Any Guide in making an AI?

Ruatha · #1 January 16th, 2003, 09:32 AM

Is there any guides on how to make an AI?

I want a peaceful AI that avoids building fleets, don't make treaties, Send's very few Messages. Builds strong individual ships. Uses a lot of intelligence, such as resource procurement and PPP.
Tries to avoid war at almost any cost.

It's for the Invisible shipset.

[ January 16, 2003, 07:34: Message edited by: Ruatha ]

Rexxx · #2 January 16th, 2003, 11:28 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Ruatha:
Is there any guides on how to make an AI?

There are lots of Posts about specific AI modding topics. However, the only guide I know of is Atraikius' very helpful sheet about ship designing. You can find it here:
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/newup...1040385338.zip

Quote:

I want a peaceful AI that avoids building fleets, don't make treaties, Send's very few Messages. Builds strong individual ships. Uses a lot of intelligence, such as resource procurement and PPP.
Tries to avoid war at almost any cost.

It's for the Invisible shipset.

There are several peaceful AIs:
To name just a few from the TDM-Modpack:
Mephisto's Earth Alliance, Narn Regime, Toron
Alpha Kodiak's Vaxim
God Emperor's Klingons and Praetorians.

The stock EEE and Phong also try to avoid wars as far as possible.

In the politics.txt you can define the highest allowed treaty and the kind of message your race will send.
Check the politics-file of Daynarr's Xi'Chung (TDM), they don't like treaties and never allow more than non-aggression. I don't know if it is possible to allow no treaty at all.
Setting all Send message topics to "no" should reduce your communication drastically (politics.txt).
In the speech.txt-file you can define the number of Messages for a certain topic. I never tried that but maybe setting these numbers to zero should lead to a very silent race.

In the fleets.txt file you can set the number of your fleets (depending of the ships or planets you have) and the percentage of your ships used in fleets. Another possibility to avoid fleets is to create Attack Bases as your standard ship. The AI never integrates them into fleets.

IMO using a lot of intelligence is pretty useless in the confines of SE IV, it's a waste of facilities and resources. Tampa Gamer's Drakol (TDM) are perfect "schemers". However, when it comes to war, they got crushed by other AIs quite easily. Intelligence is a nice feature but relying on it is deadly. As far as I know there is no way to define the Intel projects initiated by the AI, normally it uses more than 50% of its points for Counterintelligence. The rest is spent for randomly chosen projects, sometimes even resource procurement.
To make things worse Intelligence can be the reason for wars, some AIs get quite angry when you spy upon them.

[ January 16, 2003, 09:30: Message edited by: Rexxx ]

capnq · #3 January 16th, 2003, 10:08 PM

The easiest way to start is to copy one or more other race's AI files, then adjust the values in those files.

solops · #4 January 16th, 2003, 10:31 PM

Someone once made an AI Design Spreadsheet in Excel that would build an AI for you. Perhaps one of the more knowledgable designers would provide a link and comment on its strengths and weaknesses.

Mephisto · #5 January 17th, 2003, 01:00 AM

Try this link. Most of the info is still valid.

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...981;p=2#000019

The AI-Sheet from Atraikius is here:
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/newup...1040385338.zip

pathfinder · #6 January 17th, 2003, 02:28 AM

Gets lots of Tylenol and/or beer!

The AI never does quite what ya want it to...

[ January 17, 2003, 00:29: Message edited by: pathfinder ]

Atraikius · #7 January 18th, 2003, 02:42 AM

I updated the AI excel sheet that is posted this morning. The AI_ConstructVehicle section has been changed, and an AI_Speech has been added (anyone remember those Mad Libs from the 80's). There are still some errors from typo's that will show up in the game, and the most of the files are rather messy yet. I'm working on updateing the entire thing, and adding some sort of aid for modifing the files by hand (like the DesignCreation sheet I did).

1042806417.zip

Ruatha · #8 January 18th, 2003, 02:50 AM

Great, I'll wait a while before I start on this, too busy now anyway.

pathfinder · #9 January 18th, 2003, 06:19 PM

Atraikius: I am a bit dense, how does one save the individual files generated by your AI aid?

[ January 18, 2003, 16:22: Message edited by: pathfinder ]

Atraikius · #10 January 20th, 2003, 03:12 PM

Pathfinder - just copy the 'A' column, and past it into notebook or wordpad (as text file).

One thing to pay attention to with the file right now is that the Construct_Vehicle file calls for Satellite 1 & 2, Weapon Platform 1 & 2, and Fighter 1 & 2, while I hadn't gotten to updateing the design creation file to match yet. You will need to do a find/replace on one of the two files until I finish updateing that part of it.