View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0001146 | AI War 1 / Classic | Balance Issue | Nov 6, 2010 4:23 am | Jan 3, 2011 11:45 am | |
| Reporter | Lancefighter | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | no change required | ||
| Product Version | 4.028 | ||||
| Summary | 0001146: Ai defensive scaling for multiplayer | ||||
| Description | So, in my recent games of multiplayer, it seems that the AI does not scale very well defensively against multiple opponents - after playing around halfway through a 4player match tonight, I felt like the AI hardly put up a fight (diff 7.3/.6) Both ais were randomly generated fortress barrons, which is annoying in itself (superforts everywhere :| )but other than that, it was little more than a roadblock when we wanted something taken. Generally, at any time 2 or 3 of us were at full capacity ready to roll over a planet.. and roll we did. It generally seemed like even though both ais were more defensive, they lacked much of a defense over their fortresses. While I am sure the rest of the team is going to hate me for saying this, I think the AI should reinforce considerably more in a multiplayer game. Not even 3 hours in yet weve already taken out one ai, and it doesnt appear as if anything is in our way for the next one. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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I'm curious if you still think this. I rarely play solo, most of my games are four-player. And we've lost 7 out of the last 8 games we've played. Our experience tends to be that the AI is tough and reinforced everywhere we go, and we're always fighting them at ship cap, while fending off huge waves all over the place. Perhaps some of the other recent changes to the AI in general will also balance this out for you if it's a playstyle thing (if you guys are rushing, etc). |
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The AI's planet defenses don't really seem to scale up in proprtion to the humans starting with more homeworlds and thus a higher ship cap, even with the degrading gains curve unless players each individually start taking 6 or more planets. The attack waves certainly do, and scale up harder against players taking more homeworlds but their defenses do not. More homeworlds gives you a game that is harder for humans to defend with, but the AI also has it harder to defend. It is higher risk, but also quicker. If your defense screws up, it is much easier to get a runaway loss due to the linear increase in amount of waves, and thus attacking ship quantity, but less than linear increase in ship cap (but that is offset to a large extent by lightning turrets). If your wave defense planet breaks open, there's a comparatively good chance you are going down the more homeworlds you start with. The AI has to fend off a less than linear extra amount of human ships, but its defenses are on an even weaker function than that, so it does tend to go down relatively quicker with more human HWs started. Overall, more homeworlds turns it into a quicker game, win or lose. If you play against the defensive AIs with multiple homeworlds (multiplayer or just one person picking many) though, it is a cakewalk because you aren't taking what REALLY balances out more homeworlds, the hammering waves. I do think AI worlds get higher tech the more homeworlds are taken, but I am not sure if that's because I keep bumping difficulty up or because it is because of chosing more homeworlds so the ships compact into higher marks or something. |
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Bear in mind that in multiplayer, player resources are split between the players which seems to make it feel more constrained even though it's really not. So that's one factor that for me tends to make multiple homeworld starts feel faster than single. One other note of relevance is that in terms of ship counts, we really can't scale that up significantly (certainly not above the caps based on the unit cap scale, anyway) in multiplayer/multi-home-starts without degrading performance severely or even leading to out of memory exceptions. I could always put in more [i]large[/i] ships -- guardians, or fortresses, or even starships -- but having a huge extra number of the smaller ships is definitely not doable. Now that you mention it, though, our main problems ARE on defense rather than offense. And we play rather slowly, which gives the AI lots of time to hurt us. Not that we tend to lose before 13 hours or so, sigh, but still. |
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"player resources are split between the players" resources are hardly split - on general, there are 3-4x resources on any given planet.. I believe however this report was around from when the ai did not get bonus ships for some reason.. In my more recent games it seems more difficult, but the diff is also higher (diff 8 for the more recent game) So no, I dont think it needs any change at the moment. |
