[ColdSteel]

I too am very interested in how ship design really works since I have been struggling through it with trial and error when designing the AI for my new Selachii race.

One thing I have discovered is that if you place a higher tech weapon in the first slot and a lower tech one in the second slot and an even lower tech one in the third slot, the AI will use the third item until the second item is researched, then it will use it instead. Then when the highest tech item is researched it will swap out the second slot one for the first slot item. This is really handy because with it you can make the AI build ships with different weapon loads at different points in the game. This makes it a bit tougher for humans to "zero in" on one specific tactic and ship design to combat the (usually) predictable race AI. For instance, I have an attack ship and a defense ship that both use identical weapon loads initially but after PPB are researched the AI will switch to them for the attack ship wih one cap missile for a secondary and the defense ship sticks with the cap missiles with 1 PPB as secondary. When mixed into the same fleet, these simulate combined arms pretty well for the AI. Unfortunately, the AI stupidly tends to group all like ships together into fleets which defeats the purpose (Sigh).

One thing I have not been able to understand completely is how to make secondary and primary weapons show up in a design in equal quantities. I've played with the space size (thanks to a tip by God Emperor) and it does have an effect but it is a strange one and seems to vary depending on the hull size.

Anybody got any insights on how to do this??

[This message has been edited by ColdSteel (edited 14 March 2001).]

[This message has been edited by ColdSteel (edited 14 March 2001).]