Does the latest patch remember fogged colonies?

It wasn't added in the last patch.

I did make special mention of it, but the more people that do, the more likely it'll be added sooner rather than later.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Now that it colors in what systems they live in, showing the individual planets is not as big of a deal. The colors are so pretty, too. It's a great upgrade.

But does it KEEP the colours after those systems slip from your sensor range again?

I play with "I see everything" turned on, so I don´t know, but from my understanding the system´s colour on the strategic map will revert to "unknown" once you don´t have sensors uncovering an AI´s colony there anymore.

Jan

It's no less of a big deal just because the systems are now colored( although there's still the question Jan brings forth ). The AI wont work properly until it can remember colonies it has previously discovered.

Jan's right, but I hadn't realized it because I was sharing sensors with a lot of people.

Hey Dizzy,

They AI can be taught to remember AI colonies by modders. In fact that was one of the tasks I started working on for my last release. My mod currently has a rudimentary memory, but not all of the AI scripts are taught to use the memory yet. But the beginning is there and there will be more progress to come.

-unnamed

The AI *does* know which planets have colonies on them - even if they are no longer in sensor range.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Does it know in a cheating way, or does it know in a 'that planet had a colony last time it was in sensor range'-way ?

The map coloring is practically useless right now, it only helps you a little bit by making it easier to see where your ships are... and where your allies with shared sensors are (and this treaty is somewhat hard to get, especially from a human player!).

Go back to the se4 system when you could manually claim your systems, and add a multi-colored icon for systems clamed by several empires!

Raapys,

In my mod, the AI remembers like this. Each turn the AI makes a list of enemy colonies that it can currently see. It will then add in any enemy colonies it has seen in previous turns that it does not currently see (saved from the previous turn). At the end of the turn it saves all those colonies in a list to be loaded next turn. Repeat.

So if an AI has ever seen one of your colonies in sensors it will know there is a colony there. If it hasnt seen the colony with sensors it will NOT suddenly know when you colonize a new planet.

Make sense?

-Unnamed

About as close to our experience as I could make it.

So the answer to your question is, it knows from a sensor type of way. (though the next release I plan to include planets it learns about from espionage and stuff).

-Unnamed

The AI goes through system by system, making lists of various items in each system. For any planet that has been explored at some point, there is a function that returns the planet's owner that allows the AI to classify the planet. If no owner, it has a chance of being colonized. If it's owned by the enemy, it becomes a potential attack target. If it's owned by an ally nothing really happens.

Technically speaking, there is no actually need to compile a list of enemy colonies from the last turn and store it for the next turn.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

So what exactly is a "fogged colony" if I may ask? I'm assuming that it's just a colony outside of sensor range of a ship/satellite/planet/base/etc. - is that correct?

Also, I noticed the color change, all of my galaxies went to green. Does that reference who is in those colonies or something?

Wouldn't that function return the current status, rather than what its status was when it was last seen?

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Space for rent - please contact owner

The function would return the current status.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

I am still undecided if I should laugh or cry about this comment. If all people would think like you, then old computer games would never have had a chance. Because you needed to write everything down.
This change will someday make its way into a patch, but since it requires UI changes aswell, it probably won't be tomorrow or next week. Remember, it is more or less 1 guy programming everything, not a 20 man team. This means coding will be slower (and seeing a beta patch every week with some fixes impresses me )

But of course, if you are impatient enough, go and badmouth SEV. There are enough people here and in other places that will gladly tell the opposite.

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http://wiki.spaceempires.net - Visit the SpaceEmpires Wiki and help improve it.

But in that case that would be the 'cheating version', Kwok. There isn't an easy way to make it non-cheating, is there?

Correct me if I'm wrong, unnamed, but I'm assuming that means it will *not* add to the list colonies that are not shown at the end, or beginning depending on how your function works, of the turn, since that would require that you did a check for other empires' colonies for every single hex moved by any ship/fleet. Or have you covered that part somehow?

Hey Raapys,

It checks at the beginning of the turn (which also cover the situation at the end of a turn, since thats what you see at the beginning of the next turn .... unless the ship gets destroyed inbetween turns). It does not check every time a ship moves a hex, so also it might miss a colony that it sees during movement but out of range at the beginning and the end of a turn. Its not a perfect solution, but it works mostly. Also Kwok is right that directly checking each planet each turn would be direct and most efficient. However, it didnt feel right to me. (AI would notice colonies that it had never seen).

hmmm. I could make two versions of my mod though. Unnamed's Cheating AI, and Unnamed's Upgraded Stock AI. That would be funny really, give the AI all sorts of advantages (like many strategy games do for anything above normal settings) and see how well it handles the player.

-Unnamed

Personally, I prefer Unnamed's method over Kwok's as that's one of the main problems I have with many other strategy games...the AI doesn't really play by the rules you do.

