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:

---

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?

---

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

[dmm]

For the record, "ipconfig" works for NT also. You have to first do Start - Run - cmd to get a command window, or else it runs and disappears before you can see the info.

[Clovis]

Hi! Yes I bet the IP situation is covered. I will be testing it again over the weekend.

However, I'm still concerned about those pesky drones!

I must say that to re-check myself, I just did a pristine new install of 1.60 on another drive of my own machine, ran a few turns of a test game with all 20 standard races involved, and there was nary a peep about the 'Drone Attack' strategy or the AI's failure to recognize same.

So my next question is, on my other install on this machine, which currently has 32 races functioning, why do I get that pesky error message indicating that the 'Drone Attack' strategy is unknown? Another way of putting it is, 'In how many text files does the 'Drone Attack' strategy have to be referenced, and using what parameters?'

In my initial reply to the scholarly Mephisto, I made the point that having two types of drones (anti-ship & anti-planet) hard-coded into the standard out-of-the-box game would seem to require two distinct strategies. He has skillfully dodged my point, but it remains.

Is there any reason that the stock target 'Type Priorities' in the Default_AI_Strategies file are all disabled for every type of strategy, with the four 'targeting priorities' in each record used instead?

Of course I take the point that I can mod any of these factors myself and see how it goes, but I want my drones to work correctly right out of the box! After all, part of the allure of SE IV Gold was the extensively-used phrase "Drones Fully Implemented in Code!" And yes, I know the difference between text files and alphanumeric or binary "code". But still ...

And I bet its not just me -- I'm sure that the two distinctly different types of drone warheads were included for a reason.

To carry this one step further, what about using the trifold Ram, Kamikaze, and Drone Attack strategy entries to configure a third type of drone, say a recon drone or a cheap, expendable attack ship.

Why? Every Guardian's Life is precious! ;-)

P.S.: Please view me and my three young progeny at Wilmerding Family Web Site

[ 03 April 2002: Message edited by: Clovis ]

[MHSJROTCCADET]

what is the IP locator for Windows ME?

[Mephisto]

Don't know for WinME exactly bit it should be "winipcfg", too.

Mmm, didn't want to doge any points. Clovis, you are just right, you could and should have made two distinct strategies for the two drone types, However, the standard races only use warhead drones so ramming is for both of them the only way to go hence you need only one strategy.

Type priorities could have been used by MM. I guess you can discuss all day long if this would benefit a race or not. Would be interesting what other people think of it and what experiences they made with it.

The errors you have with some AIs in your 32 race setup could be the result from some not truly gold compatible races. I personally have found that bug when playing an old 1.49 game converted to 1.60. Try playing the troublesome race for 1 turn only and add a strategy "drone attack" manually. I think this should eliminate the problem (I hope so ).