homeworlds any easier or less menacing? Again, I feel that some level of grind should be required; this is the AI going "all-out" in defense. But the current situation seems to get excessive, especially if the RNG arranges things in just the wrong ways.

I'm concerned about that part as well. Current end-game needs improvements.

[tadrinth]

No, i am serious. The complaint was that the homeworld assaults feel grindy, involving throwing fleets around and rebuilding them.  That's not been my experience; the last one was really hard, but entirely due to requiring a lot of fancy stuff to be executed correctly, not because the fancy stuff cost me a fleet even if I did it correctly. It was a puzzle, not a grind.

That said, iron man mode would make homeworld assaults absolutely brutal, because I messed up the fancy stuff a LOT.  If people are doing them without reloading, then yeah, ow.

[kasnavada]

Granted, it was about 3 months of realtime and probably 30+ reloads to get the farking Wrath Lance down.

I didn't have to refleet in the middle of either homeworld. You're really not supposed to have to refleet in the middle anymore; if you take more than 10 minutes you have an exo to deal with, but if you kill the home command station it cancels the exo. I was able to do that on both HW assaults.

Oh.
Because that part I don't understand well then. While the game should be "hard", there is no reason why a 9/9 game should require 3 months realtime to finish. To me (only me) your post actually screams of "let's make the end-game better". That said, I don't find restarting endlessly fun, and mostly play AI war without pause nor reloading.

[tadrinth]

Oh, I wasn't clear, I took 3 months off because I got frustrated/ ran out of my 3 week attention span.  I spent ~3-5 evenings actually playing through HW assault attempts. 

I don't think I usually reload anywhere near that much.  Wrath Lance + Grav Reactor was a really unpleasant combo.  It did force me to get better at the game; I finally said eff it and just threw warheads at all my problems.  Diff 9 pushes me pretty hard, basically. 

I also just hate losing ships; if I was more tolerant of losses and refleets I could have gotten away with a lot less reloading. 

I don't think anyone's really been happy with the endgame, though.  Of all the places for major shakeups, that's probably one of the best; best case we come up with something dramatically better, worst case we fall back to what we have now.  And the dvs have a LOT more experience with bosses after Starward Rogue. =)