Re: Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up
 

If i mod these alterations in the game, would the stock (or TDM) AI work ok? Or they would be at a severe disvantage from the player (assuming a medium bonus).

My skill level: I can beat AIs with low bonus 90% of the time (never make any teatries with anyone, but don´t select AIs x humans), at medium bonus i can beat the ais 50% of the time... and at high bonus i can beat the ais only 10% of the time. Normally i play with medium bonus.

Re: Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up
 

Hmm...You might have too much bonus there.

Dunno. You can always test them in-game.

Re: Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up
 

The stock AI assumes that the biggest hull is always the best.
Making any of the changes suggested in this thread would falsify that assumption, and the AI would go down hard.

It would be entirely possible to change the AI files so that it will build a decent mix of smaller ships, however.

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Combining the gritecon with the other things suggested would be much too far, indeed.
Gritecon's changes stand on their own to make a nice utility curve in which all sizes can be useful depending on the situation.

Long term, you can't support much of a fleet with small ships. Short term, you can't build much of a fleet with big ships.
The shorter the term you are considering, the smaller the ships you will build.

Re: Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up
 

How about a new race tech group that make small ships better?

Can wepon mounts be limited to only smaller ships? Or would you have to create a special ship clase for the race tech?

Other posable race tech groups: Fighters and/or Missile races.

Re: Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up
 

I disagree. By the time AI start getting to the nifty weapons, ship contruction has just got up to around the CL stage at which point some nice designs will come out and hopefully live a while to make an impact. Casualties aside, the decreased maintenance costs will enable these ships to hang for a long time. The bonuses these ships have will enable them to be somewhat competitive later on and that's the point.

Bottom line is balance. Aside from QNP propulsion or gritCons idea, this is a step in the right direction that's more in line with staying stock.

Does the AI retrofit ships?

This should be the case already... I guess since no one has addressed the big ship little ship issue... we've left the AI set to bigger is better... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

Re: Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up
 

Quite simply, the AI by default will always build only the biggest.

If biggest is not best, then the human players will trounce them even more than they already do.

Now, as I also said, it is possible to mod the AI to build smaller ships too, but that's a serious bit of rolling up your sleeves and digging in with your favorite text editor.

Re: Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up
 

What about the AI that seem to never get into bigger ships? At that point, they can stay competitive... I'm not penalizing AI by making larger ships suck, smaller ships are just not so out of date...

So, what are some tips for modding the AI to build a few of the smaller ships?

Re: Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up
 

You can easily limit the largest ship size a race will build in AI_Design_Creation.txt.

Re: Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up
 

The main problem is that you can only really make about 4 or 5 ship types for the AI to use as combat ships. This makes it very difficult to have the AI build a variety of sizes through an entire game in addition to having it design ships with different roles (i.e. point defense, missile ship, etc).

Re: Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up
 

How does the AI determine what the biggest ship available to it is? Tonnage or Tech level? I was thinking that instead of altering the smaller ships, it might be an idea to add in (extra) improved versions of those ships. For example, once you research cruisers, you also get 'advanced escorts'. The AI won't use them though, if it goes for highest tonnage.