Tarsus Defensive and Diplomatic AI Version 0.6 Alpha Release (Download)

Since no one else has done so, let me congratulate you on getting an AI together, much less working on three at once. Good luck, and while I don't have a lot of time to play with your AI -- I'm working on my own mod -- I sincerly want to congratulate you on coming up with a peaceful based AI. I've never liked how readily most AIs go to war, and if you truly have come up with a peaceful AI, I wish other developers would copy it.
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There are 10 types of people in the world:

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I've been watching your progress in the discussion thread on in the general forum, and I'm quite happy to see you have released the first version. I'm definitely going to try this out, and good luck on further versions and the warlike AI.

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Give me atmopshperic manipulation cannons, or give me death!

BTW, a suggestion on the warlike AI... PLEASE try and make it throw larger fleets around at defended warp points. I recognize you'd need the AI memory to make that happen effectivly, but at the VERY least make them use larger assault fleets than they do ATM.

I'm SICK AND TIRED of having them nibble, constantly, instead of sending in effective assault forces. Defeat in detail is only fun when I'm doing it because I'm smart, not the enemy is stupid.
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There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

Cheers for the upload will give it ago when I feel remotely human again.

Just to say I ran a stock game with the Tarsus AI last night just a short one lasted until this morning and have nothing bad to report about the Tarsus AI and would note that it was the Last AI standing apart from my neutral protectorates. It’s not very warlike but it builds a good empire and runs a reasonable war of attrition. Needs some work on repairing its damaged ships I think? But I will be able to tell you more when I go back and look at the game from god mode and dig in to what the AI's are up to in saved games.

You very much seem to be getting some where good. It’s not quite as tough as the Balance Mod AI's yet but you are working with stock and Captain Quock did Mod a lot of the rest of the game to make it easier for the AI and is a beta tester I believe so he had seen the innards of the game for longer than most of us players. This is very much the sort of thing I was after and I think the game needs.

One thing to also note the AI did make an alliance with a couple of neutral empires which resulted in one nasty battle when I forced a warp point I had scouted and found a fleet of frigates and destroyers. Three turns later when my fleet crossed it as opposed to the suicide scout there was a bigger fleet of the same as I expected and a Tarsus squadron of about the same number of light and heavy cruisers. I won but it was very pyrrhic as what was left of my fleet had to hang round and wait for the repair ship to fix them up and a lot of reinforcements to rebuild its strength. The pity was that no more Tarsus forces entered the system and I rolled the hostile neutral empire up there after, but it’s a start

Right, I almost functional now and am installing your AI, I can't see any instructions on what to do with the Tarsus AI Source Code folder.... Is this just there so people can see what you have done or do i need to move it to a certain location?

Also have you altered the AI for just your races, or are their some global changes as well?

Off to find coffee and fried food.

I won the battle I spoke of above by brute force and better tech and some luck my ships out classed those of the neutral's AI massively 20+ TL so those would not have been a problem except that the Tarsus force was slightly bigger than mine and fairly well built and not that far behind mine guess 5 ish TL's and as it consisted only of cruisers and Light cruisers and my fleet had some frigates and destroyers it out massed mine quite a lot the win point occurred when most of the neutral AI's small ships which where a mix of DUC and CSM armed ships broke and ran I assume that they ran out of supplies of ordinance.

I was then able to concentrate on the Tarsus squadron and there was a very brutal slugging match which I won by dint mostly of having more advanced weapons and slightly tougher ships but it was close. Some of the Tarsus squadron seemed to also run out of ordinance which helped but they also had meson blasters so stayed in the fight till destroyed. The battle ended with me chasing down the escaped surviving neutral AI ships which took a couple more very one sided fights.

Sounds like a good plan to me. Have started my 3rd new game (wish you could force the game to choose certain AI races easier *GRRR*) and have yet to meet with your improved AIs.

I have noticed a couple of things that I don't seem to think conected to your mod but....

