AI Wave Survival Mod Information

@greyknight

Hi Greyknight,

Thanks for all the feedback! I do know the default settings have gotten a little harder with some of the changes and additions over the months. Though there are a number of hosts who enjoy the defaults, so changing them at this point would probably annoy a lot of people.

I do mean to add the ability to delay Rift Nukes and also adjust the strength of the artillery response. Just so you know, Rift Orbs (and Dooms) are vulnerable to over-charge. You can kill them quickly with one or two OC shots from your commander. Or spam T1PD under the shield, which will also quickly eliminate them.

The easiest two ways to adjust difficulty are to either increase Build Time or increase the Tech Delay setting. Of the two, I recommend the Tech Delay setting. This will delay the speed that waves tech up, giving players more time to prepare for the harder waves.

Artillery retaliation is in direct response to the power of the artillery you are building. Going for T4 artillery will trigger a stronger response. Generally a combination of artillery and satellites are effective. Building a sat + a mavor + a scathis is very effective. Sats help with targeting and eliminating individual shields/arty, scathis with eventually eliminate support structures, and mavors are good for direct damage to the HQ.

Airdrops can be heavily customized under the settings. If you are having difficulty with them, you can adjust their behavior there. And definitely still worth building AA vs the transports. The transports will drop their units early if their shields take too much damage, though some will try to reach their drop goal regardless. Building some T1PD scattered around your base is usually good enough protection from random drops that get through, until you have stronger units.

Paragons can be successfully built, but must be done quickly. Do not start a paragon if 1. Don't have the build power to use it, 2. Don't have the economy to build it quickly (you want it built in 5 mins or faster), 3. First nuke wave hasn't been launched. Violating any one of these usually results in defeat. Note, you can tone down Paragon Punishment in the settings, which will give you more time before you are overwhelmed. The punishment setting determines how much time it takes for the difficulty to ramp up after a paragon has been detected. You can also turn off the punishment completely.

Support Bases launch the Rift Nukes. Eliminating all the Support Bases will stop any further Rift Nukes. There can also be only as many Rift Orbs as there are Support Bases alive. So if you have 5 Support Bases and destroy one, the max number of Rifts that can be deployed are 4 (unless all 5 have already been deployed). Destroying Support Bases directly damages the HQ, stuns the wave, may give T4 units to players as reinforcements, and grants mass + energy to each player for a period of time. The mass and energy delivered increases with each Support Base destroyed. Eliminating all Support Bases will also cause the HQ to power stall for a period of time, which disables its shields and artillery for the duration of the power stall and causes the buildings around the HQ to begin to randomly self-destruct, weaking its defenses. Successfully eliminating all Support Bases makes it easier to kill HQ as it directly weakens the HQ and will stop Rift Nukes.

On Dooms, they are meant to be Base Breakers. They take increased damage from UEF T4 Napalm and Over-Charge shots. ACU's can do quite a bit of damage to a Doom and even stop them if the Doom is in the red. You can stop Dooms from wrecking your base by path blocking with other T4 units. Try using GCs or Megas to crash into a Doom and get them trapped in the Napalm fire to quickly kill. You will need a few T4 units to block well, and will likely lose them. The Seraphim Storm missiles are also good at dealing damage, if you can land them in the Doom's path.

The Naval Response script is relatively new and still being balanced. It is meant for maps that support navy, but either player's didn't enable navy waves because they don't know how or because there are only a few areas on the map worth using navy, so the naval waves would simply become trapped in an unimportant pond. I'll probably add an option to adjust it in the future and/or disable.

v282

• All mod settings are now recorded to the Game Log. This is so players can recreate games they'd like to play. Watching a replay or checking the game log of a survival match you just played will have the settings recorded. Just search for "AI Wave Survival Settings" in the game log.

• Rift Nukes that are intercepted will now deploy a high altitude orb that will fire on players for a period of time before self-destructing. Generally more of a nuisance than a threat. Once enough Rift Nukes have been intercepted by a team, an untargetable Rift Nuke will be launched, with a warning that SMD is being jammed.

-Mobile SMD should no longer spawn in the waves

v285

• Versus Survival:
  Changed names of Versus Survival Settings to be less confusing. Now are:
  Versus Survival - Defeat HQ: Must kill HQ to win.
  Versus Survival - HQ Suicides: Killing all other teams causes HQ Team to suicide. Requires 3+ teams.

If hosting a game with fewer than 3 teams, which is required for "Versus Survival - HQ Suicides", the scenario will now default back to Defeat HQ instead of ending the match with an error warning.

• Oblivion T4PD: Notices the cannon was firing only once every 20 seconds instead of every 10 seconds. This reduced its DPS to 400. Cannon now fires once every 10 seconds for 800 DPS (In-game info shows 4000 DPS, but that information is wrong.) Power draw has been reduced to 3000 for 8 seconds.

• Cybran T4PD: Reduced power draw to 4000 for 10 seconds for the T4 stun cannon. Fires one volley every 12 seconds.

• Transports: Added an option to be able to set HQ as Transport's spawn location.

Hello Rama,

i cant host your mod.

every game with the version past 17th march (v272) has desync.

@slykar

Can you give me more information? Any mods being used?

Hello my friend and I are trying to play this mod.
The unit mods we are using are total mayhem, wyvern battle pack mod, black ops, brewlan
The issue is as soon as the waves Start the game gives us numerous dysync errors. We are unsure as to what the issue is.
Any help? I'll he more than happy to give more info as needed!

