Polaris Sector - another new space 4x

Started by RedArgo, November 02, 2015, 04:48:47 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

jamus34

Quote from: bobarossa on April 23, 2016, 11:10:05 AM
Quote from: jamus34 on April 23, 2016, 07:08:53 AM
Well I do not know how but he managed to create transport ships that could go pretty deep into my territory. Where my transport tips out at around 10k.
Someone on the Slitherine forums brought this up.  The reply was that the AI doesn't have to worry about fuel range because it can't figure out how to stop running out of fuel (my interpretation).
in all honesty that seems more game-breaking than most other issues I've seen / heard about so far.

Do AI opponents even need / use fuel cells then? If not that is a huge advantage in size, power and weight savings.
Insert witty comment here.

mikeck

The issue for me with this is the "secret squirrel" transports you mentioned. Have the star lanes covers entering my territory. Next thing I know, a planet in the middle of my empire is having its orbital facilities destroyed and invaded
"A government large enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have."--Thomas Jefferson

Tanaka


jamus34

#363
Hell, I wouldn't mind it if the AI would send it's freighters on "suicide missions" where they are out of gas with no where to go.

However I had a game (since abandoned) where my entire fleet is now stranded because they have no gas and the colony they were at got taken over before I could mount a defense.

I hope this gets patched ASAP as to me there's just no fun in it. The AI can basically attack you wherever they want and not only that but their freighters just keep escaping battle.

EDIT: I wonder if this is a result of the patch that just hit as it seems like complaints just started appearing recently on this.
Insert witty comment here.

mikeck

It's annoying but not a game breaker. You can detect the ships with the right buildings and equipment on ships. I try to keep a few ships near big planets that can respond when I detect something.
"A government large enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have."--Thomas Jefferson

FarAway Sooner

This does seem like a nasty wart on an otherwise very pretty young game!  I'll keep my ears peeled on how this goes...

Steelgrave

I'm enjoying the game very much but I have to admit that I finally turned the damn Pirates off. At the early stages of the game, just when you're starting to crank up your expansion and industries, pirates are a pain in the dorsal fins. I got tired of emergency builds of police and slamming out Corvettes and in my current game I don't miss them.

Jarhead0331

#367
Are we sure the AI fuel issue is 100% confirmed by the developer? I've noticed a few random enemy ships deep in my space, but I always thought this was possible due to worm holes. These one-way gates are quite common and it seems plausible that an alien race had discovered a system that had a worm hole leading into my space. The enemy ships don't seem to be able to travel to any location within my space. They tend to be pretty idle. This behavior seems to suggest that they are restrained by fuel limitations. I don't think I've ever seen an enemy ship travel across my border and continue to make its way deep into my territory. They just seem to appear at random stars held by my empire. This also seems to suggest the worm hole theory.
Grogheads Uber Alles
Semper Grog
"No beast is more alpha than JH." Gusington, 10/23/18


ghostryder

As annoying as it is I'm still glad to see a game where the A.I. puts up a fight. I am so tired of braindead A.I. in strategy games---and I will note in one of my games while exploring anomalies I found one that allowed me to spot the starlanes so i could build defences on the planet. Ultimately I play on "challenge" level and generally I am being beaten on each try I make--so I rethink my strategy and try another path--it's what a strategy game should be forcing you to do-- so i'm all for that.

ghostryder

#369
Here's some random things I've discovered while playing that are not apparent from the get go:

1. You can move battle sats and even battle stations. Your need to be further up in the tech tree but once you can put enough containers on a freighter to equal a space of 6600 you can move sats. Merge with the sat and your see the "disasemble command. After that just 'load parts' ---then once your where you want it you have to reassemble it. To be honest sats are little more than early warning alarms as the A.I. easily defeats them but you can also move Battle stations. Your need 3 freighters groups with the 6600 space and the parts load up on all three.

2. I always tweak wahtever race I'm playing to use less food. Fleet upkeep or mining bonus seem to be the best tweaks. Less food planets mean more minerals which translate to more ships. You do this one the race selection screen at the start of the game. Slow pop growth is a good tradeoff or poor trader.

3. The A.I. gets several advantages. Fuel is obvious but they also get some bonus's with weapons. Your ship can be identically armed with the A.I. but his range will be better. This is deadly for your fleets. A single A.I. battleship can wipe an entire fleet. Your only defense really is very fast moving corvettes that can avoid his fire or swarms of fighters. Be sure they are correctly armed to fight ships and not other fighters. This is somewhat of a pain as your lose fighters and have to return to a planet to build more--or ferry them with mobile carriers made for that purpose. What needs to be added is a carrier component that allows fighters to be manufactured on the carrier.

4.A better solution to battle sats is a carrier with but one small engine and loads of hangars to guard planets. 200 to 300 fighters can defend far better than the best sat. Very fast corvettes or fighters really is a must end game. I can take out the enemies largest ships with just 5 very fast corvettes. They are great at swirving through fire without getting hit. You just cannot compete with cruisers, destroyers no matter how well armored or shielded--they die before they can get in range.

5. Those nasty wormholes means every planet can be attacked ----it's best to keep a large fleet or 2 behind in order to respond. and a stockpile of some battle stations and the freighters to move them once you've been laid victim to an attack because they'll be back.

6. Since you can change the stats on any race at the beginning and there is no unigue race techs the only reason to play different races is their ship hulls. Humans have the worse. Cruiser hulls are particulary horrible. Try different races to try different ones--but note dispite stat tweaking some races are natural enemies regardless.

