AI Ship Design Modder

[Felan]

Something I learned from a ship I designed that had tractors and repulsors is that the order of the weapons on the ship makes a difference. I designed a starbase and my repulsor weapons were installed before any of my other weapons, consequently they would fire first and push the enemy beyond the range of the other weapons on the starbase.

Likewise in general you would want your shield/armor ignoring weapons to fire before shield depleting weapons which would fire before the rest of your non-missle weapons and finish off with missle weapons (the rest may kill the enemy and it can use the missles against some other target).

If designing a ship capture type then I would automatically have it list all shield depleting weapons first then start staggering the boarding parties between every weapon afterwards.

I haven't looked too close at this but I think maybe the real difficulty comes in retrofits which may have a tendancy of scrambling the order of weapons a bit. Firing shield depleting weapons after firing your DUC's is pointless and doesn't help at all. I will have to investigate this further and I hope I'm wrong.