All races suddenly weak?!

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greywulfe
Lance Corporal - Panzer IA
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All races suddenly weak?!

Post by greywulfe »

I thought it was a fluke, but sure enough, all the other races ships are about 10% hull strength across the board.
Over time their ships don't get repaired either. It's like they are stuck at around 10%. Why?
greywulfe
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Re: All races suddenly weak?!

Post by greywulfe »

As a follow up - I sent over a scout to an alient planet and saw newly built ships at full strength. Then I watched as their hull strength slowly drained and eventually settled to around 10% number.
bjgrt
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Re: All races suddenly weak?!

Post by bjgrt »

They don't have enough minerals to support their fleet(s), so their ships decay over time.
greywulfe
Lance Corporal - Panzer IA
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Re: All races suddenly weak?!

Post by greywulfe »

The 'hidden option' of 'destroy ships when there are no resources to maintain them is not checked.

However this is happening to EVERY race, even the stronger ones. I find it hard to believe that all the races are all starved for minerals except me.
Darvin3
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Re: All races suddenly weak?!

Post by Darvin3 »

greywulfe wrote:However this is happening to EVERY race, even the stronger ones. I find it hard to believe that all the races are all starved for minerals except me.
The AI gets free resources and occasionally gets to instantly-complete build jobs, so in peace-time it can quickly overbuild well beyond its ability to sustain its own fleet. Basically the AI is getting screwed by its own cheating.
greywulfe
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Re: All races suddenly weak?!

Post by greywulfe »

That is a bug obviously. For some reason I am able to maintain my fleet (but of course I didn't build the massive fleets the AI did)

I am going to see what making the fleets get destroyed with lack of resources does.

Another bug..when I was short of plutonium, I simply bought it from the same alien races. No matter how many times I went (once every few months) they had a surplus of ore to sell me. Doesn't seem possible.

Also AI never requests trade from me - so why aren't they trying to get the minerals they need?
bjgrt
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Re: All races suddenly weak?!

Post by bjgrt »

Each AI faction gets a (renewable every year) "trade pool" of minerals (otherwise you would never be able to trade, because they are always "short") - this information is from the developer. It's my understanding that they can't use it themselves. However, they can use whatever they get from you in exchange. ;)
greywulfe
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Re: All races suddenly weak?!

Post by greywulfe »

Sounds like a poor supply/demand model..allocate a trade pool of minerals (which seems not to vary very often) even though you cannot maintain your fleet.

I did check off the destroy option, and sure enough it killed off most of the alien fleets, to which they rebuilt and it seems to be working again. But this is a major flaw IMO.
Darvin3
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Re: All races suddenly weak?!

Post by Darvin3 »

bjgrt wrote:Each AI faction gets a (renewable every year) "trade pool" of minerals (otherwise you would never be able to trade, because they are always "short") - this information is from the developer. It's my understanding that they can't use it themselves. However, they can use whatever they get from you in exchange. ;)
Whether it's related to the trade pool or not, the AI is definitely getting free stuff. This is particularly noticeable if you start close to another AI, since you can see just how quickly they build up at a point in the game where resource production is extremely tight. On challenge difficulty they can keep pace with you in terms of number of colonies, plus they'll have orbital satellites and fighters being freighted to those colonies, plus they'll be building up a defensive and offensive fleet. At a time when you're bottlenecking just by building colony ships.

I've seen the AI have similar issues with food, with its entire empire collapsing into unrest. It's actually a tricky problem to avoid, and I suspect everyone did something similar when first moving to challenge difficulty. You look at your food balance, see that it's positive, and go ahead and add new colonies. However, all your existing colonies are still growing so your food balance starts to decrease faster. Suddenly you realize your food balance is negative so you scramble to colonize more agricultural worlds, but it's too late. Farms build slowly, and your existing worlds all continue to grow so even with your renewed efforts food consumption is increasing faster than food production. If you only start addressing the problem after your food balance turns negative, you'll need to put your foot on the brakes and stop your economic growth. The AI seems to fall straight into this problem on a fairly regular basis.
Thrake
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Re: All races suddenly weak?!

Post by Thrake »

Darvin3 wrote:
bjgrt wrote:Each AI faction gets a (renewable every year) "trade pool" of minerals (otherwise you would never be able to trade, because they are always "short") - this information is from the developer. It's my understanding that they can't use it themselves. However, they can use whatever they get from you in exchange. ;)
Whether it's related to the trade pool or not, the AI is definitely getting free stuff. This is particularly noticeable if you start close to another AI, since you can see just how quickly they build up at a point in the game where resource production is extremely tight. On challenge difficulty they can keep pace with you in terms of number of colonies, plus they'll have orbital satellites and fighters being freighted to those colonies, plus they'll be building up a defensive and offensive fleet. At a time when you're bottlenecking just by building colony ships.

I've seen the AI have similar issues with food, with its entire empire collapsing into unrest. It's actually a tricky problem to avoid, and I suspect everyone did something similar when first moving to challenge difficulty. You look at your food balance, see that it's positive, and go ahead and add new colonies. However, all your existing colonies are still growing so your food balance starts to decrease faster. Suddenly you realize your food balance is negative so you scramble to colonize more agricultural worlds, but it's too late. Farms build slowly, and your existing worlds all continue to grow so even with your renewed efforts food consumption is increasing faster than food production. If you only start addressing the problem after your food balance turns negative, you'll need to put your foot on the brakes and stop your economic growth. The AI seems to fall straight into this problem on a fairly regular basis.
There's an easy fix to this... Simply switch the focus of your planets slightly. Production planets need to lose a lot of factories for this but otherwise destroying a couple labs or mines can have the job done (might take a good deal of mines but then you can choose which mineral or trade for it). 10 to 20 farms is enough to fill in a decent shortage and you should have decent stockpile. Now I recon for the AI it's another story because (I assume they are runing the automatic colony policies), it's agricultural world or nothing.

So yes, we all ran into this but if you have enough earthlike, it's easy and quick to fix (for the player).
Darvin3
Corporal - 5 cm Pak 38
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Re: All races suddenly weak?!

Post by Darvin3 »

Thrake wrote: There's an easy fix to this... Simply switch the focus of your planets slightly. Production planets need to lose a lot of factories for this but otherwise destroying a couple labs or mines can have the job done (might take a good deal of mines but then you can choose which mineral or trade for it).

10 to 20 farms is enough to fill in a decent shortage and you should have decent stockpile.
This hasn't been my experience, but I guess it depends on your situation. 10-20 farms will only produce around 50-100k food, which will feed like... one large planet. Even a relatively small war that only results in you taking 3-4 systems will result in your food consumption increasing far more than that.

In my worst face-plant, I had a situation where I was colonizing rapidly while I was at war with both the Drill and Humans. After crushing them and adding dozens of worlds to my empire, my food surplus started dropping rapidly. As those war-torn worlds started to rebuild, along with those colonies I'd placed, my population increased by several million. Over a shockingly short amount of time I went from a nearly 500k food surplus to a 2 million per month deficit. And that was including all the efforts I made to get new farms up as I watched my food balance plummet. I was eventually forced to institute heavy rationing across my empire, causing a plummet in resource income and bottlenecking the size of my military for centuries until I got rebalanced.
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