Some notes from my current tests.

• Terran Templates aren't working very well, not enough weapons and too much wasted space.
• 5% hullmass on destroyers is too small to effectively place anything, leaving lots of empty space.
• If the AI used spread fire reliably all the time, I wouldn't stand a chance. Changing the weights again to see if that helps.
• Possibly the others could be used, but not until late game.
• What do you think about having mono- or dual- defences only on destroyers?
• Any ideas about how/when the AI uses the -1 weights? Many of the designs that use fighters/bombers aren't getting the fighters and bombers, possibly because the weight is used up earlier. 30 tons for a fighter is really rough to budget on a destroyer.
• Checking the AI templates, I see 5+ Scout Design variants and a large portion of fleet designs are made of scouts. I wonder if we need to do so something about them. Incidentally, the Scout AIFleet weight is 0.0 compared to 0.3 for most (all?) others. Even though the devs said it was deprecated, I wonder if something from that is sneaking through.
• Siege concentrations are fine with just 2 ship types.
• The Harmony AI and I are throwing 6 CP worth of ships for the last 50 turns (started at turn 30). I'm barely making headway, but only because he doesn't use Spread Fire. The 200/200/200 defence 0/0/300 offence cruiser is a brutal design to fight against. Thank goodness it is a bit expensive for the AI. The Craver AI is walking all over the UE, which suggests that the UE designs aren't working, the Cravers are better, or the AI plays with the strengths of the Cravers more easily. The UE is wallowing in fleet debt due to having tons of ships on planets and not engaging in fights. Didn't they remove the AI's requirement to pay fleet upkeep?
• Missiles are having a hard time hitting opponents. Against the 200^3 monster, you need 12 LRMs to hit with any, and only in the Long Range Phase. It is essentially immune to LRMs in the other phases.
• Higher level bombers/fighters use multiple special slots whereas early ones use only one. That may cause problems with the hard weighting creating illegal ships.
  
  

I think you guys are doing a really good job with this. I have read the whole thread but by the time that I had done this you had already done all the races.



DarkMeph

I'm trying to figure out how ship templates are used. I've designed some ships that should provide evidence for these mechanisms.

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Ends up with a 110/110 (perfect fill) ship. with 1 Long Range Missile Rank 2 (14), 1 Long Range Missile Rank 1 (12), 1 Flak Module Rank 2 (6), 1 Power (22), 1 Engine (6), 1 Scout (30), and 1 Bomber (20). This is impossible for players to make in Disharmony, but legalish. We only get the first type of Special Module and only 1, which bodes well for more complicated designs at higher tech levels that use different numbers of special module slots per module. I have no idea how the weight is proportioned out. We should have equal numbers of each, instead we have 3 LRMs and 1 Flak. It is possible it added 1 LRM, 1 Flak, and then filled in the rest with something that would fit. However, in many other cases (undocumented), ships are left with large amounts of empty space.

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Creates a 110/110 weight ship. With 2 Kinetic Long Range Rank 2 (10*2=24), 1 Deflector Rank 2 (10=10), 2 Long Range Beams (12*2=24), 2 Shields Rank 2 (8*2=16), 2 Long Range Missile Rank 2 (14*1=14), 3 Flak Rank 2 (6*3=18), and 1 Kinetic Long Range Rank 1 (8*1=8). Again, this ship is impossible for a player to make due to the presence of 2 different ranks of a single weapon type, but legalish.

We should be seeing 100/6 = 18 tons per module type. Curiously, the weapons are taking more weight and the defenses less weight, even though the defenses were higher in the ship template. Perhaps weapons are placed on the ship first?

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Virtually the same design as the previous ship, I just reversed the ordering of the Weapon and Defense modules. I'm abbreviating module names now to make this easier.

We end up with a 108/110 (pretty close) weight ship. It has 2 LRK2 (20), 2 D2 (20), 1 LRB2 (12), 3 S2 (24), 1 LRM2 (14), and 3 F2 (18).

A legal design. I would have expected there to be 2 S2 (16) which is only 2 short of the 18 alloted weight. Instead it went with 3 (24 weight), which is 6 more. Perhaps the Shield was placed first? Or when backfilling the ship after the initial allocation, shield defenses had had priority. Suggests, perhaps, that items at the bottom of the list have priority over items at the top?