I have what looked like the repeated combat bug from 1.13, the Abbidonians (treacherous scum that they are) decided to attack a peacefull trade colony I had established in their home system (with the express aims of better our trade relations). They sent 2 frigates that both got mauled by my trade platforms (purely a shop window advertising my latest design in CSM and armour). The cowardly scum fled and managed to escape, at which point they imediately re-initeated combat, the lass damaged ship fled out of the combat zone but the slower one was not able to flee before the time limit and again re-established combat not managing to flee it didn't attack again.

In a different combat about the treacherous Terrans this time, they launched a suprise attack on a ship returning to be resupplied in ordinance and was able to flee from them but unable to leave the combat.

The other thing is that I seem to have gone back to 1.08 maps where you get loads of gas clouds, black holes and asteroid systems. I have kept the same map option as I was using previously and would only get maybe 1 out of 10 non planet systems, in my current game it seems closer to 50-50.

Not sure how any of these could have anything to do with your mod, but they are all problems I had in previous versions of SEV and haven't experienced in 1.17.

The only changes I have made to the settings file is to add your 3 races to the list of empires.

I'm not a modder that can give you expert feedback, but I can say this is exactly what SE5 will need for good solo play. I got a lot of mileage out of SE4 with TDM and Fyron's Quadrant Mod. I do appreciate all you modders and those doing shipsets as well.

When you get this a little further along it sounds like something I'll want to try.

There are certain quadrant types which come with lots of black holes and nubelae -- can quickstart select those?
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There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

It's nice to see people working on AI already. It's really needed.

Maran :

I'm currently making an extensive mod for Se5 and one of the area i did not do much is the AI. Well, i'm not done ballancing my weapons and research so there was no point looking at the AI but seem your work could greatly help mine . I'm looking forward for your updates...

How often are you making the AI update their ship and unit designs? Also what are the rules they have for creating new classes of ship.

I ask because in my current game I have both the Tarsus and Valexi. I have just had my 1st god look at the game (turn 39) and noticed a couple of things on this that might need to be adjusted.

The Tarsus had a design for frigate that was only using about 240tons out of a possible 325, it was also using lvl 1 Ion engines. At this point they had access to destroyers and contra engines (lvl 4). I also noticed that they where building space stations that had far more crew quaters and life support than they required.

When checking the Valexi, they didn't have an attack ship in their list of ships that could be constructed. Again they had space stations with more than the required numbers of CQ and LS modules.

Both races seem to be doing a reasonable tech research job, the Tarsus are 1st myself 2nd and the Valexi 3rd.

They also seem to be doing facility upgrades, the Tarsus where better on this than the Valexi. I checked the home world and saw they had both updated some facs, that said I hit the auto-update and the Tarsus didn't have much to do, but the Valexi had a whole load of stuff that needed upgrading (this could be that I happened to check just before they where about to do an upgrade cycle).

On the treaty side of thing, neither race had signed upto any really stupid treaties, but I was able to get the Tarsus (not met the Valexi yet) to agree to 30% trade, allow 1 way migration (them to me) and a sharing of 4 gen old techs. A couple of turns later I was able amend this treaty so that they gave me all their non racial techs.

I have noticed both AIs like to make a non-agression treaty as a 1st move and seem to want to build on that, but I haven't seen how they go about this.

It also seems that both races have hundreds of colony ships (and loads of colonies) It might be an idea to slow down their expansion as they get larger and make them concentrate a little more securing their colonies. As I said the Valexi have no combat ships, and the Tarsus have ones that are very old.

On a note I just went back into the game to check somethings for this post and played another turn watching the Tarsus (who I had built a better design of frigate for) and saw that they tried to upgrade a fleet of their old frigates to my new version The only problem was that it was too expensive for them, this makes me wonder if the AI will try repeatedly to upgrade these ships, or will jsut scrap them, or does it have a memory that these ships can't be upgraded.

Hope this gives you a couple of things to think about

I might have told the Tarsus fleet to upgrade, not sure if it was me or the AI.

