thats merely a quick fix, the issue will still stand.

so throwing around money will make your couples "work" faster?

yes, but its only 1/4th of the game (one X!) so it should be a normality, not a law.

thats hopelessly naive, just because it doesnt say "X-turtle!!!" doesnt mean that its not a valid, and rather popular, strategy.
in fact, the current allegiance system promotes turtling over expansion in its own way.

thats 15 points, and I would expect at least a couple trade ports, bringing it up to 19! for that you would need almost 5 completely upgraded planets. planets

it works as it always has, it expands your radar from 1 jump to 2 jumps from your planets.

If you want to turtle, sacrifices have to be made. Like maybe you can't have 8 research stations AND trade AND refineries AND culture.

Your homeworld is a gimme. 4 points. As is your bonus asteroid. 2 points. So even if you deemed tradeports necessary (even though you have 3 refineries going and a large tax base - trade is less important than in previous betas), you only need 14 points of 'expansion'. You could achieve that with a desert planet, an ice planet, and two asteroids.

How is there a problem?

theres a button in setting to change that.

I've never had an issue with it. its that way in countless RTS games.

hear, hear.

???
what exactly do you mean?

use alt





yes yes yes

additionally the AI needs its own bonus in fighting the pirates, its too weak to fight off both pirates and a late-builder human player AON

the point of turtling is to bottle those up, the sacrafice should be in resources (as is realistic and fun), not in "hey, I cant build any more... just because!"

14 points, lets see
at least 6 research
3 construction yards
2 refineries
2 BCs

being absolutely and completely conservative to the MAX, thats still not enough. and keep in mind, this is with tens of thousands spent on expansion.

and lets not forget the ship cap! 5 hangers with 3 gauss and 1 repair platform with absolutely NO fleet backup (not by any stretch a huge force) was capable of taking down a massive portion of my fleet! I sent 2/3 of my entire force at one little asteroid and I lost 1/4 of my entire ship reservoir. thats pathetic, and that was with a dunov firing away repeatedly with its restore shield, two command cruisers SPAMMING embolden and target, and the rest being cobalts and LRMS with MAX upgrades in EVERYTHING blasting away.

Played my first game on medium with a small set up with 3 ai players and no roaming pirates. Some things on a positive note: 1. AI - nice job even though it is single minded. I found that the ai was heavy on defense and even put up a good counter-attack. Also, the ai reinforces a besieged system. I lost a few battles before I broke through the ai defensive lines. 2. AI tries to dominate culturally. While I really didn't see any real result from this strategy, it's uncormfortable watch the warp lines change to a color other than your own. 3. Battles are nice and tend to see-saw back and forth....they aren't always easy. 4. the AI allies against a common threat. At least that's what it seemed like when I lost a fleet in a 3 way battle. 5. Scouting a system is actually a necessity unless you want to lose a fleet. 6. I had HUGE battles and no graphic or slowdown. 7. Good UI, I could tell how many ships in a fleet, types of ships in a fleet and system statuses, Now the not so good; 1. I really don't like the fact that we are actually only playing in 1 to 4 "solar systems" with lots of planets. I'd rather see them all as star systems. It just makes the Sins Universe seem small. 2. Scale the ships, they are to a rough scale but not close to what youwould expect. 3. Fighters and bombers don't really seem to have much difference between them. 4. Since Fighters and Bombers are used alot, shouldn't all ships have a varying degree of point defense? 5. Auto targeting spreads out firepower too much. If you leave your fleet to autotarget, be prepared to lose unless you have OVERWHELMING numbers. 6. Crystals, please make them a little more available. Even when you buy them, there is never enough. 7. give us a toggle for limited/unlimited metal and crystals. Overall, a nice experience with no system issues at all. I can't wait to see what the other two races will throw into the mix.

there sure as hell is. its called the players.

have you tested that?

well either way I dont care. I'm not concerned about turtling: I'm concerned about the overall gameplay, which has crumbled under this new system, despite having a far better AI and pirates.

Yeah, a ebil cheater AI would rock.

Noticed a few AI difficulties. They should upgrade their capital planets civilian infrastructure sooner for mo monies. They have a tendency to get their colony frigates killed by sending them in the same time as their combat ships which slows down their early expansion. They also tend to send colony ships out blindly to explore/colonize, which i guess is alright, but is asking for a Pirate Pillager pounding.

The galaxy generator seems to have taken a step back in gameplay. For example, I started a Large Galaxy game (with teams of 2-3-3-2) and 9-10 of the players started in the same system. It also has a tendency to create overlapping and confusing phase paths like so:



Annoying overlaps like this used to be a fluke but now seem to happen in every game.

Also, I ahve noticed the Gimme Asteroids occasionally being linked to enemy home planets, and home planets being linked to home planets, which is all a little weird.

And I rarely see any Volcanic worlds. Other players have complained of rarely seeing any Ice worlds, but I seem to get lots of them. Very strange.

Lastly, a small graphical irritation. When you select a star, the selection circle combines with the naturally white center to make an ugly white circle.

Thought: No selection circle on stars.