7. You can easily mod ship components. Since the A.I. has no fuel problems I intentionally modded my fuel cells to carry tons of fuel. To be honest this made no great change --I still get my butt handed to me on challenge level---and if you mod anything else the A.I. will get it too and it is very good at using them. I proved this by uping generators and lowering beam weapons power demand so i just needed one small generator to power all weapons with 4 shields to boot---and in that game the A.I. did the same and I still got whipped. But the fuel tweak at least puts you on the same playing field.
To mod this look for a file in the games' main directory named "equip.all"  --notepad+ -----it's pretty straight forward to mod range, power requirments or weight(space). But again the A.I. will use it too. Remember to back up the original file if you choose to experiment. Please note that "power cons" is used to determine generator output---a laser may have -50 so take note a generator will have 500 without the negative---so make sure your bonus is a higher number ---I first made the mistake of lowering the number like I did on weapons and my generators didn't generate power lol.

8. Production is everything. At the beginning your have to grow food on Earthlike planets--the problem with this is setting the planet to agriculture means no factories will be built and that planet will never build a spaceyard so it'll take centuries to build even a single sat. When you get the tech ocean planets are a better choice as they will build some factories to support the platforms so that planet will later get a spaceyard. I actually go back and wipe the agriculture from my earthlikes once I can grow food on ocean worlds. The more planets that can build ships the better. Minerals+ is a good choice for Earthlike planets. They'll build enough farms to not be a food drain, build enough research to equal about 10 points and minerals to support fleet building. You should end up with at least 10 industry as well for good production speed. With a race tweak to use -25 percent less food it's even benificial to grow food on dwarfs and dead planets. Ice and Hot planets with some minerals and 50 farms I set to minerals+ as well. The aim is make every planet a production planet for ship building.

Dread Rlyeh

Quote from: ghostryder on April 25, 2016, 04:17:14 PM
Here's some random things I've discovered while playing that are not apparent from the get go:

1. You can move battle sats and even battle stations. Your need to be further up in the tech tree but once you can put enough containers on a freighter to equal a space of 6600 you can move sats. Merge with the sat and your see the "disasemble command. After that just 'load parts' ---then once your where you want it you have to reassemble it. To be honest sats are little more than early warning alarms as the A.I. easily defeats them but you can also move Battle stations. Your need 3 freighters groups with the 6600 space and the parts load up on all three.

You only need 1600 to transport a battle sat.

Quote from: ghostryder on April 25, 2016, 04:17:14 PM
8. Production is everything. At the beginning your have to grow food on Earthlike planets--the problem with this is setting the planet to agriculture means no factories will be built and that planet will never build a spaceyard so it'll take centuries to build even a single sat. When you get the tech ocean planets are a better choice as they will build some factories to support the platforms so that planet will later get a spaceyard. I actually go back and wipe the agriculture from my earthlikes once I can grow food on ocean worlds. The more planets that can build ships the better. Minerals+ is a good choice for Earthlike planets. They'll build enough farms to not be a food drain, build enough research to equal about 10 points and minerals to support fleet building. You should end up with at least 10 industry as well for good production speed. With a race tweak to use -25 percent less food it's even benificial to grow food on dwarfs and dead planets. Ice and Hot planets with some minerals and 50 farms I set to minerals+ as well. The aim is make every planet a production planet for ship building.

One thing you can do is build up factories and build one or two orbital shipyards, then dismantle all the factories.  The orbitals don't diminish your capacity to build farms/research (as factories/mines do) and they will build fast.   Of course the downside is the 10k pop per and initial time required, I do wish I had noticed this earlier though and better utilized my earthlikes.  Early on that is, I agree that when you have enough food they should be your production planets. 

Nice post and double plus on the food, it can be very limiting early on.   

Barthheart

From the developer on Slitherine Forums:

QuoteAs I said before, AI can cheat with ranges, but usually it does this in some reasonable way. So, I need a save when it gets out of the reasonable limits to inspect what is going on and why it decided to act like this... So, if this happens in some of you game, could you please send me a saved game to ufnv (at) mail.ru ?

So it seems that the AI can take liberties with the fuel ranges, but is supposed to be limited in some way on how it does this....  ???



ghostryder

That's a good post dread. Although the game really lacks the tools to set planets for manual control once I've established my borders and run the research tree I generally set my original homeworld to micromanage. This way you can turn off the population control and feed colony ships from it---which is very useful if you use cloaked colony ships to colonize past an A.I. empire. I may set a couple other planets to micromanage depending on my needs. I've found just adding to the name of a planet helps in the big picture once your trying to manage a 200 planet empire. If a planet is going to have a shipyard--which is every planet either set to research, minerals plus as well as ocean worlds I just add the word "base" to the planet name so I can see at a glance which planets can build ships.

I also use stealth scouts with lots of cargo holds to explore the whole map---getting all those anomalies gives some bonus' and building those ships with the 6 keys gets you some lovin' too. Spy ships get better with age. If you just park them in the enemies territory they'll passively spy and gain experience. You can get them up to 2 stars like this. after that you need to start giving them orders --starting with the easiest tasks with the highest chance of success. over time your get 4 star spies that are very useful.



solops

Apparently patch 1.04a is done per the official forums. I do not know much about it as as do not have the Steam version.
"I could have conquered Europe, all of it, but I had women in my life." - King Henry II of England
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly. - Winston Churchill
Wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. - Benjamin Franklin