Questions on AI vehicle construction

Nitram Draw · #1 April 9th, 2001, 06:25 PM

Has anyone had any success in limiting an AI ship size?
I was thinking of creating some different designs for the AI and wanted to limit them to Cruisers and smaller but I also want the AI to choose larger ships of the same class, attack ship etc, as well. Is there any way to control this or is it a waste of time?
Thanks

Q · #2 April 9th, 2001, 07:17 PM

I'm not sure if I understood your question correctely. It's no problem to limit the size of the shpis because there are lower and upper limits for the size in the design instruction. But the problem is, that if you have different sizes of the same ship type the AI will use all he can. It is not possible until now the tell the AI to stop using a ship design for small ships once he researched larger ships. Was that your question??

Nitram Draw · #3 April 9th, 2001, 07:46 PM

That was pretty much my question. I wanted to design some specialized attack support ships for the AI, flak ships and PT boat type ships in particular, but I didn't want them to design BB size ones, cruiser size loaded with PD is sufficient in most cases.
Maybe a future patch will let you set percentages of ship type to build.

Tampa_Gamer · #4 April 9th, 2001, 10:57 PM

Nitram - I think there was this exact same question in another post that I answered Last week. The answer is yes, you can certainly prescribe a certain ship (such as PT Boat min & max hull size 300 for example) with the following cavaets:

(1) The AI will keep this as a valid ship design even in the end-game

(2) If there are multiple designs present, the AI tends to create new designs every couple of turns, even if there are no new techs

(3) You will still only be able to call the ships based on "design type" i.e. attack ship, defense ship, etc.

[This message has been edited by Tampa_Gamer (edited 09 April 2001).]

Nitram Draw · #5 April 11th, 2001, 01:22 AM

Thanks, must have got lazy and not searched to hard.
I guess there is no way to control how many of each different attack ship type is built then.
What if I built an attack type ship as a stellar manipulation ship or some other type of ship, one where the tech is not usually available early? Would the AI put it in their attack fleet or would it just cruise around by itself?

Tampa_Gamer · #6 April 11th, 2001, 01:31 AM

Nitram - that is exactly the next step that I tried (except I used the Boarding Ship and Kamikaze ship type). No dice, they were never added to attack fleets. Hence, another wish-list item is for a flag in the designfile to indicate whether a design type is valid for inclusion in Defense Fleet, Attack Fleets or both. However, I have never experimented with the stellar manipulation ships - its worth a try. Has anyone else seen them added to attack/defense fleets?