I want this
Easy (ai at a disadvantage)
Medium (no ai dis/advantage)
Hard (ai has small advantage, 10% resource or so)
Harder (ai has a big advantage, 30% resource or so)
OMFG this AI cheats. (ai starts with two planets, huge resource bonus of 50% and is rarely attacked by pirates)

also I want a part of the empire window set apart simply to hold all of your capital ships, its annoying to have them dissapear or to search through countless fleets only not to find one that needs upgrading.

Few things I noticed:

AI in ships and guns and stuff (when auto-selecting a target) will ALLWAYS favor light corvetts over anything else - when in reach.
This is only beaten by fighters going for the bombarding corvettes (koslov?)

The reason for complaining is because I see flak-corvettes as dealing much more damage (according to infoboxes) thus being a much more formidable opponent to take down.


AI does seem to travel between Star-systems, but in the one long game(29h++) it didn't even bother to take over planets in the razed system. Leaving an entire large Starsystem only spotted by several pirate nests.


Which brings us to pirates.
Boy can they be annoying. Small parties (up to 15-20 ships) can usually pop up in any planets gravwell boarder from ANY heading - is this a perferable thing?
GOOD for the pirates: When staging larger raids (with more then 30-40 ships) they start in the local Stars gravwell - where they come from? Oh well.


Which brings us to Jumping:
Pirates seem to be able to jump simultaniously - I/my fleets are very inept in doing so - and if I have a bunch of Ships grouped together I'd expect them to be travelling together... and not come drippling - crucial when facing an array of 20Gauss-Cannons


Cap-Ships AI is sooo dumb. When ordering to bombard a group of Caps (~15) they tend to fuss around, making another looping, turning here, turning there...until finally (if the moons phase is right - or...haven;t found out yet) they start to hit it. The Marzas on the other hand are MOST reluctant to attack planets. They need to be told to special-attack the planets, then they drift real close, do some magic and be done. Ordering them to normally attack results in them circling back a loooonnnng way (which can take up to a minute) until very reluctantly (see above) beginning the bombardment.


something else:
Autoplacement for structures... when playing a huge game you tend to concentrate your forces on your frontline, and building up (or rebuilding) captured systems via the autoplacement feature sure is a fast and very useful thing, but not when it comes to pirate attacks. Locating the Gausscannons at the space-lane entrypoints is a nice thing for normal adversaries, but pirates tend to jump in from another vector, and - if this system is not their real target - going for the jump-inhibitor and possibly the planet/shieldgenerator and fighterhousings which are completely unprotected.
The ideal solution (or close to) seemed for me to cluster those things in a tight knot
with the gauss-cannons surrounding the bunch - works for raiding parties (fighters have to take care of bombarding folks) - and will for players too, as when wanting to leave a system the gravwell (usually at the very center) needs to be taken down.
Greetingparties at the spacelanes can be made up from stationed bombers, which are effective for hunting down intruders.


So thats it for now,
maybe theres some useful stuff here;
Cheers
-Jonathan

But honestly I would like Ironclad to improve the base AI first so they can provide a good challenge for an average player before sorting out to cheating. Cheating AI should be the highest tier to provide a challenge for hardcore player.


Plus, without a good algorithm behind them it won't make a lot of difference no matter how much advantage you give it. Right now, it's not like the AIs don't have enough money, they just don't use it effectively (ala spend all their fortune on bounty instead of developing planet), its not like they don't have ships, but more like they don't use them effectively (ala send the ships in one by one instead of in group).



It doesn't matter if you give the AI more resource if it doesn't use it. It doesn't matter if you give the AI more ships if it still send them in one by one. The way I see it the current problem with the AI is not about acquisition, but with management.

what aabout adding spacestations

That is a mistake actually Those turrets are a stubborn older version that came back to haunt us. This will be fixed in the next patch. Good eye!

Ok a couple of things that are bugging me some of them are leftovers from beta 1.

1st I'm really starting to dislike the light carriers. Mainly because the AI spams the hell out of them. Which brings back the issue from beta 1 of fighters not attacking the bombers. I tried to counter with my own light CV spam. Low and behold i watched 1/2 of my planetary defenses get wasted because the stupid fighters went after the carriers, and other cap ships instead of the bombers. I had to manually force them to attack bombers 1 at a time because once 1 wing got destroyed they defaulted back to attacking cap ships again. Solution could be to force the fighter AI to only target, and attack fighters, and bombers

2nd which is a similar issue to above. I had flak frigates in that fight as well. Did the flaks try to shoot down the bombers? Nooooo they went after the enemy frigs ffs's! Again i had to micro the hell out of them to attack bombers. Targeting priority's need to be worked on for these ships since they are supposed to be anti fighter/bomber frigs.

Right now if you leave your fleets, or hanger defenses on their own they are sitting ducks to the AI light carrier spam, because fighters or flaks wont attack other fighters or bombers until they are the only ships left. An AI fleet with 6 light carriers damn near wiped out a 30+ ship fleet of mixed caps n frigs, and if i left them on their own they would have been completely wiped out. Im sure microers would rejoice over this, but if you have multiple battles going on at the same time i dont want to have to chose which fleet survives. Bomber spam is good, but not if you cant rely on your fighters to defend against it.