Annoying feature about the speed values in AI_Design_Creation.txr

[Marty Ward]

The limit on engine per ship size can be changed in the vehicle file. You could put any number of engines you want on a hull. Maybe that could help you do what you want.
I've noticed a lot of threads on getting engines to move based the hull size and on weight. What is the reasoning behind that?

[Sinapus]

In a mod I was testing a little while ago I increased the attack ship desired speed to 20 and then used vehicle.txt to increase the engines per move and max engines to increase the number of engines ships need for movement. Worked fine. I had battleships set to 3 engines per move and 15 max engines. The AI designer built them with 15 engines.

However, it *is* tedious to increase the "desired speeds" of those ships by so much.

[Procyon]

My solution was to find and replace "Desired Speed := " with "Desired Speed := 10" effectively changing all 6's to 106's. AI now always uses max engines.

[Trachmyr]

Let me clarify what I'm talking about... I know you can change the limit of engines, and engines per move in Vechiclesize.txt; However if the AI_DesignCreation.txt says min speed 4 and desired speed 6... it will use 4-6 engines regardless of what SPEED that will achieve. This becomes a problem because the enties for "Attack Ship", "Carrier", etc. have a range of possible ship sizes (Attack Ships range from 100 to 1000 tons)... but if diffrent sizes have diffrent "Engines per Move" entries then you get the AI to build with far too few engines for larger ships. The Soulution is to create a seperate "Attack Ship" template for EACH hull size (times the number of races)... which is a lot of work, and I worry that this may cause other problems for the AI.

As for WHY I want to do this, I want to retain smaller ships in play for far longer... to do so, I make Large ships use a lot of engines (thus reducing space for weapons), or make them smaller. I know that the larger ships can put less engines on... but they still get too much speed for a couple of engines (thus more room for weapons) in my opinion.

[Tampa_Gamer]

Trachmyr- some of early mods did try and make several attack ships (essentially one for each hull size) in order to maximize the efficiency of each design. Currently, the Darlok, Sergetti and Zi'Chung in the TDM ModPack have multi-designs, so check them out for ideals. The problems with multiple designs are the following:

(1) Each "design" is still valid in later games, thus the AI will still build them in later games (partial solution - what we did was make a range of hull designs so that you had 3 types of attack/defense ships)

(2) The AI for some reason continues to re-design the multi-designs even at full tech start! This leads to hundreds of the same designs, which would not be a problem except for the retrofit minister gets chumped trying to retrofit a design with no changes. [Note - this may be fixed in the next patch]

Anyway, this has been an issue for awhile and I just wanted to let you know how we were dealing with it. I will stop rambling

[Nitram Draw]

Trachmyr,
Could you get the effect you want by adding an extra standard move and extra combat move ability to each base hull type? It won't solve the space problem but it may be easier to accomplish, the AI would automatically get the ability.
I don't know if this ability will work on hulls but I have added extra supply to a scout hull type and it seems to work.

[Trachmyr]

Tampa,
Thanks for the reply... The AI going retrofit crazy was something I had feared. Well, let's hope the patch fixes this. I can do the work to create all the hull sizes, but if it messes up the AI then it's all for nought.

Nitram Draw,
I'm afraid your suggestion (although very good, as I've added extra move to some ORGANIC hulls I've made for organic tech) won't solve my problem. But I certainly thank you for your reply!

[This message has been edited by Trachmyr (edited 06 April 2001).]