AI advice needed.

[Atraikius]

Deathstalker -

For the carriers, I found that ships were only loaded with fighters if they are classified as a carrier as you found. But, the design type in the Vehicle Design file is not what determines which type of hull to use, its the Majority Weapon. If the Majority Weapon is Cargo - you get a transport hull, if it is launch/recover fighters - you get a carrier. Useing this theory, I temporarily removed the carrier entry from the design file, and made a new carrier that used weapons for the majority and secondary abilities, with launch/recover fighters as the first add. ability, and cargo as the second - the race started building frigate sized carriers and loading them with about 15 light fighters. They could only launch one fighter at a time, but 5 of them in a fleet early in the game was tearing the AI they were at war with to pieces. The problem is that with both a normal carrier style and a warship style in the Design file, when the AI decides to build a carrier, it tends to always pick the true carrier over the warship style. I haven't been too worried about this as when I was originally making the zorians I wanted them to use almost exclusively the warship style of carrier but couldn't make it work - now I have them building almost exclusivly cariers from the beginning of the game - can't wait to see what happens when every ship in thier fleet starts launching fighters - should have a new fVersion of them on monday.

The troopships I believe was a similar issue to the carrier bays, the AI would build troopships using the transposrt hulls, but would include transports in its fleets. As the number of troops that can be fit in even a small transport is excessive unless your trying to take a planet with a very large pop. or a lot of troops, I had the AI design the Troop transport with three cargo must have abilities, and then weapons for its majority and secondary abilities, with cargo as its first add. ability. After a few turns, my Ork AI had two fleets with loaded troopships (one was even the flagship), and the Zorians had one. All three fleets broke up shortly after that, and I restarted a game then because I had made a bunch of tweeks that would be more apparent at the beginning of the game so I havn't seen it happen again yet, but the Orks are currently researching troops in my game now. I believe that the fleet break-up were because all three of the troopships still had some cargo space left, and both the Orks and Zorians had begun building troops again resulting in the troopships breaking off to finish loading.