Slow and Pointless attacks... |
Something i've noticed that has become somewhat annoying is when the AI decides to attack me during its turn. Now, i love a good battle as much as the next, but this AI (using unnamed's AI mod) doesn't. Say i have a fleet of 40 powerful ships covering a warp point, the computer would attack with either 1 frigate, which dies, or with 3-4 fighters, who also die. Now what annoys me the most about this is that they attack the same fleet 5-6 times with small numbers of ships/fighters which simply die. And because each AI empire has over 1100 units and 300-700 ships, i myself having over 700 ships, the time it takes for a battle to finish loading for it to return to the system screen can take 2-3 minutes. So when i'm ending my turns and fighting about 20-30 pointless battles it can take almost 20 minutes for 1 turn.
Only about 3-4 times have i had to face a large AI fleet, i know they have the ships, they just don't use them! Another thing is that i have over 200 planets and an income of over 60-80 million or so a turn, the AI has... 4 million at most. They seem to build nothing but intelligence buildings, so what ships i do face are simply frigates, which my battleships, dreadnought fleets can just obliterate.
Is there any way around this? I want the computer to build mega fleets to kill me with 
Re: Slow and Pointless attacks...
The ships coming through are probably not combat ships, but intended as scouts trying to reach other systems to explore or survey. The challenge for scripting the AI is that you don't know what the ship's route will be to reach a destination (which may be perfectly safe) but perhaps they have to pass through a defended warp point. I have some conditions in the Balance Mod for the AI not to enter a destination system if the warp point is defended, but it only works if the ships destination is the same system where the protected warp point is. If there was some way to return the systems a ship had to pass through for its movement order, then you could really eliminate the described situation in the first post.
Re: Slow and Pointless attacks...
I was wondering why occasionally i get one ai trying to send colony ships through a warp point that had 10 ships guarding and two bases providing fire support and repair. Every 2-3 turns they would try. When an actual combat force went through their numbers were often close to mine. Seeing that I knew the AI knew i was guarding it, and couldn't figure out why they'd keep trying to send non-combat and scout ships through.
Re: Slow and Pointless attacks...
As usual Kwok is correct. His mod goes farther in this direction than mine currently (I hope to do some work on handling blockades pretty soon). I should be able to teach the AI to notice a blockaded warppoint, use fleets to target them, and not select targets in that specific. Unfortunately, as mentioned by Kwok, targets beyond that system will still be selected for exploration, colonization, etc.
To apw2, it should get better for the next two releases, but that does not necessarily mean it will be completely eliminated. As with so many things, it is a work in progress. But thank you for your feedback and playing.
-Unnamed
Re: Slow and Pointless attacks...
Can't the system be set as "system to avoid except fleet xy >= encountered defense " ?
this doesn't solve the problem of things targeted beyond that system but should still be a
good workaround because the single stray dogs won't get destroyed anymore .. a "can reach target " routine could take over from there ( as far as the ai script goes and no hardcoding is required )
Remember : Pillage! then burn.
- Cpt. Kaff Tagon
Re: Slow and Pointless attacks...
Like I said previously, the problem is when the ship has to travel through the system to avoid to get to another system, which is hard to account for since you don't know all the systems a move order might encompass. From the script's perspective, you have no idea that moving to friendly system Y means you have to travel throw enemy system X.
One workaround I'm using in v1.14 of the Balance Mod is to filter the planets list for colonization by removing planets that are more than 100 sectors away from the nearest colony. It cuts down on the number of colony ships sent on far flung missions due to map sharing etc. 
Re: Slow and Pointless attacks...
apw2,
It may be that my scripts are not calculating target strength properly (they should not be attacking when they have no hope of winning). I'll take a another look at them at somepoint.
For the ships getting through the warppoint unopposed; check to make sure there are not any sector/system anomolies blocking sensors or something. Had this happen in a multiplayer game one time, suprised me and took me a while to recover.
-Unnamed
Re: Slow and Pointless attacks...
Quite different. Unnamed's excellent mod focuses on the AI while Captain Kwok's Balance Mod has an overall game balance focus along with AI upgrades. BM changes technologies and weapon/ship stats and well, most everything to balance it.
So:
Unnamed's Mod for an unchanged game from vanilla techwise but way alot better AI.
Balance Mod for game balance tweaks along with upgraded AI.
Re: Slow and Pointless attacks...
I also see those annoying single ship warp point sacrifices all the time. The AI did the same thing in SE4 too. I don't see an end to this time wasting lemming-like behavior. The AI does not seem to understand the concentration of forces either. If I lost 1 battleship to 12 guarding a warp point I would not continue following up 1 at a time, I'd gather about 30+ then pay another visit.
If you're looking for common sense in the AI you may never, ever find it.