The Cheaters v1.3 released

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

I think that the Cheaters may very well be allowed in the AI Deathmatches, for players who want to play against a REALLY tough player..... also, are you making the rest of the AI for this race TDMishly hard? Then it would be a real boasting feat if you beat one of these in the AI Deathmatch.....

[RudyHuxtable]

I think Cheaters should all have a reset button to stop the game and force you to start over from scratch if they begin to lose.

[Urendi Maleldil]

I believe the max number of spaceyards the AI can put on a ship or base hull is 2. The spaceyards are each 400kt and the largest hull size can only fit two.

The Cheaters AI will use the stock data files, so you could just plug them into your regular game. My computer is still broken and I'm waiting for the Windows XP cd from home so I can fix it. Once I do, I can get back to work on race.

As for being allowed in an AI Deathmatch, I personally think it would be unfair because it's not a regular AI. But if whoever's running the match will allow it, I will enter them. Tournaments are always fun. The Cheaters will be like the Harlem Globetrotters of AI modding.

[Fyron]

Huh? A starbase is 2500 kT. That is easily 5 space yards, or 6 with a master computer. A baseship is 1500 kT. That is easily 3, still leaving enough space for essentials...

[Urendi Maleldil]

Oh yeah. I was thinking about ship hulls. But I tried adding more than two spaceyards using several req ability entries, but the max number of spaceyards remained two. I think the AI was placing one for the req abilities and one for the majority component ability.

Now that I think about it, I never tried it with the secondary component ability. That might yield 3 spaceyards.

[Urendi Maleldil]

I was working on the Cheaters this afternoon and their ship designs were very fast. I was testing them in combat when I realized: How fast your ships are doesn't matter in combat.

Aside from being able to catch a ship that's running away from you, the speed of your ship has little or no effect on its combat effectiveness. What makes a ship effective is having just enough speed to reach the enemy first by jumping in at them from just outside of weapons range, and bringing enough firepower to destroy them before they have a chance to fire back.

Obviously an AI won't be able to do that as perfectly as a human, but if I consider most enemy ships will start out on the opposite side of the map, and have a combat speed of 3 or 4, I should be able to figure out an optimal number of engines to give an attack ship enough movement to win most of the time against a comparable opponent.

Of course, I also need a high damage first strike weapon. I'm thinking about using Rocket Pods, but I don't like the short range and the refire rate. The Cheaters build Kamikaze ships with Mine Warheads on them, giving them tremendous damage potential, but you also loose the ship.

[Urendi Maleldil]

The Cheaters v1.0

The cheats they use:
200x Space Yard rate
Puts more than 6 engines on ship designs
Uses non-ship components on ships

[douglas]

Hmm, seems I was wrong. I was going by the fact that another way I found to ignore characteristic limits that I'm not too sure I want to post, as it is possible for human players and would allow blatant but not easily detectable cheating on PBW, allowed negative characteristics. For example, I set up one race with a negative political savvy and started a test game with it and another race in the same system. When I had them establish a trade treaty, this race received negative income from the treaty. I just assumed that if it allowed negative values one way, there wouldn't be an explicit check for negatives separate from the supposed limits from settings.txt for any way of circumventing those limits.

[Urendi Maleldil]

I tried negative values for a few of the traits, but they didn't work. I assumed it didn't work for any of them. As for the v1.2 general file, I must have miscalculated the number of racial points required (since you can't set them manually)

v1.3 fixes some of the maintenance and construction problems. And I think they use all available points. Ships with all the tiny components on them cost a lot and were draining the empire's minerals supply. Except for the kamikazes, they're actually inferior to most other middle-to-late-game warships one-on-one. They are tough in fleets though.

[Urendi Maleldil]

douglas said:
...this race received negative income from the treaty. I just assumed that if it allowed negative values one way, there wouldn't be an explicit check for negatives separate from the supposed limits from settings.txt for any way of circumventing those limits.

You mean the race that made the treaty with the modified empire got negative resources? You may have created the first resource vampire race.