Some observations on AI ship building in Proportions, Babylon5 and other QNP mods...

[oleg]

All right, not many people seems to be interested in improving Proportions AI (PvK is apparently out of the forum for a time being ) but anyway, here are my changes:

1032547066.zip

The zip file contains several edited AI_design files, Xiati_research file (old one has a bug preventing Xiati to research temporal weapons) and complete AI set for Phong (It is a copy of Nostropholo AI, old Phong AI completely ignored Crystalline race trait). The zip file is not organised (sorry about that), you will have to move all files into appropriate directories after unzipping. I _strongly_ recomend this AI tweak to anybody who plays Proportions with computer races.

[ September 20, 2002, 19:46: Message edited by: oleg ]

[pathfinder]

hmmm...I missed this I guess. Gonna try it in the "Gold" Version to see if it works. Thanks Oleg!

[ September 20, 2002, 23:03: Message edited by: pathfinder ]

[PvK]

Ya, I had to work the Last twelve days in a row straight.

Well, my solution was to massively mod the AI's in Proportions (and use as much help as I could get from you, Oleg, and John Sullivan). In my experience, this has solved the problem you describe, for Proportions, anyway. You have to mod the AI construction file to ask for "Attack Destroyer" instead of attack ship. Or, if you want a Category that means "largest class available", you can list the ship sizes in decreasing order of size in the designcreation file.

These techniques do get the AI to build whatever mix of ship sizes you have the time and patience to tell it to do. However, it is a lot of work, and it would be nice if it were easier to specify in the AI files. Sounds like an "SE5" feature to me, though.

PvK

[oleg]

Replacing all entries for "attack ships" by packs of "attack cruiser","attack destroyer"..." is rather tedious and even impractical since the same AI_construction file is used regardless of the level of ship_construction. The best solution is to use new design_creation files and add few entries for "attack destroyer", "attack light cruiser" and may be "atack frigate" into AI_construction file. Small ships have nice abilities in proportions but still, later in the game the bulk of the navy should be made of bigger ships IMHO.
I checked files for your and John' XiChung, Amonkrie, Abbidon and CueCuppa and they work fine.

[ September 22, 2002, 01:21: Message edited by: oleg ]

[pathfinder]

Listing the ships in decending order for the attck-type ships (largest then going to small as read down) in the AI_designcreation file seems to work. At least it did with a test of a modified Minbari in the B5 1.49 MOD.