Please help us test beta AI War 2 v1.1, now out on Steam!

[x4000]

The really awesome and huge new beta for AI War 2 v1.1 is now out on Steam: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_The_Grand_New_AI#BETA_Version_1.1_So_Much_Stuff_We_Can.27t_Even.2C_But_More_Is_Still_Coming  Help testing that before we move into pushing that into a fully-released v1.3 release would be super welcome.  There are definitely still some bugbears we are aware of, but the game is getting next-level better in a bunch of ways.  So much is evolving in a good way that we really need tester feedback.

[tadrinth]

Hrm, I can't find the Advanced: Run Massively Parallel Faction Processing option.  I don't have an advanced tab under personal or galaxy settings.

[BadgerBadger]

It should be under your local settings in a new "Performance" section. It's not a galaxy setting

[x4000]

Ah yes, it's the performance section in personal, not advanced.  Sorry for the confusion!

[tadrinth]

Whoops, was not in the beta branch.

Started up a game with a bunch of minor factions, first planet had something like 25 strength on by the time I built my basic fleet.  That seems a bit excessive.

Suggestion:  make OMDs die to remains that the AI cannot rebuild (except when reconquering) but that you can capture.  Then it doesn't matter if they're targeted by minor factions.  Not sure how rebuilding from remains works in AIW2, but in Classic, very expensive units (mostly fortresses) would be rebuilt from remains at 1% health to avoid cheese, instead of the usual 50% health.  Might need to apply that here if OMDs still have ludicrous metal costs at the trader.

[Ovalcircle]

"Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers that the player either hacked or bought now die to remains."

https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_The_Grand_New_AI#Balance_Tweaks

[tadrinth]

From latest notes:

Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers will now be automatically targeted by units again, but are set to a low priority.
They still seem to like shooting these first however, if they happen to be in the way.
This lets factions destroy these again rather than being shot to bits, ignoring them

If a faction kills an OMD before you get to it, you can't capture it.  If it died to remains, you could later take the planet and rebuild it.  Maybe that's too friendly to the player.

[tadrinth]

Any chance we could get the cap DPS and HP in the detailed tooltip?  Would help with comparing ship lines, especially when trying to decide what to get at an ARS.

[RockyBst]

I'm liking some of these changes, although currently I seem to be getting a whole heap more dire guardians spawning on low tier planets than I'm used to. That might just be the 'random' AI type I selected though, I was expecting to actually choose one at random and tell me rather than just being listed as 'random'.

Other random comments:

- Did you know you can cheese the command station fleets? Build a MK4 military station, swap it to economy and even if you haven't unlocked MK4 economy you get a MK4 economy station.
- Not entirely sure how I feel about the removal of command station XP. Probably makes sense and means you don't have to keep checking back to see if you can build more stuff, but also removes some of the 'growth' from whipping boy worlds.
- Teach a Man to Fish still seems to be getting unlocked by researching metal harvesters. Fairly sure they aren't MKVII.
- I also sometimes get in-game messages about achievements I've already unlocked being unlocked again.
- Without setting the tooltip detail to medium, you can't see what your factories are building or what ships are in a capturable fleet. I kind of feel like medium should be the default (and have changed it in my options)
- I'm liking the new Phelebotium emitter icons
- And I'm loving the outguard changes. Actually makes a lot more sense to use them now, with just an AIP cost and a recharge. Much better than desperately needing more firepower when you're naturally going to be low on metal anyway.
- My word does dropping a fleet of outguard automated shredders on a planet three hops away from mine and having them go straight to the instigator it would otherwise take me an hour to blast my way through to feel cheesy. But I love it.

[RocketAssistedPuffin]

It was changed so in the lowest detail tooltip, you can see the units of a fleet.

The Dire Guardians...they used to be a flat number, 1 on MK5, 2 on MK6, 3 on MK7, but now they're a percentage of the normal Guardian budget, and are allowed on MK4 worlds, so I imagine that's what the cause is. If it's a Royal AI, there'll be far more.

