customized ship/base designs, unfair advantage vs the AI?

[alexalexuk]

Lets face it,

I can build ships that wipe any AI race clean, everytime, so now im forced to just avoid designing ships, otherwise ill design and build better ones than the AI, and kill the AI's ships without any challenge.

Im not sure how this could be fixed, but has been discussed on many occasions,

Does anyone know if the upcoming patch will look into the AI adapting a little to an enemies loadout?

[forsaken1111]

ORIGINAL: alexalexuk

Lets face it,

I can build ships that wipe any AI race clean, everytime, so now im forced to just avoid designing ships, otherwise ill design and build better ones than the AI, and kill the AI's ships without any challenge, it gets boring.

please discuss

What is it about your designs that destroy the enemy so easily?

[alexalexuk]

so 3 load outs i use, with destroyer / cruiser size types:

1) loads of shields, lots of blasters / torps, no much speed, fully packed with weapons and shields, 300-400 fuel
2) a cruiser with tons of fighter bays, the rest in shields, nothing much else, 300-400 fuel
3) semi fast, some shields, the rest fulled with torps and some guns, 300-400 fuel

mixture of these ships in fleets of 20 or so ships, i can quite easily go into any homeworld, knock out 4 defensive starbases, and the large star base, with loosing maybe 3-4 ships...

one could argue im slightly technically more advanced, but not by much generally vs the ai.

[Litjan]

Hmm, while I am not an expert on ship-design there is nothing really out of the ordinary about your designs.

It is not surprising that the AI will not be up to par with an experienced human player when it comes to tactical and strategical decision. There are no strategy games out so far, where this holds true.

In my games the AI is usually superior in raw firepower. The amount of ships it can field is dependent on the economical power (maintenance costs). If an enemy AI shows up at my homeworld with a fleet of 20 ships (cruisers/destroyers) that are slightly advanced in technology, it will also easily wipe out my homeworld and a similiar defensive setup.

The starbases will spread their fire amongst the attacking ships, in effect rendering them useless. I wish the behaviour could be tweaked so that they concentrate their fire - that way they could pick of ship by ship. As it is now they will try to take down all ships at once - which will only work if the attacking fleet is fairly weak.

[Krob]

I go the other way, but see similar results. In the original, I had read that the pirates have access to everyone's smaller ship designs, so I started only building capital ships. This evolved into using maximum sized battleships packed with very large (Zenox) shield buffers and a ton of firepower. I don't know if the pirates still tow that line, but my battleships still seem more than able to fend off the fleets that have been coming at them. Granted I'm not all that war-like, so I've not seen how they fare against a full on invasion, but I think they'd hold up well. In my expansion game, I've only lost one so far, against the Erukti (sp) fleet. 20:1 odds and he took out quite a few of them before succumbing (and it was a few revisions out of date). Capturing the Erukti homeworld made them my new favorite enemy. Economy was just falling into the red and boom, 1.5 mil surplus. It was like Christmas or something. If only the game were playable, I could finish it out. Unfortunately, the galaxy map takes minutes to manipulate and the workarounds just don't cut it. :/


K

[forsaken1111]

If your ships are bigger and more expensive, then the AI can afford more ships with an approximately equal economy. It generally evens out. You don't have to use all of your generator's output, the less you use the longer the ship can run on less fuel during combat. There is something to be said for small cheap ships. In my current game I use tiny escorts which are little more than the basic systems, two guns, a shield (no armor) and enough engines to give them a respectable acceleration. They run forever, and they swarm around any invader.

[Aures]

Krob, in the original DW Zenox shields are actually quite inferior, there is only a very narrow range of damage where they are the best option. In ROTS it is a different matter, they are they best available up until damage levels that will see your ship die in a matter of seconds regardless of whether they have Megatrons or Meridians.

forsaken1111 if you jam two of those cheap ships together (ie just double the number of every component on the design) it will cost exactly twice as much, have exactly twice as much firepower but have more than twice the survivability (both in terms of redundancy and damage it can take). The only advantage the cheaper design has is that it can be in more places at once. If you are using them in a swarm there is no big advantage unless you are going up against ships with death rays (or a super laser).

[PaulP]

The only problem I see is the AI makes sub par decisions in regard to which components are better. For instance, I conquered the Ikkuro who had the super robotic repair racial techs. It gave me some of their ships when I took their last world. They were using their highest tech standard repair bot instead of their special racial tech. They seem to use the "latest" component (as in the most recently acquired one) instead of the best, which can sometimes mean they use old junky stuff. Same issue with other races. I got my hands on some Zenox ships and instead of their really nice racial fast recharging shield they were using the crappy starting shield just because they had apparently traded (or something, I assume they wouldn't research useless tech) for the third upgrade to it after they researched their upgraded racial shield.
 
Its the same issue when you "upgrade" ships in the designer - the latest is often not the best.

[Nalim27]

ORIGINAL: PaulP
Its the same issue when you "upgrade" ships in the designer - the latest is often not the best.

Ahhh thank you for shoving us this! I'm trading technologies often and sometimes I remember that new ship system is weaker than previous one. I did not realized this before, because I have all time checked check-box "Show only latest parts"

[alexalexuk]

i think my point here is two fold:

1) the AI does not respond to an all out attack on its homeworld / worlds of high tax value, and/or respond / defend them quickly enough - if i knock out the homeworld, the AI does not retaliate at all, as in it doesnt send everything it has to take its high value world back, and drop as many troops as he can find in his empire...

