Really Stupid Ship Design |
In my 1.20 game I've seen some really stupid ship design. There's one AI Light Cruiser design that caught my attention. It has 4 mounted Anti-Proton Beam weapons with 4 ordnance pods and 4 supply pods. Since the AP Beam weapons don't use ordnance it's rather stupid to have ordnance pods. One problem with using a formula based on ship size to determine how many supply/ordnance pods to add. Ordnance pods should be based upon weapons that actually use ordnance pods. I use a simple formula based upon how much ordnance a ship's weapons use, usually going for around 100 shots. I don't even bother to use supply pods as I go for good engines that store plenty of supply in them. It would improve the AI ship design immensely if they didn't junk up their ships with so many superfluous ordnance and supply pods.
I also noticed that the vehicular control elements were actually stuffed into Interior hull slots near the bottom of the top deck. This looks like a small improvement to AI ship design. Now to see it use all the interior slots on all 3 decks would be a great improvement.
Omnius
Playing straight Stock
Playing straight stock a lot recently and noticed that AI designs are not that poor as of 1.20 they do have too many quarters & life support components but that probably an artefact of upgrading ships which needed this number. the stock AI tends to favour energy weapons which is sensible in that it avoids the complication of ordinance but as its also averse to using PD it is vulnerable to missile armed ships. The main flaw of AI ships is that they are considerably more primitive than player ships at the same point. A poor design with 10-15 Tl’s better weapons and defences will trounce a good one without those advantages.
Idea
Would it be possible to add a section of code that examines the ship's main weapon and returns a value. That value is then evaluated leading to code which adds Ordnance?
AI Colonizer with Ordnance Supply
v1.20 + Balance 1.00: One AI made a colony ship with 1 Large Ordnance Supply 
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Eric / Gilmoy
Certain components MUST go in the outer hull
In the balance mod, certain components such as weapons, satellite/fighter/drone bays, and engines MUST go in the outer hull, they are not allowed in the inner hull. But it makes sense because they would need to be in the outer hull to actually function.
Ordnance addition
Unfortunately it's not very easy to tell the AI when to add ordnance pods. A scheme needs to be set where weapon selection has an ordnance true/false variable attached to trigger the ordnance addition during design creation. I've toyed around with this before but haven't came up with an elegant solution yet.
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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod