AI War 2 v0.611 Released! "The Special Forces Have Arrived (Again)"

[Draco18s]

Looks good to me!
I'd probably stay away from white and black on general principle (black would be hard to see, white might not look good)

[keith.lamothe]

Here are the colors I wound up with:

	Red
	Orange
	Gold
	Yellow
	Green
	Cyan
	Turquoise
	Electric Blue
	Blue
	Purple
	Pink
	Black
	Gunmetal
	Gray
	White
	Scarlet
	Brown
	Hunter Green
	Mauve

Some of them look pretty on-the-nose (that blue) but they're much less stark in-game due to what the colors are being put on.

More could be added in the lower-value colors and maybe a few in the low-sat colors, and possibly the main hue-line could be packed denser if I took some of them lower in value and some lower in saturation. But I think this is a decent set for now.

[keith.lamothe]

Incidentally, the hue-degree-loop is a great start, but several interesting things about color become immediately apparent. Specifically, that the "density" of color resolution varies dramatically across the hue range. 5 is massively different from 25, which is massively different from 45. But 105 is almost indistinguishable from 125; similar with 225 and 245, and 305 and 325.

So it took a lot of fine-tuning, taking a few colors down in value, and then adding a grayscale series and a few darker colors.

Btw, black and white wouldn't normally be used by the player (black is a zombie color, white is a natural-resources color) but some folks in AIWC really liked using them

[BadgerBadger]

Okay, here's a couple new tunables for the AI  The player can now tune the amount of Advanced Warning they get for incoming waves and also the wave composition.

For composition the player can choose "Homogenous" (waves are always composed of one kind of unit) and "Varied" where there can be more than one (Context.QualityRandom.Next( 1, 4 ) to be precise). The default is Varied (which is the current behaviour).

The wave warning time the choices are None (no warnings given), short, medium and long.

A request for Short wave times will pick the Min of "1 minute" or "1/4 of the duration between wave spawns"
A request for Medium wave times will pick the Min of "5 minute" or "1/2 of the duration between wave spawns"
A request for Long wave times will pick the Min of "10 minute" or the duration between wave spawns"
I have two mechanisms in case you are using more frequent waves.

Bot the time and the percentage are given as constants in the external constants file so they can be tweaked.

The additional flags don't look great in the UI yet (obviously), but they work.

[Draco18s]

Here are the colors I wound up with:


<table>
<tr height="44"><td bgcolor="#17E690" width="40"/><td>Cyan</td></tr>
<tr height="44"><td bgcolor="#16D4E5" width="40"/><td>Turquoise</td></tr>
</table>

*cough*
Switch these two names. Cyan is a "pure" color.

[FalseMyrmidon]

The new special forces faction is really cool.  It's also drastically upped the difficulty of actually taking planets.  It seems to build up such a large number of units quickly enough that the only way I can hope to take a planet is to hope around and snag one before the special forces can arrive.

Edit: Built more starships and doing much better now.

[keith.lamothe]

The new special forces faction is really cool.  It's also drastically upped the difficulty of actually taking planets.  It seems to build up such a large number of units quickly enough that the only way I can hope to take a planet is to hope around and snag one before the special forces can arrive.

Edit: Built more starships and doing much better now.

Glad the starships help

And yea, the SF largely functions to increase the urgency when you attack somewhere, even when the planet by itself couldn't hope to effectively resist you. I think it's a good way to keep those fights non-boring without having every single planet be a stone-wall in its own right.

You can use the Roamers galaxy map filter to keep an eye on where the SF is hanging out, and attack on another part of your border. Alternatively, you can set an ambush for them (figure out what wormhole they'll come through from planet X to planet Y when you attack planet Z, and be there waiting for them) to whittle down their numbers temporarily, and then attack with relative impunity.

[BadgerBadger]

I had one game where 20K strength of special forces arrived unexpectedly and taught me the true meaning of Christmas.

[FalseMyrmidon]

I had 11k roaming around stomping my attempts to take planets in my first game.  I'm guessing that something I did allowed them to snowball to that point but I'm not sure.

Clicking the Starship Constructor causes tooltips to not show when hovering over ships in the build menu.  If you bring it up by hitting B to cycle to it then the tooltips work.

[BadgerBadger]

From my reading of the code (and Keith can correct me), every so often the Special Forces will be reinforced by the AI, up to a max strength of 3x your current fleet size. This reinforcement occurs regardless of what you happen to be doing.

So if you max out your fuel you can definitely wind up with 10-20K special forces roaming around.

[keith.lamothe]

Once it hits the SF cap it redirects the extra to the next CPA, so any SF you kill has a relative slowing effect on that side.