2) the AI does not adjust, or can come up against my ship builds, more often than not, ive got wayyyy more shields and firepower than anything the AI has.....

frustrating,

[forsaken1111]

ORIGINAL: Aures

Krob, in the original DW Zenox shields are actually quite inferior, there is only a very narrow range of damage where they are the best option. In ROTS it is a different matter, they are they best available up until damage levels that will see your ship die in a matter of seconds regardless of whether they have Megatrons or Meridians.

forsaken1111 if you jam two of those cheap ships together (ie just double the number of every component on the design) it will cost exactly twice as much, have exactly twice as much firepower but have more than twice the survivability (both in terms of redundancy and damage it can take). The only advantage the cheaper design has is that it can be in more places at once. If you are using them in a swarm there is no big advantage unless you are going up against ships with death rays (or a super laser).

The smaller ships are generally faster than one larger ship of twice the size though, no? My escorts, which I leave on automate, seem to be very very good at swooping in for firing runs and then leaving battle before their shields drop. Of course they have an acceleration of 12 and turning speed of ~20. I wonder how quickly a ship of double their size could run away from superior firepower.

With the swarm they move in and out of combat and it spreads the enemy's damage over them to the point that I haven't lost a single one of these new escorts yet.

[jalapen0]

I bet that's really cool to see also. I'm gonna try this swarm tactic in my next game.

[forsaken1111]

ORIGINAL: jalapen0

I bet that's really cool to see also. I'm gonna try this swarm tactic in my next game.

Be warned, the advisor does NOT build enough of them. I think it expects more expensive escorts.

I have over 200 of the buggers right now. [:)]

[forsaken1111]

Oh also, you have to be careful. The biggest weakness of a swarm of ships is aoe pulse weapons. Thank god the AI doesn't adapt its tactics much right now but I expect that to change. Its why I only use tiny escorts, I still use bigger ships in my fleets.

[ASHBERY76]

The A.I roleplays its ship design and does not counter.It would most likely be too CPU intensive in a real time game to counter enemy designs on the fly.

[forsaken1111]

ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76

The A.I roleplays its ship design and does not counter.It would most likely be too CPU intensive in a real time game to counter enemy designs on the fly.

Well I don't expect instantaneous counters but after losing a few hundred ships because they can't get within range one would think they'd strap on a few extra engines.

[alexalexuk]

ORIGINAL: forsaken1111

ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76

The A.I roleplays its ship design and does not counter.It would most likely be too CPU intensive in a real time game to counter enemy designs on the fly.

Well I don't expect instantaneous counters but after losing a few hundred ships because they can't get within range one would think they'd strap on a few extra engines.

bingo

[alexalexuk]

ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76

The A.I roleplays its ship design and does not counter.It would most likely be too CPU intensive in a real time game to counter enemy designs on the fly.

how about once per month then, or less?

and only adjust designs for races its at war with / bad relations with?

it should be as "easy" as adjusting loadouts to ensure "firepower" is higher than the enemies ships, everything else after this.

ive seen frigates with 40 firepower, and 60 speed. Okay, great you can fly fast, and if 20 or so make a run for it in a fleet, thats fine, because by the time theve jumped, ive killed 10-15 easy.

firepower rules the roost,

[Aures]

ORIGINAL: forsaken1111
The smaller ships are generally faster than one larger ship of twice the size though, no? My escorts, which I leave on automate, seem to be very very good at swooping in for firing runs and then leaving battle before their shields drop. Of course they have an acceleration of 12 and turning speed of ~20. I wonder how quickly a ship of double their size could run away from superior firepower.

With the swarm they move in and out of combat and it spreads the enemy's damage over them to the point that I haven't lost a single one of these new escorts yet.

Nope, speed equals thrust divided by size. Doubling all components on a design gives the exact same speed.

Good to hear the swarm tactic is confusing the enemy, thats why I hedged my earlier comment a little. But if you haven't lost one of your cheap escorts it stands to reason a swarm half the size of escorts with doubled everything wouldn't suffer any losses either.

A big advantage of having a bigger ship is that you don't need to double everything. If you are creating cheap ships you wouldn't double the components you only need one of like a command center and hyperdrive (those are helpful for bigger designs, but you would want to invest in armor before putting in redundant components). That would allow the doubled design to have twice the firepower while being slightly smaller (and faster), or to have more than double the firepower while having the same speed, or to add more engines and by twice the size but much faster etc.

There may be some advantage to having a larger number of smaller ships in a battle when the number of ships is small. But once you get up to a decent number of ships in a single engagement fewer, bigger ships will always have the advantage over smaller but more numerous ones even if the total component list of both fleets are exactly the same. The economies of scale you get with bigger ships give them even more of an advantage.

[Baleur]

Idk maybe i suck, the AI is pretty good in my games since patch 1.0.6 (or whatever number it was). Sometimes i'm ahead because im doing good, sometimes the AI is ahead and pwns my homeworld when im ill prepared for it, with insane firepower and such.

Also, remember that this game is what you make it.. If you want a bigger challenge, have the ai civs start more advanced than you, simulate sort of a "humans discovering advanced aliens o shit better get serious" scenario.
I'll admit myself i've almost only played the good old 100% fair everyone-start-on-equal-terms games, but im not pro enough to win anyway so, works for me
I did play once with a huge advanced alien empire i named the Reapers (mass effect reference <3), and it was pretty damn fun, almost too challenging.