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[RockyBst]

I'm just getting to the endgame stage of this diff 9 run now, going to cap a cursed golem and a spire ship, maybe an archive, then I'll be rolling up on the homeworld with ~200AIP (and 180AIP floor...). This should be fun.

Got to say, I am loving the outguard changes. It fits really well with my play style, and it's something that makes up for lacking martyrs/warheads if I need to go nuke my way through a few hundred strength worth of ships. I also tend to scrabble around for every single bit of AIP reduction I can, so getting six fleets off base rather than reduced AIP is great.



This battle here for instance, it's nice to be able to dump 200 strengths worth of reinforcements right where they're needed. My only concern is that they can make cheesing away instigators / data centres a little too easy. Drop a bunch of automated shredders on a planet miles away, instigator vanishes. Cause a bit of a distraction with some hydras or Lobar, then drop in some war siegers (that you control), and that data centre on the other side of the galaxy explodes nicely.

The neutering changes sounds interesting, I've got a lot of planets in my current game with 100 strength just due to 999+ ships sitting in the home command station. However I've also seen a lot of ships just kind of hanging around without being part of the threat fleet, so I don't really know what's going on there. For instance a world on one of my borders tends to accumulate 300+ strength just sitting next to the wormhole but not tagged as threat or anything else.

[x4000]

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..

The changes I made were based on the testing that we had done.  Essentially if someone had neutered a planet with 4 guard posts and then still had the command station there, then the cap was 1/6, or 20%.

Planets are intentionally growing far faster than before, but generally that's spread out and you can approach things piecemeal.  Planets that are next to you also grow more frequently in general, because of the equivalent of border aggression, and those are your most  likely neutering targets.  These planets would get annoyingly full of ships despite being neutered.  Not enough to be truly dangerous, but enough to feel like you didn't accomplish nice.

One of my goals with the way that reinforcements happen now is to make it so that, yes indeed, if you leave a planet for hours and hours it gets absolutely insane now.  Particularly if it borders you.  But now, with these changes, even partial neutering of nearby planets can have a major impact and undo that.  And if you completely neuter the planet, it is basically helpless, indeed.  Again that was the goal: skeleton crew left, if that.

I'm not sold that the math won't ever change, but thus far this seems to be the right direction.

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.

That's kind of a generalized observation, but it really depends on what we're talking about.  In most cases (what I assume you're referring to), these were multipliers unrelated to a specific ship.  But things like "planet gets more budget" as a multiplier on higher marks, but costs not increasing, and "ship strength goes up by a multiplier on higher mark levels" as well.  Those two things had an exponential interaction, but part of the reason we didn't catch that sooner is that they aren't really related in the code in any sort of direct fashion.  One was talking about planets and their budgets, the other talking about ships, and it had an unintended consequence.

For most other things the interactions are more clear and we try and tease out the sort of forces that players can get, but it doesn't always give perfect answers.  In general we're trying to do what you're suggesting, though; there are some cases where we run into unexpected other cases, etc, but it's not the norm usually.

[tadrinth]

One of my goals with the way that reinforcements happen now is to make it so that, yes indeed, if you leave a planet for hours and hours it gets absolutely insane now.  Particularly if it borders you.  But now, with these changes, even partial neutering of nearby planets can have a major impact and undo that.  And if you completely neuter the planet, it is basically helpless, indeed.

Okay, so it sounds crazy because that's the goal. =)  Happy to play around with it, then. 

Does AIP not increase with time any more?  I didn't see anything about that.  That mechanic always stressed me out so I'm not terribly sad if it goes away in favor of time pressure from reinforcements and other softer mechanics. 

Personally, in AIWC I started using friendly Neinzul Roaming Enclaves a lot.  They were pretty good at clearing out accumulating reinforcements on neutered AI worlds.  I'd been sort of planning to see how friendly Human Marauders did at this, but for people that don't want to play with them enabled, this seems like a better solution. 

That's kind of a generalized observation, but it really depends on what we're talking about. 

Sorry, that comment was actually about an entirely different topic!  It was about the 'funny story' from https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_The_Grand_New_AI#Balance_Tweaks_4

Puffin's example, as he was the one to realize this:
MK1 Pike Corvette does 45 damage, 3x to high armour, 2x to high hull remaining, for...270 damage.
MK6 is 189 damage, 5.5x to high armour, 3.5x to high hull remaining, for...3,638.
As he put it, "I feel like I know where the "late game is easier than early" problem is."

I don't think the issue there is damage multipliers scaling with mark (though that's also bad), but that the damage multipliers scale with each other. 

I would suggest instead making it so that Pike Corvettes get 3x damage to high armor OR 2x to high hull remaining, but never both at the same time.  Then even if the damage multipliers are a bit higher, you never wind up in crazyland. 

planet gets more budget" as a multiplier on higher marks, but costs not increasing, and "ship strength goes up by a multiplier on higher mark levels" as well. 

That seems... weird?  Is the AI not buying ships based on their strength?  Like, if a Mark I ship is one strength and costs 1 strength for the AI to buy, and a Mark IV ship is 4 strength and costs 4 strength to buy, then you don't have to worry about those things interacting.  You just make the Mark IV planet get X% more reinforcement budget, based on how hard you want it to be, and then just make it only buy Mark IV ships.  If it's only supposed to be 3x as hard as a Mark I planet, but its stuff costs 4x as much, then it'll have fewer ships than the Mark I planet, but that seems fine.

