Matrix Games Forums

I have been having a great game on extreme difficulty. At turn 150 my laser infantry supported by laser walkers and beam heavy walkers and tanks has just heavily defeated the land forces of my major adversary. I was very surprised by the recent collapse of its forces. After 30 turns of fighting on the frontier what seemed like an even fight changed very quickly. I had been having extreme logistical difficulties. Initially, my schwerpunkt of 2 storm brigades, a light armor brigade and a mech storm brigade advanced 10 to 15 hexes and was mired out of supply. It took additional truck stations built up to level 4 and rail and rail heads to get enough supply to replace losses and send in food and fuel. Once that happened I promptly ran out of energy for my lasers and had to bring more energy sources online. By the time logistics had been mostly solved I had 8 brigades on a long front.

The enemy major AI had responded by sending alot of troops my way and checked forward progress and was able to infiltrate at various places. The Major also fielded laser infantry and lots of tanks. My attacks were mostly only successful when supported by the walkers attached to each brigade. The only exceptions being the light armor brigade and mech brigade which always were able to kill alot more then they lost. things were quite interesting for awhile and then suddenly the enemy collasped.

It seems like maybe he ran out of energy or maybe food and units which appeared strong suddenly took very heavy losses. For about 5 turns I was inflicting like 5k losses per turn and then all that was left of atleast 7 or 8 of his brigades was the headquarters unit.

Do AI units need continuous supply? It looked like his army suddenly went into the black status for supply. When that happens to me, my units perform horribly. Is it the same for the AI?

As an aside the AI did field alot of tanks at one sector and only countering with heavy walkers(2) and heavy tanks(2) turned the tide.

Did Logistics really screw up the AI. For me concentrating forces and hard fighting always creates bottlenecks that need to be solved.

Hugh

Fuel maybe and energy, Not sure on food, But supply is basic for AI he just needs to trace back to a source. Fuel problems can collapse a net too. Your production of energy uses fuel unless you make solar and the other none fuel sources.

In a PvE game than I had against a Nemesis the AI collapsed cuz didn't prepare his energy production to catch up with the consumption, so when it upgraded all of his infantry to laser infantry it started to steamroll us, but after some trench warfare and 10 turns, the AI stopped producing food and didn't have enough energy and collapsed completely, we also suspect than it didnt had enough fuel for his entire nation.

Bingo! Have played a few more turns and AI suffered a complete collapse with starvation destroying most of his remaining forces. Seems this may be a common problem for the AI when they start to deploy alot of laser infantry in the late game. Too much laser ground forces, energy supply depleted by heavy combat, economy begins to crash because of lack of energy and then army crashes because of no food.

Game developer take notice.

I've seen the same thing happen with large widespread major ai armies, it simply begins losing units to starvation when having many units in play. My conclusion is quite simply that this game is rather far from finished... At least where large maps and long-winded games are concerned.

A quick patch would be to artificially increase the ai's food production as the game progresses. But the only real solution to this is have the ai work according to the same rules as the player.