Building Better Monsters

[Miles]

Originally posted by Rollo:
hmm, I am not sure how exactly the AI measures the odds. I do know however that it can evaluate the battle capabilty of enemy ships (i.e. cheat by looking into your ships ).


That is pretty much everything I can think of now. An 'always attack' option doesn't exsist to my knowledge. The ways ships and fleets are handled are mostly hardcoded. Only few settings in the AI files can influence the AI behavior in that respect.

Hope that helps,
Rollo

Thanks. I have already fiddled with those parameters. The problem is, currently monster combats fall into the following categories:

• Monsters have overwhelming forces.
• Monsters have incredibly overwhelming forces.
• Monsters have unbelievably, incredibly, overwhelming forces.

The problem is, it is boring and ineffecient. The human should occaisionally have a chance. That makes the final smackdown so much more satisfying .
So, I believe that my only hope is to fool the AI's odds generator. I think that I will finish my current tweaks and issue another release. Then I will try inflating the size of the Monster hulls and components and see if that makes any difference.

Miles

[PvK]

How fast are your monsters? If the player has some hope to outmaneuver them strategically sometimes, they may be able to arrange for some attacks at favorable odds.

Another approach would be to try to figure out how the AI judges strength (it might be resource cost, or shield + structure, for instance) and then make the monsters seem tougher to the AI than they really are. For example, really high structure and powerful weapons but short range might be interesting - the player would be trying to keep away from the horde's attacks via fighting retreat, hoping to hurt them enough before they get cornered. (OTOH watch out that this doesn't mean hours of silly tactical battles where the monsters never get a shot off.)

Just some ideas...

PvK