Balance Mod Available for SE:V

[Captain Kwok]

It could just be a factor of how many ships and colonies you have in their sight, which in most cases will make them angrier.

[Tim_Ward]

Captain Kwok said:
Any other AI observations from v1.02?

I haven't had a chance to play a great deal, but it seems that the AI is now relatively competitive in terms of ship numbers, resources &c, but it still doesn't make effective use of it's ships.

It does something I've seen in a lot of 4x games, including SEIV and various Civ incarnations. It moves its ships around in small groups, apprantly at random. Whereas what those ships should be doing is sitting on important planets unless the AI is at war, in which case they should be off attacking enemy planets, in groups of 20 or 30 not 7 or so at a time.

I predict that a humam player could win a war against an AI with equivilant ship design and technology and a 2:1 advantage simply because of the AI's fleets are all over the place.

Consider the attached screen shot. It's a small map, so this is the Phong's only system. They're at war with both the Norak and the Sergetti. The Norak ship has been sitting there ever since I put my ship in the system to observe the AI's fighting a war with each other. The Sergetti planet is more recent, but it's been there for 3 or 4 turns and hasn't been attacked.

Now, I know whatever you did to make the AI attack targets works because my own ship got attacked exploring another empires system, an I'm seeing plenty of combats between the AIs during turn processing. But one thing I noticed in my last game is that an AI fleet, if it has orders, will not cancel them to do something else. That is, if you have a single ship near one of their fleets it's safe from attack because the fleet probably has orders to go somewhere and won't break off to attack your ship.

Now, according to the score card the Phong have 18 ships. Where are they? Off on some mysterious errand, that's where. And while they're excuting orders to move about randomly, they won't be given orders to attack anything. And when ships do get attack orders, there's two few of them to make an effective attack force because the empire's fleet is so fragmented. Meanwhile, any sentient player can just bulldoze the barely defened AI planets with just a few ships almost irriguardless of their fleet size.

Getting the AI to use it's ships probably is, in my estimation, the last major obsitcle for a really decent, competitive AI.

[Captain Kwok]

I agree. In my current revision I'm going to clear the fleet order's each turn so I can effectively assign a top priority for the fleet in that turn.

[Raapys]

But wont that ruin long-term AI plans, like attacking other empire's colonies? At least if they're 1-2 systems away.

[Captain Kwok]

Raapys said:
But wont that ruin long-term AI plans, like attacking other empire's colonies? At least if they're 1-2 systems away.

The last thing you want is the AI to have several turns worth of movement/orders to a target without checking the conditions around it. If attacking that colony is their first priority than they will have an order to move to that planet and attack. On the next turn, they will likely receive the same order since they'll be even closer to the target and it will be an even stronger priority to attack. The only time this will change is if new info is available that says there is another target closer or the planet is now too heavily defended etc. Overall the attack priority will be based on target strength, distance, and perhaps a few other small modifiers and a randomness factor to throw off human players.

Fleets currently are sent on long wayward patrols, but that will be eliminated as well with next update. Instead I'm implementing the scout and patrol design types for frigates which will be instructed to travel to defense and attack systems where they can keep targets in sight range. This will keep the AI's attack locations more consistent from turn to turn, giving fleets a chance to attack if appropriate.

[Q]

One thing I didn't see is the AI laying mines on warp points. They lay mines in sectors with colonies, which is very good, but warp points would be still a good place for mines too.

[Dan_]

Thanks for your earlier info on those issues.

Captain Kwok said:
Any other AI observations from v1.02?

A little while ago I had a game with team mode (don't know what version), and the AI seemed to fight each other more than the fought me. It was quite funny actually. Several times when my scout went through a warp point guarded by two 'teamed' AI fleets. They would blast each other to smithereens while he made a casual getaway to explore the rest of the system.
The game I had yesterday with 1.02, I took control of the computer players for a couple of turns & created an alliance so they wouldn't do this again. I only had to start it, and soon all the players were added to the alliance - including me! They don't even ask - you just get a message saying how they are coming to burn your cities, and you are now in their alliance... I managed to change the alliance rules so that they needed 100% of the votes to make a change which stopped that.
A possible improvement may be to allow the AI to create an alliance for team mode, or for normal games as well, but the alliance stuff seems a bit dodgy at the moment, so this may not be such a good idea.

The other thing I looked at was the population transport, as I was considering turning this on for my empire. At the time I had two races breathing different atmospheres, and from what I could tell from looking at the script it was purely based upon numbers and distance, so may mix these making planets domed when they need not be.

[Q]

One more observation: the AI researches the other two colonization technologies quite late in the game, which slows its growth.

[Captain Kwok]

Q said:
One thing I didn't see is the AI laying mines on warp points. They lay mines in sectors with colonies, which is very good, but warp points would be still a good place for mines too.

This if fixed in the next version. There was an error with the script function that returned the number of units in space, so the AI was always launching its mines and not keeping any in cargo for Mine Layers to pick up and drop off.

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AI's in team mode should be making partnership treaties - I'll have to double check to make sure that is happening all the time.

[Captain Kwok]

These are the current general orders for AI ships and fleets in the mod:

Attack Ships:
- Supply / Retrofit / Repair
- Attack Priority 1 - Defense locations
- Attack Priority 2 - Attack locations
- Attack Priority 3 - Attack any valid targets (Usually aggressive races)
- Explore / Survey
- Scout Priority 1 - Non-colony systems with enemies
- Scout Priority 2 - Non-colony systems with friendlies
- Patrol Priority 1 - Warp points that lead to enemy systems
- Patrol Priority 2 - Warp points that lead to friendly systems
- Join Fleet

Note that there are maximum amounts of ships to use for most tasks, so many of the attack ships are sent to join fleets. Attack orders will be issued only if the AI's strength is comparable.

Fleets:
- Send out obsolete ships for Retrofit
- Resupply
- Wait for joining ships (if # ships in fleet low compared to # available ships)
- Attack Priority 1 - Defense locations
- Attack Priority 2 - Attack locations
- Attack Priority 3 - Attack any valid targets
- Buildup for Attack
- Go for Training (Not implemented)
- Explore