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[sambojin]

Basic theory for above advice being:

Every 1 1/4 minutes you can teleport 2-4 entire squads of troops at anything your scarabs are doing. They're heavy infantry (or were in vanilla), so aren't susceptible to the same things assault scarabs are (light infantry still?). No strategic point is safe, but all of your's are. Jump/dash/melee/teleport, whatever. You've got 1/3rd of the entire requisition of a Necron army on call at a moment's notice, on attack or defense. They also kill the shit out of enemy morale, while they kill the shit out of anything that isn't a building or tank.

You have a better webway than the Elder or "make a coat" people (humies).

If scarabs can push a bit, then flayed ones and teleport can push it more with them, for fewer loses. They can tele back later on too, so that you can defend whatever you need to.

Easy force projection, a viable use for power, and gets a bit silly after you've got 3-5 squads worth of them deep striking everywhere.

Theorycraft, but true (hopefully).

[Sinistar]

Yup, yesterday (and partially today, for me) was a fun, bloody day to be a conscript in a UA match! Here's some AAR if anyone's interested (no pics though, sorry, maybe next time):

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Me and Mech#4 managed to beat hard Necron AI but it wasn't easy. Started off moderately ok, I pushed and stopped just short of entering the base, with Mech taking the middle route. But as I was barely preparing to field my first land raider, AI suddenly shifted gears into rape-everyone-with-tomb-stalkers mode. Yeah, I was losing my mind. And my whole damn army eventually, of course. I kept falling back, but at one moment AI decided not to push anymore, despite being in position to probably break through my last lines of defense and enter my base. Didn't pay much attention at that point, I'm guessing Mech distracted them and long enough for me to filed my first titan. The tides turned after that and we eventually won.

Then we played 3 vs 1 hard AI, orks + necrons + dark eldar vs. nids. Should be no problem, right?... Of course nids stomped us. I've made a mistake of being pop blocked early and while I held the line for a short while, eventually nids just charged through and nom'd my base. The bio-titan shoved up and destroyed Aklyon. Mech managed to field a titan of his own, but seeing it was no match against nid titan, decided to base-race. AI was smart enough to rush to defense and when DE titan went down, we just made a new game.

Next was same composition (or did Mech get CSM?) but against hard CSM and different map. Went much better, I've managed my pop with more care and rushed the AI. Didn't manage to quite finish them off, but we kept the pressure until this time I got the titan out and then we just crushed dem crazy humies. Also, that Waaaaagh! global is insane.

We also tried versing 2 hard AIs at the same time, IG and SM, but I was failing hard with Demons so that didn't turn out well for me. Other two managed to hold off for a while but then I left by mistake and game crashed. Next few games, this time just me and Aklyon was again me trying to figure out Demons, but we lost twice against 3 standard AIs so I was getting slowly pissed at myself. Then I gave up and changed to CSM and somehow we finally managed to beat the already mentioned desperate alliance. I was very close to being wiped out, but thanks to me building one and later second sort of giant defensive statue (don't remember the name right now) which turned out is moderately effective at killing stuff and with help from Aklyon, I've somehow managed to build gate to dark mechanicus (or something)... only to figure out I am 100 relic points short of being able to make a single unit. Luckily, my brain was still working good enough to remember there's some RP research and I've held just a little longer to field that Warp Drake thingie. After that, despite loosing one, we eventually steamrolled over.
Here's one fine screenshot:
Notice the position of pylon and it's target on the map, down-left. That's a shot right across the map, bitches.

I'm starting to figure out my problem (amongst other things) is not building defensively enough. I usually start very aggressively early game, but because my micro and macro can't quite compare to AI's, I run out of steam quickly. And because I have not defensive structures to fall back to, once the AI starts pushing me hard, I have hard times stopping it. Still, fun, fun, fun! One day, we'll beat those nids for sure!

Frumple: get yourself the newest patch, ffs. If we get 4 people together, maybe we can even try 2 v 2 without AIs? Or maybe 4 humans vs 2 hard AIs! Come on, we need more people!

And that goes for you too, sambojin! Enough theorycrafting, time to put those things into practice!

[Aklyon]

I tend to do the opposite thing, Sinistar, which is why I was amused at how the mod-necrons worked. I'll build up fairly defensively and then not push very far out because I'm trying to build more things.

[Frumple]

I'm updated already, as noted

Actually just finished fixing the coloration (GLORIOUS PURPLE) on everything I'd have access to in multiplayer at the moment (without shenanigans, anyway). Only irritation would be only having access to the soulstorm stuff. I actually own everything in the dawn of war 1 line except winter assault, but the base and DC ones are, well. Actual CDs. Somewhere. And I lost the keys years ago so :V

[Aklyon]

You'd also have access to IDH/Demons/Tyranids. The AI is particularly good at killing us with the latter two, so they can't be that terrible.

[aristabulus]

...

I have a DoW1 GOTY key laying about from the relic weekly bundle... want it?  PM me.

[Frumple]

*blinks* Well... sure. PM sent, heh. Definitely will roll some games with folks.

And yeah, both nids and the daemons are pretty solid. The latter in particular has some incredible turrets, and some of their stuff is just ridiculously tanky. I watched one of those khornite defiler things just kinda' sit in front of two SM turrets and a fully upgraded listening post and take literally zero damage. Nothing. It was ridiculous. Thing was tougher than a full upped primary hero critter. Part of that had to do with what weapons were hitting it, but still...

Nids are a little harder to get a handle on, though pumping out their 'rets is pretty sexy, too, especially if you intersperse them with the spore mine spawners. Was able to take a standard AI 1v1 in a nid on nid match without much trouble, but it's a little spotty figuring out what to throw at things, heh. I'm too enamored to ranged :V

Their little artillery squads are pretty awesome, though.

