AI War:AI Progress Strategy
What Happens If The AI Progress Is Lowered After Passing A Tech-Up Threshold?
Q: If the AI hits 200 and gets a new ship, does this ship somehow disappear (or the AI can't build any) if the AI goes below 200?
A: Nope, that's the one thing that is irreversible. But having a new ship type doesn't give it more volume of ships, it just spreads out the ships that it reinforces with into more ship types, if that makes sense. So it doesn't increase the difficulty unless the ship type itself is more difficult.
Q: What happens if the AI goes over 200, then below, then over 200 again?
A: This the only property that is affected by positive AI progress only, actually. In other words, the game keeps track of the total positive and negative AI Progress modifiers, and the negative are completely ignored for when the AI unlocks new ship types. So even if you have +200 AI Progress and -100 negative AI progess, showing a total of 100 AI progress on your screen, you'll see the AI getting new ship types after that point. Here again it's not so much a question of difficulty usually, unlike the actual numbers of ships built, and the tech level of the ships built, both of which are affected by the total effective AI Progress (100 from my example).
As an added note, part of why the game keeps track of the negative and positive components of the AI progress is for having an internal lower bound without ever wasting datacenters. For example, here are the cap levels:
>= 100, cap 30 >= 150, cap 40 >= 200, cap 50 >= 250, cap 60 >= 300, cap 70 >= 350, cap 80 >= 400, cap 90 >= 450, cap 100
So what that's telling you is that if your internal, non-adjusted AI Progress is 100 or more, you can never reduce the effective AI Progress below 30. But! If you kill so many datacenters that it would draw it below the cap, don't worry about that wasting your efforts. There is never a reason to delay killing a datacenter. It's true that in those circumstances the datacenter killing would have no immediate effect, but the next time your AI Progress would be increased, the prior datacenter reduction will keep it snapped to that cap level (assuming the cap level doesn't bump up to a new height).
Q: Same for when it goes over 240 and sends out level II ships. Can this be brought down to I again?
A: Yes, this can get brought back down to I. Same as with the relative volume of ships in waves and reinforcements. Any existing waves/reinforcements of higher volume/tech level won't be affected, but new ones will be back at the prior level.
