AI War 2:The Refinement of Fleets

Known Issues

• The old-style tutorials are gone, and we're still in progress with replacing that with three different styles of other help/onboarding in-game mechanisms.

• Various bugs on mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php

• Multiplayer is temporarily disabled while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop.

• There are a variety of ships/units that don't have final graphics at the moment, though they all have their icons.

• We're in progress with refining things with fleets more to remove things that are annoying or tedious about them. More info on that is here.

What's this phase all about?

The fleets work of the prior phase turned out to be a much larger undertaking than initially expected, but we also refined a whole bunch of other areas of the game at the same time. Finally implementing the new lobby and how a lot of that works, for instance. So a whole bunch of great things happened.

The downside was that there were still some things that were decidedly annoying that we know we want to tackle, and that's what this phase is about. Making sure that nobody's playstyles are removed or invalid, and that everything feels balanced, and that there's enough to capture and think about, and that there's no substantial "netflix time" where you're just waiting around (unlike the first game). A lot of the initial discussions about all this were here, but other discussions were on discord and other places.

We're also continuing to just fix other bugs and annoyances, and in general working on refining everything now that we're out of beta for the new fleets-based paradigm.

Version 0.873

(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)

• New XML flag: "does_not_die_with_command_stations_if_not_yet_claimed". This flag functions exactly like "automatically_dies_with_command_station" except the ship will NOT die if it is unclaimed (Neutral faction).

• Put in a potential fix for your fleet centerpieces getting bumped around as units spawn out of them. If there are any other cases where fleet centerpieces are moving when they really should not be moving, then please let us know; we haven't tested this one yet, but it has a high chance of working (and certainly shouldn't make anything worse).
  • Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for reporting, and ptarth for finding the likely culprit.

• The dropdowns for hunter type and warden type in the lobby now actually explain what they do! They have full tooltips now that explain each type. Even Chris hadn't been sure what all the types were.
  • Additionally, the Base Oriented type for the warden is now first in the list for the warden since that is the default.
  • The Normal type for Hunter fleets was a pretty bland name, so it has been renamed to "Intelligent Predator" to make it a lot clearer how that works.
  • The No Bases type for Warden fleets was also kind of unclear, so it has been renamed to Anticipatory.
  • Thanks to tutee for reporting the oversight, and Puffin for actually explaining them!

New Critical Target: Major Data Centers

• New Capturable: Major Data Centers
  • Currently, it is a neutral object on planets that can be claimed for -80 AIP (AIP goes down by 80 when you claim it), but raises AIP by 80 when it dies. This change does affect the AIP floor, however. It is automatically targeted by the AI as "IrreplaceableResourceGeneration", but not bothered by human units. Once it dies, it is gone forever, it does NOT revert to unclaimed or anything like that.
  • Thanks to both RocketAssistedPuffin for pointing out the lack of things that can die permanently, and AnnoyingOrange for pointing out the lack of things that reduce AIP, thus making the AIP floor not all that useful. And thanks to Dominus Arbitrationis for implementing it!

AIP-Reducer Improvements In General

• There is a new Destroyables section of the lobby options that is used for letting you configure some things that we were previously hardcoding into AI difficulties.
  • Normal Data Centers (0-6, default 6)
    • Data Centers are scattered around the galaxy and are something you can use to lower the AI Progress (AIP) if you raid and destroy them. The number of these used to vary by AI difficulty, but that wasn't entirely fair because you need AIP reduction equally at all difficulty levels. The default is now the new maximum (6), but if you want a harder game you can reduce the number of data centers as far as zero if you really so desire.
      • Note that in prior versions it would give you 8 on difficulty 1, and 6 by difficulty 3, but by difficulty 7 and up it was always 4 or fewer. People definitely were wanting to have more AIP reduction opportunities, which is more inline with the first game.
    • Major Data Centers
      • Major Data Centers are scattered around the galaxy, and come with a lot more of a risk/reward dynamic. If you capture and hold them, the AI Progress (AIP) drops by a massive amount. But the AI will start targeting them, and if they are ever destroyed after you capture them, the AIP goes UP by that huge amount that it was previously reduced.
      • More of these being seeded can give you more chances to seriously reduce the AIP, but can also put you in the position of having to capture them when you don't really want to. The default of 2 is a good balance against this.
      • Technically these are more of a capturable than a destroyable, but they are destroyable by the AI and in the same spirit of most of the other destroyables, so for the sake of organization this seemed good.