Have had a look at the ones I fought in the alliance battle as I saved the game just before I burst through the defended warp point as it happens so I took a gods eye look at the Tarsus squadron. found forty ships of six classes split pretty evenly between cruisers and light cruisers the majority of which where armed with a direct fire weapon and a seeker normally more direct fire weapons than seekers a few some of the light cruisers where only armed with seekers but both CSM's and torpedoes all of them had phased shields which explained the trouble I had with them as my fleets main weapon was Phased polaron beams and a reasonable level of shields and armour all of them had ecm combat sensors and most of the bigger ships shield regenerators.

The all seeker armed ships did not have enough ordinance on board for a sustained fight from what I could see but that said I didn’t notice these run out of ammunition in the battle which some of the others armed with Meson blasters and CSM's seemed to. None of the ships where using mounts that I saw and the tech level of the components on the ships where 5-10 Tls lower than mine and when I checked the design page about three levels lower than the Empire was capable at the best , which didn’t seem that bad really. The closest to the empire best where the shields the sensors and the ECM with weapons armour and shields being a bit behind that. The worst lag was the ships engines which where tl2 Contraterene ones and the empire could build Jacketed photon ones. Looking around the rest of the empire I found no other fleet that big though I did find plenty of fleets so it would seem that I had the ill luck to run into the Tarsus main battle fleet. I would attach the saved game to this but I am not sure which one it was in the save game folder.I made a lot om manual saves during that game.

I know it ain't simple thats why I leave it to intelligent *COUGH mugs COUGH* people like you and Kwok to do I have enough problems just trying to figure out the quote system on this forum....

The frigate was a design and in production, by the look of it the design had been around for quite a few turns, they had gone up 4 lvls of hull design and started a new one, they had also gone up 4 lvls of ion engine and done at least 1 lvl of contra without updating the base design.

I will keep an eye on it as the game progresses. I sorta understand what you say the problem is, if you can use a "getlevel" comand then it should be easy to figure out what components are available and how many they need.

This is a fairly serious issue, since I created one for them they have been happy to use it and make new designs.

On a side note related to this, does the AI always build a new ship? Or does it auto-update old designs to create new ships.

Would it be possible to set up a counter that added one for each time a "ship building" tech updated? Then have it that it reaches 5-10 ship build points it would know to either auto-update a new ship or build a new design. You could even give different techs different points, so an upgrade in cargo is worth 1 points, a weapons or engines upgrade 2, better hull 3, new engine or hull class 5.

Assuming they have the tech to build a master computer Is there any tech used to protect computers? I know there are anti computer weapons. If so they will need some of that as well.

I wouldn't go as far as banning them certainly, is there enough leeway in the system to again use a weighting where if I want 1 way migration then I need to maybe give something else in return such as old tech, star maps or communications with other races. I can that this is gonna open a real can of worms and will take a lot of sorting.....

Going back to an old idea of mine, if you could have a fear / contempt scale as well as a anger / like scale the more they fear you the more likely they are to accept treaties that favour you over them, the more they contempt you the more likely they are to demand in return.

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Yes they expand rather fast in the expansion phase , they won't enter a defense or attack phase unless they have at least 2 enemies or 1 war. Even when they enter their defense/attack phase they should still expand quite well.

I am playing on a medium size map and am now finding colony ships from both races flooding the entire galaxy, there will be nothing left for me to colonize soon *LOL* Looking at them in god mode they have probably over 50 colony ships each out roaming the galaxy looking for a home (I also gave the AI mod advantage) and there are only a few systems left they haven't entered.

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Do a test though and declare war on them, see what happens when they gain two enemies or go into war , I think you'll find an explosion of defensive ships suddenly being produced.

Once I have those benighted terrans off my back the Valexi are for it, they carry on sending colony ships into my systems and I don't like it

I have come across a few things of note, and have a couple of suggestions.

In mid game (turn 70+) Your AI races are all running hundreds of colony ships around, I destroyed over 50 for Tarsus and about 75 for the Valexi and they still had more that looked like they where on their way somewhere. By this time most of the galaxy has been colonised or they have agreements that mean they can't colonise in systems.

