Any more bug reports?

geoschmo · #1 October 8th, 2001, 06:56 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Q:
1.) If your empire reached the "maximum units in space" limit, you are unable to launch fighters during combat and they are therefore almost completely useless...

Really? I'll have to test/confirm this one. My understanding was that it only stopped you from launching fighters in non-combat strategic mode, but that during combat figters would launch/be recovered as normal.

However, the new patch addresses the mines/sat's not self destructiong when ordered. This was the number one cause of hitting the units in space limit, so that alone should make this problem less serious.

Geoschmo

Rollo · #2 October 8th, 2001, 07:03 PM

first some remarks:

quote:
-Stock AI does not invade planets with troops.

Some user made AI will use troops (Aquilaeian, Orks, TDM Sergetti, and the Space Vikings). However, troop transports do not always get included into attack fleets. Sometimes they sit in the home system literally forever and do nothing. Same with boarding ships. There is some problem with Attack bases (base ships) and Kamikaze ships as well, but Atraikius knows more about that.

quote:
1. Stratigy "Capture Planet" does not work when fully loaded troop transports are present in the fleet.

I can not second this. Capture Planet works fine for me if a troop transport is present (both in my PBW games and in my tests for the Viking AI). The only problem with troop transports in the fleet is when you want to glass the planet and a troop transport is present, it doesn't work (that seems to fixed in the next patch, though).

quote:
6. AI expands too rapidly.

That depends on the AI script and can be modded. (Btw, I think rapid AI expansion is a good thing.)

my bug list (mostly minister related):

research: the AI will research mines, after it runs into them. Not a bad thing and I would call this a feature if it would stop doing this at mines2 (or mines3 at the most), but researching mines5 in early to mid-game can really hurt the AI in getting important tech. Ergo, it is a bug.
intelligence: the choices of projects is very poor. What's the point of having 8 counter-intelligence projects against an enemy that doesn't generate intelligence points? If the AI can view all scores it should know better. Also there is no point for the AI using espionage projects, because it will just not use the obtained information.
analyze/scrap/retrofit: captured ships with research value are not analyzed. damaged captured ships with unknown racial tech are not scrapped or retrofitted.
colonization: this has been discussed before and there is an active topic right now. The improvement of the colonization minister is the most important IMHO.
cloaking: a cloaked fleet sometimes/(always?) does not decloak prior to an attack, but just move to the enemy position and do nothing. It will decloak the next turn in case of a planet, but enemy ships are likely to have moved by then.
fleets: as mentioned above, troop transports and boarding ships are not always included into fleets. Master Belisarius has stated that transports will wait for a fleet to pass through the system and then join. That works well enough sometimes, but if the transport was built in some backwater system that could take literally forever.[/list]
Rollo

MegaTrain · #3 October 8th, 2001, 07:35 PM

Bug or feature?

I command a ship to fly through a black hole system with damaging warp points to a system on the other side. The ship is equipped with sufficient armor, shields and a repair component, so I'm not worried. It also has enough range to fly completely through the system and out the other warp.

HOWEVER! As soon as the ship enters the system and is damaged, it clears the orders! (I'm sure it was just the armor that was damaged, although it fixed it before I could verify there was nothing else damaged)

And if the warp point was even 1 square closer to the center (warp points appearing anywhere in system), it would have sucked my ship down before I had the chance to give it new orders! (PBW game)

------------------
-MegaTrain-
Athlon 1.3 GHz running at 1.6 GHz on an iWill KK266

Master Belisarius · #4 October 8th, 2001, 07:36 PM

- Cloaked ships can't remove mines. (If this is a feature, then, the AI must be fixed to decloak their cloaked minesweepers, before try to remove a minefield).

- The AI still want to lay mines, in a location with the max of unit allowed reached (in theory this was fixed in previous patches, but I'm 100% sure that it still happen).

- The AI never try to send population, to colonies that lost ALL the population (for example, after a random event, or after an enemy intel project).

- The AI never use the Resource Converters.

- The AI still want to colonize far away planets, without consider if the colony ship will have supplies or not (although some modded AI's have better colony ships).

Baron Munchausen · #5 October 8th, 2001, 07:38 PM

Another one that's annoyed me for a long time is the 'auto-cloaked satellite group' problem with sat Groups and warp points. If there's even ONE satellite with 'stealth' armor in a sat group at a warp point, something in the code always assumes that the entire sat group is CLOAKED when enemy ships come through, even if it is not, and they can just sail by your defenses. Weirdly, this does not happen with ships, only sat Groups. Since I don't use fighters I don't know if it also happens with fighters. You'd have to make a "small" stealth armor and put it in a fighter to find out.

Baron Munchausen · #6 October 8th, 2001, 07:48 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Master Belisarius:
- Cloaked ships can't remove mines. (If this is a feature, then, the AI must be fixed to decloak their cloaked minesweepers, before try to remove a minefield).

- The AI still want to lay mines, in a location with the max of unit allowed reached (in theory this was fixed in previous patches, but I'm 100% sure that it still happen).

- The AI never try to send population, to colonies that lost ALL the population (for example, after a random event, or after an enemy intel project).

- The AI never use the Resource Converters.

- The AI still want to colonize far away planets, without consider if the colony ship will have supplies or not (although some modded AI's have better colony ships).

Minsweeping: This wouldn't be a problem if a cloaked ship was also undetected by the MINES it cannot sweep.

Can we have consistency, at least?

The AI unit ministers are better than most of the other ministers, but still not very bright. I still wish there was a "maintain only" setting that would just restock mine fields or sat Groups that you created. This would let you keep control of your defenses but reduce the burden of maintaining your empire.

The AI population minister is still a joke in general. It loads up a half-dozen huge transports with thousands of millions population and sends them all to one medium sized planet, for example. Then they sit there full of 5 billion or more population for years of game time while other planets are nearly empty. There is just no internal planning going on. I've reduced the problem somewhat by capping population transport size at medium transport in my AI files.

The AI will build resource converters just like any other facility if you put them in the build queue. I don't know how to verify if they are actually used or not.

Colonyships: Yes, this is something rather easy to do. Since there is a special type just for colony ships we can mod them to be better, and it makes sense for a dedicated ship type to have a special ability that helps its function, doesn't it?

I've added supply storage to the colony ship hull(s) in my custom techs to extend their range. It's much, much rarer for the AI to have hordes of out-of-supply colony ships crawling around a 1 move per turn now.

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

geoschmo · #7 October 8th, 2001, 08:35 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Minsweeping: This wouldn't be a problem if a cloaked ship was also undetected by the MINES it cannot sweep. Can we have consistency, at least?

I would much rather see cloaked sweepers be able to sweep then have cloaked ships be able to slip past mines undetected. IMHO

quote:
Colonyships: Yes, this is something rather easy to do. Since there is a special type just for colony ships we can mod them to be better, and it makes sense for a dedicated ship type to have a special ability that helps its function, doesn't it? I've added supply storage to the colony ship hull(s) in my custom techs to extend their range. It's much, much rarer for the AI to have hordes of out-of-supply colony ships crawling around a 1 move per turn now.

This is a very good idea Baron. Have you sent this idea to Aaron? What value do you use? It should be put into the stock game I think.

Geoschmo