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Well, all the DLCs just add a whole bunch of new content. I'd say pick one (or none, if you're not comfortable with the game yet), and play through a campaign/half a campaign with some of the new features turned on to get a feel for how it works. Then, add another one. I would recommend Zenith Remnant, because, well, it's the first one, and it has golems. Would love to join in on the multiplayer madness, but a) I should be looking for a new job and b) don't have the new DLC yet, so I don't think I could. Maybe in a couple weeks. But who knows, maybe I'll be around; put me as a maybe at best, until things settle out.
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Aug 29, 2014 20:44
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Now that the dyson sphere is free and the CPA quashed we've got a bit of breathing space while we wait for the fleet to rebuild fully. Let's take a look at the latest scouting reports.  We now know the location of three different advanced research stations, three different advanced starship constructors and a couple of golems. That ASC over on Dormeluv is looking mighty defensible, but taking it would require probably mean taking Ospiash as well. Given that, and the fact that it doesn't have a regen golem on it, Savkeael is probably still the best option for an ASC. Hold on, that's interesting. Location: Derae  Scouts report that they can't see anything on Derae except for a single, solitary structure. A planetary cloaker. If we want to find out what's here, we're going to need to destroy it. Oh hey, know what's fast and has a bonus against refractive hulls?  Teleport raiders. Buuut of course the cloaker is immune to minor electric ammo. Time to get tacti-cool.  Two assault transports take on a load on bombers from Boomquonxu and start heading for Derae.  Transports arrive, dump out the bombers and take out the cloaker. Suddenly, everything becomes visible.  In the end sadly the planet ends up being nothing more than another uninteresting P3, but at least the assault transports got an outing. Welcome to hour four. Location: Zarvo   Oh, just a quick aside. Remember the 3,000 ship attack that came, without warning, from Zarvo during in the CPA? Let's make sure that can't happen again. Spirecraft scouts are immune to tachyon beams so let's put one there as a picquet to counteract the tachyon command station. Location: Oorto   Huh, those teleport raiders really are surprisingly handy. Location: Arkhag  So, the eggheads tracked down a subspace signal to this location. Looks like it's time to neuter the place.  Couple of things to comment on here. There appears to be a self-destruct guardian, which we haven't encountered before. Only unlocked on difficulty 8+, these guys are essentially the AI's answer to Martyrs. So, we'll want to burn that down before most of the fleet gets here. Other than that we have an anti-starship arachnid, so probably don't want to be warping in starships until that dies. Oh, but wait, our teleport raiders have a 4x bonus against polycrystal hulls! Seeing as I've only had them for five minutes, these guys are rapidly becoming my favourites. Finally, there's a fortress well out of the way over in the corner.  Without too much hassle the planet is cleansed and the survey ship bought in to get this party started. Location: Oorto   Meanwhile on Oorto the remaining AI threat has decided it has a chance while my fleet is engaged elsewhere. The Spire module fortress intends to prove them wrong. Location: Arkhag   Well, that sure ain't no reactor. And the AI response is instant, warping in a sizable chase fleet. Fortunately this time the ship is both better positioned and much faster than the original shard with its jury-rigged thruster system. Location: Durxhua  That's quite some reprisal they have planned. Makes me wish I had the botnet golem already. Location: Zivu    The spire want to build a refugee outpost near a metal deposit. Well, it just so happens that I have a handy-dandy one right next to the Zivu home command station. The spire refugee facility is also equipped with a nice set of beam cannons, which will be helpful if the AI ever sneak some raiders on to the homeworld. Location: Durxuha   The reprisal wave to Durxuha is dealt with fairly easily. Here we also see the appearance of a few previously reticent allies in the form of the neinzul roaming enclaves. Essential a bunch of carrier ships who float around either attacking everyone, attacking just us or working with us to attack the AI as the mood strikes them. These ones are good guys, and generally hang around on our homeworlds until something nearby is sufficiently threatening to warrant them dumping out a load of younglings. Location: Zivu   The spire outpost is complete, and although suspicious of us (we did create the blasted AIs, after all) they offer to let us build a few 'tiny' ships based on their designs. The spire frigates actually aren't all that tiny, they're a pretty drat good starship. Location: Yarzon   A few science labs are extracting previously lost knowledge from Yarzon, guarded by a group of dyson gatlings. Wait, what's this? Mining golems? Location: Oorto   Mining golem vs. Spire