Author Topic: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"  (Read 8401 times)

Offline keith.lamothe

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AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« on: March 28, 2018, 08:18:55 pm »
Release notes here!

This one takes another big step towards beta.

1) The biggest individual area of changes is the defensive game. Thanks to community feedback (especially chemical_art and Badger) we realized that waves were actually too close together (a big change from how it used to be) and turrets were both not advertising themselves well and a bit underpowered for their task of generally keeping waves out of your hair so you don't have to pull your mobile fleet back. Unless you're in a really intense situation, of course.

Now turrets are a lot beefier :)

That said, with the new power-distribution-network on every planet, it's much easier to undercut the power of a big pile of turrets if the defender is not stopping attackers at the door. This goes for both the humans and the AI.

2) Some key changes were made to AIP growth and Threat behavior to make it easier for special factions like the Nanocaust to do their thing and make a ruckus, without the AI taking out its frustrations on a lone unrelated human outpost (i.e. you) clear on the other side of the galaxy.

3) There are also several improvements from Badger (Autosave, Cumulative hacking responses, a bunch of bugfixes). Thanks, Badger!

Enjoy!
Keith
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Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« Reply #1 on: March 28, 2018, 09:31:56 pm »
I enabled the Dyson Sphere. it promptly antagonized the other ships on the planet, which set off to fight me. I fear there's something wrong with your fix in this area.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« Reply #2 on: March 29, 2018, 05:17:42 am »
I enabled the Dyson Sphere. it promptly antagonized the other ships on the planet, which set off to fight me. I fear there's something wrong with your fix in this area.
Evidently there is something wrong, yes. I tested that specific case several times and the AI ships did not come after me, so I'm not sure what's going on, but I'll have to look into it.

Did the AI ships show up in the Threat total, or did they just show up to attack you? Did they actually reach you?
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Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« Reply #3 on: March 29, 2018, 08:42:15 am »
They did not show up in the Threat. They just flew over and attacked me.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« Reply #4 on: March 29, 2018, 11:33:31 am »
They did not show up in the Threat. They just flew over and attacked me.
Did you actually see these units leave a planet with dyson units on it and sail all the way over to you? I have seen something that looks like an early unannounced wave spawning, but there's not time for them to have come all the way from the dyson, so I'm trying to make sure that what you're seeing isn't that.
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Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« Reply #5 on: March 29, 2018, 11:51:26 am »
I enabled All Vision and then watched the units fly from the Dyson Sphere planet to my planet.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« Reply #6 on: March 29, 2018, 01:10:31 pm »
How inconsiderate of them.

Thanks for the info :)
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Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« Reply #7 on: March 29, 2018, 02:30:49 pm »
Here's a save game where you can watch it happen. I picked a random map (simple), changed my starting location, enabled Dyson with intensity 8 or so and then watched.

Offline chemical_art

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Re: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« Reply #8 on: March 30, 2018, 01:23:50 pm »
Notes:

Autosave was set for every one 1 minute, not 10 at startup.

Having the tooltips show the ship characteristics rather then the group characteristics is more straightforward which is nice. But trying to multiply values by 120, 240, and 400 for quick math hurts.

When control groups are set it shows squad number instead of total number of ships which is great! I still wish this was done rather then the total number of ships on the right side. Of course Keith's idea is still the superior idea and am looking forward to it.

Is there a menu to find key bindings? Wanted to do group moves but my memory "Of click + g" wasn't right. But then I couldn't find a keybind list to investigate...

First planet is still a tough nut to crack. But now that I have been shown how to properly speed up time it is not as breaking for testing. Still needs work before release but not as critical. AI really doesn't need 40 turrets on it...why have turrets at all on mk I worlds? AH! Yes the buffed turrets are the culprit. Just reduce them on mk i and II worlds.


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Offline chemical_art

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Re: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« Reply #9 on: March 30, 2018, 01:37:36 pm »
Ship tooltips do not appear when mousing over them. I have to hover over the right hand side ship list to get any info.

Turret tooltip does not all make clear that they get updated as tech increases. I heard in passing the same happens with fleetships? No idea such a thing could happen in game.

The new resource buildings being spread so widely, combined with a lack of planet wide weaponry, makes units that cloak very easy to infiltrate and raid economic buildings. Short of dragging the fleet back to deal with them a player has no recourse. Very frustrating.

