AI Ship Design Modder

[raynor]

Saw that you bumped a couple of them up. Thanks, much!

[Zeno42]

Thanks much for the info. This tells me most of what I need to know to get started. I'll have to put together a parser for the CompEnhancement file and cross-reference the Component, TechArea, and AI_Research files with the ship design files, but a good portion of that work has already been completed for my other modders.

BTW, does anybody know if any of the recent patches have changed any of this (other than filling unused space after extra shields with armor)?? Does it still have the problem alluded to in these threads where large mounts and large weapons can prevent it from adding any components in the misc column??

--Zeno

[ColdSteel]

I too am very interested in how ship design really works since I have been struggling through it with trial and error when designing the AI for my new Selachii race.

One thing I have discovered is that if you place a higher tech weapon in the first slot and a lower tech one in the second slot and an even lower tech one in the third slot, the AI will use the third item until the second item is researched, then it will use it instead. Then when the highest tech item is researched it will swap out the second slot one for the first slot item. This is really handy because with it you can make the AI build ships with different weapon loads at different points in the game. This makes it a bit tougher for humans to "zero in" on one specific tactic and ship design to combat the (usually) predictable race AI. For instance, I have an attack ship and a defense ship that both use identical weapon loads initially but after PPB are researched the AI will switch to them for the attack ship wih one cap missile for a secondary and the defense ship sticks with the cap missiles with 1 PPB as secondary. When mixed into the same fleet, these simulate combined arms pretty well for the AI. Unfortunately, the AI stupidly tends to group all like ships together into fleets which defeats the purpose (Sigh).

One thing I have not been able to understand completely is how to make secondary and primary weapons show up in a design in equal quantities. I've played with the space size (thanks to a tip by God Emperor) and it does have an effect but it is a strange one and seems to vary depending on the hull size.

Anybody got any insights on how to do this??

[This message has been edited by ColdSteel (edited 14 March 2001).]

[This message has been edited by ColdSteel (edited 14 March 2001).]

[Marty Ward]

I have a question about ship design. Is it possible to create more than one attack ship design? For example could you create attack ship 1 and design it with beam only weapons and attack ship 2 and design it with only missle weapons.

[Daynarr]

Darlok, Xi'Chung and Sergetti use more then one attack designs for quite a while now. Check out their files in latest TDM ModPack to see how it works.

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Marty Ward:
I have a question about ship design. Is it possible to create more than one attack ship design? For example could you create attack ship 1 and design it with beam only weapons and attack ship 2 and design it with only missle weapons.

---

Easy as pie. The design TYPE is rigid, but the name is not. You can just copy & paste the attack ship design, then give it a new name and modify it to be something different. As long as it is still "Attack Ship" in the design type, the AI will know what to do with it. I've got as many as FIVE different attack ship designs for some races. And then several different designs for "Defense Ship" too. Yeah, there is a "Defense Ship" type that the AI recognizes even though it's not in the default config files.

[Tampa_Gamer]

Baron nailed the issue - now if we can just get MM to allow construction calls based on "Names" instead of "Types" this would allow us far better control over production instead of the computer randomly picking which design name it wants to construct.