modular fortress. Modular fortress wins. Mining golems show up once in a while to eat planets. How else do you think the Zenith get enough material for a dyson sphere? Also goes some way to explaining why this galaxy is so small... In this case, the only planet we care about is Oorto. The AI can't see the golems, so we would need to send strike forces to Darkjayaq and Yarzarmas to kill them while facing stiff resistance from the AIs. Both are low priority planets without much interesting on them, so we'll let the golems eat them. Location: Sucje  As the last trickle of knowledge is extracted from Yarzon we unlock a new racial form for our champion. The spire destroyer is capable of mounting lots and lots of heavy weapons, with less overall slots but more 'large' slots. Unfortunately the only large modules we currently have unlocked are shields, which would make it quite tanky but not particularly shooty. Wait, the spire have something to say about our champion...  Location: Zivu  This is where we leave the spire campaign. Carrying on past this point incites constant exo-galactic strike forces, and turns the game into more of a straight-up slug-fest between the us and the AI. For now, let's stick with the 'classic' under-dog story. We've got a useful defensive structure and a few nice starships from our new allies, as well as some backstory, so let's let sleeping rocks lie. Next time, on AI War: Taking on the Advanced Starship Constructor
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Aug 29, 2014 21:50
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I really like that it'd turn the campaign on its head in the way you'd deal with it, instead of being a pointless subquest line.
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Aug 29, 2014 22:09
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Of course their thing is on the planet the mining golem is eating. Even LP aside, it sounds like it'd be about time to bail on that quest line, from what little I've gleaned about strategy in this game. For educational purposes, do you think you could go into some lower-level tactics? So far I'm finding that I mostly win battles by having a bigger ball of ships than the AI, which obviously will not be sustainable on a higher difficulty than "beginner". Are there ideal general fleet compositions? Any micromanagement tactical tips? Also, I'd be interested in joining some multiplayer as a champion or something like that. I'm on US East Coast time here (GMT -5).
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Aug 29, 2014 23:00
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You should probably grab at least one or two Spire Cities, though, just to show them off. They're interesting.
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Aug 29, 2014 23:09
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Yeah, Spire is cool as all hell, they are also one of the alternate ways to win the game, a pretty glorious way but for another time prehaps.
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Aug 29, 2014 23:43
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If you do a simple fleet mechanics explanation, would you mind doing another basic turret strategy update? You explained your homeworld turret strategy a little bit, but the screenshot's a touch cramped for me to really see which turrets are placed where and it doesn't have the super-helpful annotations of your other screenshots. EDIT: At some point I'd also be curious if you have a feel for how the AI chooses targets in a particular system, and if it ever "skips" a system to dive straight for your homeworld. For instance, if I've got a system with an advanced factory, and I slap my command station and a few forcefields on top of the factory, will the AI ever skip that and go for the next system instead via an undefended wormhole? Arcturas fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Aug 30, 2014 |
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Aug 30, 2014 00:52
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MJ12 posted:You should probably grab at least one or two Spire Cities, though, just to show them off. They're interesting. Or at least save them from being mined into oblivion! Poor Spirelings.
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Aug 30, 2014 00:54
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Arcturas posted:If you do a simple fleet mechanics explanation, would you mind doing another basic turret strategy update? You explained your homeworld turret strategy a little bit, but the screenshot's a touch cramped for me to really see which turrets are placed where and it doesn't have the super-helpful annotations of your other screenshots. Yes, Yes it will, it will still send ships for the factory (unless it is a chivalry type ai (will not target any irreplacable structures EXCEPT your home station.) but the ai will send guys at your home station in any cpa/exogalatic attack.
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Aug 30, 2014 02:02
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I'm impressed at how much interesting story there is in this game considering that for the type of game it is I wouldn't expect much story at all.