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If you always all attack the same planet together in one single blob, you'll overwhelm the AI's defenses almost every time, which is why I suggested that "make the ai ships all abandon post if severely outgunned" idea to at least inflict some losses. You also need to all get together with all of your turrets into a single warp link to defend so you can pool your entire ship cap of turrets and everything into all the waves every time to help your defenses not crumble, particularly when getting up there in AIP. I always pre-destroy any warp gates two links out before I plop a CC onto a new planet so I don't accidentally get a warp wave to a planet I am taking that isn't my wave defense planet. Piling all waves into one planet every time means I can always use all my turrets every time a wave comes rather than having waves randomly not go to planets where I have a hundred turrets sitting doing nothing for that particular wave. Gotta take advantage of that overwhelming force advantage to keep that K:D as high as possible. The linear wave amount vs less than linear (I'll figure out what function it is someday I suppose) does significantly hamper defense more right now though. It doesn't help that most multi-player games have people wanting to defend their own stuff instead of acting in unison to defend one particular gateway planet that faces the enemy which fractures the already strained effectiveness. Playing 8 homeworlds is a pretty big defensive challenge due to the dropoff, and is really only made possible because you can burn all that "free" knowledge from more homeworlds to get more lightning turrets and tractor turrets (and gravity turrets). You have to defend from 8x as many waves with only 3x or so as many ships/turrets. I don't know if this reduction is as extreme for actual multiple people though (I think it is a little less stringent, or maybe you removed the multiple players reduction, I'm not entirely sure). I know it used to be pretty strong though. I think it is fine right now though. It sets the game pace and stakes more than it really affords any advantage or disadvantage. 1hw for a slower low stakes game, 4+hw if you want it fast and deadly. The defense deficit is made up for in the ability to take more advantage of area damage, and the offense deficit is made up by the AI defense scaling at roughly the same rate as the human defensive deficit compared to AI wave offense. |
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Lance: The extra resources are actually closer to about 1.5x at most in terms of harvester spots. But, there are other compensations (multiple home planets, etc), that do make it higher than that at the start of the game in particular, it's true. Suzera: The multiple players reduction is about 14(ish) ships off per player from a cap of 190. Should be the same in a multi-planet one. So, down to something like 70 from there, if I recall. My group's challenge in multiplayer tends to be that a couple of our players are particularly non-aggressive and don't make ideal use of their resources. And one of the other players tends to lone-gun more often than perhaps he should. So we wind up often with two or three players at a planet together, rather than four. Even if we were better organized, I imagine it would be a challenge for us to hold the lines at the same time as we attack. It's not that my group isn't even that organized -- that's the wrong word. It's just that everyone specializes, and does things in their niche, occasionally grouping in 2s or 3s to meet some extra challenging goal. I think one of the key things about the difficulty in multiplayer is how the team works together, in what ways the cooperate. And of course the efficiency of the various players. Our two less-efficient-economically players (they often have high resources just sitting around) tend to have excellent KTD ratios, for example. Anyway, for a team that is just really on top of things on all fronts and gunning hard for the AI, I think simply going up to a higher difficulty is a good idea. Most teams won't be able to be that coordinated or that "on" all the time, and so that handicap alone is going to pull them down to where the multiplayer is more equivalent to their solo play difficulty. But, as you say, some of the recent AI changes should particularly help in terms of when the team comes barreling in with overwhelming force, etc. For now I'm going to mark this as closed, since the consensus here seems to be that it feels fine for the moment. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 6, 2010 4:23 am | Lancefighter | New Issue | |
| Dec 4, 2010 1:35 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0005154 | |
| Dec 4, 2010 1:35 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Dec 4, 2010 1:35 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => feedback |
| Dec 4, 2010 1:51 am | Suzera | Note Added: 0005161 | |
| Dec 4, 2010 1:53 am | Suzera | Note Edited: 0005161 | |
| Dec 4, 2010 1:56 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0005163 | |
| Dec 4, 2010 2:09 am | Lancefighter | Note Added: 0005165 | |
| Dec 4, 2010 2:09 am | Lancefighter | Status | feedback => assigned |
| Dec 4, 2010 2:12 am | Suzera | Note Added: 0005166 | |
| Dec 4, 2010 2:13 am | Suzera | Note Edited: 0005166 | |
| Dec 4, 2010 2:27 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0005173 | |
| Dec 4, 2010 2:27 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | assigned => resolved |
| Dec 4, 2010 2:27 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => no change required |
| Jan 3, 2011 11:45 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | resolved => closed |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:29 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Gameplay - Balance Issue => Balance Issue |
