...or, why Won't the Toltayans Rebuild Their Homeworld's Spaceyard?
It appears that the AI won't scrap facilities to make room for more. I was helping save the Toltayans from extinction from the Krill, had several warships orbiting the Toltayan homeworld and noticed their planetary space yard had been taken out in earlier bombardments. I waited quite awhile for them to get around to rebuilding it so they could build more ships and such.
Finally, I took over that empire and saw that they had built only more mineral miners. A quick look at the default facility construction file revealed no entry for space yards in the defend or attack AI states. So I quit the game, added them in and played a few more turns as the Toltayans. It wouldn't scrap a single miner to build a new space yard, effectively crippling itself for the rest of the game.
I'd add that to the list of Things to Add, if possible. Instead of leaving planets w/full facilities unexamined it should go down the list of what to build for a particular state and scrap a facility to build a facility that becomes buildable due to new technologies or bombardment damage.
Without this, it makes all the domed colonies established before planet utilization 7 is discovered incredibly limited in usefulness to the AI. Of course, I don't know how the AI would handle the expense of building all those converters. How difficult would it be to teach the AI to use 'hold queue' to keep it from running out of resources?
(I was thinking something to let it have negative income so long as there was resources in storage, then putting queues on hold until the cost was either positive or wouldn't take it below zero in any of the resource types.)
(Why bother saving an AI race? Play style and the Toltayans are better neighbors than the damn Krill could ever be.)
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"What do -you- want?" "I'd like to live -just- long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this..." *waggle* "...can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?"
AI Facility Construction Follies....
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