AI Design Creation Errors: ... Unknown value "Drone Attack" ...

[geoschmo]

AI Design Creation Errors: c:\games\space empires iv gold\pictures\races\RACENAME_ai_designcreation.txt

Unknown value "Drone Attack" for Default Strategy in
record "Anti-ship Drone".
Unknown value "Drone Attack" for Default Strategy in
record "Anti-planet Drone".

I had heard of this before but never figured out exactly what it was before now. I appologize if this is not new information.

When a player sets up their empire files, if there is no "Drone Attack" strategy listed in the AI_Strategies.txt file for that shipset, then they will not see a "Drone Attack" strategy in their Empire Options-Strategies screen. These strategies then become part of the player record that is stored in the .gam file. The "AI_Design creation" files are not part of the .gam file, they are pulled from whatever machine is running the host portion of the turns, PBW in our case. The game attempts to reconcile the two records and thats when you get the error.

This will cause a PBW turn to fail, and if you run the turns offline that is when you will see the errors.

You don't have to restart the game because of this. You actually may never see the error pop up if the players always run their turns. It only happens when the AI tries to run the turn and only for a player that doesn't have the "Drone Attack" strategy. Usually this is because they created the .emp file using pre-Gold and the game is being played on Gold. You can run turns offline and ignore the errors. I have noticed they seem to stop after a few turns. I guess this is because the AI only checks the design creation file when it is making new designs. Since it does this every time it gets new tech I would expect the errors to resurface every so often, whenever one of the players affected gets a new tech.

A better fix would be to have these players go into their empire options, strageies screen and create a strategy called "Drone Attack". Once they do this the error should never come back for that player.

Or you can restart and have them give you an empire file created with Gold. But that wouldn't neccesarily be fair to the players in the game that setup their empires correctly, and is not nessecary if you use the fix above.

Geoschmo

[sachmo]

Geo,

I saw this the other day and it had me going loopy. I was cleaning up some races I had downloaded to gold, and thought I had solved everything, when a game with the Colonials gave this error each turn. Thanks for the info!

[Q]

This may be a stupid question, but what's the use of the standard "drone attack" strategy anyway?
Isn't the same as "ram"??

[capnq]

what's the use of the standard "drone attack" strategy anyway?
Isn't the same as "ram"??

No; if you look at AI\Default_AI_Strategies.txt, they have different secondary movement strategies; however "Ram" and "Kamikaze" are identical.

You should customize the strategies to suit your preferred designs and tactics. For example, you could have anti-ship drones ram, while anti-planet drones kamikaze, and some third drone design without warheads uses drone attacks, all with different targeting priorities.

[Fyron]

Hmm... I have sparked Geoschmo to make a new post here.

[Q]

Originally posted by capnq:

quote:

---

what's the use of the standard "drone attack" strategy anyway?
Isn't the same as "ram"??

No; if you look at AI\Default_AI_Strategies.txt, they have different secondary movement strategies; however "Ram" and "Kamikaze" are identical.

You should customize the strategies to suit your preferred designs and tactics. For example, you could have anti-ship drones ram, while anti-planet drones kamikaze, and some third drone design without warheads uses drone attacks, all with different targeting priorities.

---

But the secondary strategy will hardly ever be used when the first strategy is "ram"! It is clear that you can modify different strategies for your specialized drone designs (e.g. drones with weapons) with different targeting priorities, but wouldn't it be the easiest fix if you choose "ram" as the standard strategy for drones?

[Baron Munchausen]

I wish drones would form up into some sort of recognizable formation and move in a coordinated fashion. The best way to make effective attacks with them is to send large numbers ('mass quantities' as the Coneheads would say) and when moving in those haphazard clouds they often get in each other's way. They ought to be sorted into their moving order before they appear in combat so they can move and attack simultaneously. The traffic jams that they frequently get into only make it easier for their targets to shoot them down.

[ July 07, 2002, 15:40: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[capnq]

That's one of the things on my wish list for hardcode changes: improved pathfinding algorithms, especially in combat.