Mines, Treaties, and Cluster Bombs
Thanks for 1.11; I was looking forward to it. Some comments and questions:
1) As far as I can tell, mine maintenance reduction is not working, but I can't figure out why. I put maintenance reduction on the warheads, too, but it didn't help. It works fine on bases. Is there a hard-coded 5% minimal maintenance limit somewhere, regardless of any reductions?
2) Small mines are strictly better than medium (and etc): They are cheaper per unit damage, being less than 66% the cost; they are harder to detect (at least, they are at mine tech 4 and 5); and they are harder to sweep per kT. Since mine layers have no per-turn limit, I see no reason to go beyond small 3.
3) (as of 1.10) The computer may research advanced mines and warheads; I'm not really sure. But even late in the game, around turn 200, it still seems to build hordes of mines using the small mine 1 body, which I can easily see with basic scanners. So... either it never researches mines, or never upgrades the design, but essentially uncloaked mines are not very devious.
4) (as of 1.10) Most AI planets had mines in orbit. However, I attacked several AI planets that had mines in cargo, but none in orbit. Maybe they were waiting for a cargo ship to pick them up, but it certainly made my attacks easier. They launched the mines in combat, of course, but they don't do anything - you can fly right over them and they don't trigger.
5) The 1.11 AI seems very happy to make treaties now. TOO happy. Every turn I get bombarded with messages requesting some changes in my existing treaties, which is really tedious and annoying. Could you perhaps make the AI a little more content, so that a given empire won't try to renegotiate treaties more often than ever 20 turns or so? With 10 treaties, I get 1-3 renegotiation requests every turn.
6) The AI is VERY happy to propose and accept tech-sharing treaties. Unfortunately, I thought that disabling the "Allow exchange of technology through gifts and trade" would prevent this. It doesn't. So... is there any way to turn off tech-sharing treaties? Unlike 1.10, games now end up with a big blob of friendly empires, all at the same super-high tech level, and the unfriendly empires stagnating with relatively low tech. The player can either join the big happy tech alliance and coast along with no reason to research anything (since it will just be shared), or refuse to sign tech-trading treaties and get hopelessly far behind, despite spending 5x the research of anyone else. Which unfortunately makes the game very unfun for me.
7) Small Cluster Bombs and Rocket Pods are similar or identical in damage, cost, size, reload time, supply/ordnance. But Rocket Pods have a wide variety of targets, and Cluster Bombs don't... moreover, Rocket Pods are 10% the size and 50% the damage of Capital Ship Missiles, while Cluster Bombs are 25% the size of Planetary Napalm and 10% of the damage. So, Cluster Bombs have seemingly no reason to exist with their current stats (and those of the rocket pods).
8) Were you still planning to increase the price of colony modules?
Overall the AI in 1.11 seems better, in terms of initial expansion, building ships, and building research facilities... but I have a slow, old computer and not too much free time so I'm not too far along in testing it yet.
|