Simple way to improve AI ship design... |
The AI seems to design some rather mental ships with absolutly no efficiency and it seems to me that instead of having the AI try to design ships itself instead have a selection of pre-set hull designs for each race.
This would help give the alien races a nice unique flavour with some creative pre-made ships and make for a more challenging games as some of the AI's ships are just plain daft. Obviously the AI would need many designs to draw on to cover the wide selecion of tech levels but as you can pretty much use the same weapon and retrofit higher levels of them into the ships then they could just update the same basic designs?
Doesnt seem that hard...
Heres a simple example of what i have in mind...
Bling Blob Consortium have a standard small warship design, that races weapon of choice is depleated uranium cannons so it would have 4 of those some armor a load of engines and a couple of shield generators plus combat & basic sensors ect...
There small warships lets say frigate would always follow this design exactly and the AI would focus its weapon reaserch in the areas realtive to the tech its ships use. As the level of weapons/defences increase simply have AI use new higher levels of equip and retrofit old ships that have no orders, once it has maxed out small hull tech the on board space would never change and there would never be a problem as no matter how high your depleated uranium tech gets it will always take up 30 tonnes (i think).
Not quite indeed
Preset designs would be a lot of work to create, without much gain.
I think the AI needs to have a certain list of components it should put in a design, then the remaining space should be done the way it is now, by percentage. I've seen colony ships with Combat Sensors, but no weapons, and then Frigates with weapons but no combat sensors. It's annoying.
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With all these people, you would expect one of them to carry an iguana around...
not quite
This seem like a poor idea to anyone else?
Heres why: There are so many tech levels that designing each available thing would be impossible. So the designs have been made to allocate certain types of component based on percentages of tonnage. This works much better, and though some designs aren't very wise, most of the time this is the way to go.
The problem is that they AI doesn't know when to build the right ships sometimes. It also is quite daft about how it uses them. Thats the real problem.