AI without maintenance ?

[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.

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 ?

[Suicide Junkie]

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

[geoschmo]

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]

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).]

[Nitram Draw]

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

[Omega]

quote:

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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.

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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.

[CaptSpoogy]

In my current game, the AI is not building very much ships - maybe 3-5 for each system they have. If I increase the maximum storage level - would they then begin to build more ships?

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[dumbluck]

quote:

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Originally posted by Omega:
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.

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Is this still the case with the new patch? I know that the patch was supposed to get a line in the ai files working that went something like this:

Max percentage maintenance over production

or something like that anyway. The line is supposed to tell the ai to stop building ships if it's maintenance costs exceed x% of its resource production.

I'm guessing that the storage ratio thing you found was a stopgap fix for the ai until he got the % thing fixed. Sooooo, now that it's fixed......

just my overpriced $0.02

[PsychoTechFreak]

I have played 2 test games, with exactly the same setup except maintenance, 1st was without maintenance (v1.35), the 2nd with the usual maintenance rate (25%).

5 races: Klingon, Pyrochette, Sergetti, Romulan, Darlok (every race under complete AI control); 100 turns; high tech, one planet start

The results after 100 turns are maybe not surprising:

3 to 4 times more ships/stations if played w/o maintenance

Stellar manipulation ships :

2 ships (both romulans) with 25% maintenance
10 ships without maintenance (9 romulans: star destr./creator, WP opener/closer, Black Hole destroyer, storm destroyer, planet creator; one pyrochette star destroyer)

Also the races had severe lack of resources problems with 25% maintance, these problems haven't been observed w/o maintenance

I haven't patched yet, the patch has a 5% minimum for maintenance (hard-coded I guess). Well, I haven't tested with 5% maintenance yet (maybe it's low enough for a thrilling setup, maybe not...). I know the zero maintenance causes problems especially in multiplayer games, but couldn't we get a button in game setup to restrict or release the zero maintenance feature (e.g. for non multiplayer games) ?

IMHO 25% maintenance is too much (at least for the AI), it's very hard to support SM-ships if you have to pay the costs of a new ship every 4 turns.

What do you think ?

[PsychoTechFreak]

... doesn't seem to be much interest in the no-maintenance-feature for the AI (I liked it to see more SM activity of the AI from my tests, hopefully it will be enough with 5% also), so I have patched to 1.41 now too.

But I still think to pay a quarter of the ship costs every turn is too much, the AI doesn't seem to handle this very good (lack of resource problem), so I'm going to decrease it a little bit for the AI races.


[This message has been edited by PsychoTechFreak (edited 28 June 2001).]