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Aug 30, 2014 06:59
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Arcturas posted:You explained your homeworld turret strategy a little bit, but the screenshot's a touch cramped for me to really see which turrets are placed where and it doesn't have the super-helpful annotations of your other screenshots. My turret strategy is pretty much 'Place it between the command station and the wormholes. Make sure that the command station is in range'. If you want proper strategy, take a look at section three of this forum post: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13369.0.html This thread (http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,8598.0.html) is also a decent read for some fleet combat tactics, although as per usual quite a lot of it is a bit outdated now. Neruz posted:I'm impressed at how much interesting story there is in this game considering that for the type of game it is I wouldn't expect much story at all. One of the the things that everyone liked about the light of the spire expansion was the journals. So the devs have done more and more of them in the later expansions. RockyB fucked around with this message at 10:34 on Aug 30, 2014 |
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Aug 30, 2014 10:28
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 Well, our next target is going to be Savkeael. Let's see what we've got.  Oh, this could be interesting. This planet has a special command station, bristling with lasers, which is going to be hell on my bombers or anything with a polycrystal hull. Not good when it's sitting under a forcefield, which bombers are the normal counter to. It's also got a couple of more unusual guardposts.  The munitions booster increases the firepower of allied ships by 90% in a fairly large radius. That's a nasty start. The enclave guardpost spits out drones while enemy ships are on the planet, essentially acting like my own drone spawners. I also get a nasty feeling that the special forces are likely to show up to defend this planet.  On the plus side, as well as the ASC there's a spire tractor platform fabricator here that I previously overlooked. We can always use more ships.  Very first move is to take out the tachyon sentinel over the wormhole. Teleport raiders manage that admirably.  Next up, take out the munitions booster guardpost. At this point the enclave guardpost has wiped out most of our raiders. It has a bonus against ultra-light hulls, so putting the teleporters up against it would be suicide. The drones it generates are also floating off to other planets as threat. We need to take this out before the spam becomes unmanageable.  What's that, we've got almost 600 missile frigates with a bonus against light hulls? Well get half of them into the assault transports and get over there! As predicted, the special forces have shown up to defend the planet. Good job these transports have cloaking, huh? These guys will stick around as long as there are military ships on the planet, even cloaked ones, so transports need to go back to Yarzon. I'm kind of put out by the response time actually, they must have been hanging around fairly close by.  Once the special forces have wandered off, the missile frigate dismount and blow away the enclave post. Some get caught out by tackle drone launchers, but most manage to make it back to the cars and escape.  Now we have to figure out some clever way of taking down the command station. With the addition of another laser guardpost under that forcefield bombers are going to get slaughtered long before they take it down. Teleport raiders could do some damage to the forcefield, by my calculations a full cap of 340 of them could take out all 1.7 million health in around 30 seconds. That assumes no attrition of course, which is nonsensical. But they seem like the best option for now.  Here's our strike-force then. Raiders to take down the forcefield. A number of medium or neutron hulled starships which the lasers aren't effective against. A quartet of plasma siege starships, whose damage 'bleeds' through forcefields to damage units under them. And a load of tackle drone launchers and drone spawners to distract the enemy ships and keep them off us.  OH GOD. We've made a huge mistake. Can you spot it?  The forcefield is melting, but so are our ships. The cookie monster is here! Told you we'd get back to him. This completely indestructible ships roams around the galaxy at random, looking for ships to eat. When he finds a juicy planet he can kill 1,350 ships per minute. The only way to survive is to escape. Which the teleporters rapidly do. The starships aren't quite so lucky, and I lose a lot of the slower ones. Reprisal level one. The one good thing you can say for the devourer golem is that he's impartial. As harsh as it can be to run into him on an attack like this, he's also quite happy to sit and destroy 1,000+ ships worth of AI threat for you.  Okay, you know what at this point I'm just getting annoyed. Time to get out the penetrator. This spirecraft assassin gets only one shot every 30 minutes and needs scout support to fire. But what a shot it is, penetrating forcefields and doing 130,000 damage. Actually, technically I would need two shots to take out the command station as I only have Xampite. But with a bit of support from plasma siege starships and raids I should be good. Location: Durxuha   GODDAMN MIMES. Teleport raiders, starships and tackle drone launchers … exactly the units I just selected to take down a forcefield. Thankfully I happen to have eight on Durxuha, rather than just one. Plus an OMD to help deal with the starships. Location: Savkeael  Round two, this time with less devourer golem. Penetrator takes his shot then high-tails it out of there.  