View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0008633 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - Balance Tweaks | Jun 20, 2012 12:07 am | Jun 26, 2012 9:35 am | |
| Reporter | darke | Assigned To | |||
| Severity | minor | ||||
| Status | considering | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 5.035 | ||||
| Summary | 0008633: Disabling "Heavy Defense" (aka, forcefields and fortresses) should only disable it for the AI. | ||||
| Description | Disabling "Heavy Defense" (aka, forcefields and fortresses) should only disable it for the AI; or have two options, one to AI disable and one to player disable so you can turn them on/off independently. I've been trying to play with them disabled to avoid the complete roadblock that is worlds with AI Eyes + Starship Ion Cannons + Regular Ion Cannons under forcefields all on a single world, which happen annoyingly commonly in games in the 10-30 planet range I've been playing; however it's pretty much impossible to keep any important buildings alive (Mk IV Advanced Factories for instance) without forcefields on my side of things. Thus it would be nice if the player could choose to use them (or not) even if the AI wasn't. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | Feature Suggestion | ||||
| related to | 0008660 | considering | Don't have AI Eyes spawn when number of planets is <= 30 |
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Inclined against this. The only reason I am not strongly rejecting it is for the possibility of being able to toggle it seperatley for humans and AI, which I could live with. Basically, I am under the philosophy (not the right word, but I can't think of the right one at the moment) that if we can use stuff to cheese/create crazy situations, so should the AI. So if we can stack all kinds of insanely powerful defenses and support structures under forcefields, why shouldn't the AI? (EDIT: Not saying there aren't good answers to the positive for this question in some cases. In fact, there already are some cases where there was a good reason why the AI got an AI only limitation or nerf. I'm just saying that in most cases, there is no good reason to tie the hands of the AI to do something human players can do) If you are encountering a planet that is too strong for you to take, then that is a sign that you may be trying to take it too early. Maybe you should leave it, and come back once you get more tools to deal with it. Now, if you are at practical max strength and still cannot take out important but well defended planets, then maybe there is a balance issue. But that would be more of an issue with the defensive/support units and/or AI forcefields, not the possibility of this sort of situation itself. |
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At 30 planets, the game is going to be harder in that respect. Try 60 planets and put yourself in the middle of the map. Much easier and you'll have a lot fewer worlds with insane combinations. Although honestly, AI Eye, Orbital Mass Driver and Ion Cannons under Force Fields aren't bad. Raid Starships solve that fairly easily. Use Transports and Cloaking Starships if necessary, and you might need more than one trip. Take OMD first, then IC. |
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@TechSY730: The main problem is that to properly assault a Mk V world, you need to be sitting at least somewhere in Mk III land with your base ships. It costs 8500 knowledge to get to that level, so 3 worlds each, for fighters, bombers, and frigates means that with your starting knowledge you can just barely upgrade all three of them by taking over four or five worlds depending how much you've had to spend on other non-military items (such as grabbing the first level of harvester upgrades). It's not possible to just do a knowledge run on the worlds since you're desperate for resources as well, so you really have to take the world and get the resources from the command stations and harvesters to build there. In a 10-planet map, normally you hit the first Mk V world at about the 6th or 7th world in (if you're playing in a straight line map, if it's a normal topography it's a bit more random), and there's a Mk IV usually before, and the V worlds are separated by at least one non-V world from memory. I'm starting to think the main problem isn't the shields, it's that the AI Eye on small maps like this is a little more overpowered then larger, since there's less enemies and most of the AI's power is in it's emplaced weaponry and the like. Anyway I'll keep beating my head against it, I think x4000 has gotten used to me beating my head against odd corners of the game until something interesting happens. :P @Hearteater: It's been a while since I tried it, but back in the 1.x era it was possible to beat a pair of AI7's on a 10 planet map starting with one planet, and not using any of the "features" that x4000 fixed after I bragged about them... err, helpfully pointed out. >.> <.< That was before all the specialised guard posts, the AI Eyes, the anti-starship ion cannons and such caused problems with even the best laid plans. Granted it was pretty rare chance of success, maybe a 10% success chance and 90% grind-to-a-stalemate, but I'm more trying this out of curiosity to see if it's still possible then trying to do this as a serious play style. Unfortunately after about 20 games I haven't even gotten to the point of it being a stalemate, usually getting stuck before I even get to a Mk V planet due to the aforementioned problems. Also you'll only get one chance to try any of those techniques to work around this problem too, as soon as you succeed with, say, the raid starships (and sometimes even before!) the AI will have out at least one of their gravity-slowing-ships causing your ships to slow to a crawl and be torn to pieces before even getting close. :( Aaaaanyway.... the reason I logged this bug report was because I turned this setting off and I discovered the game was very close to unwinnable due to how easy it was for the enemy to destroy your command centres and any other vulnerable buildings due to lack of shielding. I mainly reported it because I figured that this probably hasn't been seriously tested at all by players since, after all, who would disable their own use of forcefields? It'd be suicide! :) The only way around it I've thought of so far is abuse of the absurdly overpowered gravity turrets and using them to slow down things like starships that are like command-center-and-mk-iv-factory-seeking-missiles. :( Or abuse the fact that spire-shield-starships aren't actually considered forcefields at the moment, which surely is a bug. |
