Need design Creations help

[Emperor's Child]

Is there a way to force the design-creations ships to build an EXACT weapons mix for a given hull size? The mod I'm working on is intended to be played with all weapon technology available, but with artifical limits on "standardized" ship designs that all must use. My plan is to define each ship in the design creations section, but the problem is that it looks like you can't define the percentages in the primary and secondary weapons mix, nor does it allow you to define more than a "primary" or "secondary" batch of weapons. I have 9 basic weapons that are in combindation of up to 4 on any particular ship that I'd like to ensure are the same every time they are made. I'm not sure how to get the AI's Design creations file to do this. Can this be done?

Is there a way to pre-load the standard designs into the AI file and guarantee they will not be changed during game play?

[douglas]

You can't specify more batches of weapons as such, but if this is for a mod, you can use AI tags. Give every weapon in a particular set the same AI tag ability, and add those weapons to the designs by calling for the appropriate AI tag.

[Atrocities]

Have you read the design creation cheat sheet? I think Fyron has a copy of it on SE.net in the Mod works section.

[Fyron]

Emperor's Child said:[
Is there a way to pre-load the standard designs into the AI file and guarantee they will not be changed during game play?

You could create the empire files yourself, then create the designs manually for each race. Then, you can load each AI empire you want in your new game and set it to AI control. After you start the game, you can go in and disable the design minister for every AI empire. This will prevent the AI from making any new designs. However, it is not a practical idea for anything but high tech start games. Letting the AI rely on the design creation file is much easier, since you do not have to manually create a few hundred designs for each race...

You can set the AI tags mentioned by Douglas as must have abilities, which would prevent the AI from designing the ship unless it can add some weapons of each class to the design.

[Emperor's Child]

I'm in the stump the chump mode on finding an AI-tags description. My searches have come up with lots of references to "use AI TAGS", but I can't find something that actually describes how to do it. I didn't see it in the design creation cheat sheet, but my computer at the moment is toast and I had to read the word file in text mode. Nevertheless, doesn't appear to be there.

Where is the use of AI tags described?

[douglas]

AI tags are just a set of 20 meaningless abilities that were added in patch 1.91. They don't actually do anything, but the AI treats them exactly the same as any other ability. If you set up a design creation file to call for something with the ability "AI tag 1" (that might not be the exact ability name, look it up in ability.txt), it will work just the same as if you had called for, say, the quantum reactor ability. The AI would look for the best component it has the tech for and use that. For AI tags, "best" is defined in terms of the number of tech levels required to get the component. Listing the same tech area multiple times as a requirement for the component will have no in game effect, but will increase the AI's evaluation of how advanced the component is.

Note: While the above discussion mentions only components, AI tags are valid anywhere they might reasonably be used to aid AI decision making.

[Fyron]

The abilities are named "AI Tag 01", with leading 0s for the numbers below 10. Case is also very important, for all abilities. There are 20 possible AI Tags to use. Look in Abilities.txt to see all abilities that can be added to ships, components, facilities, planets, etc.

SEnet ModWorks provides a tutorial detailing how the AI chooses which component to add to a ship design or which facility to build (it is the same process):

http://www.spaceempires.net/home/ftopict-448.html

Incidentally, chapter 16 of SEIV Modding 101 provides a more detailed overview of all abilities, including which files they can be used in.

[Emperor's Child]

Thanks folks, that's been a great help!

[Atrocities]

Should note for the record that saved designs with EMP files are lost when used with mods.

[Fyron]

Actually, I think that may be a result of them using mounts. Any ship design that uses a mount will not be saved with the empire file, even in stock SEIV.