War stories, trivia, screenshots, etc. for social media

[kasnavada]

@captain jack: just trying to understand here, but stuff that's going to sound like klingon to "outsiders" is ok ? Then... My biggest story around here has to be this one:

AI war : knowledge is power.

Once upon a time, the Arcen forums bruised with activity, some discussions were done, and a challenge arised. It's not possible to win a game with spending 10k knowledge, people said. A few days later, at 2h30 AM in the morning, some newbie had done it.

He detailed his strategy :
- rush advanced research station.
- scout / neuter as much as possible up to 3 system away from colonized systems / reduce AIP with the CP and DC.
- regroup some stuff so you do not die against exos.
- take some more planets (core shield)
- take out the first AI.
- reinforcements start to become annoying, you have to intensify clean-up so you can still pass from system to system (scout 2 was taken because it was necessary to see what happend to be able to do the clean-up properly).
- take the last research station which I completely forgot about
- take out the second AI.

He went to bed. Next day he found out he stirred the forum with alarming posts (extracts):

Keeeeeiiiiiiith! Balance problem!

You won on 7/7 while spending only 500 knowledge (on scouts).  This is absurd

I agree, but there's a huge difference between "not hardcore" and "you can win even if you ignore the entire Knowledge mechanic"

Much discussion then occured, and thus started the story of how a self-initiated challenge removed mark-2 ships from ARS, forever.

With Arcen, devs care: suggestions, challenge, everything you do can make a difference. In my case, make everyone hate me (a bit). Well =).

Complete post (for reference).
https://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,12915.0.html

[Captain Jack]

*cackling*

I had NO IDEA this was a thing, this is great. I'll actually want to work with you to expand this out into a longer narrative if that's all right.

[kasnavada]

*cackling*

I had NO IDEA this was a thing, this is great. I'll actually want to work with you to expand this out into a longer narrative if that's all right.

Sure . Twas 3 years ago so I forgot some of it. You do have the "source" material too.

[kasnavada]

Found it again.
https://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War:Current_Post-6.000_Beta#Revising.2FPolishing_Expansion_Stuff

Important part I think, the Arcen process where people are credited for what they've done, and inspired. And, their fast response to issues. I mean, it was about 5 days between report & release.

Prerelease 6.024 The Squeaky Wheel Gets The Buff (or Nerf)
(Released April 29th, 2013)
(...)
Advanced Research Stations now no longer give MkII of their bonus type for free, but:
    They now grant 500 extra Knowledge immediately upon capture.
    Not directly related to ARS's, but related to Knowledge balance: researching a MkIII triangle or bonus ship type now costs 4000 instead of 6000.
        The idea being that we're no longer going to count "You get MkIVs of this type if you also have an advanced factory" when computing the cost of these. In theory that yields a cost of 3750 but we went with 4000 since mkIII units are slightly more than 1.5x as useful as MkIIs. We're not yet sure of whether to apply this same philosophical change to MkIII starship costs, as the balance of those is still very much in flux.
    Thanks to kasnavada, TechSY730, Hearteater, Cinth, LaughingThesaurus, Wingflier, Winge, chemical_art, Kahuna, Faulty Logic, Zeyurn, and others for inspiring these changes.

[Draco18s]

Ah, here it is.

The Electric Glow of Turtle Soup

Zenith trader came though.  We bought a Planetary Shield Inhibitor.  Next time around, a Black Hole Machine, unlocked Grav Turret Mk2 and dropped two of those down.  Next trade ship we went "what else can we buy?  HOW ABOUT A SUPERFORTRESS?"  So I did.  [...]  I had enough resource income that at the current rate of Wasted Resources 101 I could speed build the Super Fortress for fifteen minutes and get it half-completed.

Footnote about transports: Our previous game had found that we could go 7 jumps before the transport died.  [So we jumped 7 systems out], set up a temporary base to get the regen, and jumped another 6 systems out for an Advanced Factory.  I am certain that it was my posting about [that previous game] that got the Transport attrition rate upped to its current value of 35%.  Which I fully support, as being able to get that far out in hostile territory with a huge fleet is way too much.

I can't find any prior AAR, just a comment on how to use transports to assault the homeworlds.

It's worth looking at the couple of linked screenshots, too.

[tadrinth]

I think this is already in the marketing materials, but if not, may I suggest the best line from Peter Ebbesen's Ride the Lightning AAR:

Playing AI War is a bit like playing whack-a-mole, only with armed moles, an ever increasing number of mole-holes to keep track of, a rubber mallet, and moles that smile knowingly at you all the time, even as the mallet descends.

That AAR is epic and while I think that's the best quote from it, there are probably some other good ones. 