The command station is severely damaged from that blow and soon goes down to the rest of the task force. +20 AIP. Now that the command station is down the special forces aren't going to show up again, so we can take the rest of the planet in a leisurely fashion without 2,000+ ships jumping down our necks.  Soon the planet has been cleansed and we put up a command station and what can conservatively be described as 'an arseload' of turrets and forcefields around the ASC and the fabricator. Oh, and a forcefield over the broken golem until we can get it up and repaired. Might as well take out the class B core shield generator network while we're here, too. Location: Darkjayaq    Scouts on Darkjayaq report that the planet has been vaporised. Looks like the mining golems got what they came for. Location: Savkeael  Defences on Savkeael are mostly online. 50 engineers are rapidly repairing the regen golem (at extortionate cost), and will speed build the spire modular fortress after that. All in all, a successful operation. It's notable that, despite the two zenith power generators, I'm now straight back into not having enough power. I think this is a side effect of the turret changes, which made them per-planet caps but twice as expensive. Next time, on AI War: When Nemeses attack
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Aug 30, 2014 22:22
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Oh yeah its gotten more energy expensive, i've found myself building the matter converters and just tanking the expense in metal to keep a nice web of turrets. I'm thinking of doing a private game server thread for ai war co-op play, maybe that will get us enough people?
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Aug 31, 2014 01:12
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My god, this game...  I've worked through the tutes, and played a couple of abortive campaigns - I was very much in the mood of 'grab all the land, out-produce the AI'. Yes, I did play zerg in SC1, why do you ask?. So this game, I'm going super-conservative, guerrilla-warring my rear end off. It's so awesome to have an AI finally kick my rear end for trying to tank-rush, force me to actually use tactics in a strategy game! So, here's a rough overview of where I am in my current game, and my plan. I got lucky on map gen (I think). Not really after advice right now, I'm sure I'll learn more from my inevitable failure! Also: My progress does not bring all the boys to the yard.  e: Also, autocannons are my favourite thing of the moment, hence the unit counts.  e2: I assume there's a gladOS mod for the AI voice? If not, I think I've got a project lined up... petrol blue fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Aug 31, 2014 |
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Aug 31, 2014 02:25
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I tried getting into this game a couple times and never could, but reading this LP has been fun so I gave it another shot and have been doing much better than before. Started up a new game on difficulty 7 and I got a sweet starting location in a little dead-end cluster of 4 systems. After securing them and the entrance point I scouted out and found a string of 4 connected systems housing a hive golem, 3 spire civilian leaders, and at the end a Super Terminal.  Not sure if I should tackle the Super Terminal yet, not really sure how increasing the AI progress floor works. Sicking the Hive Golem on a system is  as hell.
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Aug 31, 2014 03:07
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Agreed on the Super Terminals - My read of the wiki is 'decreases aggro as long as you hold it, but increases the difficulty of holding it. Lose control of it and gain a ton of aggro', is that about right? I feel like I don't 'get' it, so I don't want to risk taking it, so I don't get it, etc.
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Aug 31, 2014 03:17
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The game has caught my eye in the past, and I recently bought it due to this LP; I just don't have that much time for it. Well, maybe I'll join Goon Command and see if I can't
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Aug 31, 2014 03:18
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petrol blue posted:Agreed on the Super Terminals - My read of the wiki is 'decreases aggro as long as you hold it, but increases the difficulty of holding it. Lose control of it and gain a ton of aggro', is that about right? I feel like I don't 'get' it, so I don't want to risk taking it, so I don't get it, etc. The floor is the minimum AI progress you can reduce the AI to. If you have a higher AI progress, say 500+, you can really scale back what the AI has if you can hold that planet for a long period of time with the terminal active, probably to 250ish. This can be a really big boon if you've taken out some really expensive AI planets, or perhaps activated several Golems. I would not activate it early, because you probably don't need to, and also you don't have the necessary means to hold the planet from the rapidly increasing waves of enemy ships.
