Help - I've fallen and I can't get up!

Gimboid · #1 July 13th, 2001, 04:49 AM

Under the Empire Status -> Strategy -> Damage section in the game.

Does the 'Damage Percent Per Ship = 80% have anything todo with your ships not bothering with the severely damaged one sitting on the warppoint?
if its set to 100% do they completely destroy all targets?

DirectorTsaarx · #2 July 13th, 2001, 03:35 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Gimboid:
Under the Empire Status -> Strategy -> Damage section in the game.

Does the 'Damage Percent Per Ship = 80% have anything todo with your ships not bothering with the severely damaged one sitting on the warppoint?
if its set to 100% do they completely destroy all targets?

Well, this setting _shouldn't_ have any effect on whether a sector is considered an attack location. But it's certainly possible...

Alpha Kodiak · #3 July 13th, 2001, 05:26 PM

I tried an experiment Last night. I changed the "Maximum Systems to Defend at a Time" setting to 50 (well more than the number of systems the Rage have) and waited to see what would happen. And waited. And Waited. The only change was that the number of ships milling around the warp point slowly declined as more and more of them were sent off in different directions (presumably because the AI now had more perceived threats to defend against). But, after a good fifteen or twenty turns, there were still a dozen attack ships dancing around in front of the blocked warp point.

Perhaps Gimboid's idea has something to do with it. I'll have to do some more experimentation.

capnq · #4 July 14th, 2001, 06:32 AM

Far too often, I've had ships run away from a colony ship rather than attack it, because at some earlier point I had set the Do Not Attack flag for colony ships in Strategies, and forgot to change it before I ordered the attack. Did you check that setting?

------------------
Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Alpha Kodiak · #5 July 14th, 2001, 05:15 PM

Well nothing I could do in strategies seemed to do anything. Then, a battlecruiser returning for resupply came through the warp point from the other side, stumbled into the colonizer, and vaporized it. Once in combat, there was definitely no problem with not wanting to attack a colonizer.

Interestingly, after the blockage was gone and the ships were moving off to their assignments, the Rage became aggressive again. They even attacked a colonizer that was plodding through Rage space at a speed of one, that had been ignored for at least 20 turns. It seems like the AI was so concerned about whatever it was trying to send ships to on the other side of that warp point that it was ignoring everything else going on.

Bottom line to this is, it seems like it was ignoring the colonizer blocking the warp point because something else was more important, while it couldn't get to whatever that was because the colonizer was in the way. It's almost a form of the dreaded "Deadly embrace" in software design. Two routines each hold on to something the other needs, waiting for the other to finish.