Can't say I'm a current fan of the meta of having a ship that can almost reproduce your fleet instantly on the go from minute one. Such a thing was possible in AIW 1 but required a large tech investment and was a mid to late game tech that was pretty specialized. In AIW 1 having it from the start is steering the game pretty hard in a certain tactical direction. Not sure if it is the best course of action.
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Offline chemical_art

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Re: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« Reply #10 on: March 30, 2018, 01:48:53 pm »
Starships in general have too little hp. A siege starship has 10x the health of a single missile frigate, or less then 10% of its hp as a cap limit.

Wait, or is that side bar showing squad strength, because if it is individually based then it claims fighters have a 2.4 mil hp cap? With them doing 880 dps? The numbers are not adding up. Very confusing.

Regardless, starships are all paper tigers with seemingly good hp but die from a sneeze.

That early bug of tooltips not showing up? It happens if I am in the "system" menu. If I back out using ESC to "menu" then it returns.

Since AI gates no longer have AIP then by default all waves will need to be balanced assuming a player has to defend one wormhole, since it is logical that a player always does that.
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Offline chemical_art

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Re: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« Reply #11 on: March 30, 2018, 01:58:29 pm »
It is currently not possible to add ships to a control group from a different planet, since the camera jumps to it.

Due to all high build speeds it is possible to go from 900k to 0 quickly, then go back to millions within 10 minutes. The numbers jump so much that values such as metal gathering feel meaningless. There is no need to consider an economy build that you might from AIW 1.

Combine the strong economy, the rapid and convenient building, and the general over all 2-3x enemy strength on enemy worlds I face no repercussions to sledgehammer attrition warfare. There is no need to have a neinzul style unit, you can do tactics like that with triangle ships with no tech investment.

Research feels more constrained. Needing to capture two worlds to get a MK II ship feels grindy. I know that MK I ships upgrade to II's but at first glance it feels a bit tough.


---End of game 4---
« Last Edit: March 30, 2018, 02:09:16 pm by chemical_art »
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Offline chemical_art

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Re: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« Reply #12 on: March 30, 2018, 11:36:04 pm »
To provide a conclusion to my thoughts on this update as I drift to sleep:

AIW 1 had a radar charts of sorts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart) in terms of a player strengths due to tech specialty. Things such as economic might, static defenses, time to recover, absolute offense (regardless of price), flexible forces (expendable forces that could be replaced relatively freely), and others, were factors influenced by tech and ship types and a player could never hope to do all at once so required to make choices. I have not yet hit mid game so cannot tell if such a thing for certain but from first impressions I feel like AIW 2 will have a more streamlined path in terms of this direction. A LOT of this is due to the fact this game does not have 5 - 8 dlc's backing it up. But I hope an awareness of this fact can be brought to bear as future considerations are done.
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Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« Reply #13 on: March 31, 2018, 01:49:46 pm »
Starships in general have too little hp. A siege starship has 10x the health of a single missile frigate, or less then 10% of its hp as a cap limit.

Wait, or is that side bar showing squad strength, because if it is individually based then it claims fighters have a 2.4 mil hp cap? With them doing 880 dps? The numbers are not adding up. Very confusing.

Regardless, starships are all paper tigers with seemingly good hp but die from a sneeze.
There were still some bugs in the numeric display, sorry. I've fixed those up for the next version, but here are the real stats (in the version you have) for the triangle and the starship types:

internal_namecap_healthvisual_thing_healthdefense_type
Fighter_Mark1120000300Evasion
Bomber_Mark1102000425Armor
MissileCorvette_Mark150000416.67Structure
AssaultStarship_Mark1120000120000Armor
SiegeStarship_Mark12500025000Structure
SniperStarship_Mark15000050000Structure
StealthStarship_Mark1100000100000Evasion
CarrierStarship_Mark1100000100000Structure

So, yes, the Siege Starship is made of paper. The numbers may be overly harsh, but the idea is that it's the trebuchet/catapult/etc that can mercilessly hammer anything in its (long) range, but if enemy troops ever get in striking range of your trebuchet you can expect to have a pile of wood splinters pretty soon.

Put another way: in practice, is the Assault Starship also made of paper?

If you want to try "things die slower" go to GameData/Configuration/ExternalConstants/KDL_VanillaConstants.xml and change the value of

balance_seconds_per_efficient_fight="7.5"

to, say, 15.

All DPS numbers are based on that, and the current value means "1 cap of X can kill 1 cap of Y in 7.5 seconds if X's weapon is good against Y's defense, and X and Y both have the 'Normal' durability class".


