Stealth Armor: Unbalanced

[Phoenix-D]

The ONLY way to kill a ship you can't see is with mines. If a ship decloaks in a sector with enemies, combat doesn't start. Therefore, defending with anything other than mines is pointless, (against a star/planet killer), they'll just die or be useless. Given the limit of 100 mines (plus or minus a few) it's not hard to send in sweepers enough to clear a field for 100% sure. Unstoppable destruction.

Combine that with the fact that any inhabited system defending against this player would have to be heavily defended ALL THE TIME, lest he pick off your colonies more or less at will, and it's likely the tonnage and cost destroyed will way exceed the cost of the ship.

quote:

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Surely a player exercising such abilities in a human game would find himself a potential target of a coalition as other players band together or die one at a time.

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More likely everyone takes that trait.

EDIT: cost wise, a BC with a cloak, shield, armor and max move costs 112k/52k/103k and takes 2.5 years to build on a homeworld with maxed space yards. Assuming your "uber cloak" costs 10 times that much, the cost becomes 129760/51k/108880 and the time 2.9 years.

Even if it's that much cost or more (and 10k IS a lot of additional cost for a normal ship), having your opponent be totally invisible, and therefore able to strike you more or less at will, would probably be far too frustrating. Unique components are fine, but unique totally uncounterable components are just irritating.

Phoenix-D

[ 13 December 2001: Message edited by: Phoenix-D ]

[Q]

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Originally posted by LGM:
Who cares about the AI?

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I do!

I agree that it will be practically impossible to create an AI that will win without major bonuses against a good human player in SE IV. But I do believe that it is very interesting to make an AI as strong as possible. And certainly if you want to play when you have time and not when the next turn is awaited from other human players you need the AIs. So I think SE IV should give players both possibilities: to play against humans and to play against AI's that are as good as possible.

[Baron Munchausen]

Honestly, I don't expect the AI to beat a human player. I expect the AI to not make utterly stupid blunders. Like constantly sending the same number of ships with the same tech level against a force that can defeat them with ease. Or forgetting that it even had a claim to a system once you've destroyed its colonies there. If the AI can be made to retain a bit of memory and make NEW approaches when its first attempt fails then it'll be good enough.