I just tried to play a FFA with 5 other hard AIs and I just found it impossible to win, this is mainly because all the AIs with which you don't have a Non-Aggression have you as a priority to kill. It does not seem like a FFA but rather like all against the human. The first such FFA I tried to play was a disaster. I had all 5 players simply assaulting me together in cooperation.
In the next game I tried my darnedest to make as much alliances as possible. At the start when you can increase their favour towards you mostly with resources, all seemed to go ok. However this is generally not enough to get a non-aggression going so you need to do more tasks for them. The tasks that they give you however are just insane. They always ask you to destroy fortifications and buildings which means you have to overextend to achieve anything. And even if you do manage to ally with one or two, they just love asking you to attack your new ally for more rating, or you simply end up losing rating from them.
At some point I had managed to get a non-aggression with 3 AIs which gave me some valuable breathing space, as the other 2 had already banded together and were sending huge waves against me, while I had no one backing me. So I had to concentrate all my resources for defending one chokepoint. All the three of my allies were constantly giving me quests to attack either my other allies or destroy fortifications from the two others (impossible). Eventually, as I couldn't do any more quests, one of them broke the non-aggresion and attacked me from behind. There was little I could do at that point, especially after the other 2 attacked me with a huge fleet (about 3 times the size of my defenses+fleet) and it was game over after a majestic battle .
The AIs seem especially annoying as they seem perfectly capable of making alliances among themselves without any difficulty.
So my question is, how do you deal with this? is there any point in playing with many hard AIs FFA as they'll just all gang-up on you? What kind of strategies do you have to keep alliances? Is there a way to gain favour without doing quests? I tried bribing them but it didn't do squat.
PS: I was playing Vasari.
Yay! I started a new game and I managed to win (sorta). I managed to make peace with 3 AIs and then defeat the other two, so I count that as a victory. However the game didn't end which tells me you can't really have a peaceful victory :-/ (I seem to remember that I managed it once though)
The trick for me was the map, if you can get a bit of isolation and you don't begin smack in the middle of 3 others, you have a chance to avoid them until you can convince a few to join you. I actually gamed the AI a bit by not taking a planet very close to me because, as some noted here, that would give me a planet within 2 jumps of an AI planet, which means that everyone else would ask me to go on assault missions. By avoidiing to colonize that planet (even though it was a juicy terran) I managed to get far more resource quests which allowed me to find allies.
Had some awesome battles too but my VGA stopped to a crawl from the amount of ships and particles.
Now to arrangle a nice 3v3
Everyone needs to be allied for an allied victory. If you're allied with 3 AIs, but they're not all allied with each other the game isn't going to end because they're still fighting
As, I see. That makes sense. That just means I need to kill the lone struggler, who was incidentally my staunchest ally in the rest of the game
It's a pity you can't make other see sense and ally with each other.
Come on, it's fun stabbing them in the back!
Btw, I have a save for a huge battle but I can't really enjoy it much with the hub in the middle. The cinematic camera simply removes the fleet colours so it doesn't help much. Is there any way to make watching grand battles like this more enjoyable?
I don't remember which game it was which had a cinematic option with which the camera simply left your control and started taking cinematic views on its own. At one point it would follow one ship up close, at another it would do a bullet view of an attack, at another it would show your Big ship lining up for a beam strike etc. I think it was Haegemonia but I can't remember.
Anyway, is there anything similar or any other easy way to enjoy a battle instead of zooming in close and panning the camera manually?
Not quite. Between Cinematic Mode and Ctrl+Shift+Z to remove the hud, you'll get a fairly clean view of the action though.
U R damn right!!!
Semantics : I'm going to stab you now, with bullets
I'm having a similar problem. I'm playing Advent on Random Huge with 7 AIs (I think I'm on Medium diff). I've gotten to the point were I have the best economy and most territory, and if I could just hold off the 3 remaining AIs (allied with 1 TEC and the remaining AI factions are defunct) for a little while until I get my invasion fleet geared up I could clinche.
