Does the AI use mothballing?

raynor · #1 February 5th, 2001, 07:56 PM

Has anyone ever seen the AI mothball a ship or base? Or, does the AI just scrap ships when it starts running low on resources?

HreDaak · #2 February 5th, 2001, 08:47 PM

quote:
Originally posted by raynor:
Has anyone ever seen the AI mothball a ship or base? Or, does the AI just scrap ships when it starts running low on resources?

I am 99.9% sure that the AI never mothballs its ships. If it has problems to maintain them it just scraps some...

Q · #3 February 5th, 2001, 08:59 PM

Never seen the AI use mothballing and I controlled them quite a bit as you may know from the other topic.

raynor · #4 February 5th, 2001, 10:11 PM

That's what I thought.

Yet another ability *not* to use if you want to play a fair game against the AI...

Right now, I think I have more ships in mothball than I do active...

WhiteHojo · #5 February 5th, 2001, 10:36 PM

W/o some means to filter all those mothballed ships from the ship report window, doesn't sorting thru the rows & rows of mothballed ships drive you crazy?

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Character is best defined as that which you do when you believe nobody is watching.

raynor · #6 February 6th, 2001, 10:39 AM

quote:
Originally posted by WhiteHojo:
W/o some means to filter all those mothballed ships from the ship report window, doesn't sorting thru the rows & rows of mothballed ships drive you crazy?

I don't know why I was so crazy as to increase the number of systems to 254. WAY too many systems, planets and ships. All the displays become pretty useless without filtering--mothballed ships or not.

Hopefully, that will be something they add by the 1.50 release.

henk brouwer · #7 February 6th, 2001, 11:20 AM

There should be some kind of drawback to mothballing ships. At this point it's a far too easy way to keep huge fleets on standby without paying maintenance.

Maybe mothballed ships should receive some random damage to components depending on the time they have been mothballed. After all they don't pay maintenance so it seems pretty reasonable. This would also mean that mothballed fleets need some time to be repaired before they can be properly used again. These changes will make the game more realistic, and improve gameplay as well....

Daynarr · #8 February 6th, 2001, 01:58 PM

quote:
Originally posted by henk brouwer:
There should be some kind of drawback to mothballing ships. At this point it's a far too easy way to keep huge fleets on standby without paying maintenance.

Maybe mothballed ships should receive some random damage to components depending on the time they have been mothballed. After all they don't pay maintenance so it seems pretty reasonable. This would also mean that mothballed fleets need some time to be repaired before they can be properly used again. These changes will make the game more realistic, and improve gameplay as well....

Or simply limit the time you can have ship mothballed to a number of years (could add a flag in settings.txt for that one), after which the ship will be automatically unmotballed with all the necessary resources used or simply lost if you don't want/have resources to spend.

Baron Munchausen · #9 February 6th, 2001, 07:40 PM

There are already some disadvantages that you haven't thought of for mothballing. A mothballed ships DOES exist on the map. If the place where it sits is attacked it will sit there and do NOTHING to defend or protect itself. And once you mothball ships, you often end up paying "maintenance" in the form of upgrades to keep them comparable to your active ships. So, there is a cost of sorts. I think that this "penalty" could be added but it ought to be a very gradual sort of thing. Maybe one component per year of game time that it was mothballed could be damaged and require repair when it is unmothballed. Alternatively, just disallow retrofits for mothballed ships. Your "investment" would quickly decline in value during any game that was not "max tech levels" from the beginning.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 06 February 2001).]

Daynarr · #10 February 6th, 2001, 09:50 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Alternatively, just disallow retrofits for mothballed ships. Your "investment" would quickly decline in value during any game that was not "max tech levels" from the beginning.

Now you are talking

.