Bingeling
Posts: 5186
Joined: 8/12/2010 Status: offline
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In my AAR game, I have explorers, constructors, research, and design automated. It is easy to see the failures of the exploration AI. In addition to being slow in general, they get stuck at "impossible" systems. There is a main pirate base in the system? Tag it down for "later", there is no need to die over and over again to investigate every rock in the asteroid field. The same in independent systems crawling with pirates. The human player knows that those systems are camped by pirates, the AI should know that too. There is no need going there for neither fuel nor exploration. The construction ship AI is decent but stubborn. It looks for specific things of not massive rarities so hard it can move 7 sectors away to place a mine. No sane human player would do that, unless maybe at the territory of an ally that can control its borders well. I am not so down on the design AI. It follows patterns set in templates. Having some minimalist of things like carriers would do not harm, but it is not the biggest deal in the world. Research is a headache to watch. It is much improved in ignoring the "wrong" weapons, but there is so much left. The trivial thing: You only need 1 kind of shields (or blasters) until the next tier is up for grabs. The main fault of the AI in research though, is the failure to understand the importance of build size early on. And the total lack of relating things to each other. For instance, you will never need hyper deny until you can actually build a ship that will equip it. In the AAR I sit with 2 hyper deny techs, and 300 build size. It can't even put out a decent destroyer, and will according to the template I watch only put them on capital ships (dhayut). It has carriers researched, but the AI has no chance to put fighter bays on anything but bases. It is of course a challenge to make a good research AI without making it extremely scripted. Some randomness is good. But even if you do a good research pathing there are options when it comes to the exact research order. I bug reported it wanting to build carriers without fighter bays, that one is obvious. It is mainly a fault of the designer though, the design should not exist. I find the AI decent, and I have fun games. But that is mostly because I allow the AI to rule in areas where it does mess up a lot. It holds my empire back alongside my enemies.
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