New ancient unique techs

[KnidVermicious]

I originally started thinking about new uniques because I wanted to add a planetary defense cannon to the Planetary Assault mod.

Currently I'm thinking of adding:

Planetary Defense Cannon (weapon platform and nasty long-range but slow recharge anti-ship weapon)

Ancient monolith-monoliths, hopefully not unbalancing

Advanced missiles-'cus I think they should be tougher

Ancient cloaking device-powerful, but large, expensive and supply guzzling

Some kind of scanner coupled with a minesweeper

Any thoughts?

[Arkcon]

A good one would be some sort of super engine -- mabye 24 movement points, that had a kt such that it almost completely filled a ship. Yes, it's a blantant ripoff of Larry Niven's Quantum IV hyperdrive.

But then there's a balance problem -- how big should it be. If you needed a baseship, then you'd be waiting forever to use it, making it useless. But if it were smaller, you could build a fleet around them.

[Ed Kolis]

Scale mount it! Just make it really huge so you can't use it unmounted on ANY ship, then make a series of scale mounts, one for each ship size, where each ship size has a mount that makes it take up a large amount of that particular hull's space. So if you want it to take up 50% of any ship's hull space, and the size in Components.txt is 2500kT, then your scale mounts would be 1% for every 50kT of hull size, so you get a 75kT (3% of 2500kT, since an ES is 150=3*50kT) engine on an Escort, a 200kT engine on a Light Cruiser (8% of 2500kT, since a LC is 400=8*50kT, and similarly for the other ships. Just tweak the numbers for the particular sizes you want - if you want the engines to be more space-efficient on larger ships, but still not a constant size for every hull, you can reduce the mount scales for larger ships.
Now what would we have done had Aaron not put in mounts in the first patch???

[KnidVermicious]

Does the AI ever use unique techs? Is that even worth considering when creating new techs?

[capnq]

Does the AI ever use unique techs?

Some of the TDM-ModPack AIs do.

[KnidVermicious]

I ran into something bizarre. I had made large weapon platform a unique tech, and included a big nasty cannon. I removed all weapon platforms from regular research,and I set all weapons to not have weapon platform as a vehicle type. I changed the unique tech to ship construction 1, just to see what the AI would do with it. When I play the game and go to the Weapon Platform screen I can only choose the weapons I created, exactly how I want it. However, when I turned all the ministers on, the AI makes large weapon platforms with CSMs, DUCs, etc. How is this possible if those weapons should not be allowed on WPs (and don't show on the screen)??

[PvK]

Because the AI is not restricted in its designs by all of the same rules that a human player is. What the AI builds is determined by its design files, and its designs can be illegal in some ways. The only reason it doesn't cheat in the unmodded game is because its files are all legal in the unmodded game. If your mod introduces new restrictions, you may need to mod the AI files if you want the AI to obey the limits.

PvK