Help - I've fallen and I can't get up! - Page 2

Lupusman · #11 July 12th, 2001, 07:43 PM

What happens if there is a new attack ship built in that system? Will it get orders to attack the colonizer, or will it ignore it like the others?

DirectorTsaarx · #12 July 12th, 2001, 08:19 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Alpha Kodiak:
<snip>
For some reason, a minister is assigning the ships orders to do something on the other side of the warp point every turn, but never assigns any one of the many individual ships or fleets the responsibility to attack the colonizer.

I keep wondering if there is a setting in one of the AI files that says "Don't attack non-combatants" or "Don't attack non-threatening ships" but I can't figure out what that setting would be. Could it be something to do with the "Maximum Systems to Defend at a Time" setting in the AI_Settings file? It is set to 5 for the Rage, which is as high or higher than most. However, by this time (past turn 100), the Rage have many more systems than that and are at war with four different races. Perhaps this system is not considered threatened enough or strategic enough to warrant defending.

I think you've almost got the answer with that Last statement. But it's not the "system" that's not threatened enough/strategic enough. It's that the crippled colony ship isn't enough of a threat to be considered an attack location. Every time your attack fleets have their orders cleared, the AI goes through the cycle of finding the 5 most important attack locations (or whatever the AI's setting is). It assigns orders to attack ships to move to those 5 locations, and ignores the crippled colonizer because it's just "not important". There ought to be a way to program the AI to notice a blocked warp point and either assign it as a highest-priority attack location or find a way around it.

Alpha Kodiak · #13 July 12th, 2001, 10:12 PM

Hmmm....

Seems like the number of systems to defend needs to be a percentage of total systems owned, or some such. This probably explains why all 10 of the AI's I'm using in this test game seem much less inclined to attack anybody now that their empires have grown fairly large. Watching them, it seems like they just keep sending their ships back and forth across their empires. Based on this discussion, it probably keeps rerouting them to different places since the perceived threats probably change with every turn.

Quikngruvn · #14 July 13th, 2001, 03:28 AM

quote:
Originally posted by DirectorTsaarx:
...Every time your attack fleets have their orders cleared, the AI goes through the cycle of finding the 5 most important attack locations (or whatever the AI's setting is). It assigns orders to attack ships to move to those 5 locations, and ignores the crippled colonizer because it's just "not important". There ought to be a way to program the AI to notice a blocked warp point and either assign it as a highest-priority attack location or find a way around it.

Or a way to have the AI recognize ANY foreign ship in a sector as a threat (whether armed or not) and send the closest ship or fleet to blow it to smithereens. (Does the AI already figure distance to the destination when assigning ships to their duties?)

quote:
Originally posted by AlphaKodiak:
...Based on this discussion, it probably keeps rerouting them to different places since the perceived threats probably change with every turn.

If that is the case, there needs to be a way to keep the AI from switching destinations if the difference in perceived threats were small.

Example: A fleet is headed toward point A because the AI perceives a threat there. Suddenly, the AI perceives another threat at point B, and must choose whether to send this fleet to that other threat. The AI could calculate the two threats, compute this difference, and compare it to a pre-determined threshold value (probably a percentage). If the difference is less than the threshold, threat B is considered not that much more serious than threat A, and the fleet's order stand. Above the threshold, and threat B is a much bigger threat than A, and the fleet is diverted.

As I am not a modder, I have no clue if this can be added only be editing AI files or if it will take a hardcode change, or what will happen with more than one fleet and more than two threats, but maybe someone can adapt (and expand on) my line of reasoning.

Quikngruvn

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"That which does not kill you will make you stronger." -- Nietzsche

[This message has been edited by Quikngruvn (edited 13 July 2001).]

Gimboid · #15 July 13th, 2001, 04:49 AM

Under the Empire Status -> Strategy -> Damage section in the game.

Does the 'Damage Percent Per Ship = 80% have anything todo with your ships not bothering with the severely damaged one sitting on the warppoint?
if its set to 100% do they completely destroy all targets?

DirectorTsaarx · #16 July 13th, 2001, 03:35 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Gimboid:
Under the Empire Status -> Strategy -> Damage section in the game.

Does the 'Damage Percent Per Ship = 80% have anything todo with your ships not bothering with the severely damaged one sitting on the warppoint?
if its set to 100% do they completely destroy all targets?

Well, this setting _shouldn't_ have any effect on whether a sector is considered an attack location. But it's certainly possible...

Alpha Kodiak · #17 July 13th, 2001, 05:26 PM

I tried an experiment Last night. I changed the "Maximum Systems to Defend at a Time" setting to 50 (well more than the number of systems the Rage have) and waited to see what would happen. And waited. And Waited. The only change was that the number of ships milling around the warp point slowly declined as more and more of them were sent off in different directions (presumably because the AI now had more perceived threats to defend against). But, after a good fifteen or twenty turns, there were still a dozen attack ships dancing around in front of the blocked warp point.

Perhaps Gimboid's idea has something to do with it. I'll have to do some more experimentation.

capnq · #18 July 14th, 2001, 06:32 AM

Far too often, I've had ships run away from a colony ship rather than attack it, because at some earlier point I had set the Do Not Attack flag for colony ships in Strategies, and forgot to change it before I ordered the attack. Did you check that setting?

------------------
Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Alpha Kodiak · #19 July 14th, 2001, 05:15 PM

Well nothing I could do in strategies seemed to do anything. Then, a battlecruiser returning for resupply came through the warp point from the other side, stumbled into the colonizer, and vaporized it. Once in combat, there was definitely no problem with not wanting to attack a colonizer.

Interestingly, after the blockage was gone and the ships were moving off to their assignments, the Rage became aggressive again. They even attacked a colonizer that was plodding through Rage space at a speed of one, that had been ignored for at least 20 turns. It seems like the AI was so concerned about whatever it was trying to send ships to on the other side of that warp point that it was ignoring everything else going on.

Bottom line to this is, it seems like it was ignoring the colonizer blocking the warp point because something else was more important, while it couldn't get to whatever that was because the colonizer was in the way. It's almost a form of the dreaded "Deadly embrace" in software design. Two routines each hold on to something the other needs, waiting for the other to finish.