• The tooltips in the intel tab for the coprocessors and data centers are now a lot more informative and actually explain how much they reduce the AIP by.
  • There are now intel tab tooltips for major data centers, explaining how those work without you having to go and find them in the galaxy by hand.

New Ways To Get Science And Hacking Points

• There is now an intel generator that explains how to get more hacking points, and from where, for planets where you have hacking points left that you can gather.

• Distribution nodes were all but useless, previously, since they granted you some metal in a lump sum, but at a steep AIP cost (well, 1 AIP, which is still a bad deal).
  • These now grant you 1000 science and 20 hacking points, which is waaaay more attractive.

• The astro trains that you destroy also now grant you 200 science each, in addition to the 50k metal they granted already.

• There are now objectives that tell you about structures that you can destroy in order to get science, hacking points, or both.
  • Now you can actually discover, for example, that destroying AI superfortresses is a great way to get an extra 2k of science!

• Distribution Nodes used to be seeded a rate of 1 for every 6 planets in a galaxy, but now it just seeds 6 in general (now that they are so much more useful!). However, you can increase this to 10 in the Destroyables section of the galaxy map settings, or reduce it all the way to 0 if you prefer.

Balance Tweaks

Tesla

• Doubled the reload time and targets hit per shot of Tesla Guardians, Dire Tesla Guardians, Dire Tesla Guard Posts and Dark Spire Eidolons.

• Doubled the reload time, damage, targets hit and health of Tesla Corvettes and Turrets, as well as doubling their cost for the AI, and halving the amount the player gets.
  • Essentially, these are twice as strong, but there are only half as many, and they also fire at half the rate for roughly the same DPS.
  • This means there are far less Tesla visual effects on the battlefield, coupled with the above change.

• Tesla weapons now have a Stack Damage bonus of 4x.

Grenade Launchers

• Doubled damage and reload time of all Grenade Launcher units.
  • Similar to the Tesla, this vastly reduces the amount of visual effects on the field, while keeping their damage roughly the same.

• • Grenade Launcher Corvette, Turret and Guardian explosion radius increased 20%.
  • Since there is so fewer effects on the field, the size of each one can be increased a little, while still having a huge net decrease. This helps the issue where these units were rarely hitting as many targets as they should.

• Molotovs now cause a rather weak engine slow and weapon reload debuff effects.
  • It's not super noticeable, but it's something for them other than being purely a faster and weaker version.

AI Guardians

• The guardian purchase budget has been vastly reduced in general. It's still using some internal multipliers in the code, which is less than ideal, but we'll deal with that later. For now the code should be resulting in many fewer guardians on all planets, but in particular not the insane numbers on mark 6 and 7 planets that you saw before.
  • Thanks to WeaponMaster, DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY, BadgerBadger, and Dominus Arbitrationis for reporting.

AI Turrets

• There is a new range_multiplier_to_all_weapons xml tag that can be applied to ships to easily modify their weapon/system ranges to be higher or lower when creating a variant type.
  • We're now using this to make AI versions of all the turrets, with lower ranges on all of them.
  • This won't affect existing turrets in existing savegames, but in new and existing savegames, any new turrets that the AI spawns will have half the range of the old ones. Sniper turrets (which are rare) as the exception.
  • For the player Ensnarer turret types, which are really rare (and even more rare now), those ALSO now have half the range, in exchange for all their tractor beams being on there.
  • Overall this is something to make the battlefields feel a bit more segmented, and so that you aren't being shot by all the turrets all at once on enemy planets.
    • This can be combined with that recent hack we added for weakening turrets at a planet to make their range truly pathetic, which is great. But the player-side turrets are not any weaker.
  • Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for pointing out how... well, annoying this was!
  • Please note this is not well tested, so we'd love feedback on it.

