Monster AI

[dogscoff]

Such a long time ago... I remember a game with 24 planets, with names starting
A-Z. I think there was colour coded rings and things on the map to tell you what was happening in that place.

I think the ships went something like

Scout
Escort
Missileship
cruiser
dreadnought
Railgun

Or something like that. The combat system knocked out the smallest ships first, except the railguns, which hit the bigger ships first.

I don't know, I'm probably confusing three different games here. I'll fire up my 'miggy tonight and see which ones I still have installed (most of them probably, I haven't changed the contents of my amiga's HD in years.)

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"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"I think so Brain but, if you replace the P with an O, my name would be Oinky, wouldn't it?"

[capnq]

quote:

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The combat system knocked out the smallest ships first, except the railguns, which hit the bigger ships first.

---

Wow, does that bring back memories. A quick rummage through my Amiga floppies confirms that the game with that combat resolution system was Conquest. I'm pretty sure I have the color Lore of Conquest Version, but both of my Amiga 500s are down right now until I have time to cannibalize parts from one to fix the other, so I can't double-check.

Before the current breakdown, I still fired up the Amy to play old games while this system was tied up with long downloads, virus scans, or defrags.

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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"

[dogscoff]

Hehe -yeah, my 1200 is still in full wrking order. In fact I still plan to upgrade it into a comptitive system - you'd be amazed what you can do to them these days, if you're prepared to pay more than the equivalent PC upgrade.

It's currently mounted in a full 9 bay tower, but when I get some serious cash I plan to start bringing it up to speed. If I can get the cash, thre's no reason I couldn't get a high-end voodoo video/3D card in there, a high end RISC PowerPC CPU (like they use in macs), PCI cards and SCSI storage, lots and lots of memory... a system like that would give any PC on the market a run for it's money.

Amiga's website will give you an idea of what's possible these days.

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"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"I think so Brain but, if you replace the P with an O, my name would be Oinky, wouldn't it?"

For my Version of Conquest - that was 24 SYSTEMS A-Z and up to 24 FLEETS a-z all color coded. I forget what code I used except that enemy systems and fleets dispatched to enemy systems were in red. Each system had up to 9 planets and each planet start size varied from 10 to 90. But as I said I changed it so that investing part of the production not only built factories, but also increased the planet capacity and the current population. IIRC the most I ever got before wiping out the AI was cap and pop 2700 from one that started as a 90. There were only 4 ship types - Transport (T), Scout (S), Cruiser (C), and Battleship (B). There were 48 commands (A-Z and a-z), but again I forget what they were. The map shared space with the system list of planets in the left hand window, so you could have one or the other but not both. The right side was a seperate window that had the ship list or whatever you were looking at. It was all very primitive text stuff with no graphics. The AI was pitiful by today's standards but I thought that the 5000 or so lines of C code for each of colony management and ship dispatch was hot stuff back then....

The Galactic Zoo game was another concept and would have been graphics. The system map was a 255 by 255 by 255 sized cube with 64 'planets' scattered through the volume. Each of 16 races got 4 of the planets as a starting seed. You could also build an outpost at any location in the volume which was the same as a planet except that it could not refine fuels (there were 8), grow food, mine minerals, had no sun, and its population had to have energy units delivered or go into stasis. The energy units had to be charged up by solar sats deployed at a planet and delivered as cargo along with food, population, and more colony units to increase the population capacity of the outpost. Mostly outPosts did research, which gave income to be spent on buying stuff from the zookeepers.

There were standard hulls from size 7 to 255 hull units. You could put various engines, power plant, armor, cargo, long range and short range defenses, and LR/SR weapons on a hull. Each race was allowed 255 different ship designs and IIRC I gave about 144 standard designs that could be bought from the zookeepers. They ranged from the Insect class Tiny series hulls up to the Whale class Gargantuan series, thus the name "zoo". There was no limit on how many facilities could be put on a planet or modules on an outpost except that you could not have more than 65535 of any one thing at any one place.

I had the economics, outpost planting and ship/cargo management fully developed at 24000 lines of C. I decided to get an opinion before writing that much again to do battle and battle strategy. As I said the guys looked at all the data about planets or outPosts or the empire that was available. After about 20 minutes they said it was all too complicated and looked too much like work for anybody to want to PLAY it. Like an idiot I BELIEVED them. Now look at these third and fourth generation 4x games and laugh at all of us fools who PLAY something that ****LOOKS TOO MUCH LIKE WORK****......


Edit :
I had no tech tree, all tech was known to buy anything, research just generated income. But so far as I know I was the VERY FIRST to build a 4x carrier. A medium class hull could carry up to 7 tiny hull and a Whale class could carry up to 7 mediums, with nested carriers allowed. I was also the first to make a Kamikazi, which was just a hull outfitted with engines and fuel that would pour all of its fuel into the engines at once and cause an enormous explosion, bigger than the broadside of a Whale size battleship.

[This message has been edited by LCC (edited 01 August 2001).]