cursed population minister.

oleg · #1 May 13th, 2002, 10:06 PM

I am trying to improve proportions' AI but run into trouble with population transport.

If you are not familiar with proportions mod, the major difference is importance of population and much higher populations "weight" as a cargo.
Another difference is slow speed of transports.

So, I instructed AI to build population transports, but run into problems:

1) AI completely refuses to transfer population to domed colonies. This is a minor thing instandard game but a big problem in Proportions

2)Even worse: AI transport people only to planets two turns apart from homeworld !!!!
I consistanly witness this picture: AI load people, send ship to a planet in other system. If it does not reach colony in two game turns, transport turns back home

Even if target planet is only one hex apart and ship has plenty of supplies ( I made sure that each and every transport has enough supply storage for round trip).

So, is there a trick to make AI to transfer population given slow speed of transport ships ?

pathfinder · #2 May 14th, 2002, 12:35 AM

You may want to ask Val. He seems to have worked that out of the B5 mod which uses a good bit of proportions in it. At least he has fixed that quick turn around problem...still can't get AI to drop pop off at domed worlds but at least the AI will deliver to un-domed ones, no matter what the distance (in my test runs anyway).

PvK · #3 May 14th, 2002, 01:31 AM

Ya, I thought it would just be the resupply minister sending ships back as they approach 50% supplies, but I guess not. I'd love to hear if Val or anyone has figured out what's going on with transports turning back. I hadn't seen it yet myself, though.

PvK

dmm · #4 May 14th, 2002, 05:10 PM

The problem is occurring because after 2 months the colonists are sick of manna and demand to go back to Egypt. You need to equip each pop transport with a Moses component. Unfortunately those take 80 years to build.

eorg · #5 May 14th, 2002, 05:39 PM

fell off the chair

))

oleg · #6 May 15th, 2002, 11:34 PM

HHHaaaa HHHaaa HHHaaaa.... !!!!

Still, how can I do this ?

Baron Munchausen · #7 May 16th, 2002, 01:02 AM

This problem might be related to the way it makes decisions on what planets need population. Since the AI has no sense of 'proportion' it will suck a planet dry & send the transport off to the far corners of the known universe. But every so often it must 're-assess' what planets need population. If the transports are still loaded then it probably sees that original world empty and decides to 'move some population' to it.

I have to admit that I haven't seen it act that way myself.

The frustrating thing I've always seen is that it will load a transport full of population and LEAVE IT SITTING THERE. So, you don't get the production bonuses or the additional growth that population would provide ANYWHERE. I've given up on using the population minister in SE IV though I used to use it in SE III. Unfortunately, the AI is stuck with ... the AI! So, I've modded my AIs to limit the size of their population transports and not build too many. This reduces the bad side effects of AI stupidity considerably.

oleg · #8 May 18th, 2002, 04:58 PM

[ May 18, 2002, 16:00: Message edited by: oleg ]

oleg · #9 May 18th, 2002, 04:58 PM

With help from Val, I solved this problem (well, sort of). AI needs a LOT of suplies, well in excess of round trip to shuffle population.

Now I have another problem: AI always select only one planet as a target for transport minister. It is not a problem in standard SE, but in Proportions, it practically impossible to saturate Transport minister (think about Railtrack in that matter) to change his priorities.

So, does anybody have a clue what is a threshhold when AI decides enogh is enogh and switch to another planet ?