[Pumpkin]

Post cat pictures, comments about restaurants you visit (without naming names), comment on current events without being a jerk and try to show you're a real person... who really likes Arcen games.

You asks me to have... a... real tweeter account? Meh! Why do you think I didn't have one before?!

Because keeping a social media presence can be work. I had to ditch my Twitter account because it was eating productivity. It's possible to have fun with it though! Pick a few things to follow in game dev, science fiction, pop culture, real science, and just post two or three times a day.

Twitter spammed me with emails. Beside, I'm not interested in that kind of activity. Supporting Arcen a thing; talking about my like on a social media is another. Account deleted.

[Draco18s]

You can unsubscribe from the emails (and by type, e.g. only getting an email when someone mentions you)

But I completely understand.

[chemical_art]

Here's a screenshot from https://steamcommunity.com/id/incredidave

It is exactly those kind of situations that I love fireflies.

[Dominus Arbitrationis]

It was not an exciting story however feel free to dress it up a bit.

When I first saw it. My first though was mainly to find a Achilles heel if you will. It was not easy to find something that worked short-term. I looked at everything I had available and then unlocked more. It did not help that I had no idea what to expect. Dive into the deep end first if you will. My biggest problem was time.

So I basically brought time by having one of the shipyard (one of those mk V fabricator don't' recall which one it was) that somehow escape the destruction behind GSC build ships as rapidly as they could. Each time a new ship show up behind the GSC it would stop and turn around back and waste time getting to my HQ command station.

As soon I had everything built except for that one shipyard. I threw everything at it and manage to stop it a few hops away from my HQ command station.

This was before they toned it down. Otherwise it was small game since I set the AI to 1/1 to completely focus on experience the GSC firsthand.

[Vyndicu]

Found a very old screenshot. The numbers on top screen for threat is actual number of ships not "firepower". I think this was one of the most laggiest AI war game I ever had. This actually inspired one of the dev to change dark spire spawns so that if total x already exist in a galaxy. Then each 10 x would instead become a stronger y for performance reason alone.

I caused this to happened purely by accident. I thought that the neinzul spawned by roaming friendly enclave carrier would NOT contribute to spawn dark vengeance and I had a regeneration golem to prevent anything from contribute (that part did indeed worked).

Turn out that was a deadly mistake on my part! Each time the AI would show up at the choke hold system Swoverko which also happens to host a dark spire vengeance sphere. I had fortress (champions) with module to spawn neinzul. My friendly neinzul enclave carrier were in the 15 and could easily spawn enough neinzul to kill a hunter/killer mk1. The trouble was not that bad at first. I expected them to show up anyway and decide to have some fun. It was not until much much later that dark spire vengeance start to kill "everything" that the trouble really started.

At that point they had enough roaming ships to essentially locked me down in Swoverko. I could not get a command station start up in Murdoch to get the friendly enclave carrier move over there.

Also notice how everything I scouted were all on alerted? Heheh. None of them were on alert from anything I had. What I had in those area were scouts only.

I would say roughly 99% of those were dark spire vengeance ships roaming and knocking on the AI's homeworld (already cleaned out the mk 4 system next door). You can see me scouting and seem like the only place that remain almost untouched by this swarm is bottom left branch as my scout can't go past the tachyon station there.

Why did I put my chokehold there in Swoverko and not Murdoch? Funny story that. Notice how some of the branch in my corner in the bottom right all were THREE hops exactly across Laslovgor to Swoverko except for two branchs?

Well to min-max my territory for spire cities. I put them the following systems: Dintune and Gicitio and Swoverko. See how the hops from Dintune and Giocitio fall exactly on third hop at swoverko so I could make use of my fallen spire cities on the chokehold. Spire cities need to be 3 hops apart and it just happens that map layout like this allow me to put lot of cities behind a chokehold or two.

Lesson learned NEVER ever ever make a dark spire vengeance system a chokcehold FOR any sane reason ever!

[chemical_art]

Lesson learned NEVER ever ever make a dark spire vengeance system a chokcehold FOR any sane reason ever!

When they first came out they were strong enough to wipe a 10/10 AI which made things more manageable. Of course you (the player) had to manage to outlast what the AI could not, but the payout was amazing.

[Vyndicu]

Lesson learned NEVER ever ever make a dark spire vengeance system a chokcehold FOR any sane reason ever!

When they first came out they were strong enough to wipe a 10/10 AI which made things more manageable. Of course you (the player) had to manage to outlast what the AI could not, but the payout was amazing.

In my game they were strong enough to actually prevent nearly ALL exo-wave/CPA and the likes from reaching my chokehold at all. So in effectively they manage to neuter any dangerous from AI itself heh. It was rare for a minor faction in my game to do that in any shape or form. Of course fallen spire campaign is an exception.

