AI improvements

[imperishable]

I noticed that AI doesn't make very good ship designs. I set up a demo game with open technology tree, so every race had all the demo tech. After I met cruisers from AI, I spent some time designing my own cruiser. Neither of us used missiles. I was able to make a design that allowed 2 of my crusiers beat 3 of AI cruisers with no losses half the time. Computer was in control of both sides. I simulated this combat a dozen times so I'm pretty sure AI design was inferior to mine.

Anyway, what I am suggesting is adding a learning algorythm to AI. So while the human player is taking his turn, AI would semi-randomly create ship designs and test them in the simulator against best ships known to it of the same size. That way you will almost always fight against good AI ships, given the technology. This shouldn't be a hard thing to add since the main ingredient is the simulator.

Another area that could use some improvement in AI is combat strategy.
First of all, as someone already mentioned, AI shouldn't use fleet formations. It's much better if each ship followed its own strategy.
Second, AI needs to learn how to use specialized ships together. For example, lets say AI fleet has a few ships equiped with shield depleting weapons and a few ships with normal weapons. I don't know if AI ever creates such a fleet, but it should, and the shield depleting ships should target only ships with shields, you know. AI should also learn how to create and efficiently coordinate fleets like:
1) engines killer ship, shield killer ship, boarding party ship, computer virus ship
2) all missile ships, learn to 'missile dance'
3) engine killer ships, long range missile ships. (Here AI should kill enemy engines and then move out of the way, letting missile ships fire from safe distance)
4) ships with normal damage weapons and a worm hole weapon. (AI strategy would be to focus normal damage weapons on a single target and use worm hole weapon to teleport other ships far away. This is 'divide and conquire' strategy)
5) another little trick is to build a large ship equiped with only 1 small weapon (point defense) and use the rest of the ship space for shields. You could send those decoy ships first so enemy AI targets them first, and while they are busy lowering immense shield defense of the decoy ship, your other ships do their job undisturbed. Doesn't work all the time, but often enough.

You get the idea. Such fleet combinations would have to be hard coded into the game, so AI used them. Considering the variety of ship equipment, it's a shame not to use ship specialization combat strategies. What's even worse is that in multiplayer we can't control ships during combat, so we need to teach AI how to do it the way we would.

[This message has been edited by imperishable (edited 09 January 2001).]