There's an option for it to say what the AI type is. Personal Settings -> HUD, at the bottom "Show Random Or Adaptive AI Type".

[RockyBst]

Cheers for that, looks like it's a one-way door master so the heavy dire guardian presence must be the new normal. Them being in the hunter fleet (either bought or due to threat -> hunter I'm not sure) makes thing interesting.

By the way, any idea what might be triggering two back-to-back (literally) reconquest waves at 400 strength each? Dumping 20,000 ships on me out of the blue seems a touch excessive...

[RocketAssistedPuffin]

Reconquests tend to be stored until it's confident of winning. I'm unsure what exactly the ratio is. Will try and find.

Are these the first ones it's tried? What settings are used? It may have simply stored up a lot of budget over time since nothing seemed viable.

[RockyBst]

Diff 9, standard settings, I had just fleet wiped on a 250 strength planet with the intention of spawning dark spire ships to clean it up.

I think these were the first recapture waves aimed at a planet I already owned, about 5 1/2 hours into the game. There had been a couple of small (~10 strength) waves to neutral planets before that. The planet they attacked was fortified to 90 strength between turrets, a battlestation and zenith trader goodies, but there were other accessible planets sitting more around 30.

I'm not complaining, I got the best part of 6,000 zombies out of it. Just interested to see if there was some sort of hitch in the logic that has gotten to 800 strength and dump it all on the strongest available planet.

Am I missing a setting to enable writing the AI decisions to file? Always used to like spelunking those logs in AIWC to see why the AI made it's decisions. Especially the hybrid logs.

E: Oh the command station thing, the bug is that it preserves the theoretical level of the last built station and applies whichever is higher between that and the actual tech to the new one. So if you have Mk 4, 2, 1 military, econ and logistics you get can build a MK4 military command. Replace it with econ, get a MK 4 econ. Replace it with logistics, get a MK 2 logistics. Replace it with military, get a MK 4 military. Replace it with logistics, get a MK 4 logistics.

[RocketAssistedPuffin]

Sounds a little much, but if it's not spent much before that point, it doesn't seem too surprising. Higher AIs are more conservative with their waves and often delay them.

For the setting - in Personal Settings you have the Debug section, though not much too useful for AI decision making. In-game though, ESC -> Debug Menu -> Tracing

Whole bunch in there. Budget Spending should let you see if it's delaying things, Independents I seem to recall is for the Hunter / Warden Fleets, and some others.

You'll need to go to the PlayerData folder in the main directory, ArcenDebugLog to see the results. I'd recommend deleting it every now and then just to clear it out.

The Command Station thing I think is on Mantis? It needs someone else to look at it, my programming ability is very limited.

[tadrinth]

Looking at the next patch: neutering a planet will reduce the reinforcements it gets by 95%.  Or, an unneutered planet gets 20x the reinforcement budget of a neutered planet.

That seems really high.  As in, that seems like way too much variance in reinforcements between an untouched planet and a neutered one.  Either the untouched planets are going to get way too many reinforcements, or neutered planets will get basically none.

I'd reverse the math and make it so that for N guard posts, each living post increases the reinforcement rate by (200% / N).  So for four guard post, they'd each at 50%, for 200% total. Then fully neutering a planet knocks off 2/3rds of its reinforcements. 

Edit: or, for a system that started with N guard posts and currently has X guard posts, strength = base * Nth-root(3)^X.   

In a related note, it sounds like if ships have more than one multiplier, the multipliers stack multiplicatively.  That's absolutely wild and I think probably not a great idea for balance.   Any time a player figures out how to combine two multipliers, that ship type is going to do as much as the rest of their fleet combined. I would make them stack at most additively, or more realistically make only the highest multiplier apply.  Either of those would be a far safer space to design ships in, and would open up a lot more interesting reasonable combinations of multipliers.