Is it possible to put a conditional statement in the build queue, if you already have more than 30 colonisers total (all types) or 12 of type rock / ice / gas then do not build any new colony ships. This would at least give them more realisitc fleets, you could make the numbers variable and decrease as the game went long into the game, start at 25 of a type and reduce by 1 every 10 turns. (or something like that)

Your AIs don't build enough resupply depots to maintain their fleets efficiently. I tend to run a fleet of about 30-40 high end ships and will have at least 2 or 3 resupply depots in every frontline system (I try and keep my resupply over 7000 per turn), I will reduce the numbers as I ramp up production by fac upgrades. I don't rely on solar sails or quantum reactors in SEV as they simply don't produce enough to maintain a war fleet. I do however rely on organic ordanance vats, but thats only part of the solution.

I am now around 100 turns into the game and it seems your AIs are slowing down on facility upgrades, not sure why but I tend to check every 10 turns and it seems they are spending less and less time upgrading facs.

Your AIs keep huge fleets of obsolete frigates and destroyers (most of which have run out of supplies) in their home systems. Is it possible to put a conditional statement in to scrap these when they have more than X ships of a larger catergory, i.e. I have 5 light crusiers so I can start scraping a frigate for every new LC I build. These shups are also obselete as the AI stops upgrading them when it decides a larger hull size is its prefered build.

Or you could try giving the AI a number of "ship points" where attack craft are given a point rating based on their hull size. i.e. Frigate = 1, destroyer =2, crusier = 4 e.t.c. and when they get above 60 fleet points they will scrap frigates on a 1 per new build basis, and if they get above 80 fleet points then all frigates will be scrapped, if no frigates are left then start scrapping 1 destroyer per new build and so and so forth.

I have noticed on some cruisers the Valexi are putting 2 combat sensors and 2 ECM, this is obviously a waste of hull space. They are also ignoring PD. I haven't seen a Tarsus cruier yet so I don't know if they are doing the same thing.

Both races could do with using a little more PD as default.

Both races seem to prefer lots of armour over sheilds.

I have seen the Valexi sign upto a treaty that means they can't make treaties with other races.

The Valexi seem to have stopped building research centers (or their RPs haven't really increased in about 15 turns). This also isn't helped as they aren't doing enough upgrading.

Neither race seems warlike enough either. I have been fairly agressive against the Valexi wipping out a could of their fleets and creating a colony in a system of theirs and they don't seem to want to hit back at me yet.

Also I have attacked a race that the Tarsus have a mutual protection pact with and the Tarsus have done nothing, I am also massing large amounts of military hardware in a system they have lots of colonies in, and they are still Aimiable with me.

Both races are building defences on their planets.

Hope this helps a bit with your next build.

They do use PD on larger ships but seldom more than one or two which is generally not enough to save you from a missile swarm. As we all know Missile swarms are not that hard to create

I don’t think that the AI should necessarily abandon smaller ships when larger become available as a max tl frigate hull with a beam mount and an auxiliary seeker is a first class and relatively cheap picket ship or scout. It should scrap unnecessary ships and keep those it has up to date and in supply as far as possible. It might be necessary to introduce a conditional statement which causes ships which are too obsolete to upgrade to be scraped. It is however quite possible to keep a hull in service more or less indefinably if you upgrade little and often. This is generally what I do especially with core system defence fleets

Not tried the Valexi out yet but I have the Tarsus in every game so far and they do, do a lot better in the stock game than the stock AI

Colony ships
Not seen these hordes of colony ships myself so cant comment on this much but it might be an idea to later in the game drop the priority of colony ships unless the AI has a valid target to colonise. I generally stop building colony ships during a consolidation phase and if I have stopped expanding as I will do when I have come up against neighbours on all fronts I will only build more colony ships if I have developed or acquired the ability to colonise new types of world.

it occurs to me that the hordes of colony ships might be a result of the use of Ancient race for both races which will cause the race to see lots of targets and the fact that there is no way of knowing whether the target is already colonised.

