AI without maintenance ?

PsychoTechFreak · #1 June 18th, 2001, 11:39 AM

Has anybody ever tried to play against (every) AI with no maintenance costs? I would like to know if they would build excessive fleets in this case, and also if their problem with the storage capacities would be solved.

Also I don't know how to test that easily, maybe a racial trait whithout costs, which is activated for the AIs manually ? But if a maintenance bonus is given with a racial trait, is there a cutoff at zero maintenance or would it turn to negative maintenance ?

Nitram Draw · #2 June 19th, 2001, 01:34 AM

You could change maintenance percentage in the settings file to zero to test this.

Suicide Junkie · #3 June 18th, 2001, 02:40 PM

Setting maintenance reduction above 25% will result in 0% maintenance. Adding a culture bonus will not push your maintenance negative.

geoschmo · #4 June 18th, 2001, 03:21 PM

For the truly masochistic out there who really wan't a challange from the ai, why not set the resupply down as well.

This could be done very easily by upping the value of the advanced power consumption racial trait, and lowering the cost of it. You could then give it to every ai.

I would think an ai unencumbered by maintenance on ships and not having to resupply them would truely be a formidable enemy.

Of course it would still be the "Moron with a big stick" mentioned in another thread, but it would be a pretty big stick, and it would not be quite so moronic.

I think most of the behavior that seems moronic in the ai is due to one thing. Having to resupply. This is aggravated by the fact that it is never content to leave it's ships in one place. It's always moving them around using up supplies, which means it has to resupply often.

Geo

PsychoTechFreak · #5 June 18th, 2001, 05:49 PM

I'm not masochistic

(I'm going to give the same bonus to myself) with my regular gameplay. I just like to test unusual conditions which oftentimes lead to new ideas. Maybe the AI is going to build SM ships (abbrev. for stellar manipulation not for sadistic/masochistic) or other heavy ships which are normally very tough with regard to maintenance costs. Test...

[This message has been edited by PsychoTechFreak (edited 18 June 2001).]

Omega · #6 June 20th, 2001, 03:15 AM

quote:
Originally posted by PsychoTechFreak:
Has anybody ever tried to play against (every) AI with no maintenance costs? I would like to know if they would build excessive fleets in this case, and also if their problem with the storage capacities would be solved.

The AI has some truly odd production limitations. The number of ships that it builds is limited directly by the amount of storage that it has available. Even if the AI has massive amounts of minerals available, it will still stop production when some arbitrary ratio of ships vs. storage is reached. This is hard coded into the game. This can be circumvented by raising the Minimum Empire Point Storage value in the settings.txt file to an astronomically high number. Mine is currently set at 5000000.