Planet Capture? Is it worth it?

raynor · #1 January 27th, 2001, 09:46 AM

Something to keep in mind:

The AI is fairly poor at choosing which world to build which facilities on. For example, in my current game, I took special care not to destroy the facilities on a huge world before my troops arrived. I was pretty excited when I saw 20 miners plus other facilities. Imagine my shock and dismay when I found the planet value to be just 34% minerals.

I imagine I'll still capture it intact so I can move the Methane breathers around to my other planets.

Tomgs · #2 January 27th, 2001, 11:23 AM

The catch all planet type for the AI is mineral miner worlds thats why you see 1% worlds with a bunch of wasted miners on it. If the planet doesn't fit any critera or all the types it fits have been built in the system it makes the world a mining world.

This especially looks bad when the world next door has 99% minerals and its filled with research facilities. I have seen it before. The AI just doesn't evaluate the worlds nearly as well as a human would it just makes the types it needs on the first suitable planet it colonizes without looking to see if there are better worlds next door.

[This message has been edited by Tomgs (edited 27 January 2001).]

Atrocities · #3 January 27th, 2001, 05:01 PM

quote:
The AI is fairly poor at choosing which world to build which facilities on. For example, in my current game, I took special care not to destroy the facilities on a huge world before my troops arrived. I was pretty excited when I saw 20 miners plus other facilities. Imagine my shock and dismay when I found the planet value to be just 34% minerals.

Time to build some value improvement plants.

You see, my prob with taking a planet, is getting my ships to do it for me without me having to do the battle manually. Sometimes, I love to do it my self, but most of the time, its a clean up option, and the AI does not do this very well. In fact, when I set my ship stratigies to CAPTURE PLANET if carring troops, all my ships will do is go to the planet, hoover and use up there turns and DO NOTHING. That really bothers me, for I then have to manually play the next round, and move my ships to the planet, and then drop them. That takes about 5 minutes to do.

In 5 minutes, if the auto feature worked, I could take 3 to 5 planets in stead of just 1.

I do love this game, but this would be a nice fix for the next patch if indeed it is a bug.

------------------
"We've made too many compromises already, too many retreats! They invade our space and we fall back -- they assimilate entire worlds and we fall back! Not again! The line must be drawn here -- this far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done!" -- Patric Stewart as Captain Picard
UCP/TCO Ship Yards

raynor · #4 January 27th, 2001, 07:11 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Tomgs:
The catch all planet type for the AI is mineral miner worlds thats why you see 1% worlds with a bunch of wasted miners on it. If the planet doesn't fit any critera or all the types it fits have been built in the system it makes the world a mining world.
...

Thanks for the info. That explains some of the stuff I've seen.

Generally, when I play, I build research centers on worlds with < 75% on all numbers. But that is just at the beginning of the game while I'm trying to get my research points up to at least 100,000. Since, I'm pouring ALL excess mineral production into fighters, I don't need much storage.

In the middle of the game, I need more minerals for refits plus I've probably accumulated a good bit of research points. At that point, I build storage facilities on worthless worlds.

Finally, towards the end of the game, I start building intel centers to protect myself.

I haven't yet played a game where I was doing so badly that I intentionally built mineral miners on a world that wasn't pretty close to at least 100% on minerals. If the AI was expanding as quickly as it should be, I think it should be hard-wired to *NEVER* build a mineral/organic/radioactive facility when the number is below 75%. I consider any other behaviour to be a bug worthy of calling this game Ascendancy-like...

Tomgs · #5 January 27th, 2001, 08:16 PM

Well I build storage facilities in the early game so my strategies are different

. I hate to waste that early production. I build spaceyards on 99% of my planets build heavily and almost never run out of resources because of this.

But back to the question at hand. I think some changes in the text files improve this problem it may not get rid of it completely untill we can use numbers below 100 to set the planet types but for now you can limit the Mineral miner types to 101 minerals. Just remember to set a catch all type of planet at the bottom of each AI state. You will still see some miners in bad planets because the other types of planets like Military also build some miners if space allows.

UmberGryphon · #6 January 27th, 2001, 09:04 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Atrocities:
In fact, when I set my ship stratigies to CAPTURE PLANET if carring troops, all my ships will do is go to the planet, hover and use up their turns and DO NOTHING....

Funny, I don't have that problem. It sounds like your transports are getting a "Don't Get Hurt" strategy from somewhere, and it's higher priority than their "Capture Planet" strategy--that would make them move to the planet, but would keep them just out of weapon platform range. If you're using ships labeled "Pop. Transport" as troop transports, consider putting them in a fleet whose strategy is "Capture Planet"--this worked the few times I've done it. Ships labeled "Troop Transport" default to the right thing.

With my huge troop transports, their repair facility 3s and their eight emergency propulsion 5s, I sometimes succeed in taking entire systems in 5 minutes. And yes, sometimes those planets have stupid facilities on them, but I can always scrap them... and that's a small resource advantage over glassing and recolonizing, right? And I don't have to build a colonizer (another resource advantage), and send it to the planet (a time advantage)....