The bulk of my territory is shored up pretty good. About 6-8 planets and as many asteroids with enough gas giants and dead space to make getting an enemy fleet into the heart of my territory more trouble than it's worth. The trouble is the last two planets I conquered are pretty exposed, with a wormhole to hostile territory (remaining TEC and Vasari empires) on one side and an embattled Vasari empire on the other. I have a solid Advent fleet guarding both planets, and I'm pumping out ships like mad. My TEC ally has been helping me hold of the local Vasari while I deal with the TEC and Vasari alliance from the next system, but right about the 5 hour mark of the game my TEC ally strikes a cease fire with the local Vasari and I just start getting overwhelmed by superior numbers.
Part of it is I need to get better at fighting Vasari. I do okay draining anti matter against smaller fleets, but once my TEC allies stop going after the local Vasari their fleet just becomes to much to handle with it's heals. I could probably go back and play up the diplomacy as well, get one of the 3 fleets off my back, but I feel like if I could just field a large enough fleet with a serious anti matter drain I could put it over the top. But I've been at it for three nights running now, and no matter how far I push it I always end up looking at a wall of ships chewing my fleet to nothing.
Don't know if this helps you out bigdog, but I had problems fighting vasrai also with advent. I once saw a evacuator capital ship not only survive, but have their HP continually heal and rise during the course of one battle due to their Overseers. That was pretty incredible and frustrating to watch since I focus fired from about 60+ ships.
Anyway, priority targets should be Overseers and Subjugators. Overseers heal and those subjugators have a disabling ability with an area of effect. Very bad for your fleet if they come in large groups. After that I usually target the capital ships. I usually ignore the cruisers until clean up, because they tend to get inside my fleet's formation. The guardian's push ability is good to use if you've got it researched here. For my capital ships a choose a radiance , a progenitor and I forgot the name of the one that has Vengeance. I keep alternating animosity between capital ships if I have multiple Radiances. I'm sure the damage return helps in battle, but I've always been more interested in just not having my smaller weaker ships shot at to keep up the DPS.
In a recent game I had none of this was enough and ultimately what I had to do was get them to attack a planet with 35 defense platforms. I managed to jump into gravity well from one side that put them beween my beam cannons and the fleet allowing me to cut them to pieces because in order to fire at me they would have to turn away from the cannons. Most of the time AI will attempt to leave the gravity well if this situation occurs, so make sure to build phase jump inhibitors and use a small fleet of subjugators to to disable their jumps to keep them in the gravity well for as long as possible. You can slowly wear down their fleet this way, by leaving your fleet out of that gravity well and luring them into attack.
Hope some of this helped.
just play with locked teams
The problem here is that you were focus firing your entire fleet on a "tank" - a cap ship with full support is very difficult to take down because it has a lot of hull, gets full benefits from ~70% shield mitigation while being repaired, and your dps was probably suffering from the Stilaktus Subverters disabling your frigates and cruisers.
the way to attack a Vasari fleet late game, provided your fleet is at least of comparable strength (if they have 3x more ships than you do in terms of resource cost, your are most likely SOL anyway) is this:
1. Focus fire on the subverters ASAP. They will probably be "mingling" with your ships due to their "teleport and dsiable" ability, which should make them relatively easy to pick out. Take them out to the exclusion of all other ships - the group disable SEVERELY cripples your dps, but the subverters are fragile by Vasari standards and should go down in one or two salvos each if fire is concentrated - this also means they won't have time to gain benefits from support ships before being pulverized.
2. Once most of the subverters are taken out, you have a choice to make. If it's a mixed fleet, start trageting overseers, if it's an LRM-heavy fleet, start taking out the missile ships by focus firing a couple at a time. The LRMs are fragile enough that they won't have time to get healed if you focus fire them.
3. Take out the overseers if you haven't in step 2. If you have, take out the cap ship with the most annoying ability (probably the Carrier Cap Ship with repair cloud).
