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Quote:

Originally posted by Q:
One more thing:
The AI can handle plagues, if you give them a population transport design with a medical bay in it!
So I think you could use the plague intel project without being unfair against an AI empire. More important seems to me that the plague level is not too high, otherwise the entire population is dead before the ship with the medical bay arrives.
And I like the idea to link these projects to the tech levels of the corresponding weapons. So you still have to research quite a lot before you can use them and IMO these super intel projects should be expensive, very very expensive!

No, the AI is not smart enough to send a medical bay equipped ship even when it has them. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif

As far as the cost, yes, I've setup the 'biological warfare' projects to require both Intel level 3 and the corresponding level of biological weapons. All five levels. Like I said, this is intended for human-only games where you're going to be smart enough to research all levels of medical tech and deploy ships with the bays.

The question of intel points cost is an interesting one because of how counter-intel works. When you make an intel project cost more you are making it somewhat harder to pull off, but you are ALSO making it harder to stop! And I wonder if the extra difficulty of stopping an expensive project makes it worthwhile to assign a huge cost to the plague intel projects. You might be making them more effective rather than less. If they cost more than 100000, for example, level 1 counter-intel can't stop them.

[ July 15, 2002, 19:02: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

Quote:

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
No, the AI is not smart enough to send a medical bay equipped ship even when it has them. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif

Quote:

Originally posted by geoschmo:
<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
No, the AI is not smart enough to send a medical bay equipped ship even when it has them. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif

I think what he meant was you design your transports with medical bays. All of them. Then the AI goes about happily moving populations around and one time happens to cure a plague by accident. Not very efficent, but I believe it would work. But it would have to be a very slow plague. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Geoschmo<hr /></blockquote>I cannot exclude that this happened by chance, but I saw the AI move population transports that had medical bays straight to his colonies I infected shortly before with plague bombs.

Baron M: Great discovery on the Intel/Events connection!

Quote:

The question of intel points cost is an interesting one because of how counter-intel works. When you make an intel project cost more you are making it somewhat harder to pull off, but you are ALSO making it harder to stop! And I wonder if the extra difficulty of stopping an expensive project makes it worthwhile to assign a huge cost to the plague intel projects. You might be making them more effective rather than less. If they cost more than 100000, for example, level 1 counter-intel can't stop them.

Perhaps by pushing the intel projects up the tech tree you can make the projects "cost more" in research cost rather than making them cost a great deal to produce. The equivalent would be the "suitcase nuke" where the real cost was borne out in the Manhattan project, where-as the cost of the actual device is "cheap" in comparison to the research costs. If the device is then always cheap, it will be fairly easy to block with counter-intelligence. You'd have to catch your opponent sleeping to get one through...

My .02 $Cdn

[ July 16, 2002, 00:13: Message edited by: jimbob ]

Well, this is another behavior I've never seen. Hmm... what could make the AI send repair ships and medical bay ships for one person's game but not another? Aren't those options hard coded?

Quote:

Originally posted by Q:
I cannot exclude that this happened by chance, but I saw the AI move population transports that had medical bays straight to his colonies I infected shortly before with plague bombs.

Could be that the AI was attempting to drop population on the planet...

I prefer tests to speculations:
I infected a homeworld (full population of 4000M)with level I plague. The attacked empire had a population transport with a medical bay in the same system on an other homeworld with 4000M population. On the next turn the AI moved the empty population transport to the infected homeworld, cured the plague, but did not load or unload anything.

Yes, I back this up. I repeated the test. Good find, Q.
If you look at the ships orders it even reads "Move to blablabla. Render Medical Aid".

Rollo

The next test is to see if the AI will bring a medical bay in from another system to cure the planet.

Quote:

Originally posted by dumbluck:
The next test is to see if the AI will bring a medical bay in from another system to cure the planet.

And then see how bad it would be to add an escort-sized medical bay ship to the AI files, and set the "Must Have" number to something appropriate.

We could also add a special medical bay hull, maybe smaller than an escort, with movement bonuses & stiff combat penalties; that could reduce maintenance costs for the AI without opening up too many abuses for humans.

Of course, the AI still has to research medical bays...