I have seen both light crusiers and crusiers with no PD

I have no qualms with upgrading small ships, I know they can be useful, its just that doesn't seem to be the way the AI works.

It tends to abandon older hull sizes, and so stops developing these ships fairly early on. Often when it has hordes of them... armed with pea shooters, no real supply / ord storage and slow engines. These I am sure will be used by the AI to calculate its own military strengh and therefore block the building of bigger better ships.

If you or any other modder can make the AI continue to develope these ships then great, they can be very valuable (although I tend to end up scrapping anything smaller than a light cruiser one way or another such as using them as mine sweepers and gate scouts.). That said it should still downgrade the value of these ships when it comes to regarding its military might. Even a dozen well armed frigates are going to struggle against a Human Cruiser of similar tech.

It will always update ship designs with the biggest hull availiable, that's why it has a lot of old designs rotting because it doesn't update them anymore. The work around would be to assign special designs for each ship sizes instead of letting the AI choose the size of the hull (wich will invariably be the biggest one). This way the AI will have something to update it's old design to and probably avoid bankrupcy building huge number of large ships (or ships way bigger than they need to be).

I already plan to implement this in my mod. I already made a few test and it can be done quite easily.

Doesn't the AI use some kind of scoring system to workout how much military might it has, and how much it can support?

I must admit I haven't really seen an AI go bankrupt until their empire starts to vanish... and anyone who looses their empire will find bankruptcy an issue. I would have thought that having 10s if not of hundreds of obselete little hulks floating around draining supplies would be a far bigger issue than a fleet of large modern ships.

I'm sure the AI is quite capable of dealing with maintenance of all it's ships, though from what i could read on this board, it doesn't scrap obselete ships, it just wait for it's enemy to do it. Old designs are significantly cheaper to maintain, so they are not a significant drain for an Empire, though they can syphon supplies and ordnances that would be better used by newer designs. This game is really cheap on resupply, it's far quicker to build new ships fully loaded than wait for them to stock up... One of the first things i changed in my mod .

I like the sound of what you are doing, I don't have the time to do a full reply to your post at the moment, but I will give a short round up of points I remember.

Yes more PD is needed, +1 will be a good starting point, you could also vary this between the races... The Tarsus are peace loving chickens who pile it on, whilst the war loving Hive see it as a nessicary evil so only really use it to fill out the hull.

I think the problem with the armour vrs sheild thing is that most armour only comes in 5 ton chunks where as shields are 30 or 40.... I tend to put on about equal amounts of components for sheilds and armour, not even tonnage. This will of course alter my perceptions.

In the mid - late game the AI should focus as much as it can on boosting research, and trying to get treaties with friendly races that involve tech trading (I would suggest 2 or 4 tech old equal swap, at least until the stock AI gets better. This will help all the AI races ). (This will also be a good stop-gap until you can improve the diplomacy AI, make it counter any tech ask that isn't in its favour (depending on all factors) with a both way treaty...

Have seen the Tarsus banging their heads agaisnt the 200 ship limit (I know I can alter this but my PC will start to get really unhappy if I do), so they really need someway to dispose of un-needed colony and obselete hulls.

Having increasing numbers of ships in system should make an AI race nervous, at least get them firing off please remove your ships diplomacy messages. Is there any method for the AI to actually measure if these are full filled? i.e. it asks me to remove ships from the xill system, I agree but don't. Having these types of requests refused (and ignored if the AI can do that) should make them angrier, and either prepare offensive weapons, or take defensive precautions dependant on the race.

For example if there are more than 10 "enemy" ships in a system you claim as yours then either build attack ships, or planetary defenses depending on your race, and idealy your anger / fear scores.

Hope this gives you more to think about, but not too much..... Now when will 0.7 be out? I am getting to the point where I need to kill my game soon and attack everyone (my pc is starting to struggle with so many races and ships).

Off topic why dose any post but the first in a thread need let alone requite a subject surely the subject remains that of the original thread

Back on topic Just to thank maran for all his hard work and say I look forward to trying out version O.7 I am glad that we are beginning to get stock AI's which are challenging. I will of course post my observations as I am sure a version 0.8 will be needed

On a related topic has any one had any thoughts about variant neutral AI's at all?