Some conclusions

• In some cases I was having problems where allocating sum weights greater than 1 was giving me empty space on the ship. Here we have evidence that this is not always the case.
• Special Module Slots are allocated while adhering to ship limits.
• Hard weighted modules (-x) have priority. But sometimes they don't appear at all, even when the modules are available. Perhaps a typo in the template?
• hard weighted modules are filled from top to bottom.
  
  

I think that the changes I made should infact realize just that: Use spread-fire almost always unless you encounter really well defended ships.

I put your changes in. I'll see how it works.

*Update* I tried them. They didn't spread fire against glass cannons reliably.



What do you think about having mono- or dual- defences only on destroyers?

Well, not very much. Omni-weapon-designs would kill them easily. I really don't think of destroyers as ships that should wield much defenses at all. Reason being their bad hull-weakness makes it very inefficient.



True. However, just a little bit of defense helps the Kinetics to last that extra round which is important for kinetics. Spreading out to 3 defenses covers all your bases, but I'm not sure its enough to make a defense. Going with the dual-defenses may be enough to help 2/3 times. Going with mono-defense would be safer, but only 1/3.



I think that's because you violated the scout-design suggestion. The AI maybe identifies the scouts by their default-loadout which is Engine+Sensor+Nothing.

Your scouts were stuffed with weapons in addition to that so that maybe changed it. At least I cannot remember scout-spam from other races.

The ships from ShipDesigns.xml also show up. The events seem to use those templates too.



Didn't they remove the AI's requirement to pay fleet upkeep?

No, fleet-upkeep has been the bane of the AI throughout vanilla and only got better due to the improvements to FIDS/pop in Disharmony.



That's unfortunate. However, out of the immediate scope of the current issue.



Missiles are having a hard time hitting opponents. Against the 200^3 monster, you need 12 LRMs to hit with any, and only in the Long Range Phase. It is essentially immune to LRMs in the other phases.

That's what I found aswell. Not only can missiles not swap targets, no they also have a high chance to not even hit.

I think it is more that Flak is stronger than it would seem. I've some thoughts, but need to test them.

After quite some time I revisted ES while showing it to a friend.

I used the Ship-Designs-Mod for this and saw that in the early-game the altered designs worked pretty well.



The medium-sized hulls of the AI, however weren't as good as I thought. He designed his medium-sized hulls similar to the small ones with almost no defenses and mostly weapons and could destroy most AI-ships in Long-Range-Phase.



This apparently means that for medium-sized hulls a smiliar approach to the small-sized ships is very applicable.



One thing that worked well against that was Fire-and-Forget-Carriers that were in company of at least one tanky ship. The Fighters and Bombers dealt massive amounts of damage while their ships were long gone.



He eventually lost. An interesting sight was, that the AI-invasions always used invasion-troops to insta-invade, since this mod used those on their designs.



I now think the best approach would be:



All small and medium-Ships should be cheap glass-cannon-like long-ranged-weapon-wielders, which also utilize bombers when researched.

Large ships should have a lot of defenses and fighters but very little weapons. This would probably be the best approach for the AI that tends to mix its ships anyways. Some ships with more standing-power allow the bombers of the other ships to unfold their full potential.



Invasion-Ships should only be the smallest design and always contain invasion-troop-pods to speed up invasion.



I would also say that the AI probably never should use the +25/+50-tonnage modules. The increase of ship-efficiency simply is not worth the increase in ship-cost, since most ships become like 70% more expensive.



The AI is actually pretty good with swarming tactics and having many cheap ships would help them more than a few very strong ones.

The lack of A.I troop invasions is a big flaw in vanilla.

Well, it is the way it was in vanilla and back then I never considered it to be a flaw.



I actually liked the simplicity of fleet-management back then.

Sorry I ment no invasions in vanilla disharmony.

It's not exactly "no invasions". It is just so rare because there's like only 1 out of a total of 12 or so invasion-ship-templates use them. The AI is capable of performing the invasion but can't because their ships are can not.

thuvian wrote:
Retreat Rules

AI Fleet Design

• I tried out a experimental game with the start of my modified Harmony Fleet Designs. I never had a chance.
  
  

Not really sure if you mean what I think you mean.

So you modified the AI-Harmony-Ship-templates and then played against them and got owned by your creation?