@lavastorm

That is a lot of unit mods. I've only tested with BrewLAN, Blackops, and Total Mayhem individually, and with Blackops and Total Mayhem together. Never tried with Wyvern. Usually, Total Mayhem causes a desync on start that can be ignored, as it has no impact on gameplay.

If you have a replay ID, I can check and see if it is an issue I can correct.

Is there a way to "denoise" the Game.prefs from all the custom settings from this mod?

@rama how would I obtain that?
We also figured that Brewlan was conflicting with one of the other unit mods but I'm not sure which one atm

v286

Some balance changes:

Makes Game Harder:

• All bosses now spawn max veterancy. This prevents an occurrence where bosses would lose their health boosts if they vetted up, making them easy to kill.
• Spawned defensive buildings and artillery are max veterancy.
• Waves will gain veterancy based on mass income of team, maxing out at 10k mass.
• Airdrops will drop randomly vetted units.
• Rifts will increase veterancy level based on number of Rift Nukes intercepted.
• Artillery now gain Damage Amplification damage boost, if the feature is on.
• If HQ health is too low that killing a Support Base or Alternate HQ would kill HQ, instead damage will be deflected and cause half of wave to be destroyed at random.

Makes Game Easier:

• ACU Hunters have had torp damage reduced by more than half.
• Storm Launchers energy costs reduced by half, mass costs and build time reduced by 10%. Storm Missiles have increased speed and acceleration. Storm Launcher's passive tac missiles have 2 hp, to be more effective against navy.
• Abyss, reduced costs and build time by 10%. Increased shield strength from 25k to 26k, missile range from 150 to 160, shield bubble from 60 to 70, antitorp defense range from 50 to 60, and depth charges range from 40 to 50 and damage to 2k.
• Guardian Shields increased shields from 55k to 60k and regen rate to 400hp/s.
• Spawned reinforcements are fully vetted and have orbs attached for additional firepower.

The Yolona blueprint replacement breaks the visuals from the unit's script and makes the weapon unresponsive since it uses WeaponRepackTimeout instead of RackSalvoReloadTime.
FAF's Yolona was changed to not have the weapon unpacking typical of other launchers since it doesn't need that to control its fire rate: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/5758

Edit: Using MuzzleChargeDelay instead of RackSalvoChargeTime can also make the launcher not respond like you would want it to, it'll fire in 5 seconds regardless of the launch order being cancelled.

Hello Rama,

thanks for you work. it keeps me playing FAF.

v287 and current client version from 12.07.2024 -> Transporters are super slow, as you mentioned in chat,.

Hello Rama,

we just played on Seton's #22930939, you can see that around min 37 and min 57 the mobile SMDs did not work (once for choco and once for mansR). In the past I had it quite often, that the mobile SMDs did not work (even if you had both, mobile and stationary, next to each other), so I always go the UEF SMDs w/o any mobile. Also the UEF's SMDs are currently the only SMD buildings which can be constructed. I'm not sure what interacts here wrong.
On some maps SMDs do not work at all, like on the Epic Water Pass where SMDs in the brown corners do not send anti-nukes #22890868
Anyway: in general these are only minor issues, it's a great mod and it's so much fun to play.
Thank you

@lanthanplan

I checked the replays, and looked like the mobile SMD had issues when on sloped terrain. They did fire, but look to have fired their SMD into the ground. I've adjusted their Firing Tolerance in v288 of the mod, and did some testing on sloped terrain. Hopefully, that corrects the issue.

Game won't start despite HQ spawn being set in replay #22959277, seems to be a map issue.
Error running lua script: ...er\mods\ai wave survival\hook\lua\ai\aibehaviors.lua(19115): attempt to call method `GetArmyIndex' (a nil value) stack traceback: ...er\mods\ai wave survival\hook\lua\ai\aibehaviors.lua(19115): in function `GetAIOrHumanEnemyBrain' ...er\mods\ai wave survival\hook\lua\ai\aibehaviors.lua(19354): in function <...er\mods\ai wave survival\hook\lua\ai\aibehaviors.lua:19324>

Also it's frustrating to lose to SMD having issues with nukes:

• would be nice to have front-targeted nukes fire first so front SMD can kill front nukes instead of rear-targeted nukes.
• change the SMD projectile to bypass terrain and have better turning so that it is more consistent.
• Maybe create some new weapon code to improve SMD targeting so they don't lock up the target for so long. There is already some code to do that in the FAF repo applied to TMD so I'd start there (DisableWhileReloading bp field).

Hi Rama, I've been trying AI Wave Survival, and have enjoyed it a lot. Clearly a lot of thought and customization has gone into this mod. I have a question about adding another configurable option. Can adjusting the Rift orbs count be enabled as a setting? The goal would be to create a survival style where HQ is not very strong, but there are a lot of Rift orbs and Air drops raining down. The play style would be to survive all the rift orbs and fight to the HQ and surrounding support bases.

Potential Rift Orb Config Options:
Count, Frequency, First launch timing, Health, maybe target destination (maybe alternatives to random), how often SMD gets disabled when they are fired.

@lightwire

I was planning on adding some type of option for a rift survival like that. Though, the options list has ballooned so much, I've stopped adding customizations and plan to try and trim the options list. Currently, rift count is tied to Support Base count, and increasing bases will increase total rift count, which can be used as a way to have more rifts until I add the rift survival mode.