Because of the recent comments field on the right hand bar, which some of us actually use to browse this website (after clearing out the backlog, of coures, its a very nice tool just to find the new posts)?
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There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

Just a quickie,

I have noticed that when your AIs gets hold of sheild regenerators they tend to use multipul ones, they need to be marked as 1 only at least until the game is altered to allow them to stack (if that happens).

You can't stack shield regenerators? I thought you could. . .

The AI sounds great! I'll have to give it a try.

You can put more than 1 shield regen on your ships / bases, but unfortunatly the effects don't stack in SEV, I am not sure if this is by design or by ommision.

The AI is a lot better than stock, I just can't wait for 0.7 which is going to be a load better than 0.6. I just can't wait till all races have access to better AIs.

When the next version? It's been a while and no update about the AI... I hope the project is not shelved.

I believe Maran was waiting till after Mondays patch just in case it turned out to require a lot of changes in the Mod be patient 0.7 is on its way

He has mentioned being busy with work.... not much of an excuse I must admit, but real life does sometimes interfear with whats important.

I can't wait to see 0.7, as I have just started a new game in 1.20 and seem to be stuff in my starting location, I have my system have has one large breathable, then the next in the chain has no breathable but a few large and a couple huge, then I seem to have just asteroid fields, gas clouds and black holes *GRRR*, at the moment by the time my colony ship gets to the black hole it has no supplies left....

Anyone know if there are any problems with 1.20?

It does for me, but I do know that 0.7 which should be out some time soon will work better with 1.20 as well as having further AI tweaks

I'm playing the .6 Tarsus mod in 1.20 and I haven't had any problems yet. Can't wait for .7, though!

Hi maran,

Thanks for your work. I used to play SEIV and have just started with V. Reading the reviews, I decided not to bother playing the stock version at all and go straight to mods. I installed BM1.01, and then because I didn't see an explicit statement here that Tarsus wasn't compatible with BM, I popped your three empires into the BM folder. All three Tarsus AI's spawned into the game. However, after 20 turns I noticed the Tarsus players were in last place and had no colonies. When I checked them out manually, it turned out they didn't have any ship designs. They had bases and every type of unit, just no ships. Obviously I don't expect Tarsus to be compatible with other mods as well as stock, but is there something simple I could change manually within your TXT files to get the ship design to work? (Even if they have to use Terran designs or something, I'm sure they still blow away the stock AI.) Since they design bases and units just fine, it doesn't seem like a fundamental problem. Thanks again & I look forward to trying out your AI.

The AIs need to be designed specifically for the Balance Mod. Don't worry though - a lot of Maran's changes were based on the Balance Mod AIs but adapted back to stock - so the Balance Mod AIs are already on par with Maran's work.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Thanks, Kwok, I thought it was something like that. Problem is that with Tarsus/Stock, you get 3 decent opponents and 14 losers, plus none of the general gameplay fixes of BM!

Personally whilst I like the Balance Mod I rather prefer the depth of stock as the abiding flaw in the Balance Mod from my point of view is the way its tech tree is foreshortened. You get a better game in the short run but I really dislike maxing out tech levels in twenty years even with the costs bumped up to the maximum and trying to avoid building to a research rush.

The thing I want is a good AI in general for stock and some nice specialist ones like those in the Tarsus Mod so you get three really hard and interesting opponents and fourteen decent ones in a game you could play for 200 game years and not run out of stuff to research.

I will keep playing BM as I appreciate the skill and effort that’s gone into doing it, all the more since I am struggling with my own rather limited Fighter Mod

You might want to try my Inter-Related mod. It's still an alpha, but the tech tree is huge and the AI should pose you a better challenge (it's really efficient at making an huge empire and supplying a huge armada).

Check the IRM v 0.54d thread.

just downloaded the latest version and about to see if the dread lond of Klarg gets a good fight.