When AI scrap ships ?

[Suicide Junkie]

Ok, I thought you were referring to settings.txt, and the maintenance reduction limits, along with the racial trait choices related to it.

Since you are talking AI_settings.txt, that is completely different.

[Q]

Originally posted by oleg:
Ok, how about this test :

Set "largest hull" for first 10 turns = 300.
generate the empire with this setting. Start a game. AI will make design only destroyers, transports, etc.
Now, exit the game, edit AI_settings to mke ai design larger ships, sey up to 1000. Start SEIV, with the old emp. file. - AI still designs small ships only. Changes in AI_settings are ignored !

Oleg did you save the ship design in the emp file?

PS. Repeated your test with an empire file that had no ship designs saved: the change in the maximum ship size in the AI settings.txt file worked perfectly.

But back to your original topic: I agree that this bug is extremely bad for the AI performance because it annihilates almost completely the AI bonus effect for resources. I had the impression that even at high bonus AI empires had not that much more ships than I, if we had more or less the same empire size. But I blamed it on imperfect contruction files and trusted that the bonus worked.
I mailed this now to MM and asked for a fix. Even a mini patch with nothing else would be great.

[ June 03, 2003, 10:21: Message edited by: Q ]

[oleg]

Thanks for communicating the bug to MM. May be will be blessed with a new patch

I still have ship size not changed when I change AI_settings
And no, I did not save ship designs. Very strange indeed.

[cybersol]

Yes, I too would love to see a mini patch to address the AI using the bonus correctly. It would be easy and would greatly enhance the competitiveness of the AI. There is the problem with using the bonus for scrapping ships mentioned here and also for overridding ai_planet_types discussed here in the death match 2 thread. Has someone contacted MM about that as well?

And what exactly is the best method for communicating with MM?

[Mephisto]

I cannot confirm the problem. I have set up a game with the EA, one empire under human control, the other computer with high bonus.
In the next step I activated the ministers for the human empire except for ship movement (so no colonies were set up) and de-activated ministers in the computer empire likewise.
After some turns the human empire hit the maintenance limit with 8 ships, using up some of the stored resources.
The computer empire had build 15 ships in this time. It had crossed the maintenance limit by 5k minerals (because the bonus was now gone after human control). It still had full storages, a sign that it had no lack of minerals at all in the past turns.
My conclusion is that bonus are working quite well.

[cybersol]

Originally posted by Mephisto:
I cannot confirm the problem. I have set up a game with the EA, one empire under human control, the other computer with high bonus.
In the next step I activated the ministers for the human empire except for ship movement (so no colonies were set up) and de-activated ministers in the computer empire likewise.
After some turns the human empire hit the maintenance limit with 8 ships, using up some of the stored resources.
The computer empire had build 15 ships in this time. It had crossed the maintenance limit by 5k minerals (because the bonus was now gone after human control). It still had full storages, a sign that it had no lack of minerals at all in the past turns.
My conclusion is that bonus are working quite well.

Not as familiar as the others about what is going on. Here is a guess nevertheless. Wouldn't it be the ship movement minister that would have to send the ships to be scrapped? Thus the AI can produce ships above the maintenance limit, but at some point it starts scrapping the same ones it is building. What if it is the ship movement minister where the bonus is not taken into account as far as scrapping goes?

[oleg]

Not so simple. I did see bonused empires going minus without scrapping. But then something clicks and AI starts scraping for no apparent reason. It just like some sort of flag that activates scrap minister and he does not go away after. I have no explanation right now.

[PvK]

Anyone tried setting maintenance level to zero or -1 to see if it causes the scrapping to stop altogether in a puff of illogic?

[Krsqk]

AFAIK, the scrap minister moves ships on his own, just like the resupply and retrofit ministers do. I'm assuming the "ship movement minister" is actually the attack, defense, patrol, and exploration ministers (all the individual ministers can move ships, in fact, except for facility construction and possibly space yard ships).

We'll figure out how to set the maintenance properly the same time we figure out fleet experience.

[oleg]

I don't think Scrap minister (curse him ) )moves ships. He scraps any ships that are currently sitting over shiyards. Unfortunately, that makes shipyard bases primary candidates, as well as population transports. Attack ships, which are usually away from the planet or in the fleet, seldom get scrapped.