SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[teal]

I wish you could sort the planet list by size and distance from existing colonizers. These are the attributes that I usually care the most about...

[Phoenix-D]

Rigelian: Gold adds a -lot- of stuff in the patches, though a lot of it is for better modding. It also fixes the stupid player order determines who shoots first thing.

"Not being able to assign the same build to multiple queues at a time"

And that, if it wasn't in 1.49. Shift-click the build lists you want then click Multi Add.

[Fyron]

Multi add was added in 1.60 (gold). One thing it does not allow is multi adding facilities. But you can always use Fill Queues to make filling new planets a snap.

[Me Loonn]

Hope the repeat order in queue to be made so that each item in the queue get built in order, top first then second and so on to the bottom. And THEN repeat it from the top again. Current repeat only does the top over and over. Its good to have but it lacks something.

[Fyron]

That should be a separate order..

[cybersol]

Ok, the great rocks-paper-scissors strategy article by Stone Mill got me thinking about a way to improve the ai. I still think a scripting type language would be the most flexible solution for the ai, but I also realize that parsing and compilers are not everyone's specialty!

The idea is to give the AI rocks-papers-scissors capability. I think it could be implemented relatively easily even in the SEIV scheme of things.

First, for each ship type, say "Light Attack Ship", in designcreation the hard code keeps stats (over the most recent 20 turns for example) on the total damage done by each weapon family to that ship type. At redesign time note the weapon to do the most damage.

Then under weapons family pick for that type in designcreation you use some special family like -1 or something to indicate that ship type uses rock-paper-scissor capability. If it does, then that same ship type will be found in a rock-paper-scissors.txt file. In this file you first list the ship type then family pairs. For example, 2->6 for point defense to counter capital ship missles. If the first majority (or secondary) weapon family is the special one then it looks into the rocks-paper-scissors file with the most damaging weapon family number (say 2 CSM in this case) to find the counter weapon family number (6 point defense here). Then it uses that counter weapon family as the majority (or secondary) weapon type for this redesign period.

The changes required would be to keep the statistics and parse the extra rocks-papers-scissors file (and the fun error checking between the two files). All in all, not too hard to implement, but it would greatly increases the ability of the ai to respond dynamically to situations.

Also, it would still be fully moddable!

[dogscoff]

Nice idea for the AI there.

As for the repeat build thing- I've said it before and I'll say it again: Programming-type functions for ship orders.
(If/Then, Loop, Gretaer than/ less than etc, and a whole bunch of variables pulled from the game environment to pwork with)

If these were implemented, it probably wouldn't be too hard to extend some similar functionality into construction queues as well:

code:

---

Build [spaceport]



repeat

{

Build [mineral miner]

}

until [facilities_on_planet(mineralminer)>=4]



build [robotoid factory]



repeat

{

Build [mineral miner]

}

until [facilities_slots_free=0]



Do

{

Build[fighter_design_1]

}

Loop

---

Crappy pseudocode but you get the idea.

[Erax]

Just elaborating on some of the more recent ideas :

- Retrofitting - should be a job in the construction queue. It takes up manpower resources same as building a ship, right ? A simultaneous build option would also be nice.

- Alternating fire - give each ship/base/satellite/fighter/platform an 'initiative rating' based on their size, speed and type. Let them move and fire in order of initiative.

[Suicide Junkie]

Retrofitting does use up your worker's time...
It just uses the repair crew to install replacement parts instead of the build workers.

With real time combat, you will get an infinitely fine-grained initiative system.

[Erax]

Your repair crew is the absolute minimum number of people required to keep everything running. If you take on a big job like a retrofit, you hire more people or pull them off other projects. And your industry has to build the spare parts, which could have been used on a brand new ship, etc. etc. (I don't think you'd keep a spare ion engine just lying around, if you need something big like that you build it).

Regarding RT combat, I wish Malfador would go the X-Com Apocalypse way and give us both options : regular turn-based tactical or real-time tactical combat.