Research feels more constrained. Needing to capture two worlds to get a MK II ship feels grindy. I know that MK I ships upgrade to II's but at first glance it feels a bit tough.
Planets have different levels of science, so it depends on the planet. Some give enough for a MkII and some extra to spare.

If you want to try it with more generous planets you can go to that same file and change:

balance_planet_resource_multipliers="2,1.5,1,1"

to, say, "2.5,2,1.5,1"

That would make the best-science planets (including your starting planet) give 2500 science, the second-tier ones give 2000, the third-tier ones 1,500, and the worst-science planets 1,000.

This would also increase metal/fuel/power/hacking gathering, so potentially I'll need to split that out, but it's still useful for testing.


There is no need to consider an economy build that you might from AIW 1.
If you hit metal-starvation in the middle of battle your effectiveness drops radically due to the inability to effiicently replace fleet-ship losses. So having a solid econ allows you to win fights you would otherwise lose.

Or are you finding that your income is staying positive in the middle of a big fight?


Quote
Things such as economic might, static defenses, time to recover, absolute offense (regardless of price), flexible forces (expendable forces that could be replaced relatively freely), and others, were factors influenced by tech and ship types and a player could never hope to do all at once so required to make choices. I have not yet hit mid game so cannot tell if such a thing for certain but from first impressions I feel like AIW 2 will have a more streamlined path in terms of this direction.
There's still a big difference between putting lots of science into turrets vs starships vs fleet ships.

I also want to switch from having the resource-converter buildings to just having a line of techs each for Metal, Fuel, and Power output, but that's not being done right away.


Quote
Combine the strong economy, the rapid and convenient building, and the general over all 2-3x enemy strength on enemy worlds I face no repercussions to sledgehammer attrition warfare. There is no need to have a neinzul style unit, you can do tactics like that with triangle ships with no tech investment.
Yes, they are much more like Neinzul, except without the fiddly self-attrition. And it takes more econ to sustain full output of them.

In general the idea is that they're the expendable units, and thus very different from starships.

The reprecussion you would normally face from attrition warfare is that your attack takes too long to succeed and the Warden Fleet shows up to shut you down. But the Wardens were nerfed heavily and repeatedly in the past month or so (especially for the early game, because they were stonewalling the player), so you may just not have run into them much.

On the subject of build time, you can try slowing down that initial prototype flagship's build queue by changing (in GameEntity/KDL_Ships_Starships.xml) :

<metal_flow purpose="BuildingShipsInternally" balance_planets_worth_of_metal_throughput="5" />

to 1 or 2

The current thing means "the prototype flagship can completely consume 5 average planets' worth of metal output".


Quote
Such a thing was possible in AIW 1 but required a large tech investment and was a mid to late game tech that was pretty specialized. In AIW 1 having it from the start is steering the game pretty hard in a certain tactical direction. Not sure if it is the best course of action.
I guess the basic question is: what would you prefer? There seem to be a few basic options for times when you attack against significant resistance:

1) You take losses, slowing down the rate at which you're destroying the enemy, until either you win or just run out of units (or retreat).

2) You take losses, but you're frequently switching your view to an adjacent planet to round up reinforcements built there and send them in.

3) You take losses, but you've got construction facilities on an adjacent planet replacing your losses and sending them to the target planet (via Rally; AIW2 currently has rally-to-control-group but not rally-to-planet).

4) You take losses, but you've got construction facilities on the target planet replacing your losses.


Quote
Is there a menu to find key bindings?
Not in-game yet, but PlayerData/inputmappings.dat (or something like that) has them all.


Got it on cutting the AI turrets on Mk1/Mk2 planets.
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Offline chemical_art

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Re: AI War 2 v0.716 Released! "Activating Mk4 Grinding Machine"
« Reply #14 on: March 31, 2018, 02:48:40 pm »
Thank you Keith, that last posting style was filled with a lot of comments. I noticed the time table we are running on is getting short so I'm trying to dump as much data I can for you to read. It isn't neatly written and I know can be a chore to read but I feel the need to just give you many data points and have you decide which are most important rather then me zero in on a single point and explain it thoroughly. I can do the latter if that helps you more but I notice I'm the only one give these broad impressions so I feel I should just give many raw feelings rather then refined nuanced singular feelings

It's the weekend so I don't think me at the moment spitting out more data for the very valid questions you bring up will do a lot of good. I'll let them incubate a day and try to push them out Sunday evening so you can read them Monday morning.
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