Veteran Spam

posted on May 21st, 2009, 4:22 pm

Hi guys, i have come to find a very disturbing thing while trying out my favourite map Nirvana II.

I set up 4 teams with two players of one of the Non-Borg factions in each, the general game difficulty was easy and i set all AI players to easy too, i wanted to take a look at all the new stuff from 3.0.6.

I built up my base (feds) and warped in 2 Descents, then i wanted to level them a bit, but the moment i approached the wormhole leading to the inner smap sqare i came across some k´tingas and b´rels, nothing to worry i thought, BUT then i noticed that those ships (the k´tingas that is) seemed to be invincible.

Well they weren´t, but they were veterans, i guess two or three. I barely managed to get one of my descents out there alive, so i built some more ships to clean my sqare and there they were again, not only didn´t the number of vet ships ever too become smaller even though i destroyed some of them, but the whole map was swarming with ships, i have never seen this before ever (remember it was supposed to be easy).

Maybe AI gets Veterans too fast ? And why the hell did ANY race spam like hell, i wasn´t really able to get out of my base. It really reminds me of Prerelease 3.0, is that intentional ? I love FO but that game wasn´t very enjoyable.

So, i really like to know what you think and how you experienced the new version so far.

And sorry for all the words but maybe something i did sealed my fate and giving all this information could help to figure the whole thing out. 

posted on May 21st, 2009, 4:33 pm

The AI should get Veterans at the same rate then everybody else, but i will take a look at it

posted on May 22nd, 2009, 1:22 am

Thank you Optec, i wasn´t able to get much in the way of veterans in this game, because everything i sent out got blown up too fast.

Well, to be honest, i got one defiant veteran that was destroyed 10 seconds after i upgraded it.  >:(

And because of the massive spam that got around, none of my ships survived long enough to even gain the first exp rank.

On one occasion i had a whole fleet (2 descents, 4 sovies, 4 defiants, 6 exselsiors) done in mostly by a few k´tingas, b´rels and one or two k´vorts, and i guess thats because half of those tiny ships were veterans, which is hard to see btw, cause only the fact that those ships seem to live forever gives you any ckue about their rank, the other option is to chase every single ship with the cursor to check it´s values and the tooltip,

Ah, maybe i´m hust a bad payer, but easy ai, well then is something terribly wrong with me.

And i´m very sorry about complaining minutes after 3.0.6 is out, i love FO, and i appreciate all the work the team puts into it, so please don´t be mad at me. 

posted on May 22nd, 2009, 6:59 am

odd. i found a medium dominion AI fairly easy as klingons (playing on Wormhole Passage, the best map i made in my opinion). didnt see a single enemy veteran. Usually what happens is the ship you get to veteran needs repairs cause its taken some battle damage (bugs kept ramming my ships, very annoying...)and thus it doesnt get the full advantage of the boosted defense.

posted on May 22nd, 2009, 11:20 pm

Maybe it´s the map i was playing, i always experienced strange things there, like all ai players ganging up on me at once without bothering to fight each other, thankfully they never approach your base, they seem to guard the wormhole in some strange way.

So far i resorted to play on 2 player maps, just to try 3.0.6 out and have a look at veteran abilities for my favourite ships. i never see an enemy veteran there, they simply don´t kill anything. 

posted on May 23rd, 2009, 12:31 pm

I played a game with an AI for an ally (so I can see their ranks, plus I nearly always have Fed & Klingons together) and very few of thier ships were officers, let alone veterans. They had about 2 veterans, max with mostly rank2 ships.

posted on May 23rd, 2009, 9:59 pm

I guess the problem on nirvana 2 is the central sqare, the ai sends build ships there and constructs mining stations all over the place, so any fleet coming across kills those stations and ranks up. Since the ai mindlessly rebuilds those structures they deliver a steady supply of experience.

Or maybe i took too long builing up, since i hate to feel unprepared.

@ tyler: what you wrote about observing your ally answers my unwritten question whether the ai uses the experience system like human players, although i read somewhere that hard ai builds fully experienced ships , that´s quite scary with veterans going around.