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Aug 31, 2014 03:27
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petrol blue posted:Agreed on the Super Terminals - My read of the wiki is 'decreases aggro as long as you hold it, but increases the difficulty of holding it. Lose control of it and gain a ton of aggro', is that about right? I feel like I don't 'get' it, so I don't want to risk taking it, so I don't get it, etc. Unless they've changed it, no, it works more like hacking. You hold the system, and every few seconds your AI progress goes down and it spawns (more and more) AI ships in that system. The longer you hold it (IE, the more firepower you can put in the system) the more the AI progress goes down. The floor keeps you from reducing your progress down to nothing, but other than that isn't really a problem. In theory you're supposed to hold the system as long as possible then kill the superterminal, but unless they changed it you can just delete your command station and clear out the spawns, so if you're willing to game things you can get some huge AIP reductions from a superterminal.
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Aug 31, 2014 03:44
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Oh, thanks, that makes it a lot clearer! Is there any way to see my current aggro floor, is do I just have to guess? (Or is it some incredibly arcane series of hotkeys like everything else?) Next question: is there any way to make using the Cloaker starship easier, rather than 'selected only warships to move, loldead" or "military moved faster, lost stealth, loldead" or "didn't turn some ships to passive, loldead". Et cetera, et bloody cetera. I'd prefer to be a little more subtle than "500 autocannons", but managing the Cloaker seems absurdly bad so far.
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Aug 31, 2014 03:52
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petrol blue posted:Oh, thanks, that makes it a lot clearer! Is there any way to see my current aggro floor, is do I just have to guess? (Or is it some incredibly arcane series of hotkeys like everything else?) Hover your cursor over the AI progress, it will show you the floor.
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Aug 31, 2014 03:55
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petrol blue posted:Next question: is there any way to make using the Cloaker starship easier, rather than 'selected only warships to move, loldead" or "military moved faster, lost stealth, loldead" or "didn't turn some ships to passive, loldead". Et cetera, et bloody cetera. I'd prefer to be a little more subtle than "500 autocannons", but managing the Cloaker seems absurdly bad so far. If you go into controls there's an option for "Brave Cloaker Starships" which means they'll get selected together with military ships if they're in your selection area. Holding down "g" when giving move orders forces the group to stick together (moving at the speed of the slowest ship in the group), so the Cloakers shouldn't be left behind. And hitting "k" with your group selected toggles low power mode for the entire group on or off. I'm guessing those are the defaults since I never messed with the key bindings as far as I can remember.
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Aug 31, 2014 04:28
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'Brave'?! Do I look like a goddamn hippy? As long as they stop shirking and go to their deaths in an orderly fashion, I'll be mollified. 
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Aug 31, 2014 05:02
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Bremen posted:Unless they've changed it, no, it works more like hacking. You hold the system, and every few seconds your AI progress goes down and it spawns (more and more) AI ships in that system. The longer you hold it (IE, the more firepower you can put in the system) the more the AI progress goes down. The floor keeps you from reducing your progress down to nothing, but other than that isn't really a problem. The super-terminal was modified when hacking was promoted to a full resource. It used to be that knowledge raiding and super terminal hacking were the only forms of hacking, and these were somewhat 'hidden'. What it does is increase AIP by one then reduce it by two, which has the effect of decreasing AIP but increasing the 'floor'. AIP Floor is Total AIP /5 or /4 or /3 for Difficulty <8 / 8+ / 9+, but is always at least 10. Current AI Progress is either total - reduction, or floor if floor is higher. Back in version 5.028 the super terminal was updated so that you couldn't switch it on and off at will and had to destroy it to stop the reduction / AI spawns. As of 7.xx using the terminal now costs HaP at a ratio of 1 per tick, which increases slowly (but still exponentially) over time. So you can fairly rapidly get to a point where it isn't worth spending any more HaP. For me that point is around 5HaP per tick. The two have combined to balance / nerf it fairly significantly, but honestly that was quite a necessary thing. Oh, and FYI. You don't want to send your HaP negative. The AI gets ... nasty.
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Aug 31, 2014 10:52
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Define nasty.
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Aug 31, 2014 11:46
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Oops, I might have neglected the roaming Threat last night. Go to expand, get eaten by a massive swarm of autocannons. They're only fun when I spam them, computer! 
