AI Production Halted Abnormally

[Omega]

I have almost finished my new AI mod. I have run into a production anomaly that is making the AI quite weak late in the game. Around turn 110, the AI’s production drops off precipitously. Within 20 turns the production of both ships and units is almost zero.

The AI is not even close to the limits for ships or units (both set to 5000). The AI has a surplus of 1,127,995 minerals, 176,316 organics and 326,668 radioactives per turn. The AI has not met the ship or unit build quotas in the AI_Construction_Vehicles file. Most of the shipyard construction queues are empty and there is zero production of mines.

Have I run into some type of arbitrary limits in the AI production routines? If I have, it is impossible to make a challenging AI by modifying the AI data files. The AI appears to simply shut down it’s production beyond a certain point. Has anyone else seen the AI halt it’s production of ships and units for no reason?

[Q]

O yes, there has been several discussion topics about that in this forum. Just use the search function.
I found it helpful to increase the storage capacity of the AI empire, but not everybody had the same positive effect on the AI production.

[Jubala]

I seem to recall that building defense bases would cause this since the AI would try to build defense bases where it can't, ie planets with no space yards and choke. Taking out Defense Bases from Vehicle_Construction.txt fixes that. Don't remember if other reasons exist. Or if this one has been fixed.

[Mephisto]

The Defense-Base-Bug has been fixed. You need to build some storage facilities and everything *should* return to normal.

quote:

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Originally posted by Jubala:
I seem to recall that building defense bases would cause this since the AI would try to build defense bases where it can't, ie planets with no space yards and choke. Taking out Defense Bases from Vehicle_Construction.txt fixes that. Don't remember if other reasons exist. Or if this one has been fixed.

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[Omega]

There are no defense bases in the vehicle construction queues. I don’t find them terribly useful. I will try to fiddle with the storage as see what happens.

[Omega]

Well, I’ll be damned. It would seem that there is some type of ungodly relationship between the amount of storage space an empire has and how many ships it will produce. That makes absolutely no sense.

I had set the Minimum Empire Point Storage line in the settings.txt file to 500,000. Apparently this was not high enough. I was able to get my AI to resume production by upping the storage to 1,000,000. The AI is now producing 150 new ships. It does not appear to be producing any new mines.

This has to be some kind of bug. There must be some type of logic in the build routine that is meant to cap production before resource exhaustion. I wonder if the routine looks at mineral storage capacity when it should be looking at net mineral production. Even then, the ratios of mineral production vs. construction make no sense.

I recommend that everyone set their Minimum Empire Point Storage to 1,000,000 or higher and remove all storage facility building from their AI_Construction_Facilities files. This will result in more robust AI players.

Oh, and a hearty thanks to Q to pointing me down the right path.