Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up?

[Suicide Junkie]

The stock AI assumes that the biggest hull is always the best.
Making any of the changes suggested in this thread would falsify that assumption, and the AI would go down hard.

It would be entirely possible to change the AI files so that it will build a decent mix of smaller ships, however.

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Combining the gritecon with the other things suggested would be much too far, indeed.
Gritecon's changes stand on their own to make a nice utility curve in which all sizes can be useful depending on the situation.

Long term, you can't support much of a fleet with small ships. Short term, you can't build much of a fleet with big ships.
The shorter the term you are considering, the smaller the ships you will build.

[Glyn]

How about a new race tech group that make small ships better?

Can wepon mounts be limited to only smaller ships? Or would you have to create a special ship clase for the race tech?

Other posable race tech groups: Fighters and/or Missile races.

[Dizzy]

Suicide Junkie said:
The stock AI assumes that the biggest hull is always the best.
Making any of the changes suggested in this thread would falsify that assumption, and the AI would go down hard.

I disagree. By the time AI start getting to the nifty weapons, ship contruction has just got up to around the CL stage at which point some nice designs will come out and hopefully live a while to make an impact. Casualties aside, the decreased maintenance costs will enable these ships to hang for a long time. The bonuses these ships have will enable them to be somewhat competitive later on and that's the point.

Bottom line is balance. Aside from QNP propulsion or gritCons idea, this is a step in the right direction that's more in line with staying stock.

Does the AI retrofit ships?

It would be entirely possible to change the AI files so that it will build a decent mix of smaller ships, however.

This should be the case already... I guess since no one has addressed the big ship little ship issue... we've left the AI set to bigger is better...

[Suicide Junkie]

Quite simply, the AI by default will always build only the biggest.

If biggest is not best, then the human players will trounce them even more than they already do.

Now, as I also said, it is possible to mod the AI to build smaller ships too, but that's a serious bit of rolling up your sleeves and digging in with your favorite text editor.

[Dizzy]

What about the AI that seem to never get into bigger ships? At that point, they can stay competitive... I'm not penalizing AI by making larger ships suck, smaller ships are just not so out of date...

So, what are some tips for modding the AI to build a few of the smaller ships?

[Fyron]

You can easily limit the largest ship size a race will build in AI_Design_Creation.txt.

[Captain Kwok]

The main problem is that you can only really make about 4 or 5 ship types for the AI to use as combat ships. This makes it very difficult to have the AI build a variety of sizes through an entire game in addition to having it design ships with different roles (i.e. point defense, missile ship, etc).

[StarShadow]

How does the AI determine what the biggest ship available to it is? Tonnage or Tech level? I was thinking that instead of altering the smaller ships, it might be an idea to add in (extra) improved versions of those ships. For example, once you research cruisers, you also get 'advanced escorts'. The AI won't use them though, if it goes for highest tonnage.

[Atrocities]

Imperator Fyron said:
You can easily limit the largest ship size a race will build in AI_Design_Creation.txt.

How?

[Fyron]

All entries have two fields for min and max size of the design class.