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Aug 31, 2014 15:45
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petrol blue posted:They're only fun when I spam them, computer! (EDIT: To be clear, I'm not complaining. While I've gotten frustrated with them, that's just because I'm used to exploiting the AI. It's a GOOD thing that I have to account for all available tactics and not just the arbitrary subset that the programmers put into the AI's scripting) Though, personally my main concern is that while they've done a great job keeping the AI 'functional', the way they've done it feels like it's removed a lot of strategic 'debt' For example, if we're really fighting against an AI whose forces are for the most part 'occupied elsewhere', why can't we win by drawing the AI into over-committing over a longer period. As in, presumably the other forces are doing SOMETHING out in the warp-net. If they are attacking us, they are not doing that thing. If we can keep them busy with us, surely they'll eventually weaken on an empire-level scale? While I'm fine with fighting a superior foe, I'm not too keen on fighting a foe who's so superior they would be literally invincible if they didn't fatally underestimate you. aerion111 fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Aug 31, 2014 |
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Aug 31, 2014 19:18
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aerion111 posted:I think that's legitimately one of the reasons a lot of people have trouble 'liking' AI War; Even though the AI plays a different game than you, it still has a lot of 'cheap' tactics that can make you rage if you're used to being the only one who can use them. See, you're thinking about this the wrong way. You see another potential victory condition. I see another loss condition when the dudes the ai has to focus on show up and wreck your poo poo to complete their takeover. VVVVVVVV huh, must have missed that. Is it in one of the alt win condition things I never used? FoolyCharged fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Aug 31, 2014 |
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Aug 31, 2014 19:33
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FoolyCharged posted:See, you're thinking about this the wrong way. You see another potential victory condition. Well I won't spoil it about what the ai really is up to but one of the expansions does explain it fully, Rocky can spoil it if he wants though.
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Aug 31, 2014 20:03
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AtomikKrab posted:
That is probably a good idea, especially with sessions in this game being rather long.
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Aug 31, 2014 21:00
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Hey RockyB, name the tag you want for your thread and I'll change it.
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Aug 31, 2014 21:21
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AtomikKrab posted:I'm thinking of doing a private game server thread for ai war co-op play, maybe that will get us enough people? I'd be interested in this as well.
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Aug 31, 2014 21:27
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Yeah, hopefully AtomikKrab can get a thread up for next weekend, seeing as he's the one who knows all the group admins and server details. From chatting in the steam group it seems likely to be 2-4PM EST for a start, which is about 7-9PM in the UK. Chip, originally I was going to say just go with  . However on reflection,  probably more accurately reflects the ethos of the game. Thanks.We'll keep the details of what the AI is up to out there a secret for now, but suffice to say they're dealing with a considerably bigger threat than us. You can consider their current defences in our galaxy to be the obsolete tech they left behind when moving on to Hunter/Killers and Motherships, kind of like the British army probably has a room full of pikes still hanging around somewhere. Location: Savkeael  Regenerator golem is online. Defences on Savkeael, including mod fort, are online. First let's take a look at our new forces, then it's time to go get the botnet golem.  Here's our sparkly new regen golem. Any allied ship which dies in her presence gets instantly rebuilt at the cost of only some health. This can be very handy if, say, your botnet golem gets one-shotted. She also auto-regens over time, so if you choose you can save the massive metal cost on repairs. A very nice force multiplier, anyway.  This is a spire tractor platform. The interesting part here is the '150x tractor beam'. If we wanted to micro these we could take ten of them and grab hold of 1,500 AI ships. Those could then be taken through a wormhole back to a cluster of turrets and rapidly disintegrated. Or we could use them on defence to keep bombers away from our forcefields etc.  With the capture of Savkeael we now also have 7,000 knowledge to spend. Seeing as we have an advanced starship constructor now, it probably makes sense to spent it on starships. So let's go for Mk III leeches and Mk III Neinzul Combat Carriers.  Unlocking the Mk III technology automatically gives us access to the Mk IV at the starship constructor. However I'm going to have to go kill some turrets or something in order to have enough energy to build these. Because our empire is getting a bit strung out it's becoming a bit of a pain to redirect ship production, so I'm also going to drop a cluster of intra-galactic warp gates on Savkeael. This means that all new ships produced by me anywhere in the galaxy will automatically teleport here. They get a 60 second paralysis from this, but that's probably faster than making their way here in real space.  A tractor platform in action, helping fight off a wave. Or rather, given they are cowards, helping stop a wave from escaping to join the threat. The white lines you can see coming from every conceivable angle are from the sniper turrets, unexpectedly caught on camera.  