Preset "animosity files"

[dogscoff]

Or whatever it's called...

You know, that thing we've all been asking MM for for ages, where you can alter the AI files give the EEE a pre-programmed tendency to hate the Druckshocka, or have the Star Wars Rebels hate the Empire and stuff like that.

Anyway, I had an idea to expand it, and I don't think it would be much extra work for MM (not much work on top of the original suggestion, anyway). It might give "animosity" the extra usefulness needed to make it worth MM's time. Anyway...

The suggestion we already know about involves the game looking at one of the values in the AI_general file for each target race, and then adding or subtracting a given value to the anger count for that race when it came across "Empire name: Rage" (for example)

Why not have it search through the other values in AI_General as well?

Why not have a race that despise Gas giant dwellers or oxygen-breathers? That could be an important tactical decision, so that the race will be more aggressive towards races with which it competes for colonisable planets?

How cool would it be for the (male-hating) Space Valkyries to have a natural trust of any race governed by a Queen or Empress or other feminine title?

I'm sure you can all think of dozens of other good applications, but these few alone could make a huge difference to role playing and maybe even AI performance.

BTW, I imagine the reason Aaron hasn't implemented animosity yet is that the game doesn't seem to track anger values for races which aren't in contact with one another. If he altered this part of the engine to allow animosity, it would also (probably) automatically fix the exploit where you can close a warp point with your AI enemy and force them to forget all about you, then re-open it next turn and re-establish friendly relations.

Just some food for thought.