Enemy ship quantities - how many are "too many"?

[DarthTex]

I was "researching" with RedEd, messing around with capital ship build cost/maintenance. On a whim I set both values to 1 for the Imperials to see what kind of fleet would be generated for me. I was surpised to start off with 57 ships (about a dozen ISD's, a dozen & a half VSD's, and a plethora of the others), which leads me to believe that there is some "random range" of the number of build points allocated at the beginning of the game used to then randomly select ships until they're used up. If this "seed" number & range number could be identified, then it would be possible to change this value to get more ships at the beginning of the game without directly changing the capital ship data file. Is it worth tracking this down, or just sticking with using RedEd on the data files?

 

Also, if one was to do this only for the enemy ships, approximately how many enemy ships would be a threshold for a really tough game bordering on an impossible game; 10+, 20+, 30+, 40+, 50+ or more enemy ships (and of course, loaded with troops & fighters if they're capable)? Even with the AI as stupid as it is, it wouldn't have to be all that smart if loaded down with gobs of firepower (I would hope, but you never know).

 

Has anyone tried this before?

[Darth_Rob]

Ive tried to lower the cost of the Death Star when I played as the Empire, but never gave anything else such a low cost. But its an interesting theory Tex. From what you say, it sounds about right, seeing how you started a game with that many ships.

[RenegadeMax]

Wow. Once in a long while I'll get a tough start and the Imperials will be very aggressive. I'd think that 30 or so ships would be a challenge when playing as the Rebels. The Imperials have a more difficult time of it, as they can easily lose their capital and one of their main advantages (the command bonus from having the Emperor on Coruscant) right off the bat. As the Rebels, it can be kind of fun to have to retreat and hide at the beginning, but if you lose your means of production, you're screwed. So much of it is luck in the random set up and just how the AI decides to react.

 

It would be fun to play around with. I'd love to be able to let the Imperials start with that advantage, as long as they didn't get to build SDs for super cheap throughout the game.

 

Oh, I'm assuming that the selection of ships was standard (ie: no advanced designs). A couple of Interdictors at the start would obviously be a HUGE advantage.

[RogueIce]

Wow. Once in a long while I'll get a tough start and the Imperials will be very aggressive. I'd think that 30 or so ships would be a challenge when playing as the Rebels. The Imperials have a more difficult time of it, as they can easily lose their capital and one of their main advantages (the command bonus from having the Emperor on Coruscant) right off the bat. As the Rebels, it can be kind of fun to have to retreat and hide at the beginning, but if you lose your means of production, you're screwed. So much of it is luck in the random set up and just how the AI decides to react.

 

It would be fun to play around with. I'd love to be able to let the Imperials start with that advantage, as long as they didn't get to build SDs for super cheap throughout the game.

 

Oh, I'm assuming that the selection of ships was standard (ie: no advanced designs). A couple of Interdictors at the start would obviously be a HUGE advantage.

 

Yeah, should just be a whole bunch of your intial research ships.

 

Anyway, I played a LAN game against myself (so I could do a story and such, but mostly to have big battles) and had the maint. down to 1 for each side, and I got a ton of capital ships. Same thing happens if I do it in SP as well. Since I don't have Traitor I can't see if it'd do the same for the AI, but I imagine so.

 

Just imagine a game on Hard with a Huge galaxy, set up in that "aggressive AI" manner outlined on here somewhere, with the AI as Empire. And you give them all 1 maint. for their ships and they start off with a dozen ISDs and a bunch of VSDs, Dreadnaughts and Carracks. That would be an...interesting game...

[dulljackieboy]

I've done a good little bit with this. In my current settings, I'm dividing the Imps resource and maintenance numbers by a factor of eight while keeping my rebels at default--this is too hard for me to play with (I always play huge and toughest difficulty) because any system I show up in is libel to have around a dozen Vics waiting for me. I've also given the Imps the option of building Neb-B's (hey, they designed them in the first place) by removing the 2 troop carrier ship. I used to play at a quarter cut and that was more reasonable, but also too easy (though it did slow me down a little). One of the main problems is fighters. You can only cut down the values on the fighters so much before they're at zero, and when the Imps have tons of capital ships, they can very rarely fill them all up with fighters, which actually does away with the challenge. Let's say the Imps show up at your base with 3 ISDs, 6-8 Vics and a bunch of Nebs and Carracks and all you've got is a bunch of fighters (In the neighborhood of a couple dozen squadrons). Scary, right? Nope. Odds are, they'll not have a full compliment of TIEs, and lacking numbers, these will get shredded quickly. Then you turn your guns on their capital ships and suddenly you've got a victory you didn't really deserve. Until you can give the Empire an adequate number of fighters, capital ship strength will only allow the AI to hold on for a short while.

 

I don't know how many ships they have in total in these settingsl, but I commonly run into Neb-B #22 or so near the beginning of a new game, suggesting that they've run out of names before the action even starts. VSDs and ISDs soon follow, so I'm assuming they start out in the neighborhood of 80-100 capital ships.

[RogueIce]

I'll have to agree with the above. I played a game as the Alliance, Hard, Huge Galaxy. I gave the Imperials a straight 1/1 for everything but the Death Star (they still had to research stuff though). They wound up with a crapload of ships: at least 36 VSDs (For which I saw the numbers) a bunch of ISDs and various other ships.

 

The problem is, the AI didn't seem to know what to do with them all. Various espionage missions showed them going to different places, but I couldn't figure out the "logic" of it. When they finally got around to attacking me they didn't use the crushing superiority they had; they sent some light stuff after me. But with no fighters (!) and a VSD and some Carracks got chased away by one lousy Y-wing squadron. Finally they started stocking fighters and my auto-resolve had my fleet run away. The problem now? They didn't bother stocking up the troops! They even had empty Galleons for God knows what reason showing up over my planets.

 

It's not that they didn't have the troops. They did. An espionage mission revealed that at least 30 or more regiments were all enroute to Averam though. Why I do not know. Finally, eventually, they started putting troops on their fleet. And by day 311 they actually invaded all of the Farfin sector (they started off with three systems, and by diplomacy I got the other seven).

 

The sad thing is I really didn't do anything to them. Aside from the diplomacy, I built maybe three Y-wing squadrons total in that sector. And elsewhere all I ever really did against them was espionage. But for whatever reason they were just screwing around all over the galaxy. It seemed they didn't even care about other sectors. For example, in the Corellian sector all I had was Selonia and they had four other systems. Should've been easy to invade and take over, but they didn't. Sure there were random sabotage missions throughout the Core but that was about it.

 

I suppose to be fair to the AI, it was probably never programmed to deal with the massive amounts of troops, ships, and fighters a 1/1 start would give them. Either that or it figured if they had all of that, so did I, or something. But still. It took them around 200 days to even try to start assaulting one of my planets. Eventually by around day 150 I had gotten so bored I stopped doing anything, set the game speed to fast and let it run. When day 500+ rolled around and all they'd done was invade my seven systems in the Farfin sector I just gave up. I didn't feel like waiting for the rest of it.

 

Now this was on the default galaxy setup. I didn't take the time to do a search for that "aggressive AI" setup and implement it. I don't know if it'd make a difference or not. And I guess if I waited long enough the AI would've gotten its act together eventually. But still. It was pretty sad.