[Captain Jack]

So my social media work is about ready to start coming. We'll be scheduling it ahead of time which certainly won't come back to haunt me at all. 

Before that gets started, can I ask another favor? Can anyone name content or mechanics that were introduced in the expansions that made their way back to the base game?

I also need the major game changing mechanics changes.  I already have things like "remove crystal" and "hacking" and "per planet turrets". CSGs I guess?

[tadrinth]

You're looking for stuff that was a big deal but wasn't listed as a major feature of a new expansion, yeah?

I skimmed back through the patch notes to the 5.0 release, here's the big stuff that jumped out:

Salvage and reprisal were big changes to the base game. 

There was the great 'Divide health and damage by 100' change.

There have been MULTIPLE iterations of the 'homeworld assault counter-exo' mechanic; didn't exist, then launched exos whenever a core guard post died, then launched those exos but from the attacked AI homeworld, then the current system is that you have 10 mins to kill the homeworld once you start or a BIG exo launches.

Champions got a new champion-nemesis exogalactic strike force response, as well as threat and defending nemesis responses.  And an alternate progression mechanic, which is hugely popular for people that have played the same nine nebulas 800 times.

Carriers got totally overhauled; now if you damage a carrier, it damages the ships inside, and if the carrier is empty it despawns.  That's a HUGE improvement over the old version where a dying carrier would merge its carried ships into... interesting things to avoid the ship count on the current planet getting too high.  Oh, and carriers do more damage the more ships they contain.

Bullheaded targeting: carriers and some other things go straight for your fortresses and command stations, ignoring everything else.

Threat logic: the AI is now very sneaky about attacking you when your military force is far away or occupied in battle, or if your planets are already under attack. 

Warheads got changed from 'X damage to everything within range' to 'X damage total, capped at Y damge per target', and you also can only build one per minute.  That was a huuuge balance improvement.  By which I mean, a nerf to Kahuna and various other masters who were otherwise unstoppable. 

Reinforcement and wave logic were both heavily overhauled; they're both now based on strength budgets which accumulate over time, reinforcements track debt per planet, at high AIP reinforcement strength gets redirected to waves which is freaking terrifying, etc.

Golems got rebalanced (no more attrition, gigantic buffs).  Spirecraft also got tweaked; siege towers and ion blasters became oversized plasma siege starships and translocating spire railclusters, which are both amazing to have on your side.

Special Forces got Riot Control Starships (and there was *much* gnashing of teeth).  Somehow, this is Faulty Logic's fault, even though he didn't inspire this on purpose. 

Astro trains got totally overhauled and are a colossal pain in the ass now. 

Map untangling!

Batch auto explore for scouts (also auto-explore and auto-pick behaviors). 

Enclave Starships went through a bunch of overhauls. 

Planets got ship-type preferences to increase planet 'feel' variety (AI Reinforcement Focus).

AIs unlock particular guardians like they do fleet ships, rather than just having access to all of them, increasing variety between games.

Motherfreaking CPA + Exo + Wave synchronization: if a CPA launches, any Exos that are 60% charged will *also* launch at the same time, and any waves that are sufficiently charged will try to launch 90s after the CPA.  Oh, and CPAs now launch in carriers. 

Roaming Enclaves were revamped to be a smart, coherent fleet that you can give high-level directives to; these guys are like having a friendly player around that can act independently and sensibly enough to be a major asset.

Back in the day, the ships in waves were all the current tech level of the AI; then it was changed so that they gradually transition to the next higher mark to avoid suddenly difficulty spikes in waves. 

Various AI mechanics got added at some point, before my time:
* Deepstrike mechanic: if you send ships too deep into AI territory, it spawns threat to discourage such behavior.
* Strategic reserve: the AI has a reserve of strength it can use to spawn ships to defend important worlds that come under attack, especially the homeworlds. Always has spiders, and as of the most recent expansion, it also always has Powerslavers.
* Special Forces: hangs out in AI territory and rushes to defend AI planets that come under attack
* Threat-fleet: freed AI ships that can't find a good way to hit the player will back off into a single coherent fleet and wait for an opening

The energy system got reworked from some horrendously complicated system to 'every planet gets 150k energy' + 'matter converters give 50k energy but -200 metal/s'. 

A bunch of minor factions got changed to have intensity sliders instead of just being on/off. 

'Helper' player type was added, so you can add a friend mid-game and have them help coordinate ships but not add any extra units to the game (basically an observer that can have shared unit control).

Do you want things that are always-on if you have that expansion enabled? Things like:

Coprocessors, the Superterminal, Core Turret Controllers, Dire Guardian Lairs, Spire Archives, all the 'brutal' core guard posts.