[cybersol]

Ok, the great rocks-paper-scissors strategy article by Stone Mill got me thinking about a way to improve the ai. I still think a scripting type language would be the most flexible solution for the ai, but I also realize that parsing and compilers are not everyone's specialty!

The idea is to give the AI rocks-papers-scissors capability. I think it could be implemented relatively easily even in the SEIV scheme of things.

First, for each ship type, say "Light Attack Ship", in designcreation the hard code keeps stats (over the most recent 20 turns for example) on the total damage done by each weapon family to that ship type. At redesign time note the weapon to do the most damage.

Then under weapons family pick for that type in designcreation you use some special family like -1 or something to indicate that ship type uses rock-paper-scissor capability. If it does, then that same ship type will be found in a rock-paper-scissors.txt file. In this file you first list the ship type then family pairs. For example, 2->6 for point defense to counter capital ship missles. If the first majority (or secondary) weapon family is the special one then it looks into the rocks-paper-scissors file with the most damaging weapon family number (say 2 CSM in this case) to find the counter weapon family number (6 point defense here). Then it uses that counter weapon family as the majority (or secondary) weapon type for this redesign period.

The changes required would be to keep the statistics and parse the extra rocks-papers-scissors file (and the fun error checking between the two files). All in all, not too hard to implement, but it would greatly increases the ability of the ai to respond dynamically to situations.

Also, it would still be fully moddable!