[grumbler]

I think it would probably be pretty easy to get a valid facilities system going, so long as we acknowledge that the needs (and abilities) of the AI have to be priority #1, so that we avoid a facilities setup where "being human" is a hige advantage.

Similarly, we need to design the weapons system from the "top down" IMO, and the starting place for that is a general description of what we would expect a ship of any given type (massive ship, capital ship, carrier, cruiser, destroyer, escort) to have in the way of weapons suites.

That is to say, for example, would we expect a capital ship to be armed with two or three instances of the race's most powerful weapons, or six to eight? Should the capital ship have intermediate weapons, or should it just be primary weapons plus PD weapons? Should it have fighters? How much of the "weapon space" should be devoted to fighters?

Once all of these questions are answered, we can then build an AI model of the capital ship, and determine what the size charactorists of the weapons that will go in it should be. We can duplicate for each ship type down the line. Only THEN do we need to actually start to assemble the weapons characteristics.

The reason why this is a superior model to the "ground up" approach is because it then makes the AI opponent design ships that are fundamentally as good as what the human player builds, instead of having these quirks where the AI has 10kt less space than needed to put in the optimal weapons, and rather than shorting something else (as a human would do) it builds using the second-best weapons.

Plus, building weapons is a lot easier if you know the parameters for size and whatnot ahead of time, and merely adjust power to reflect size.

Anyway, that is my theory. Discussion?