Maintenance Formula

[Talenn]

LintMan:

Hehe...yes, well, Carriers are probably close to that in terms of operation costs. Also remember that the maintenance costs also include the whole support infrastructure (planetside) that having a fleet would entail. I just view these costs as abstracted into the cost of the individual ships.

I also agree with your AI issues. But I dont see how they can be altered easily. I think the best tweak would be to FORCE the player to spend resources on fleets by having more hostile AIs which would actually use their fleets to harass and annoy the players.

Overall, I'd like to see something like the AI in 'Imperialism II' where you did NOT want to be perceived as the weakest player (militarily). Everyone and their mother declared war on the weaker powers. The AI in SE4 is too rooted on the SCORE. A high score will generally keep the AI at bay (until Mega-Evil level), but a high score is NOT necessarily an indication of military power. I've played games where I was in 1st or 2nd place the whole game with barely a Scout or two for defense for the first 100+ turns.

To me, showing a strong econ and weak military should be a red flag for the AI to attack, attack, attack! These are empires that are RIPE for conquest. Forcing an expanding player to constantly be on guard would go a LONG way to making the game far more challenging IMO.

So, I guess my suggestion would be to more heavily weight the score based on ships and units rather than on raw CPs and RPs. That and even presence on the borders should be accounted for IMO. A strong empire with a weak border should be viewed as a potential target as well IMO.

Talenn

[sapperland]

What I would like is have the prototype cost 3 times as much for first ship built. Make shipyards MUCH more expensive and have ships take a minimum of a year to build. Allow 6 month build time with double cost. Make ship yards have a build tonnage limit per turn, like a shipyard can build up to 500k tons but still only make 10% any ship construction on any turn. This would allow several smaller ships to be under construction at one time a one larger ship or a combination. example,
3 ships at 100k tons and 1 ship at 200k would have 10k tons built on each small ship and 20k tons built on the larger ship each turn.
If you only had one 100k ton ship in the ship yard then you waste 400k worth of build space , and the ship still takes a year to build.

Make the players move resources from systems without shipyards to systems with them by frieghter. The spaceport would just collect all the stuff on one planet in the system so you wouldnt have to visit each planet.
This would open up the ability to do raids on shipping to destroy or capture.

[This message has been edited by sapperland (edited 21 November 2000).]

[LintMan]

Talenn, I think that's a good idea about the AI using military strength rather than score as a decision whether to attack. (One thing though about a strong econ/weak military as being a prime target for attack... I think that was a key factor in Japan's decision to attack the US in WWII - perhaps not the best idea in the long run!)

But does the AI know what the military strength of its neighbors is? Intelligence is quite expensive to get and it risks pissing off your neighbors.

Also, a more agressive AI doesn't help in the situation I'm in. In my jumbo galaxy, there are 8 AI players plus myself, giving huge amounts of time for expansion before even encountering one other race. I'm not an expert player, but by the time I met another race, I already had a very substantial lead over them in tech, economy, population, and planets. I didn't have a single ship with weapons on it built yet, nor any minefields, platforms or setellites. I'm confident though that if the AI went on the offsensive immediately upon discovering me, the fat cat
with no military, I would be able to quickly ramp up my war machine in defense without losing more than a few outlying colonies.

Military aggressiveness would only work if it hit me early on to have slowed me down, or if it was coming from an empire as strong as mine research and economy wise.

Of course, the solution in future games will be to fill it with more players so I will be slowed down, but that doesn't fix the fact that the AI doesn't do peacetime buildup very well.

Well, what would fix this? Well, the AI needs some tweaking to recognize the likely long term peacetime situtation, and go balls-out expansion. And it needs to be smarter about exporting population to the colonized worlds, and building up research. It should build more base space yards so it has the production capacity to quickly produce some defense if needed.

But also, I think if fleet maintenance was less, it would help things a bit even without the above tweaks. It would be nice if the AI (or a player for that matter) could build some ships for defense without needing to pay the high costs.

Some thoughts:

- What if the maintenance cost was lower for the first number of ships, and then grew as the number of ships exceded a certain amount (say, more ships than you have colonies or space yards).

- Maybe maintenance could be reduced for ships that are "local" to you (ie: ships in a system with a colony owned by you and having a spaceport), so ships that are on defense in your systems would cost less to operate than those in a distant campaign.

- Or maybe a variant of something like in Alpha Centauri, where the further ships were from a "headquarters" the more ineffiency there would be and thus the more they would cost to operate. The headquarters would be an expensive facilty that could be built nearer to the action to cut down those costs.

[Talenn]

Lintman:

Yes, the Japan/US war in the Pacific didnt end too well for Japan, but the capacity for large scale annihilation of the enemy's industry didnt exist yet.

I'm not sure if the AI knows your military or not (they say it doesnt cheat, so I'm inclined to say 'no'). However many of it's decision making algorithms are based on a 'score comparison' between the empires, so it at least knows that much.

Maybe two different 'scores' should be kept with a one beign heavily weighted on military. Then the AI could use 1 or the other or both scores in determining its policies? I'm just thinking out loud here...

I've made some tweaks to the AI and when playing on 'Hard' with 'Low Bonus' I've seen it do some really nice buildups. The problems arise in that they fail to inhibit the player build-ups as well. Still, I'm fairly pleased with my current AI in terms of expansion. I just wish I could figure out how to make it more hostile.

Talenn

[Barnacle Bill]

Just a note on maintenance cost vs procurement cost. These figures come from "How to Make War" by James F. Dunnigan. The info on naval forces is presented in a way that I can't readily relate the two costs, but here are the figures for a US mechanized infantry division:

Cost to raise: $4519 million
Cost per DAY in combat: $75 million

This means translates to 50% maintenence per turn, in SE4 terms.

Of course that is in combat, with full consumption of fuel, ammo, and incidental loss of equipment, plus combat loses. Still, it means the SE4 maintenance percentage is not unreasonable.

[Taqwus]

Against a "fat cat" empire without much military (which might be guesstimated based on, say, the number of shipyards observed, the number of ships/stations, total systems... note that if the AI manages to get a human player to agree to a Partnership, a LOT of information flows both ways), aggressive use of intelligence ops might be extremely nasty.

I'm thinking, in particular, of economic disruption, crew insurrection (of the few ships that *are* there), and puppet political parties; even a smaller (population-wise) empire can have an advantage on intelligence points, and that advantage can be used as a weapon anywhere in the target's empire. For instance, it's possible to target homeworlds first with puppet political parties as long as you have line-of-sight to them, which you will if there's a partnership (think backstabbing). The fewer but higher-tech warships you have, the greater the impact of a captured ship, because you have fewer *other* ships with which to stop its rampage. And it's hard to put down a riot without a fleet, and hard to build a fleet when your colonies are are rioting.)

Likewise, if you send a high-tech ship to put 'em down, and they capture and analyze it, they've just gotten free tech upgrades... Ouch.

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[sapperland]

Ships cost 25%/turn
Bases cost 12.5%/turn

So what do mines, weapon Platforms and satellites cost per turn?

Do frieghters cost the same as war ships per turn?