Cheers guys. Very brief notes:
1. In terms of having AIs actually plop down permanent expiditionary forces over near you, they already have some capacity for doing that, but they do it rarely and usually more like the middle of the road between their place and yours. I think the rarity there is a good thing.
2. Re: combined arms still having a lot of trouble and the AI not making optimal decisions, a lot of that comes down to having a design at present that is not AI-friendly. We could chase AI problems all year by making a game that is ill-suited to AIs. That not only eats up dev time, but it will create increasingly long interturns. The solution is to create modifications to balance that make both players and AIs equally suited to combat. You've given me some interesting food for thought with ranges on things there. The inability to move into range does make range incredibly paramount, which I hadn't fully anticipated despite being in a number of fights myself. That is interesting.
3. Re: fighting in general, my goal is to give a MAJOR home field advantage to everyone, including you. An attack is generally not the sort of thing that should take over an enemy civilization and raze them to the ground, except sometimes when the Thoraxians or Spire do it. Or in other various circumstances. Rather, an attack is Really Messing Things Up. It's one more thing to manage, like trash or disease, in your empire building game. The balance in fighting is so incredibly far right now from what I want it to be that it doesn't remotely resemble the above, which is part of what I was talking about in my original post. The new 0.821 actually brings things a lot closer, but anyhow.
4. Given the extreme home field advantages, that should lead to two things:
1) The AI doing raids on you and each other with saucers and other things, and making a mess, leading to temporary setbacks and other empire-building issues that are relevant but not in themselves game ending. Think Sieges in Dwarf Fortress in a lot of respects. It really messes up your plans for a while, and can be the start or the middle of a generalized death spiral. But one on its own is not an immediate gg.
2) You attacking the AI is
hard, and you're having to use all of your wits to really solve the combined arms puzzle that is at an enemy city if you want to do more than damage it. If you really want to capture it or destroy it, you're going to have a fairly lengthy siege with incremental movement forward, etc.
5. Note that the above in #4 has always been my goal, but the balance was not something I could ever really address because the AI wasn't in the right place for that, etc. As it is, the AI prioritizes doing stuff to mess you up when it attacks you, rather than stuff that is immediately going to lead to the survivability of its attack. I've shifted that to a more balanced approach in this coming release, which will make the AI more effective and unpredictable in some good ways, I think.
6. This is fascinating in terms of the specific things it brings up:
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,17467.0.html-- I haven't had time to digest it yet, but I will think about it some. I see that as mostly closing some exploits in the form of some things I never thought to do, and some of that might involve some turn order shifts in terms of when what happens, etc, yep.
7. Blast panels protect buildings that are under them. I originally thought there would be a lot more of those on your side, but I wound up moving away from that because I wanted the player empire to be more visible on the surface and the AI stuff to be a mixture of visible and hidden. So the design shifted slightly to be what it is now, but yet blast panels remain in a functional but semi-pointless manner. I think they do need to be repurposed, and ideas on that are quite welcome! Or they just need to be removed, which is also fine. It's not like the game is small without them.
