Questions About the Coming Gold Patch

[Clovis]

My sons and I play SE IV, and I just bought the Gold (1.60) a few days ago. Having trouble with the following:

(1) In QuickStart games, some races' AI_Design_Creation files do not recognize the primary strategy "Drone Attack" listed in the sections under Anti-Ship Drone and Anti-Planet Drone. I stop the error Messages (which do not crash the game) by substituting "Ram" for "Drone Attack" in those two lines of each file -- is this a fully valid solution that preserves the AI's drone tech functionality?;

(2) Trying to implement TCP-IP on a two-machine micro-network with P75's running W98SE and W95, the TCP-IP Player cannot contact the TCP-IP host when directions are followed precisely. [A previous problem preventing the machines from loading the game at all was solved by installing/reinstalling Dial-Up Networking and/or the TCP-IP protocol. I have only seen that solved problem mentioned with respect to the Gold demo -- are others encountering it with the full Version?]

[BTW the machines -- both P75's -- are also configured for IPX and we have played 1.49 (and now 1.60) more or less successfully on them for weeks by loading the game from a shared drive on one of them, then both players saving to that drive, etc. (this saves laboriously sending the player files back and forth). However, the following additional observations were made on this micro-network configuration.]

(3) Trades offered and gifts/tributes made between player partners (non-AI) frequently seem to 'get lost' for 2, 3 or more turns, and sometimes altogether, then they will appear in the players' logs ignoring any causes for several turns' delays. Is this enemy intelligence at work?

(4) Sizeable planet populations have disappeared once or twice with no mention of the causes in the player's log. Could enemy intelligence block notification of a massive attack on a planet?

(5) With 'Players Can View Scores of All Empires' set as active, a few score turns into our latest game the scores and various achievement stats of all races in the game suddenly plummeted to about 1/3 their previous levels in one turn, erasing a sizeable lead by the sole aggressive empire AI (in this case Xiati) and putting both players, the one AI, and three AI neutrals at about the same level of scores. This seemigly affected the graph charts only -- the tabular score chart may have retained its data. Is there some bug that causes the scoring and recordkeeping algorithm (or the formats used to report its results) to break down sometimes?

Or perhaps did one of these little old machines' computational abilities fall down on the job? One is running W98 w/ 32 MB RAM and the other is running W98 with 48 MB RAM -- both of them are machines I pieced together for my young sons from spart parts.

Great work on this game everyone - you have made a convert of a long-time Stars! player and are now making inroads against my number one time-sucker, Asheron's Call!

[Mephisto]

Hi Clovis, lets see what I can do for you:

1.) Please report the names of the races. The standard races should not ignore the drone attack line. Do you have any other races beside standard ones?

2.) Maybe you are not using the correct IP addresses. As both machines are on your local network, all your IPs should begin with 192.*. The next patch will allow you to choose from all available IPs your machine has from in-game.

3.) I have encountered such bugs in the past but they have vanished over time. Make sure to always click on a message type (like general message). If you don't click on a message type before typing and sending the message will be sent and shown as sent but will never arrive. If this is not the cause of your problem, try to catch the problem in a save game (one for the turn you are sending and one for the turn were it should arrive).

4.) Never heard of this. Try to catch it in a save game and sent it to MM.

5.) That was probably just a rescaling of the graph. SE4 will do this from time to time, the actually numbers are not affected, it just looks weird for a moment.

[Clovis]

Hi Mephisto! I betcha that IP address hint you gave me will work! Will try it with the boys ASAP.

On the other issue, Drone AI references. I think I have discerned something important here. Yes, the standard AI's of the races in 1.60 do not seem to recognize the 'Drone Attack' strategy in their AI_Design_Creation files.

Point 1: There are two types of drones, anti-ship and anti-planet. Therefore two types of targeting priorities are called for depending upon which type of drone is to be built and directed by the AI. However, the 'Drone Attack' references I have seen, such as in the Default_AI_Strategies file, have only one set of priorities. Note that the specs in that file differ remarkably from the previous example held forth in these discussions, your own Toron race.

Suggestion: Why not use "Ram" as the targeting strategy for Anti-Ship, and "Drone Attack" as the targeting stragegy for Anti-Planet? This would avoid any immediate need for hard-coding a response to this problem.

But would it generally make the game AI's funky and in need of major adjustments?

[Mephisto]

There is a small program you can use to find your IP address with W95/98 that you have to run once in a dos box. It is "ipconfig" for W2k but for the life of me I cannot remember how it is called in W95/98. Anyone?

Drones:
Bear with me. What exactly is the drone problem? Do they produce error Messages? If so, can you sent me a savegame to [email protected]?

You can give a drone any strategy you want and - as you already found out - I actually did.
IMHO it is not a very wise strategy to slam these very expensive devices into the next planet if I can glass it with my beam weapons and then go to the next planet repeating history.
If you want to use more strategies make sure to alter the right file, for the standard races in the TDM-ModPack this would be the Default_AI_Strategies.txt in the TDM\AI folder.

I agree with you that the standard races could use widespread improvements and that is exactly why I'm part of the TDM-Crew. However, I have now 5 races and that is the maximum I can support. I could increase this number but only by neglecting testing my races.
I personally think that drones are not that great a tool for the AI as it lacks the knowledge how and when to use them. Those my races use drones only in a limited way. None of my races uses both types of drones, only one. If you increase the amount of drone types you only end up confusing the little AI brain even more. For the AI to do a good job you have to make it simple to use. And as I only use one drone type I only need one drone strategy.

[Suicide Junkie]

"winipcfg"
for win9x

[Quikngruvn]

quote:

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Originally posted by [K126]Mephisto:
There is a small program you can use to find your IP address with W95/98 that you have to run once in a dos box. It is "ipconfig" for W2k but for the life of me I cannot remember how it is called in W95/98. Anyone?

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I believe you're thinking of 'winipcfg', which you don't have to run from a command line (but can). Go to Start--> Run, type in 'winipcfg' there, and a Window will appear with IP address info. At least it does in 98.

Quikngruvn