Conveniently, I had a save from a little while ago, where I was just about to start a SuperTerminal hack. So, I upgraded, tossed in that save, and repeated the 60 AIP reduction ride I'd done before.



I noticed immediately that the spawns were significantly larger, due to the accounting for AI Difficulty. Ok, good. It really was too easy before.

Then, when I hit 60 AIP down (net 40 reduction) and had spent 95 HaP (35 net), leaving me with 90-ish left, I killed the SuperTerminal.

Instantly, over 3000 Mk II ships spawn - 68,000 base strength. A surprise, all right, and they threatened my defenses a bit.

I was surprised. All 60 ticks of the SuperTerminal previously had only accounted for maybe 2000 ships combined. So I reloaded the save, and tried again.



An 80 AIP reduction (60 net) cost 162 HaP (net 82), so I still had about 30 HaP left. This resulted in 16,000 Mk II ships - 150,000 strength. This overwhelmed my defenses. My fleet plus 8 Battleship Champions plus Core turrets and Mod fort could only kill about 10,000 of the units before being wiped out. The remaining 6000 also wiped out a few nearby outposts before eventually stalling at my Homeworld.



So I tried 100 AIP reduction. This costs a net of 164 HaP (264 raw), which put me slightly negative. About -50 HaP or so. This produced an amazing 46,000 Mk IV ships - 1.3 million strength. Obviously, I did not survive.





The problem I see is that all of the charged-up pulses expend at the final response level, as if the player were repeating the entire hack again, but this time at the new, much higher AI response.

This same thing happens when you do any other hack, such as a 15 minute (900 second!) Advanced Production hack. Even worse, in those cases, the 'vigorous hacking response' happens even if you fail. A successful hack's response produces 5-10x the number of units the actual hack did.



While the idea of an AI 'chaser' to kick off the end of your hack certainly has merit, I think this is too much. The ST is now pretty much hard-capped at 80 or so, if you do a LOT of prep, or have a lot of warheads prepared. Going negative on any of the facility hacks is nearly suicidal. Encouraging players not to go negative is one thing, but if you consider it that much of a problem, I'd rather see a hard cap: 'You cannot start a hack unless you have enough HaP to finish it'.



I think there should be a few changes to hacking to increase the difficulty, but severely tone down this 'chaser'. Here are my three suggestions (and one request).

First, currently the AI's Hacking Response = Max(Current_AIP - Current_HaP, 10). Changing this to Max(HaP_Used, 10) both makes more sense, produces a continually rising response, and is almost equivalent: It's just Total_AIP - Current_HaP, after all.

Second, change the 'chaser' to be more like the Exo-waves that result when you kill a Core Guardpost. Base the Exo budget off of a small, fixed number of response pulses: 5, say, or 10.

Third, when spawning Zombies as response, give them a leader to follow - or at least, orders to all attack a single target. Part of the reason that Zombie spawns are not so threatening is that they throw themselves onto your defenses in ones and twos. If they were throwing themselves onto your defenses in groups of a hundred, they'd be a lot more noticeable.



Finally, related, a side issue: The AI can still spawn non-reclaimable ships as part of the hacking response, leading to huge groups of Maws or Zenith Medics joining the threatfleet as normal units while the Fighters all go off and get killed as zombies.





I like the new, reduced AI Champion Alt-Response so far. I'll finish my current game to be sure, but it seems a lot more workable than before.