[Mech#4]

I find the spore mines for the Tyranids to be a bit too powerful. Especially against low health infantry like Dark Eldar or Sisters of Battle. A few get in melee and your whole squad gets blown up. (I've also had a bug with them where they are able to reduce a flying titan, the phoenix of the Eldar, from full to nothing in about 4 seconds. I'm guessing a stacking damage from gas clouds or something).

All that aside, a four player game would be quite enjoyable. I wonder how the computers will be able to handle it?

[Frumple]

Probably depends on what races are involved, ha. Will say the ork skirmish I just ran did have a wee bit of slowdown after the free sluggas came out and I started topping off that 250+ infantry population.

Spoiler: speaking of which... (click to show/hide)

A proppa' ork game :V

E: Soooo... times and whatnot?

[Mech#4]

For me, anytime from about now. That would be 1:00pm (GMT +10) Melbourne, AUS, until twelve hours from now. Most of the games I've played so far with Sinistar and Akylon have been around 11:00pm onwards, so 9 hours from now. If you want to, PM me your Steam name and we can organise it that way. Easier to see when people are online and available.

[Frumple]

Aky should already have it, actually, I think. M'bout to (almost literally, am incredibly sleepy) pass out, so fiddling with a pm will have to wait. Nine hours from now would be... interesting, since it's about a quarter 'till eleven (PM I'm... GMT -6? I think.), for me, so that'd be... 8 ish in the morning. Which... might be awake! Might not. Will find out then :V

E: Well, after three or four attempts at games, I think we've learned that dawn of war does not handle out of sync players with anything even remotely approaching elegance. Looks like having a slow-ish computer doesn't fly with this game, in multiplayer

Did have some moments of personal hilarity when I was communicating with people 15-20 minutes ahead in the game to try to help out. This is how you play a co-op time travel themed RTS, if you want to lose customers :V

Still, playing dawn of war effectively blind is kinda' interesting. I could actually see someone making a game to do that intentionally -- one person can see enemies, the other person can see allies, and they have to communicate back and forth to achieve victory. Something like that.

[Aklyon]

So we found of two things today, although frumple's edit covered the more important one.

The other thing is that if we take more than an hour to finish we'll probably crash mega and sync-error out, even if the Harder AI we teamed up against already had snuck between me & frump and beat him up.

Also, have another pic, since I was looking for their other base and waiting for the death lord to pick himself back up.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Since Mega fell, I built a pyramid for him on top of his former position. And then two smaller pyramids for his units and his buildings, or something like that

Also the AI had build a second stronghold one that spot the pylon is blasting.

[Sinistar]

I finally got around to downloading the map pack Mech#4 posted! Haven't been on Steam much lately, but if you guys see me, feel free to poke me for some more UA.

And just to add something in regards to our last match - first of, yeah, me crashing after 1+ hour of gameplay is becoming really annoying. Do you guys run +4GB RAM machines? Because iirc I've been the only one of us 4 that had this kind of crashes. Though when me and Mech#4 played vs that hard Necron, the game clocked around 1h 30 min I think, without any crash(es)... then again, we both played low-unit-count SM/Necrons and there was only 3 of us in total, so I guess that's a lot less units for a PC to choke on? Theeeeen again, our last mach I was already out and neither of you had that many units but I still crashed... Dunno. Also, is it just me or does the AI really like to go full-murder mode against the first human player it encounters? I've been noticing in our games, because I always expand quickly and (usually) encounter the AI first, it does it's best to rush me with everything it's got. But could be just my imagination or some weird coincidence.

[sambojin]

This is very speculative on reading this thread:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/ultimate-apocalypse-mod/forum/thread/ai-inconsistency

Any enemy AIs you engage will focus you as their target. Especially if you attack what they consider their "base lands". This may simply be anything within a certain distance away from their first structure or their resource points.

Enemy AIs may also share information. If you are the first to attack units or structures near one of their first base structures, they may all set you to be their attack priority.

This may or may not ever change, depending on weather friendly troops attack near that particular enemy's or other enemy's base structures.

It may even be a priority list, where a friendly player may have to have more accumulated damage against a certain AI's units/structures (possibly within base structure distance) than you have for the enemy to change their focus to other friendlies. It may not just be your damage vs them, but their's vs you as well, added together. So once battle has started, it may be very difficult to lose priority #1 status against the AI.

Friendly AIs may have to be coaxed into battle by running enemy troops into their base structure distance to do damage (strategic withdrawal run/begin proxy war) thus setting that enemy as their priority. They may not have one until this point and may just faff about.


All highly speculative, but it is an easy way of programming an AI. Especially with the mod changing what would normally be considered a heavy sort of troop into "whatever, it's not a Titan. Attack anything lots" style troop. Thusly, all kinds of shit gets charged headfirst at you, that actually are pretty good troops in vanilla (or even UA).

Lesson being: Use coordinated pushes and voice comms with your allies. If you charge ahead first, you'll be set as priority #1 for the enemy AI, and may never lose that privileged title. If it's a priority list, then everyone will occasionally get #1 on a coordinated push as one player does more damage than another, and as this changes over time and a particular player's forces that are able to be engaged with the enemy forces, they will get #1 priority. It may swap hands several times with waves of reinforcements and teching stalls. Otherwise, you're boned. Don't overextend, make heaps of defenses, and engage at a decent distance from the enemy's bases until sufficient forces are massed that being priority #1 isn't a problem. For any of you.

[Aklyon]

Yeah, I've got extra ram Sinistar. Mostly to make sure I could run some of the ftb packs without extensive slowness, but it comes in handy elsewhere.