4. Mop up. If cap ships are a problem (i.e high level), take them out by focus fire. If the cap ships suck, take out the karrak assailants, heavy cruisers and karrastra skirmishers in that order (LRM -> heavy cruiser -> light frigate). Adapt this based on circumstances (if they only have a couple heavy cruisers mingling with your fleet, while the LRMs are sitting at range, pick off the heavy cruisers, than move on to LRMs, etc)
5. Kill the carrier cruisers last. Never waste your time shooting at carriers unless you are picking off remnants of a retreating fleet, or your opponent has nothing but carriers. They don't do any damage directly, have a large amount of shields and hull (meaning they get a lot of benefits from shield mitigation), and even when you kill them, the fighters/bombers will linger for another couple of minutes. Counter the fighters/bombers the best you can, and focus on ships that damage you directly.
Having a couple of Radiance Battleships (since we are talking Advent) can be good here - the battleship has a very synergistic set of abilities. Use Animosity to make the enemy attack your tank (Cap Ship), Ablative armor will passively restore your antimatter (while reducing DPS slightly due to the armor bonus), which you can use to detonate animatter in surrounding enemy ships, doing both decent DPS (albeit spread out, and so subject to repair cloud) and preventing the subverters and overseers from doing their thing. Cleansing brilliance is nice if your ship is that high, but really, the three primary abilities shine if used together.
Thx for the help Annatar, Can't really try it out right now though... but while we're waiting(not to be a pest) could I have a configuration for a 2500 size fleet?
Thx
P.S. Sorry for the massive gap between replies, I'm grounded so I can only post while at school.
Koda0
Ok guys be realistic. srsly now how can a game with only hard AI's be all that difficult. when I play single player I set it up on a random huge map some times multi star with all hard AI's and locked teams some times(if I'm feeling praticularly machostic) and I come out looking like a porn star. I wipe out the first 2 AI's next to me in like the first 45 minutes of the game. honestly can you guys explain in more detail why you can't seem to win cause.
There are thousands of strategies out there and one thing you can do to ensure a victory is make fleets and
The easiest way to make alliances is to make constant assaults with your fleet. This will please some, who will be eager to assist your glorious cause. Remember, alliances are your best border defense!
Yeah this map was a good lesson for me. I went back to about the 4 hour mark and focused more on politics and fleet building. I was able to declare peace with three factions (up from 1) and it gave me the time I needed to augment my fleet and wipe out one of the Vasari. Now I'm free to do some planet capping and maybe take out one of the three remaining factions.
Biggest challenge is still those massive Vasari fleets. Good thoughts from Drunk Templar about taking out the subjugators before the overseers.
I've tried a couple unlocked team games recently (I personally don't like the setting because of the double standard between player and AI). I have a few insights to bring up. First, the size of the map is a huge factor. If it's a relatively small and crowded map, you cannot win. I had a 6 way FFA on a relatively small map where everyone starts in the same solar system. It didn't matter how many I bought off, everyone I didn't buy off rushed me hard, and just completing their quests didn't mean they wouldn't rush you. In fact, quite the opposite, I found that often they wouldn't accept cease fires even though I did pay them. I had to reload several times before I survived a 3v1 onslaught. This was a phyrric victory, since I failed all the "attack this enemy" missions I'd been given (a little hard to go on the offensive when you have three fricken enemies attacking you!) and everyone turned on me afterwards.
It really reminded me of playing Risk with someone whose only goal is to make sure you lose. It just isn't fun, because he will succeed. If someone wants you dead at the cost of their own chances of victory, you can't stop them, and it sucks all the fun out of the game. Now, I did manage to get off the ground in a larger FFA game where players started in multiple star systems (so only so many could possibly rush me), but it felt it was effectively decided in the first thirty minutes. Either the player lost to a coordinated AI team rush, or the player is established and the AI's are just relentlessly running into a brick wall and feeding him experience. This is the problem when the AI's are out to kill the player, and not to win. They either succeed at the beginning, or shoot themselves in the foot because they crippled their long-term prospects, so the game is boring and one-dimensional.
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