• On average, now only every 6th reinforcement point will be able to have turrets and non-turret defenses on AI planets, although it's not quite that simple.
  • It's going off of primary keys, and those are just sequential numbers assigned to all ships. It's using modulus 6 to make it so that it's every 6th entry at MOST... but it could be that quite a few guard posts are moulus 6 on one planet, and next to none are on another planet, so expect uneven results (in a good and interesting way) rather than it being uniform on every planet.
  • This helps to make the AI planets a little bit less of a pain to deal with in terms of static defenses, and makes it so that you can focus instead on the guard posts and the ships in them, which are more specialized. Puffin recently made some changes to make types of turrets at each location more consistent (and thus something you can plan against), and so paired with that we should be in particularly good shape. Knock on wood.
  • Please note this is not well tested, so we'd love feedback on it.

Irreplaceable Human Stuff

• Puffin and others have pointed out that there's a real inability to lose things permanently in this game, which can be kind of... anticlimactic? It definitely makes a lot of things less tense.
  • At any rate, now the three types of intra-galactic coordinators, the Zenith Matter Generator, and the Zenith Power Generator all die permanently when they get killed (versus just going back to being neutral).

Version 0.872 Supply and Control

(Released July 3rd, 2019)

• Add a setting for FRD mode available via GalaxySettings; if you disable it then your ships will spread out a bit more in FRD. It's a pretty subtle difference.

"Supply" Requirement Removed

• The concept of supply has been removed. This is something that was super annoying to the point of making some folks not even want to play the game just because of this feature.
  • There are some things that, because of the removal of supply as a requirement for ships, will cause players to want things like old-style control groups and whatnot. However, rather than going back down that road (which is a lot of micro for you as a player), we have a whole other slate of tools planned that should make you very happy and able to do a lot of things you want: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=21310
  • That said, those things are not in place at all yet, but we're removing the supply concept in advance of those additions because it was just so darn annoying.
  • Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for suggesting.

Tractor Changes

• The AI will now have tractor ships actively try to kidnap your ships and drag them off planet. This includes AI Black Widow Golems, Tractor Guardians, Etherjet Tractors and their variants.
  • Feedback on how intelligent this behaviour is would be appreciated (ideally with a save game)
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting

• Tractor Systems can now be configured to tractor more things at higher mark levels. I'm not sure what mischief Puffin is going to use this for, but I look forward to finding out
  • Requested by Puffin

• Ships caught in a tractor beam are always allowed to shoot at the tractor source that has caught them. Also they will be more likely to shoot at said tractor source
  • Requested by Puffin

Bugfixes

• Remove some duplicated logic in the GameEntity HoverText. No functional change

• AI Drones will now fight to the death instead of retreating from the planet; they would just attrition to death anyway once they left the planet
  • Thanks to WeaponMaster for the bug report

• Make Clusters: Small and Clusters: Medium map types work
  • Thanks to UFO for the bug report

• Mobile Combat Factories (and Gyrn) are no longer allowed to build ships while crippled.

• Fix a bug where reprisal waves were double-sized. Also the notification now shows the "time till wave is sent" in the icon itself. The hovertext for the notification also explains that the waves are 1.5x normal wave size.
  • Thanks to WeaponMaster for the report

• Fix a null reference exception in the EntityHover code

• Fix a bug where ships deployed from guard posts against minor factions (in particular, the Dyson Sphere) would just go after the player
  • Thanks to Puffin for the report and TechSY730 for some additional saves. Possibly other people reported it as well?

• The "Debug: Kill Enemies" button now kills all units hostile to the player on a planet, not just AI units
  • Thanks to Oval for requesting

• Fix (or at least significantly improve) a bug where your units would stutter as they moved toward enemies to fight. This has the pleasant side effect of making autobombs and the like suck slightly less.
  • Reported by a lot of people, including Puffin and Ecthelon

• Make Autobombs and other melee units no longer fire shots sequentially; this improves the delay before Autobombs go off. It's still not great, but it's an improvement.

• Hopefully fix a rare null reference in the Decollision code

• Improve the Incoming Damage Detection code to take multishot ships into account. This should (hopefully) make your units better able avoid overkilling targets.

