Neutrals: eliminating their research

[Phoenix-D]

There is in fact a hardcoded element to research. Once they hit the end of the file the AI will start to research other items, IIRC.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
There is in fact a hardcoded element to research. Once they hit the end of the file the AI will start to research other items, IIRC.

Ah, well if that's the case my first idea won't work. However, the second idea would almost work. They'd research, but at such a slow rate you'd likely see little or no tech progression.

[Siegebreaker]

How about reducing the research points they get from the facilities?
Is it possible?
Like a research penalty or something.

[Combat Wombat]

There is one simple answer here that I am suprised no one has said. Make a tech area that costs an insanely large ammount of research points and make the neutral ai research that. The tech area will cost so much the neutral can't finish it and will therefore not research anything else.

[geoschmo]

I did a test and Phoenix is correct they will start researching other stuff if you don't give them anything to research in the files. Although, I can't quite figure out the logic behind the research choices. It almost seems random. One neutral started researching cargo. Another started researching ice colony, although there was not a preponderance of ice colony worlds in their home system.

Originally posted by Combat Wombat:
There is one simple answer here that I am suprised no one has said. Make a tech area that costs an insanely large ammount of research points and make the neutral ai research that.

That would work of course if the objective is to only restrict their research and not give them some compensation for the wasted facility space as I was trying to do.

For that matter you don't really need to modify the tech file. You could make them research only applied research to the max. It would take them longer to get through that track then any reasonable game would be likely to Last. Or you could let them research other things that would make sense for a system-bound race. Space yards, sattelites, resource generation, etc.

You could also modify the AI_general files and set their research attribute to 50%. Use the points to raise their rates of resource extraction in the other areas. It's a less effective, but also less mod-intensive way of doing my previous idea of modding the facilities themselves.

There are a lot of ways to do this. It just depeneds on what other factors you'd like to change as well.

[Fyron]

You could make the research facilities require a new racial trait. Human and regular AI empires would all take this trait, neutrals would not. No more research possible, except through trade, which would be rather slow.

Give them a raacial trait and a special research fac that only generates 1 point of research (So the AI will select it when filling out the research facility homeworld requirement) and also generates standard resources they can use

This is unecessary. If there are no research facilities available to use on the HW, mineral facilities will be used instead.

[ March 08, 2004, 18:26: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[geoschmo]

Edit: Never mind. My brain took a little vacation there.

[ March 08, 2004, 18:39: Message edited by: geoschmo ]