Looks like our champion has unlocked a new toy. Nanosubverters aren't particularly damaging but do add some nice reclamation damage. We'll spend the effort to get them up to Mk III and retrofit the human destroyer for better anti-fleet capabilities.  Location: Ifice.    This is Ifice, which has our botnet golem and an ARS on it. Somewhat worryingly it also has a vengeance generator. Whenever a ship dies on this planet the vengeance generator spawns dark spire ships proportional to the number lost. They then fly around attacking everything in sight, human and AI. These used to be massively overpowered, ending up choking the galaxy with angry ships. But even now they can be nasty and you don't really want to be killing waves of AI ships on a planet with a vengeance generator.  The defences on Ifice don't seem very well planned. The command station is just sitting there next to the botnet golem, completely unshielded. The champion takes advantage of this.  All ships on the planet are now freed as threat and leave the guardposts to go go wherever they like. Unfortunately for us though there is still a raid eye here, so we'll have to be careful when taking down the guardposts.  Here's our starship heavy raiding party. Backed up by the regen golem we can be fairly confident that these guys will last long enough to take out multiple guardposts.  Well, we wiped out a few guardposts. But it looks like the dark spire wiped out too many of the AI ships. The raid eye fires against the planet and another 770 AI ships are added to the threat. Starships retreat for now.  The dark spire continues doing our work for us. This is one of the reasons they are so dangerous, unlike every other minor faction in the game they are quite happy to take down any AI structure they find. Including the ones that would increase our AIP.  One way to deal with the raid fleet, send riots and tractor platforms into the planet to bring them back to Savkeael where our defences can mangle them.  This also has the handy side-effect of spawning a load of dark spire ships to carry on attacking guardposts for us. Location: Boomquonxu  Hybrids take advantage of a bomber wave to attack Boomquonxu. The lightly guarded command station goes down before I send most of the fleet to mop up the attack. Location: Durxhau   Another wave of eyebots take advantage of the situation to wipe out Durxuha command station. And, more annoyingly, the ion cannon there. We're now in a massive energy crisis from two destroyed collectors. It also looks like 1,500 threat is about to join in on the fun over on Miknei, but will mines are dealing with that.  As the count-down to the exo-galactic strike reaches 99% rebuilders have just got the two dead command stations back online and are starting to fix the defences. Fleet, minus starship raiding party, has been redirected to Oorto so they can do fast response to wherever the exo strikes first. Exos tend to go straight for the homeworlds, so that's likely to be either Oorto or Durxahu. Location: Ifice   Back on Ilfice the dark spire have just finished our work for us. The last guardpost goes down, and so to does the AI eye. This planet is ripe for the taking as soon as we've dealt with the exo-galactic strike force. Location: Savkeael   The exo appears on Savkeael, scaring me for a moment. But they appear to be dashing for Jobark? Also holy hell, that is a lot of nemesis ships. Location: Oorto  Aha, they're headed for Oorto (and hence Dageo, my homeworld). Good for me, as Oorto is my most heavily defended world and has a fully operational OMD.  Even given that, the nemesis fleet is ludicrously powerful. They chew through my forcefields like they were barely there, wiping the command station as they go.  Location: Dageo  They're on Dageo, my homeworld. And a second wave is now passing through Durxuha intent on Zivu. The fleet is giving chase.  Energy brownout, all my forcefields are offline. On Dageo the penetrator takes a shot and removes the highest health Zenith shadow frigate. Location: Zivu   This is bad. This is really bad. The second wave of nemesis ships have flown straight through the offline forcefields on Durxuha and on to Zivu.  Two starbases, a spire refugee outpost, some friendly roaming enclaves and a bunch of turrets are all that oppose the strike-force. In a desperation move I tell the neinzul combat carriers and enclaves that are sitting uselessly two planets away to self destruct, in order to claw back enough power to run the forcefields.   Too. Goddamn. Close. I may have severely underestimated how bad the champion alternate progress exos are going to be. I stupidly left the regen golem and most of my starships up on Savkeael, and forgot to redirect fleet production to reinforce the homeworlds. We also really need to do better energy management. So, to prevent this situation from happening again:  1.) Build matter converters. We have more metal than we know what to do with, so let's convert it into energy. 8 of these will be -1,600 metal/s but give us another 400k energy.  2.) To increase defence resilience we need to be able to weather the loss of a single energy collector. As such, let's set a minimum energy threshold of 305,000 units. Once we hit this level no more ships or structures will be constructed, leaving us with a safety buffer. Location: Ifice   Right, back to Ifice. The fleet is slowly rebuilding itself, but we don't need to wait for them. We can quite happily stick a command station up next to the botnet golem, as this planet has no permanent irreplaceables that we need to defend. Then once we extract the botty this place essentially becomes another crumple zone.  The ARS gives us cutlasses, a very cheap swarmer type ship which rams into things. We also get 500 knowledge, in addition to the 3,000 we can extract from the planet itself. If we had been particularly bothered we could have hacked the ARS for either Zenith Chameleons or etherjet tractors instead, but that would have taken 15 minutes and a lot of HaP so I don't normally bother. Next time, on AI War: The Botnet Golem gets his first outing
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Aug 31, 2014 22:28
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Nice to see the AI keeping you on your toes!
