AI Ship Design Modder

[Zeno42]

Hey All. Now that I'm back from vacation, I'm gearing up to get started on an AI Ship Design Modder. Anybody have any thoughts/ideas/requests/suggestions on what they would like included??

--Zeno

[Jason2]

One of the best designs I've seen so far is the modpack 1.61 for the Sergetti... the make heavy use of point-defense and Uranium Cannons/Phased Beams and armor and seem to constantly update. This is much better than missiles (which I never use) because the point defense takes out missiles/fighters/sats and the Large-mounted guns pack quite a punch.

I don't know if looking at their AI would help?

[Felan]

Something I learned from a ship I designed that had tractors and repulsors is that the order of the weapons on the ship makes a difference. I designed a starbase and my repulsor weapons were installed before any of my other weapons, consequently they would fire first and push the enemy beyond the range of the other weapons on the starbase.

Likewise in general you would want your shield/armor ignoring weapons to fire before shield depleting weapons which would fire before the rest of your non-missle weapons and finish off with missle weapons (the rest may kill the enemy and it can use the missles against some other target).

If designing a ship capture type then I would automatically have it list all shield depleting weapons first then start staggering the boarding parties between every weapon afterwards.

I haven't looked too close at this but I think maybe the real difficulty comes in retrofits which may have a tendancy of scrambling the order of weapons a bit. Firing shield depleting weapons after firing your DUC's is pointless and doesn't help at all. I will have to investigate this further and I hope I'm wrong.

[Zeno42]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tampa_Gamer:
Wow - this is going to be a tough one to make a program for! To the best of our knowledge, the AI will go through the design several times until the ship is filled. The biggest wishlist would be able to somehow determine how the AI will construct the design based on what you have entered (i.e. shields per x, etc. The problem is the other two variables - (1) tech level of various components (reached or not reached) and (2) whether the next higher hull size is available yet. That being said, maybe we could enter these variables as assumptions and then run something similar to your "analyze prerequisites" in your tech modder. Anyway, I am rambling - but this is the biggest pain about the design file b/c it forces you to play the game and inspect the AI race designs periodically, then flip back to the text file to modify more.

---

Tampa, I was thinking along the lines of leveraging the work I've already done on the AI Tech Queue modder. You'd merely enter a research point total, and the current techs and tech levels would be determined from the Research File. You'd select a design template from a drop-down list, enter a tech point total, and press a button to be presented with a representative AI ship. What I've got to figure out is how exactly the AI uses the Design Types File to design ships at a given Tech level. What's the current state of knowledge on how the AI fills up the ship based upon the Space per One entries??

--Zeno

[Tampa_Gamer]

Zeno42- The knowledge is 80% sure, 20% assumption right now. There are several good threads from about a month ago on this subject where everyone explained multiple times using a ship as an example. I will try and see if I can "bump" them up for you. As this was one of the first areas Mephisto dived into, he has a good understanding of the design algorithm. If I cannot find the threads, I will gather my notes from home this evening and re-post details here.

Later-
Tampa_Gamer

[This message has been edited by Tampa_Gamer (edited 13 March 2001).]

[raynor]

Saw that you bumped a couple of them up. Thanks, much!

[Tampa_Gamer]

Wow - this is going to be a tough one to make a program for! To the best of our knowledge, the AI will go through the design several times until the ship is filled. The biggest wishlist would be able to somehow determine how the AI will construct the design based on what you have entered (i.e. shields per x, etc. The problem is the other two variables - (1) tech level of various components (reached or not reached) and (2) whether the next higher hull size is available yet. That being said, maybe we could enter these variables as assumptions and then run something similar to your "analyze prerequisites" in your tech modder. Anyway, I am rambling - but this is the biggest pain about the design file b/c it forces you to play the game and inspect the AI race designs periodically, then flip back to the text file to modify more.

[Zeno42]

Thanks much for the info. This tells me most of what I need to know to get started. I'll have to put together a parser for the CompEnhancement file and cross-reference the Component, TechArea, and AI_Research files with the ship design files, but a good portion of that work has already been completed for my other modders.

BTW, does anybody know if any of the recent patches have changed any of this (other than filling unused space after extra shields with armor)?? Does it still have the problem alluded to in these threads where large mounts and large weapons can prevent it from adding any components in the misc column??

--Zeno

[ColdSteel]

I too am very interested in how ship design really works since I have been struggling through it with trial and error when designing the AI for my new Selachii race.

One thing I have discovered is that if you place a higher tech weapon in the first slot and a lower tech one in the second slot and an even lower tech one in the third slot, the AI will use the third item until the second item is researched, then it will use it instead. Then when the highest tech item is researched it will swap out the second slot one for the first slot item. This is really handy because with it you can make the AI build ships with different weapon loads at different points in the game. This makes it a bit tougher for humans to "zero in" on one specific tactic and ship design to combat the (usually) predictable race AI. For instance, I have an attack ship and a defense ship that both use identical weapon loads initially but after PPB are researched the AI will switch to them for the attack ship wih one cap missile for a secondary and the defense ship sticks with the cap missiles with 1 PPB as secondary. When mixed into the same fleet, these simulate combined arms pretty well for the AI. Unfortunately, the AI stupidly tends to group all like ships together into fleets which defeats the purpose (Sigh).

One thing I have not been able to understand completely is how to make secondary and primary weapons show up in a design in equal quantities. I've played with the space size (thanks to a tip by God Emperor) and it does have an effect but it is a strange one and seems to vary depending on the hull size.

Anybody got any insights on how to do this??

[This message has been edited by ColdSteel (edited 14 March 2001).]

[This message has been edited by ColdSteel (edited 14 March 2001).]

[Marty Ward]

I have a question about ship design. Is it possible to create more than one attack ship design? For example could you create attack ship 1 and design it with beam only weapons and attack ship 2 and design it with only missle weapons.