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

Suicide Junkie · #1 March 25th, 2006, 04:06 AM

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 · #2 March 25th, 2006, 04:12 AM

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 I'm not penalizing AI by making larger ships suck, smaller ships are just not so out of date...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 · #3 March 25th, 2006, 06:03 AM

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

Captain Kwok · #4 March 25th, 2006, 11:31 AM

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 · #5 March 25th, 2006, 12:04 PM

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.

Captain Kwok · #6 March 25th, 2006, 12:18 PM

It goes by the largest allowed size of the last valid entry for a given design type.

Urendi Maleldil · #7 March 25th, 2006, 01:05 PM

I might make a Small Ship Masters racial trait for the Masters Mod, and I was wondering what advantages might be good to add to advanced small ship hulls.

faster?
cheaper?
stealthy?
+defense?

Atrocities · #8 March 26th, 2006, 03:01 PM

Quote:

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

How?

Fyron · #9 March 26th, 2006, 03:20 PM

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

Atrocities · #10 March 26th, 2006, 04:21 PM

If you want to make smaller ships more practicle, give them the ALWAYS HITS ability.