If that's the case, then that's exactly the thing that I had in mind to happen with this. Improving one of the AI's weaknesses to make the game harder.

What was the difficulty-level you used for it?



Could you please post an example of your Templates so I can compare them with my changes to see if I go in the right direction?

Found out the first one myself:



Works like that:

Hahaha, yea if you don't know, I definitely don't know

I've done it for 2 races but it gets really tedious. I also don't want to simply copy&paste since parts of the designs also consider special-race-boni.

Is someone else in the mood of doing this for the greater good. I'm pretty sure this could be one of the things we could convince Meedoc to include in a patch, if it makes the AI better.



In my opinion it's one of the greatest weaknesses of the AI right now: They lose all those battles they should have won or drawn because their ship-designs are so terrible.



If not, I'll make some work-schedule for that and do 1-2 races each day from now on. ^^



Update: 4/10 done

Can you post up an example of what you've done? I can take a swing at the Harmony if you haven't filled it out yet.

Sure, I'll make the fifth race now and then post some of it...



I've filled out up to Hissho now. Harmony being before Hissho in alphabetic order.



Here's an example:



Before:

















After:



















Often you'll find Repair-Mods on Small ships. I always replace them with Power-Mods.



In case you don't know yet how those templates work:



Negative numbers behind a module mean: Put exactly this number on the ship.



Example:





This means: Always put 2 Fighters on (of course only if you have researched them)



Positive numbers mean: Distribute the remaining space like: this number/all positive numbers



Example:











This means from the remaining space take:

0.15/(0.15+0.25+0.35+0.4)=13% for least usefull defense-module

0.25/(0.15+0.25+0.35+0.4)=22% for medium usefull defense-module

0.35/(0.15+0.25+0.35+0.4)=30% for most usefull defense-module

0.4/(0.15+0.25+0.35+0.4)=35% for most usefull weapon-module



Of course it won't always fit perfectly but it'll try to get as close as possible.



For weapons you can add this:

Weight="0.8"/>



to force long-ranged. Which is what I did for all small ships but not for Medium and Large ones since they usually are not glass-cannons and thus can take quite a beating.

• Did you figure out how exactly "FleetWeight" works?
• Does the AI refit using money?
• How does the AI calculate defense and offense usefulness?
• Do the AIs always use the base Races?
• What are you using as the AI targetting plan? What can I do to convince you (and Meedoc) to make it spreadfire 100%?
• How does ShipDesign.xml fit into things? Is it just another list of ships? I noticed the AI was building them.
  
  

I think that ModuleSupportInvasion strength is being miscalculated by the AI. More precisely, from SupportModule.xml:











I was looking at the ships for a late game Endless Craver AI. I'm no longer impressed with my ability to match him him militarily.

FleetWeight is not used at the moment. It's a deprecated property...

Yep, the AI refit with money as the player. But the difficulty grant some bonus on the refit cost.

We compare the effectiveness of the weapon/defense during the several last battle. We try to find some weak point in the enemy defense and try to counter his weapon with appropriate defense. So if you use a lot a missile, the ai will try to use a lot of anti missile.

We compute the long/medium/short range stuff by the following rule (define in the registry.xml around line 434):

-> Long is good against short, average against long, weak against medium. (best weapon = missile, average = laser, weak = kinetic)

-> Medium is good against long, average against medium, weak against short. (best weapon = laser, average = missile, weak = kinetic)

-> short is good against medium, average against short, weak against long. (best weapon = kinetic, average = laser, weak = missile)



I will let Meedoc answer about targetting plan ^^.

Thanks for the information!

Two more if I may?

• Is there a way to dictate ship construction type composition? The original thought was FleetWeight, but since that is deprecated, what took its place?
• Currently, defense fleets get filled up with siege ships. Is there a way to modify which ships get put into which types of fleets (Commando/Defense/Etc)?
  
  

Nope, currently, we use a "Random" to choose the ship. And I agree that we should use something else...

Odd... normally, siege ships are not used by the "military" part... I define the ship utility by comparing the Military power to the invasion power. If the invasion power is greater than 0.5f (not sure if it 0.5 or 0.8) then I don't use it as military...

Did you have a save with can describe this odd behavior?

Perhaps the siege fleet was just "gathering" on the system when you attack it... so it was not a "defense" but an "attack" which has been intercepted...