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Aug 31, 2014 23:15
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RockyB posted:Next time, on AI War: The Botnet Golem gets his first outing  It's nice to see all the new trinkets since I last played (I stopped shortly after Vengeance of the Machine, back in the age of crystal and wormhole nebulas) and how a higher difficulty than what I usually played works. Also did you not have any more martyrs available for that nemesis wave or would they do too little damage?
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Aug 31, 2014 23:35
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I like that there are forces that ostensibly help you by killing AI forces until you read the fine print where: A. They can attack your forces just as easily B. They increase AI alertness level making your long-term victory more difficult. I can see designs where a player will desperately try to kill it before it pokes the wrong beehive and I can equally see situations where it gets rid of some annoying obstacles. That's some creative "sword cuts both ways" mechanics employed.
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Sep 1, 2014 00:21
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Botnet golem is great  and is set to spawn close to the player I think (i've never had it very far away.)(Incidently the group guy is going to be doing the thread instead of me.) AtomikKrab fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Sep 1, 2014 |
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Sep 1, 2014 00:56
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AtomikKrab posted:Well I won't spoil it about what the ai really is up to but one of the expansions does explain it fully, Rocky can spoil it if he wants though. If anyone else is like me and curious about this game's story and frustrated at the lack of information about it on the internet, you can read the journal entries in the game files. They're located in Steam/steamapps/common/AI War Fleet Command/RuntimeData/Language/en/ as XML documents named 3journal, 4journal, ect. It looks like steam downloads them all for the base game regardless of if you own the relevant expansion or not.
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Sep 1, 2014 02:39
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Falcorum posted:
Martyrs or lightning warheads would actually have been a partial solution here, yeah. Base hull strength (ignoring forcefields) for a frigate is 150,000, while the Martyr does up to 100,000 damage to anything in range up to a total of 5 million. In total we had 37 frigates per wave, *2 waves, which means we would have needed about four Martyrs. Because each spire asteroid is a one-shot deal, and because they cost energy to maintain while just sitting around doing nothing, I normally only have 2/3 held in reserve across the empire. As I didn't think the exo was going to be particularly bad (hence why I didn't move my starships back down to defend), I didn't move them into position to intercept. And the nemesis fleet was moving so fast that I couldn't send the relatively slow Martyrs to catch up to them in time. Actually, looking at the galactic filter for spire asteroids it seems like I've got a lot of Pysite at the moment. Normally we'd expect far more Reptite (the lowest level asteroid: Reptite -> Pysite -> Xampite).  That's 37 easily accessible Pysite on my current worlds, along with 14 Xampite. And that's discounting the idea of raiding nearby AI planets for rocks. I'm not likely to run out of Martyrs anytime soon then, although of course I'm probably going to want to save some of those asteroids for shield bearers, scouts, penetrators, siege towers etc.
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Sep 1, 2014 08:42
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I appreciate the detailed tooltips, but this one bugs me. It reads like they copied a wiki entry of some sort and left it at that.
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Sep 1, 2014 09:48
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