I do see a problem with Unnamed's method, though, at least the way he described it. If a planet used to have a colony on it, but doesn't now (got glassed by a 3rd party, for instance) the AI won't consider it as a colonizable world unless it sees it again, while it's uninhabited. Seems like the 'last turn' list needs to have an age attached to it, so after several turns (a few years, maybe?) it discards the old information and would send a ship to that area again, getting new sensor info in the process.

Yeah, I guess it's fairly common, in games with fog of war, to simply let the AI know everything that is going on. It does take away some of the fun too, though. But what you've done already is definitely progress from stock's non-existing AI colony memory. What information do you store about the colonies? Planet and Empire name?

Must start lobbying inside Aaron's mailbox, though. A decent AI memory should definitely be a part of the stock game.

It's not my method. It's the way the built-in function for determining ownership of an object works. It's part of the stock script in place in the Script_AI_Lists - so unless unnamed has removed this, it's no different.

I wouldn't say it's cheating either. It's nothing a human player can't remember. The only actual benefit would be in the case the planet changed hands since it was last in sensor range - hardly an advantage for the AI, who wouldn't be able to understand the significance of such an event.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Raapys: without looking at the code, from my memory I believe it stores: Location (system and sector), owner/empire, and strength.

rdunham3: Very perceptive. The following is a problem I agonized over for a day or two. Actually there is no current function to differentiate between what the AI sees with sensors and what the AI simply sees in the system (think those planets out of sensor range). So a dead/uncolonized planet in sensor range comes up the same as a planet outside the sensor range. Therefore there the AI cant tell that it has killed the planet and it would add the old enemy planet from memory. Thus even after the planet was destroyed and in sensor range the AI would always have the old colony added into attack lists and such. Therefore, I have the AI check whether there the planet is still colonized each turn. If not its removed from the list. Unfortunately since there is no way to differentiate between whats in sensor range and not, it checks every planet and updates. Thus Even planets it has no way of knowing dieing, it will still remove from list if they actually have died. Therefore, in this sense it does cheat slightly. It will never add a colony to the list it doesnt see, but it will remove one if it dies; even if the AI doesnt see it die. This is the only way I could think of updating the AI list of enemy colonies. Thats one of the reasons why I said earlier its not a perfect solution.

Sorry for the long explanation, it may not even make sense.

-Unnamed

I think I'd rather face a super-smart enemy than a total brain-dead lobotomized AI. Besides, the AI can't really plan, so long-term strategy isn't really in the picture.

I don't know. Is that really a problem? I mean, it's the same for the human player too; he can't know when/if the colony he discovered is still there or if it's been destroyed or changed hands. So unless he has reason to think otherwise, he must assume the colony is still there. And since, in the AI's case, scouting/explorer/patrol ships are regularly sent out, the colony's status will automatically be updated every once in a while.

But yeah, perhaps, ideally, you could also store the game date the colony was discovered, and when it reaches a certain age a ship would be sent out to recheck it, like rdunham3 says. It's very possible that would just be a waste of ships, though.

However, thinking about it some more, perhaps it would be just as well to make the 'cheating' kind and having the AI know about every colony. It does make some sense, after all; realistically, there'd be thousands of civilian ships, smugglers, spies, etc. going in transit between colonies. If a colony was to be destroyed, it'd be 'all over the news', so to speak.

I was working on much the same problem for my own game, Cosmic Crises (http://kolis.dyndns.org/cosmic - yes, shameless plug there ) and I realized that maybe all Aaron needs is someone to convince him that "fog of war memory" is not all that hard to implement. So I sent him an email explaining the algorithm I'd come up with to do it in my game, hoping that he could use it in Space Empires V. I haven't heard back from him yet, but maybe (you never know) he's hard at work implementing that algorithm!

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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious

Well, I'm not sure that knowing a colony has died without scanning it is that unrealistic. You'd think even the lowest level of intelligence gathering would be able to find out that a colony had been wiped out even if only relying on rumors and info from private trade ships and the like. One could certainly monitor artificial electronic emissions from a great distance (even if you couldn't understand them) and when they suddenly stopped or changed you'd know something bad had happened. I'm not a 100% convinced that you could hide any type of large population for very long even if a ship had never gone there. I suppose it is possible that the time it would take for radio or whatever could be too long for someone to detect the colonies without going there in a faster than light ship, but if that were true than it would also seem likely that you couldn't command your ships after they got very far from your planet due to the time lag in receiving orders, so that seems to indicate faster light communications ability, so I'm back to my "can detect" theory. Ouch this is making my head hurt...

I think you should probably be able to tell where all populated planets are after certain amount of settlement time provided you had an intelligence center and some type of low level detection technology. You might not know who owns them and certainly wouldn't know how well defended they are, but you'd know they were there unless they had some type of planetary cloaking.

Since coding things so the AI puts stealthed sensor sats in every system isn't likely to happen, it might indeed be better to let it 'cheat' and know the current status of every planet.

But it rankles a bit. Especially considering how hard MM has worked to implement an AI that really doesn't cheat except when you explicitly tell it to. (AI bonus level in game setup)