Re: Is this possible in a mod?
 

I'm not sure drones can give Stellar Manipulation orders. Their order set is highly restricted (Attack basically), so the SM button may not appear for them. That aside, it should work fine.

A possibility would be to remove all ways of repairing ships. I doubt you would like that, though you might justify it given your story. Another alternative is to make the component use a *lot* of supplies (as high as the game goes, if possible), and also provides these supplies. So, when the component is used, all those supplies are gone. If you make everything else use a lot less supplies, you should have a component that can only be re-powered by using five hundred ships or some such. This time, you would have to remove all "free supplies" stuff (Resupply Depots and Quantum Reactors basically).

A more interesting way is to create an Ancient Empire (or a slightly more inspiring name) with unique access to the Ancient Technology race trait (this trait would behave like Crystalline, Religious, etc). This Empire would then be able to research, build and repair the Ancient stuff, and give it/sell it/get it captured by the other Empires. However, you cannot repair components if you do not have access to all the requisite technologies, so these components would effectively be one-shot.

That approach is only worthwhile for a multiplayer game, of course, unless your idea of a fun game is to abuse the AI. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Is this possible in a mod?
 

In a quick test, I made a drone with a gravitational condenser. It had no stellar manipulation button while on a warp point.

Re: Is this possible in a mod?
 

Ugh, damn it =(


Most games I play the AI doesn't really get to the point that it is making warp points. When they do it appears to be a bit random and not to helpful for them. The Warp Point tech is best used in the hands of a human player. Now AIs going around destroying stars is nasty. =)


The Ancient empire isn't around anymore, creating a race that can be conquered.... wait a second.....

Taking Alneyan's idea a step farther, what about creating an empire that is INVISIBLE. All of their ships have innate Cloaking ability that makes them never be detected. They would be designed like the pirates/raiders that I've heard talked about. They'd have to be designed so they never go hostile, don't know if that's possible, especially with Team Mode turned on. Even so, give them very restricted tech so that they never have weapons, and then would never attack anyone... though they could stumble upon someone or even mines. Anyway, they'd be designed to create "Gates" which would be slow moving ships that only have room for the gate. Analyzing the vehicle will get you nothing since it is all built off of racial tech. These "Gates" would be detectable, so they could be "discovered". Of course the race would have to not respond to any diplomacy.

Undetectable Cloak
Easy to do

Non-hostile Race
Make all activities to include enemy ships in system to generate goodwill towards other AIs.

Wandering Race
To avoid all the gates from being produced in a single system.
Give them only one mode, or have ALL of their modes do one function.... build "Gates".
Control the rate of production by giving them low production rates. Will allow the gates to have low maintenance costs once they're captured.

Mines
Only seen fighters and drones being able to be immune to mines and drones at a Settings level.
Could give them so much Armor or a Minesweeper ability that it's impossible to destroy them with a mine.... but they'd be clearing mine fields.

Randomly build "Gates"
These gate vehicles wouldn't have any cloaks. They could boarded and taken into custody

Never responds to diplomacy
Empty Speech file?
Set the highest Treaty to be no treaty?

Remove Homeworld or make it Invisible
Don't know how to remove it, will have to look into the Pirates mod see if they've done it.
Invisible by hiding it in a storm with complete obscurment. Though I don't know if this can be designed in the autogeneration capability, and make it not possible for other players.


Unable to colonize
Don't give them any colonizing tech, though they start off with colonizing tech of their homeworld.

Protection against Intel Projects
Give them the ability to produce LARGE amounts of Intel points, but only ever spend it on Counter Intel.


How would you prevent other AIs from just destroying these "gifts" instead of capturing them

Re: Is this possible in a mod?
 

If they are never visible, it doesn't matter if they're non-hostile. And if the AIs AREN'T hostile, they'll never capture the gates.

Re: Is this possible in a mod?
 

The playing AIs can declare war on the Invisible AI. I just don't want players getting messages about some invisible race declaring war on them. =)

Re: Is this possible in a mod?
 

Can the Random event frequency be setup to happen almost every other turn?

Since you can change the Random event file to include only warp point open and close events, this should create a map that is constantly rearranging warp connections.

If you start with a map with no warp points connections, you would probably need more opens than closings. 2 to 1? So that over time the total number of warp connections increase.

Are the warp points opened truly random? (IE. No limitation on distance?)

Re: Is this possible in a mod?
 

Your comments do bring up an interesting point. I wouldn't want this invisible AI race "Using" the gates. =(

Re: Is this possible in a mod?
 

Events can only happen once per turn at the most, for all races combined. It would work as an add on to existing WP's, but it wouldn't work very well if there were no WP's at the start of the game.

If the ancient race had a racil tech, you could give them a facility at the start that used the sector ability to cloak their planet. Just add the ability to a facility that the game setup calls for on their homeworld.

The diplomacy for an invisible AI could be chalenging though. I think you could keep them from making treaties easily, and setting them to get friendlier from other players ships and planets works pretty good, but they may still send general messages with no text if there is nothing in the speach file. Maybe a line like "Your race isn't ready for our secrets." or something like that.

Re: Is this possible in a mod?
 

Any ideas on keeping the ancient race from using the gates? =) They're suppose to be dead... can't go using stuff when you're dead. =)

Re: Is this possible in a mod?
 

If you make them neutrals, they will not be able to travel through (any) warp points. That's about all you can do, short of making their ships have no practical deep space range.