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Yea, low planet plays are tricky, especially now that the AI has many more tools and much more intelligence. I wonder if AI Eyes should be like many minor factions, no AI Eyes on map sizes of <=30 or so planets, because in those games, you don't really have enough resources to do anything but "blob" your fleet. On the disabling forcefields thing, if it is a pointless feature that no one in their right mind would use, even for a laugh, then it should be removed. EDIT: Though I could live with the toggle being split into one for AI and one for humans. And I agree that gravity units are rather OP right now, for both humans and AI (not necessarily the mechanic though, though that is up for debate, but the current values gravity units have are currently OP) But this is a different issue. |
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I don't think the shields themselves are the problem, but rather like others already mentioned that the AI eye might be hard to deal with on really small maps. Ion cannons and the like you can easily take out with raid starships or anything else that goes through shields so I don't see a problem with them being shielded. Even the AI eye disappears when the rest of the guardposts and the command station is gone. So you don't NEED to deal 400.000.000 damage to it. And even if you had to, a shield wouldn't normally add all that much to it compared to the HP it already has. |
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After playing another couple of games I think that the main problem probably is the AI Eyes. Comparing a few planets, if I have similar attack/defensive profiles (bunch of my ships, heavy on the bombers, going against a guard post + ion cannon under a shield) under good conditions I can manage to take it down with heavy losses due to my other ships being chaff for the ion cannon and the guard post. (I couldn't get more then one Raid-starship raid to work reliably vs ion cannons, the AI's too smart and starts throwing out things that counter that and the raid star ships are glass cannons otherwise.) However I can barely get a full set of bombers onto a world with and AI Eye on it, let alone the "chaff" to soak up the ion cannon blasts, so that looks to be the primary weakness. Also it didn't help that I was previously playing on my usual Low/Ultra Low unit cap scaling, so ion cannons are either 2x or 4x as powerful in that situation. (I tend towards playing with 4x starting worlds, but have been testing this scenario with only 1x, and forgot to change back.) I did these tests with "Normal" unit caps though and had the same issues. In any event in summary: Disabling AI Eyes for <=30 worlds sounds like a good thing; I'd test it but that requires code tinkering. It's a shame there's no way of disabling a ship type like the diabledaitypes.txt file. Changing the "Heavy Defence" to only enable/disable the fortresses would probably work well, though I can't recall having seen the AI actually using them in ages... but then again I can't say I've been paying much attention to them either. As it is it you can't disable Heavy Defence since it seems you can't disable forcefields without the player getting completely squished by an AI too smart for it's own good. >.> <.< (Edit: Of course as soon as I complain that I've never seen an AI fortress... I get one right next to my starting planet. >.< ) |
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OK, I guess this should be split into two new issues. One, disable AI eyes when # planets <= 30 (which I will post since I'm the one that suggested it) The other can be what darke suggested in his most recent comment, make the "Heavy Defense" ship toggle only toggle fortresses and similarly huge defensive structures, and possibility move forcefields to their own toggle. (Do you want to do that, or me?) |
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OK, the AI Eye suggestion is now posted, 0008660 Vote up if you like it. :) |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 20, 2012 12:07 am | darke | New Issue | |
| Jun 20, 2012 8:40 am | tigersfan | Internal Weight | => Feature Suggestion |
| Jun 20, 2012 8:40 am | tigersfan | Status | new => considering |
| Jun 20, 2012 9:24 am | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0025980 | |
| Jun 20, 2012 10:27 am | Hearteater | Note Added: 0025982 | |
| Jun 20, 2012 11:01 am | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0025980 | |
| Jun 20, 2012 11:58 am | darke | Note Added: 0025983 | |
| Jun 20, 2012 12:13 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0025985 | |
| Jun 20, 2012 12:18 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0025985 | |
| Jun 20, 2012 12:24 pm | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0025985 | |
| Jun 22, 2012 8:13 am | snelg | Note Added: 0026025 | |
| Jun 22, 2012 8:16 am | TechSY730 | Note Edited: 0025980 | |
| Jun 26, 2012 1:53 am | darke | Note Added: 0026060 | |
| Jun 26, 2012 2:14 am | darke | Note Edited: 0026060 | |
| Jun 26, 2012 9:31 am | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0026063 | |
| Jun 26, 2012 9:35 am | TechSY730 | Relationship added | related to 0008660 |
| Jun 26, 2012 9:35 am | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0026064 |
