quote:
Originally posted by Alpha Kodiak:
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For some reason, a minister is assigning the ships orders to do something on the other side of the warp point every turn, but never assigns any one of the many individual ships or fleets the responsibility to attack the colonizer.
I keep wondering if there is a setting in one of the AI files that says "Don't attack non-combatants" or "Don't attack non-threatening ships" but I can't figure out what that setting would be. Could it be something to do with the "Maximum Systems to Defend at a Time" setting in the AI_Settings file? It is set to 5 for the Rage, which is as high or higher than most. However, by this time (past turn 100), the Rage have many more systems than that and are at war with four different races. Perhaps this system is not considered threatened enough or strategic enough to warrant defending.
I think you've almost got the answer with that Last statement. But it's not the "system" that's not threatened enough/strategic enough. It's that the crippled colony ship isn't enough of a threat to be considered an attack location. Every time your attack fleets have their orders cleared, the AI goes through the cycle of finding the 5 most important attack locations (or whatever the AI's setting is). It assigns orders to attack ships to move to those 5 locations, and ignores the crippled colonizer because it's just "not important". There ought to be a way to program the AI to notice a blocked warp point and either assign it as a highest-priority attack location or find a way around it.