Some AI questions

[Jason2]

SEIV is my first shrapnel game and overall I am quite impressed. However I have a few questions (hopes) about the AI and plans for a patch. If these have already been covered please forgive me - I read some of the Posts, but there are too many to read entirely.

1) Does the AI ever make fleets?? It seems that the AI will attack me piece-meal even when the odds are clearly in my favor.

2) Does the AI ever use stellar manipulation? I had planned a game where we started in clusters without warp points, in the hope that I would have a nice build-up before battle - the AI never seemed to have left a rather limited system time and time again.

3) Does the AI ever attack planets in order to occupy them?? I have never seen it use ground troops, just wipe a planet if it is able.

This game is SO CLOSE to being ideal - that I really hope they will patch the AI. I realize there are a ton of issues to cover, but combat tweaking would seem to make the most difference in terms of difficulty.

Finally, I am not a technical person - so would someone be willing to step me through improvements to the files if needed?

Thanks

Jason2

[Taqwus]

1) Yes. I've seen it use fleets of 9+ ships, but not as a human being would. That is, they all tend to be highly similar warships, while a human player might instead include supply tankers, repair/shipyard ships, minesweepers and a different mix of warships types.

Given the distance function used ($L_{\inf}$), it also probably should be using 'Wall' (or is it 'Line'?) more than 'Inverted V'. It's not like there are extra penalties for risking any one particular ship (unless one's highly experienced, which would be an annoying loss), so there's often little reason for having only some of your warships in firing range.

2) Hrm. Haven't yet. Maybe w/ hard AI/high bonus in a no-warp it will. Have you tried giving an AI an unarmed ship with a warp-point creator? One with no other function, that is, so it can't mistake it for, oh, a mere pop transport.

3) Haven't seen this, on medium/no bonus. I have seen it build troops, oddly enough (very very rarely but it's happened), but never an invasion. OTOH I play aggressively enough that the AI is normally on the defensive, and w/ solar collectors/QRs most battles are normally deep in AI territory.

But it should invade -- e.g. if I use espionage to capture an enemy homeworld, it should try to retake it ASAP. Hmm.


I've not looked at the AI files enough yet to consider modding, or to help modders. Mostly still looking for inconsistencies, imbalances and anything else that strikes me as odd.

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[Mephisto]

[quote]Originally posted by Taqwus:
[b]1) Yes. I've seen it use fleets of 9+ ships, but not as a human being would. That is, they all tend to be highly similar warships, while a human player might instead include supply tankers, repair/shipyard ships, minesweepers and a different mix of warships types.

Yes, the AI is using fleets, I have fought against 20+ ship fleets.

2) Hrm. Haven't yet. Maybe w/ hard AI/high bonus in a no-warp it will. Have you tried giving an AI an unarmed ship with a warp-point creator? One with no other function, that is, so it can't mistake it for, oh, a mere pop transport.

The AI has the design files for it but it is very slow to reasearch stellar manipulation if it ever researchs it.

3) Haven't seen this, on medium/no bonus. I have seen it build troops, oddly enough (very very rarely but it's happened), but never an invasion. OTOH I play aggressively enough that the AI is normally on the defensive, and w/ solar collectors/QRs most battles are normally deep in AI territory.

Never seen invasion, too.

[eagleton]

2) I've played a real long game (about year 2465) until my victory conditions (one player has 200% of second player) were met. Then I looked at the AI designs and saw that they had designs for everything in stellar manipulations with the exception of ringworlds and sphereworlds. But I never saw them use stellar manipulation and I don't know if they actually built these ships.

[Noble713]

I've been invaded by the AI ONCE. It was in my current game, actually. I had taken a system from the Terrans but wasn't willing to disperse my fleet to cover every planet, so they slowly came back and glassed several of them. I was quite surprised when one of their fleets came with a medium transport and dropped a mere 7 large troops on one of the planets.

So yes, the computer does use the VERY few troops that it builds, but certainly not often enough. I think the problem lies in the AI_Construction_Vehicles file. The computer is set to only build 1 troop per planet and 1 transport per 10 planets for the Infrastructure setting, and for the Attack and Secure Holdings settings, troops and transports aren't listed at all.