The AI could be tactically stupid even in the first game. The most obvious offender tactic is to have one of your planets with many turrets destroyed by the A.I.; all you need to stall even a huge fleet is to keep sending new remain rebuilders from the nearby planet and micromanage them to keep rebuilding the turrets, easy to do especially if you built the sniper ones all around the planet "border". I used this tactic to massive effect to gain enough time to replenish my warhead stockpiles and deal with several attacks which were otherwise too massive for my defenses to handle. Not sure how much of this is due to the lack of advanced unit types, though.
Ugh, that sounds like really annoying micro.
I see that engineers and remain rebuilders are back in the game; for the love of God, either replace them with the new planetary controller or allow them to be automatically rebuilt even if the planet is under attack. By far the most annoying thing in the whole campaign was the micromanaging of the rebuilding of those two units during a planetary defense. Or maybe flat out forbid them to be rebuilt and/or warped in from a nearby planet during an attack; this will block cheese tactics like mine above, but note it will also make defense much harder.
Keeping all the units at the latest rank is an easy win over the first game.
The problem with this removing civilian units like that from the game is that it isn't clear how much logistics that drops out of the game. (see comment from .hawk.) And then trying to figure out a new system to give the same depth to replace them with would be a gamble. And we found it that it didn't necessarily block those cheese tactics since the planetary controller was rebuilding turrets and causing the attacking AI to keep retreating to destroy them.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I dislike having engineers/rebuilders as well. I hate to say "wait for them to be reimplemented and then make good points to remove them again or make them less annoying", but I think that's the only option on the table (from my understanding).
The revert to the gazillion hull and weapon types is, I think, a mistake. On paper having a hugely complex rock-paper-scissor subsystem is good, but in practice, it will get ignored the instant it becomes unmanageable due to the lower cap between player skill's and game controls' abilities to actually use it to your advantage. I didn't even try to start fiddling around with ship and turret types and just went straight to "build as much of every type as you can and throw everything at the A.I" stage. Maybe an advisor of some kind which tells you the most prevalent A.I. hull types observed so far and which units/turrets kill them most easily?
I dislike this too, but we were finding other problems with the 3 or 4 type rock paper scissors approach. Having only 3 types makes it easier for the player to see and exploit the relations, but classic RTS controls are not well designed to implement this that level of control (especially not with hundreds of units with 7 or more types). So we could have a legible number of defenses and incentivize people fighting against the control scheme, have a legible number of defenses and risk implementing a new control scheme that might not work/be liked, or revert back to an illegible number of defenses. Sure, the most masochistic of players will still take the AIWC defenses and control scheme and micro them into effectiveness but I can't think of a solution that isn't a gamble and at least that isn't worse off than AIWC.
Now, your idea of an advisor... perhaps a science advisor that is recommending you build X and Y type ships because the AI is predominantly building A and B ships is interesting. I'm afraid it might end up being bad advice because perhaps the player just hasn't seen enough AI ships yet or maybe those ships aren't the ones the player should be worried about, but I think it's worth exploring for post-fun-point. Any suggestions on how to implement?
Rally points for ships being built from a mobile dock. Pretty please?
The current plan is everything that builds uses the same interface, so they should still be able to get rally points.
I know that I sound like a broken record here, but fleet build caps specific for control groups would make waging a multi-front war so much easier for the player.
Yeah, I know. One of the two design proposals for dealing with the rock-paper-scissors effect discussed above was exactly that, turning control groups into discrete fleets that you slowly accumulate as you pick up flagships/golems through the game (each flagship or golem was its own fleet, plus it might be able to build a certain amount of escorting fleet ships, starships were buff ships a fleet could equip). The intended play was to fly each fleet as a unit, although you could split the fleet up and select individual fleetships if necessary in a fight (but ships that left formation lost their buffs, so you better have had a good reason). It was a very cool idea, but a significant departure from AI War and a risk to implement and test (possibly to find out it wasn't fun) at this stage in the game.
Turret caps used to be galaxy-wide and became planet-wide in AIWC several expansions in. Who knows, per-fleet caps might come some day too (or the other, more tactical proposal).
