Zed-F Wrote:I don't recall ever having seen an AI empire design a megafreighter; it seems like they start with one DD freighter design and just stick with it. I'm not sure whether this is a bug or a deliberate omission, though.
Hmmm. I don't recall for sure with the Tarka, but the other Hivers had a lot of different DE freighter designs. Different weapon combinations, about 20 of them. If they never actually design and build a mega freighter, why did they research the tech?
Zed-F Wrote:Yep, the AI does like to spend a lot of money on stations that could probably be better spent doing other things.
It was odd that the Tarka build a nice mix of stations -- I saw repair, trade, command, and science and there might have been a scanner in their as well. But the Hivers were all but one repair.
Zed-F Wrote:Not really, all missiles is pretty wasteful on a DN since they have poor DPS and generally can't kite effectively. I'm pretty sure if most of their DNs were all missiles, we would have been able to beat them easily, especially with a few deflector cruisers added to our fleets. Note that PD missiles in SotS1 are great versus torpedoes and drones, but useless against missiles; they won't even fire as it's too hard to intercept.
Only some of the designs were all missiles. Most had some heavy stormers and then various mixes of HCL, fusion cannon, missiles, etc. I have never tried PD missiles, and will have to keep limitations in mind. Still, given the 0% chance of regular PD I guess PD missiles is better than nothing.
Zed-F Wrote:Not sure about this one. I'm pretty sure Hivers have a 100% for suspended animation, so I couldn't tell you why they didn't grab it this time. That said, the AI doesn't follow a set tech path and instead has something like a different tech preference personality every game. In some games they will rocket up the industry and bio trees, in other games they will focus on weapons, etc. None of this stuff is set in stone either as the AI will try to adapt to what other races are using against it. It's a complicated system, and it certainly doesn't always prioritize things in the way a human player would... but it's more designed to provide a fun challenge than to be perfect, anyway.At higher difficulty levels, the AI compensates for not always researching stuff in the best order with just plain researching a *lot* of techs.
I find game AI programming a fascinating topic, so it is interesting to think about issues like this. SA just seems like such an obvious tech to grab if you are settling new planets at all, as the initial pop boost makes the whole dev cycle faster to payoff. Oh well.
Zed-F Wrote:A lot of their colonies were relatively recent, claimed just around the time the Morrigi were being wiped out, so that helps account for the fact that they were still working on their trade net.
Yep, it was mostly their newer worlds. And many of them were developing very slowly because we had stripped them.
Zed-F Wrote:They never researched it because I only offered it to them as a special project after they had run out of places to settle; prior to that they didn't have it in their tree at all.
Ah, a mystery explained.
Zed-F Wrote:Remember though, what a live player would do with a 12LY speed and what an AI player would do with a 12 LY speed are very different things! Most of the Tarka's ship construction capability is back in their side of the barbell; we strip-mined most of the worlds they settled out near our side of the map. So in many cases their fleets would be moving more than 12LY to get to their targets, and the AI wouldn't necessarily think to planet hop to their own worlds first.
I wonder what the AI's logic for fueling/refueling looks like. Using owned worlds to reduce the need for tanker/refinery support seems like it would have some value, especially for the Tarka with their "go anywhere" warp drive. But again, these are more complex issues to program than they might seem at first glance.
Zed-F Wrote:Moreover, the AI is also notorious for including older ships in modern attack fleets, at least until such time as those older ships are destroyed or scrapped. That would slow down their effective fleet speed for a significant amount of time until they could build fleets with entirely new construction. And recall that the AI didn't have the economy to build large new-construction fleets on a moment's notice to the degree we could.
Mixing in old ship types...definite issue for the AIs. I noticed most of the Tarka ships, even recent variants, still had the SH-Fusion drives. Only the last types actually had AM drives yet. So you are probably correct that we would not have seen really fast Tarka fleets for some time, if ever.
Zed-F Wrote:Further, the AI as I said before tends to be pretty deliberate about how it attacks. Even with 12LY speed for the Tarka, we were not far away from Farcasters ourselves and more than capable of massive parallelism in our own attack plans, thus keeping the Tarka firmly on the defensive and rendering their speed advantage largely moot.
So, overall we might have taken some damage, but I would have been quite confident going up against the Tarka empire if it had come to that.
I believe we would beat them, but there would be some rather heavy fighting in the beginning and we might lose a few worlds.
Zed-F Wrote:Nope, a single enemy world in our trade sector does not disrupt trade there, as I recall (though at one point, it did.) They would need to have a control of a majority of worlds in the trade sector in order to disrupt trade; our income would barely drop at all from a war declaration with the Tarka. And it would be trivially easy to wipe out those low-resource Tarka worlds in our space anyway.
Hmmm. I thought it only took one world either not explored or not "safe" to make a sector insecure? I know when we were unlocking them earlier that even one local Tarka world was enough to prevent them from being secure for trade. Are the rules different once a sector has been unlocked?