My armies have a terrifying and debilitating fear of victory.

[keith.lamothe]

This problem is partially why I almost always try to get the acutians on my side; launching planetcrackers at those defiant planets is sadly necessary  .

The Acutians seem to be on a roll with the solutions.  Dissolve the population.  Smash the planet into distinct chunks.  Etc.

[Draco18s]

This problem is partially why I almost always try to get the acutians on my side; launching planetcrackers at those defiant planets is sadly necessary  .

The Acutians seem to be on a roll with the solutions.  Dissolve the population.  Smash the planet into distinct chunks.  Etc.

Sadly that won't work when they're one of the races you're trying to send off into oblivion.

[zespri]

See the attached images - the first is from year 3040, and shows my Federation's terrifying deathball hovering over the homeworld of those poor, doomed Andor.

If you look at the second, you will notice that it's six years later, the doomfleet has 1 million more combat strength, and the population of the Andor has nearly tripled.

What in the world is going on here? Am I missing something important? Has my game bugged out and some calculation exploded?

Oh yeah. I just finished writing a post about what I witnessed in the observer mode. Exactly the same thing. And what is worse, It did not resolved in the next 80 years. I'd like to hear a comment from a developer.

[keith.lamothe]

Oh yeah. I just finished writing a post about what I witnessed in the observer mode. Exactly the same thing. And what is worse, It did not resolved in the next 80 years. I'd like to hear a comment from a developer.

Beyond the ones I already left earlier in the thread?

I'm currently logging one of the saves now.

[Tridus]

Oh yeah. I just finished writing a post about what I witnessed in the observer mode. Exactly the same thing. And what is worse, It did not resolved in the next 80 years. I'd like to hear a comment from a developer.

Keith's a developer and he's working on it. Next patch should be better.

[zespri]

Oh yeah. I just finished writing a post about what I witnessed in the observer mode. Exactly the same thing. And what is worse, It did not resolved in the next 80 years. I'd like to hear a comment from a developer.

Beyond the ones I already left earlier in the thread?

Am.... yeah, I guess I had to at least glance through the thread before I post =))))) Ooops. Everything is abundantly clear now =)

Keith's a developer and he's working on it. Next patch should be better.

Duh. I simply did not read anything in the thread but the OP before I answered =) sorry about that. With the number of posts in hundreds one would be expected to know that Keith is a developer. On the other hand one would be expected to read (or at least glance through) the thread before posting too =)

[keith.lamothe]

Yep   We did various revisions to ground-combat and orbital-bombardment fairly soon before release.  Mainly to address planets holding out too long.  It's possible we missed something then, or introduced it.

Just ran a logging test and... well, none of the orbiting fleets is even calling DoOneDayOfGroundAttackAgainst().  That would be kind of a problem   Of course, they're not _supposed_ to call it for the first X days of being in orbit (to avoid planets flipping before you get a chance to see and react; during this preliminary time they can still attack the defending fleets if any), but I ran it for considerably longer than that window.

My next guess is that the fleets are frequently breaking off the attack and then resuming it, resetting that "don't actually attack the planet for X days" thing over and over again.

Another thing I found is that the Burlust planet in question has 10 bomb shelters, and I suspected that the 10% bonus vs bombing was adding up to a 100% shutdown, but I checked the math actually it wasn't adding up that way at all.  Should be a fairly minor factor here.

Anyway, back to it.

[Draco18s]

I'd probably add in an extra check to not even decrement that counter unless there are no defending fleets in orbit.  Can't bomb the surface while you're being shot at.

Not unless you're an omnipotent four headed hydra-thing.

[keith.lamothe]

I'd probably add in an extra check to not even decrement that counter unless there are no defending fleets in orbit.  Can't bomb the surface while you're being shot at.

Nah, its only purpose is to make sure you have a chance to respond to the event, not to actually make it harder for planets to be taken per se.  The idea is that it takes that long to get into position with all the various nasty turretry in orbit, etc.  But that can be done in parallel with the fleet engagements.

Anyway, it was simpler than I thought: a recent change to make it so that you could bombard/invade with only 1 defensive armada in orbit (as opposed to waiting all the way until zero) would actually only permit the bombardment/invasion check if there was _exactly_ one defensive armada in orbit.  Which probably held true for most of the tests of that change, as presumably it was during a situation where there was always at least one defensive armada left (due to rapid construction thereof).

There's also a secondary issue I'm resolving now where the chunks of "progress towards next population unit killed" were so very small due to the various divisors obtaining in this kind of more-advanced-gamestate case that the floating-point-precision wasn't high enough and the values were being treated essentially as zero.  So I'm converting those to double-precision now.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, now I've got those bombarded Burlusts dying in job-lots.  Math in action.

Adding a rule to do some RCI damage to any RCI bar above 0 (might be a little too gentle, but didn't want to hit this too hard just yet).

Also strengthening the rule of "cannot have more births than natural deaths while under bombardment or ground assault" to "cannot have any births while under bombardment or ground assault".

[GC13]

That's really interesting, actually.

How about planetary ion cannons? It says they do 0.067 (I believe) damage to enemy fleets every day. How much does that actually dissuade them, though? I know that possible can't mean it damages their hull by that little, but even if it was popping that much of an armada every day they would pop about four every three months per ion cannon the planet has. Not too shabby, I'll admit, but we've all seen the death balls. And even if they ARE significant, well, what planet won't have all five of them? Can they be specially targeted by bombardment, or do you need to sabotage them?

[keith.lamothe]

How about planetary ion cannons? It says they do 0.067 (I believe) damage to enemy fleets every day. How much does that actually dissuade them, though? I know that possible can't mean it damages their hull by that little, but even if it was popping whole armadas every day they would pop about four every three months with a planet with all five ion cannons it's allowed.

Oh, they're doing their thing.  There's a number of enemy armadas, and a number of total enemy power, which is basically the number of squadrons multiplied by tech-related bonuses, etc.  That power number will generally go down by 1 squadron's worth every 15 days if there's a single defending ion cannon.  In this case there's 5, so those squadrons are actually dying fairly fast.  But there's SO MANY of them that it's just spitting into a rainstorm.  And more fleets are generally coming in to reinforce the siege fairly often, etc.

[GC13]

So twenty squadrons in three months from a full assortment of ion cannons? Definitely doing work, but as you said, we get up to fleet numbers where that is spitting into a rainstorm. Do armadas have any kind of economic drain to maintain right now? Not only do you have to pay (or at least support) the guys to pilot them, but you need to manufacture fuel and spare parts for them to do their thing. It might help keep the fleet sizes from getting silly, and adding an additional cost to deploy them somewhere (they're using fuel and parts at an increased rate, after all) could help make nuking planets less common.

[Aklyon]

This problem is partially why I almost always try to get the acutians on my side; launching planetcrackers at those defiant planets is sadly necessary  .

The Acutians seem to be on a roll with the solutions.  Dissolve the population.  Smash the planet into distinct chunks.  Etc.

Sadly that won't work when they're one of the races you're trying to send off into oblivion.

Throw the Evucks at them then?

[keith.lamothe]

There are limits to how many armadas a race can support, yes.  They don't have an economic burden per se (I've suggested it, but generally we're trying to avoid mechanics which let the AI tie itself up into an ineffective knot), but they can't just go on building forever.

Anyway, yea, when there's a dark-sky fleet coming at you the ion cannons aren't going to cut the mustard.  Either you have your own dark-sky fleet or you die.  In theory, at least