SE's Best Quality, And How to Improve It

[capnq]

Aha, Phoenix-D's post reminds me that Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri did that pretty well, too.

[Phoenix-D]

Right, Civ4 just makes it visible to the players and improves the process a bit.

[thebigsilly]

Wow, you guys are nuts. Uh okay I'll do you the courtesy of ceasing to post in this thread of mine, since obviously I'm being ignored.

I've made it pretty clear that it's difficult to program random/dynamic AIs and as a result that demand would fall outside the realm of possibility for an SEV mod or for SEVI, and that a much more feasible method would be to simply spread the various "paths" that a truly dynamic AI might take across a range of AIs, by prioritizing techs and building/battle tactics in different ways for different races.
Instead of responding to anything I've said on that matter, you lot are content to keep going on about hypotheticals and abstract ideas. Fine, cool, I'm not saying you're wrong - but it's really immaterial, isn't it? Nothing that you're saying is related to the immediate objective of pumping this game up a bit - it's all just empty chatting. If you'd spared a post or two to even attempt addressing the points that I STARTED this thread to talk about, I wouldn't care what else you say, but instead you just ignore them completely. And then Kwok shows up, and instead of encountering a discussion that might've actually been of some use to him as he mods this game into enjoyability, he's just faced with your endless hypotheticals to comment on.

heavens to betsy but you're all a bunch of sillypusses

[Fyron]

That's one hell of a way to make friends...

[capnq]

You are being "ignored" because there isn't really anything to add to the things you said. Yes, it would be nice if somebody programmed some AIs that followed different strategies. Every person who's ever played the game probably has their own pet strategy they'd like to see implemented. Suggesting ideas to "help" Kwok write mods is like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. (Although I doubt you're old enough to understand that turn of phrase.)

Thread drift is the normal state of things on any Internet forum.

[dmm]

capnq said:
How do you define "improving", "casual", and "firm", in terms the AI understands?

Clearly SEV has a "how much I like/hate you" factor that every AI uses when dealing with every other player (AI or human). If the AI likes the other player it will accept/offer treaties. And the treaties it will accept/offer get gradually more and more like a total alliance with that player. So, my question is, can modders currently access that factor directly when programming the AIs, or is that all hard-coded? It seems to me that it is already there: congenial races appear to gradually warm to me, provided I don't do stuff to tick them off. Can modders tweak that? And can we decide what actions tick off AIs, or is that all hard-coded? Currently they seem to get mad automatically if you have ANY colonies in "their" systems (unless you have the appropriate treaty -- but the "allow colonizing in my systems" treaty is very hard to obtain from an expanding neighbor).

[Captain Kwok]

The Balance Mod AI has a lot of the characteristics you are after.

Nothing is really hard coded with the AI in SE:V, the only real limitation in what you can do is what script functions you have available.

This thread at SE.net has some more info:
http://www.spaceempires.net/home/ftopict-3368.html