AI colony ship design

[Tenryu]

I solved this problem and some other annoying issues to my liking by REMOVING most of the supply capacity from engines and making it an ability specific to each VEHICLE! Bigger hulls generally get more supplies.

I also give most my hulls a built in movement allowance and by limiting the number of engines per hull and using the "engines per move" field give my hulls the number of 'engine rooms' I feel comfortable with for each ship.

I feel a Gunboat should have way less engines than a Dreadnought and any one engine hit on a gunboat should have way more impact than a loss of an engine on a big ship.

So, my Gunboats have a max of 2 engines, with 1 move per engine and a built in movement of 2 while my dreadnoughts can have 12 engines, but move 1 per 4 with a built in move of 1.

The built in movement on the hulls simulates, at least to me, that putting a ship dead in the water, so to speak, forever, is pretty hard to do.The crew can usually get the ship to make some way if given enough time and the vessel isn't in imminent danger of floundering.

I left a little bit of supplies on the engines and at each level give them a little more supplies. Starting at Ion I, my sequence is: 50, 55, 60, 60, 65, 70, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 95.

Additionally, I gave all my Ship Bridge components 1 extra move, I have Base specific and Ship specific bridges, if you're wondering.

You're a ship, you lose your bridge, you slow down some, even if you have an aux.




[This message has been edited by Tenryu (edited 08 February 2001).]

[WhiteHojo]

quote:

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Originally posted by Daynarr:
Anyways, I am using our mod pack and in it the Mephisto has disabled all the supply components.

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What exactly do you mean here? Normaly I'd ignore my little voice in my head that want's clarification, but if Mephisto is doin it, it is prob'ly worth snoopin into...



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Character is best defined as that which you do when you believe nobody is watching.

[Daynarr]

Just like it says there. In his mod, Mephisto has removed a lot of the extra components from the ship designs in order to make more space for weapons, armor, shields and more weapons. One of the things he removed are supply components.

[Baron Munchausen]

If each ship type's built-in supply capacity could increase with your tech level that would be ideal. There ought to be some inherent damage rating for the hull, too, so the ship has "structure" just like in MOO. This is the innate abilities for ships idea again. I hope MM can do something like this in the future when the AI is working decently.

Edit:

But this works well enough for the colony ship problem. I can add the 'extra fuel tanks' to the colony ship hull type and the stupid AI can't cram a colony ship into a battleship because it has 'supply storage'...

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 08 February 2001).]

[Tenryu]

quote:

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Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
If each ship type's built-in supply capacity could increase with your tech level that would be ideal.

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I don't know, but I suspect it could be done easily with the existing code if they just gave vehicles a 'family' line and then handled vehicle upgrades as per other stuff.

[Mephisto]

I have removed resupply, emergency movement and cloaking.
My reason were:
1.) Cloaking was not used by the AI.
2.) I don't use emergency movement personally so I excluded it.
3.) The resupply minister for the Ai is -actually- quite good except for the colonizers. Further, the AI does not travel very far with its ships so they had no real use for extra supply. Instead they could use every bit of space for point defence and weapons. So I kicked the extra supply.

quote:

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Originally posted by WhiteHojo:
What exactly do you mean here? Normaly I'd ignore my little voice in my head that want's clarification, but if Mephisto is doin it, it is prob'ly worth snoopin into...

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[Tomgs]

I have to say that initially I didn't like the supplies taken out of the ships because some of them tend to run out of supplies even with them. But after playing the mod for a while I found that it didn't seem to happen more often than it did before the mod (yes I did see it a few times but not that often). The ships however were "tougher" so overall it did improve the AI. Now with the increased awareness of the building queue problems and other squashed bugs I think I may have a challenge on my hands after the patch (even before if I would download the new mods). Since I am completing my Twin Galaxies tournament game I haven't had a chance to try the new mods yet but it looks like everything is moving in the right direction.

My attempted mod to the engines I wrote about below wouldn't add extra engines to a mod pack game because the AI only added them in the place of supply storage units. So if you want just add a few more supplies to each level of engine and it should work right. If you want to give the AI some bonus engines you have to tell it to add supply storage and put engine supply levels at a higher level than the supply storage units. They will add the extra engines even though a human player could not (you can't design a ship with warnings but apparently an AI can unless this ability gets patched somehow).

[This message has been edited by Tomgs (edited 09 February 2001).]