Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

I checked this out and the cheats could make for an interesting challenge. However, there is a problem, a great construction rate doesn't do any good if the race isn't reproducing its population. So... I took the liberty of optomizing the AI_General file. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif I tried to stay with the spirit of your original set-up and came up with the attached file. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

You forgot to mention "ignores limits on range of characteristics". Speaking of which, if you set up the politics file to never have trade treaties, you could drop political savvy far into the negatives for extra points. Also, if you really want a challenge from them, change the culture to berzerkers and raise aggressiveness/defensiveness to illegally high levels (greater than 125). That would be much more effective than going all out construction and maintenance, provided that the ship design includes enough PDC's to neutralize missiles.

Edit: If you don't care about making troops completely useless for actual combat, which you apparently don't since physical strength is at 0, you could also drop physical strength to a very negative value to get extra points.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

Yeah. I found that out. I was wondering why the AI would build and expand and then all of a sudden have zero minerals. I did some tweaking of the AI_general file as well. I'm looking at your AI_general file and it looks like we did a lot of the same things, except I kept Maintenance Reduction, and raised Repair Aptitude.

Cheaters v1.2
 

Cheaters v1.2 Download here.

Balanced the racial traits a little better.
Tweaked the Ship Designs and the Research file a little.
Added ship names file Cheaters.txt
They wiped out the stock Fazrah in the first 24 turns.

Re: Cheaters v1.2
 

I'm quite suprised that the game allows you to bypass the limits in the AI_General file like this. I remember doing some testing on this way back and thought that it did not permit this, but I may have only been testing Advanced racial traits. Do you have some parameters on this? For example, why did you choose 171% for shipyard instead of 999%? Are there actual limits in there somewhere that you can't pass?

Re: Cheaters v1.2
 

The only limits are the cost in racial points available at the start of the game, and as defined in the Settings.txt

For most traits it's
1-80 : 10 Points Each
81-120 : 25 Points Each
121-? : 50 Points Each

I don't know how high it can go, but it will cost you a lot of points. For Maintenance Reduction it's doubled except for the low end which is halved.

I initially put the Construction Aptitude at 175. With the 1000 point Advanced Trait (which was cheaper) it added up to 200%, but I found I needed to balance things out. I had reduced Repair Aptitude to 0 since the AI uses suicide ships, but then the AI was retrofitting starbases that never got repaired. I also had Environmental Resistance reduced to 0 because I didn't know what it did. The population never grew.

I reduced the Construction Aptitude to 171 to get some points for other things.

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

Empires created from AI_General files can ignore the minimum and maximum values for characteristics, but cannot spend more than the allowed number of points.

Anyway, since the whole point of this race is to exploit bugs that are available only to the AI, why stop at 0 with physical strength? Negative values generate points just fine, and don't have any worse effect than 0 does.

Re: Cheaters v1.2
 

Ok, it still stops you from using more than total number of points allowed, but you can reduce individual stats below or above their normal limits, interesting.

The current stats you have there in v1.2 aren't for a 200o point race. You have another 550 points you can use. That's enough for 120% in research, or to bring the ground combat back up if you want to make the Cheaters use troops.

Also, you've got the Opt 1, Opt 2 and Opt 3 settings all the same. So in a 3000 or 5000 point game you are leaving a lot of points on the table. You could raise a lot of your stats in the opt 2 and 3 charateristics, or throw in some advanced racial traits there.

Your choice to lower the mining rate might be a mistake. With such a high construction rate it seems like it would be quite easy for the AI to spend itself broke. Of course if you play with bonuses that won't be as much of a problem.

Geoschmo

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

Really, that's quite interesting. Typically SE4 doesn't like negative values for anything. It's oddly inconsistant for it to permit it in this one area.

Geoschmo

Re: Cheaters AI Race
 

Douglas, are you sure about this? I tried running a test just now setting the physical strength to -10 and it breaks it and sets the physical strength in game to average(100%) instead of 0 or minus 10. This results in too many points being used down the line and the construction aptitude also being set to average.