[RocketAssistedPuffin]

There was such a note. The unit in question was a Pike Corvette, which has 3x bonus versus armour of 90 or more, and 2x bonus if target had at least 75% hull left, at Mark 1.

It was a problem in general, not specific to any one unit, but some were indeed rather extreme. Far as I know these are the only units with more than one bonus multiplier:

Pike Units (3x to armour of 90 or more, 2x if target has 75% hull left)
Aggressor (5x to Engine gx of 14 or more, 3x if target has been here for less than 9s)
Tripper (8x if target moving at speed 1000 or more, 3x to Engine gx of 14 or more)
Ramifier (8x to albedo of 0.3 or less, 5x to mass of 5tx or more)
Ram (2x to armour of 40 or less, 5x to mass of 5tx or more)

Of those, Pikes are fairly universal, Aggressors are time limited, Trippers have half the damage of Snipers and so if I recall only go to about 50% stronger if both apply. Ramifiers are...the most extreme case, but I don't recall too many units that fit both - higher mass units tend to have 0.4 albedo or more. I think there's a few Guardians and Guard Posts that are applicable, which might be a problem actually. Rams...I can't think of anything that fits both.

Ramifiers, Rams and Trippers are all copies_of their parent units (Tritium Frigates, Auto Bombs and Snipers respectively), and until recently I believe, it wasn't possible to remove or modify an existing damage bonus, so I had to work with what the parent had. Trippers were originally meant to be an even more extreme variant of Snipers, with worse damage but ridiculously high bonus, but that caused...well, 8x and 20x modifiers, so they got turned into their current form.

So...essentially I can remove it from most of those units with little incident, if required/desired. I would need to redo Aggressors I think (Agravic Pod variant), if done.

[tadrinth]

I did finally track down the note!  I edited my comment accordingly.

I wouldn't change those units; I'd change how bonuses interact.

[RocketAssistedPuffin]

That seems... weird?  Is the AI not buying ships based on their strength?  Like, if a Mark I ship is one strength and costs 1 strength for the AI to buy, and a Mark IV ship is 4 strength and costs 4 strength to buy, then you don't have to worry about those things interacting.  You just make the Mark IV planet get X% more reinforcement budget, based on how hard you want it to be, and then just make it only buy Mark IV ships.  If it's only supposed to be 3x as hard as a Mark I planet, but its stuff costs 4x as much, then it'll have fewer ships than the Mark I planet, but that seems fine.

There's "ai_cost_to_purchase" set on units that it can have. This doesn't scale with Mark, so it costs the same for a MK1 V-Wing and MK7 V-Wing. I recall this was done in the Fleets update, as it used to be based on strength. Here's more info on that from Chris in the relevant update.

https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_The_Arrival_of_Fleets#Costs_For_AIs_Purchasing_Things

[x4000]

Does AIP not increase with time any more?  I didn't see anything about that.  That mechanic always stressed me out so I'm not terribly sad if it goes away in favor of time pressure from reinforcements and other softer mechanics.

No, I don't think it ever has in this game.  Or if it does, it's super slow.  We have the Risk Analyzers or Instigators to give the same effect but in a way that is preventable, IIRC.  Because some people want time pressure, but AIP as the time pressure driver gets stressful as you say.

The reinforcements and other soft mechanics like that are meant to give some light time pressure, but not something that is irreversible like AIP can be.  That being a thing in AIWC was something I enjoyed, and it hasn't really felt present in the prior builds of AIW2 because the planets all started so close to their caps (halfway there) and then would max out their cap and just sit there.  So now their starting percentage is lower, but can go much higher, but you can limit them even more harshly.  Hopefully it's in the vicinity of good balance, and the beta testers seemed to enjoy it (though the neutering being extra-effective was not tested by them; they were still complaining about a fully-neutered planet getting too many reinforcements, hence my change).

That seems... weird?  Is the AI not buying ships based on their strength?  Like, if a Mark I ship is one strength and costs 1 strength for the AI to buy, and a Mark IV ship is 4 strength and costs 4 strength to buy, then you don't have to worry about those things interacting.  You just make the Mark IV planet get X% more reinforcement budget, based on how hard you want it to be, and then just make it only buy Mark IV ships.  If it's only supposed to be 3x as hard as a Mark I planet, but its stuff costs 4x as much, then it'll have fewer ships than the Mark I planet, but that seems fine.

Strength is a funky concept that sometimes is overly high based on something that is tanky but not very strong, etc.  So we needed a way to budget with an "ai cost" same as ships have a "metal cost" on the player side, and those are both separate from strength.  Some things are a better deal than others on both ends, etc.  But more often than not the ai cost is just identical to strength.

The reason for higher-mark ships not costing more is... that's how it is on the player side, too.  You pay no more metal for a mark 7 bomber than you do a mark 1 bomber.  It's just a better bomber because of the tech it has, and your payment was in science.

For the AI, they have budgets per-planet, as well as an overall budget for some other purposes, and they can only use the budgets from a certain number of planets at once.  They are intentionally ignorant of what would yield the most strength, and instead reinforce and choose budgets based on strategic proximity to you and similar factors.  This in some ways gets back to the  whole "sub commander" idea, in that each planet has its own level of tech, type of ships it can build, types of ships in its waves, budget, budget cap based on partial or full neutering, and so on.  The central AI control is intentionally in the dark about the details of each planet's bonuses or penalties, and you can cause the AI to be wasteful by aggroing low-level planets that are mostly neutered but not yet at cap, for instance.  These same ideas, implemented slightly differently, were present in AIWC from 1.0 and before.