• Ships dragged through a wormhole via tractors will now pop out a short distance from the tractoring unit, instead of stacked right on top of the tractor
  • Thanks to ptarth for the bug report

• Fix a bug where a hostile-to-player only or hostile-to-AI only devourer golem would no longer try to kill the zenith trader
  • Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting

• Fix a bug where ships could go through wormholes while the game was paused
  • Thanks to hawk for reporting

• Scrapping units on planets with Dark Spire Vengeance Generators now correctly generates energy for the VG
  • Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting

Balance Tweaks

• Greatly increased many of the Instigator Base effects.
  • Strengthen Waves and Strengthen Hunter Fleet are quadrupled.
  • Strengthen CPA and Strengthen Wormhole Invasion are doubled.
  • Strengthen Warden Fleet is tripled.
  • Unit Spawner now spawns every 90s instead of 20, but spawns significantly more each time. This means it is a much more consolidated force, rather than a trickle.
    • Thanks to Badger for reporting these aren't something to be bothered with at all.

• Pike unit high hull health bonus reduced from 4x to 2x.
  • Unlike MLRS, which operate on low health and thus effectively had a cap on how much the effect could do, Pikes could often one shot units entirely with this bonus. Coupled with the fact they already have another damage bonus, this was a bit much in practice.
  • The bonus is still cool, so it's preferred to keep it. Want to keep an eye on it though, since that's a nasty result of it that was only just spotted and may have contributed to the feel of Strikecraft being mere chaft.

• A minor nerf to reprisal waves

• Military Command Station damage boost 50% -> 25%, increase per mark 50% -> 25%.
  • This was likely far too much beforehand, but with Experience allowing these to rank up, it needs to come down.

• Military Command Station metal production 60 -> 20.

• Added a bunch of mono-type AI Ship Groups for Guard Posts and Turrets.
  • So now a bunch of AI planets will have only one type of Post, and one type of Turret. There is still the possibility of having an utter mishmash, but far less.
  • Thanks to ptarth and Annoying Orange for bringing the point up separately that this mess forces generalist compositions and the old conundrum of "anti-bomber Post under a Forcefield" from Classic, in a way.

• Tractor Arrays, Ensnarer Battlestation, Black Widow Golem Ark, Tractor Guardians and Ensnarer Turrets now all gain some tractor count per Mark.

• Cloaking and Tachyon Systems now increase their Points by 50% of their base value each time they Mark up.
  • Now upgrading Tachyon Arrays and Sentry Frigates actually does something beyond health, and this lets sneaky units last longer around lower tier detectors.

Multi-AI income increase

• Previously each AI's strength was "Strength of a single AI" / "Total number of AIs in galaxy". Now the logic is as follows
  • For difficulty < 5, keep the old logic
  • For 2 or 3 AIs, each AI is 75% as strong as a single AI (this is up from 50% as strong and 33% as strong)
  • For 4 or more AIs, each AI is 50% as strong as a single AI (this is up from < 25%)
    • This will be a sudden jump in AI difficulty

Strikecraft

• Space Plane and Mirages now only take 1% damage from enemies beyond their range, down from 50% and 25% respectively.
  • This is more like their Classic incarnation, with the change of they can be hurt by the thing they're targeting, as there is no way to bypass radar dampening here.

• Mirages now have the same health as Space Planes, damage 65 -> 40, bypasses personal shields completely, and has a damage bonus against anything with healthy hulls.
  • Essentially, it's now terrible at actually killing something outright, but amazing at weakening it for something else to clean up.
  • Thanks to StarKelp for developing this idea!

• Etherjet Cloak re-enabled, damage and reload time quadrupled on all variants, albedo 0.3 -> 0.7, speed 1,200 -> 1,600.
  • For some reason, they were able to Tractor while Cloaked for some time now, so that system is re-enabled, and the weapon is adjusted to slow the rate they drain their own Cloaking Points.
  • Coupled with the new AI behaviour with Tractor units, these should hopefully behave more like their Classic incarnations.

• Adjusted numerous Strikecraft strength values, and also their ai_cost_to_purchase values to better fit how powerful they actually are.
  • A lot of these were overpriced for the AI, so now there'll be quite a few more of them when found.

• Vanguard health increased 30%.

• Vanguard Hydra Head damage 60 -> 140, speed 400 -> 600, now spawns in groups of 5 and are invulnerable for 8 seconds after being spawned.
  • Some poking showed these to not really work as originally intended. The normal Vanguard is pure tanking, so to help diffentiate Hydras, their Heads are now much more offensive orientated.
  • Spawning more Heads also helps to emphasise that particular trait (and adds more offense), and the invulnerability guarantees they get some damage done instead of being picked off due to such low health.

• Ablative Gatling/Troll health increased 30%.

• Agravic Pod damage 80 -> 100.

• Concussion Corvette damage 70 -> 96.

• Porcupine damage 50 -> 80.

• Grenade Launcher Corvette/Molotov health increased 30%.

• Dagger health increased 50%.

• Eyebot health increased 25%.

• Zapper shields 2,000 -> 3,000.

• Parasite/Persuader health increased 50%.

Frigates

• Brawlers lose all shields, gain it in hull. Their missiles now cause knockback, some engine stun, and also have a damage multiplier against anything slower than its base speed. Damage 300 -> 200, reload time 3s -> 2s.
  • It's now kind of like the Translocator Starship? Shove little guys around and slow them down with some damage as a bonus.
  • Also thanks to StarKelp for developing this idea! It's a little different, but the spirit is there I think.

• Forcefield Frigate shield size increased, size of the ship itself decreased, shields 200k -> 250k.
  • So it covers more, and isn't taking up as much of that space itself. Also lasts a bit longer, since it'll probably be hit more often.

• Siphoner shields 120k -> 160k, damage 2,000 -> 250, reload time 4s -> 1s, now does 5x the damage to a target if it has more than 50% personal shields left. Vampirism gain changed from 5HP per 1 damage to 7HP per 1 damage.
  • Lasts a bit longer for the same reason, shoots faster so it's a more constant regeneration, and better suited to breaking down things like Guard Posts and...well, siphoning the shields off stuff.

Flagships

• Armored Golem damage 2,000 -> 1,000, Sabot damage 3,000 -> 2,000.
  • This thing by far dominates its Fleet, and was really pushing the smaller units out of the game, since things had to be balanced for the player having these.
  • It was actually pretty absurd, being the toughest and best damage dealer of the bunch so...no surprise people felt it was dominating.

• Cursed Golem damage 1,250 -> 700, Sabot damage 2,000 -> 1,500.
  • A similar case. This thing is much longer ranged than the Armored, and has paralysis to boot (including the very rare ability to paralyse bigger targets), and so also dominated the Fleet.

• Botnet Golem damage 500 -> 450.
  • Really minor, but just brings it in a tad more.

• Black Widow Golem damage 500 -> 200, tractor count 350 -> 250.
  • Same deal with the above ones. This thing has a lot more shots than normal for the purpose of engine stun, so the damage is definitely low per shot.
  • Tractor count is lowered since it now gains some with Mark.

Guard Posts

• Stealth Guard Post albedo 0.4 -> 0.7.
  • Missed it long ago.

• Pike Guard Post damage 1,200 -> 600.
  • This thing had far too high a generalist damage. Coupled with the high hull health bonus, it was capable of slaughtering things it really shouldn't have been.

• Moved half of Guard Post hull into shields.
  • In a previous update, Guard Post durability was doubled. This unfortunately really hurt Fusion Bombers, coupled with the fact you generally have less of these specifically than you used to early on.
  • By shifting the hull over, they retain their overall durability, but are weaker to Fusion Bombers, letting them be the experts of Post demolition again.

• Moved two thirds of Dire Guard Post hull into shields.
  • They now follow the same hull/shield ratio as the normal Posts.

New Hacks!

• Bunches of new features for our hacking system.
  • only_for_ai_planets allows us to make hacks against planets that are AI-only.
  • added_cost_in_hacking_points_per_mark_level_of_planet allows us to add increased costs based on the mark level of the target planet.
  • max_mark_level_of_ai_planets allows us to make hacks only work against planets of a certain mark level or below. Aka not working against homeworlds or other mark 7 worlds, as one big use case.

• Added a new hack, which is tested and does work: Weaken AI Turrets
  • Hacking into the local AI network will reduce the range of AI turrets to 25% of their normal values, and their damage output to 50% of normal. Only works on planets of mark 6 or lower.
  • Costs 1 hacking point at mark level 1, plus 5 for each mark level of the planet above that.

• Added a new hack, which is tested and does work: Weaken AI Guard Posts
  • Hacking into the local AI network will reduce the range of AI guard posts to 50% of their normal values, and their damage output to 75% of normal. Only works on planets of mark 6 or lower.
  • Costs 5 hacking points at mark level 1, plus 10 for each mark level of the planet above that.

Prior Release Notes

AI War 2: The Arrival of Fleets