Ail wrote:
I took the PlanetInfrastructure.xml, changed EnoughPop to 0.7*MaxSystemPopulation but instead allowed to continue building food on planet-types that get a bonus of at least 66% to food-production. Also I once again prohibited food-exploits at all for the Sowers. It once was this way. Then we figured it hurts them when they can't make food-improvements. But somehow Meedoc must've also allowed them to make food-exploits. Which makes no sense.

Hum... Can you explain what the food exploit is all about? Also, what is the purpose of the other changes, i'm not sure what they are supposed to do...

The way to test it will be doing a save at turn 0, and run it one time with the changes and one time without and at the end compare FIDS of the lone AI, that is going to be in. Random events will be off, of course.

I'm sure there will be some difference, but we will see how much. I'm sure though that an AI that start producing FIDS sooner must get some edge on another that focus a lot on food production. It might be useful to keep food production around even after the pop is high enough (like to fill those colonizers), but seem like a waste if there is more than 1 such colony in a given system...

The purpose is that Planets with a food-bonus continue to make food as long as the system isn't full yet.



But about the test. I remembered/rediscovered something really disturbing. Hitting Enter ASAP drastically differs in result from going slowly about it and waiting ten seconds each turn.

The AI doesn't execute all commands, including colonization when you end the turn too quickly! So when you are slower to do that, the AI will colonize much more.



So the test-scenario is pretty useless and I will restart with time-control and auto-end-turn to get reasonable results.



Also I had forgotten a bracket anyways (this caused them to always keep making food on some systems).

Amoeba, Endless Difficulty, Fast, after 50 turns



Hitting Enter asap for the first 35 turns or so:

Fids: 4233

Pop: 104



Waiting 10 seconds for each turn right from the beginning:

Fids: 39361

Pop: 555



"Slight" difference, hu?

Well, if that's interesting.

I'm trying to merge FairFight with AggressiveAI, but there seems to be.. substantial conflicts (which now make a lot more sense, i'd say). Ail, you tried that?



By the way, i'd suggest to try to keep the mod specialized, and not to dive into "General-purpose \ quality-of-life" stuff.

If (and that's a big if) i manage to expunge all non-combat related changes from your mod, would you mind me doing a modmod with the sole change of having nearly all weapons of a specific tree requiring a specific resource?

If you have problems with merging, I might give you some hints:



Take everything from "Fair Fight" and then just copy



Simulation/Term.xml

and the stuff inside of the

AI-folder into it. (there are no conflicts there)



All the other files are not really important for the purpose of making the AI aggressive.

They are mostly cosmetical (coloured anomalies) or minor tweaks. (e.g. colony-ship starting with an engine)

Aureon wrote:
Well, if that's interesting.

By the way, i'd suggest to try to keep the mod specialized, and not to dive into "General-purpose \ quality-of-life" stuff.

If (and that's a big if) i manage to expunge all non-combat related changes from your mod, would you mind me doing a modmod with the sole change of having nearly all weapons of a specific tree requiring a specific resource?

Yeah, initially i made this mod for combat only, but soon realized other things affected combat, like how well the AI could build and use it's fleets... Thus came the changes to industry, AI and stuff (i admit, i did go all over the place, some of the things i added were not really related to combat, like colored anomalies). I don't mind if you want to take parts of my mod for your own purposes, go ahead and use what you feel is useful.

Ail wrote:
Amoeba, Endless Difficulty, Fast, after 50 turns



Hitting Enter asap for the first 35 turns or so:

Fids: 4233

Pop: 104



Waiting 10 seconds for each turn right from the beginning:

Fids: 39361

Pop: 555



"Slight" difference, hu?

Ouch, that's bad (never noticed the problem since i rarely rush turns). Maybe they should impose a delay before we can hit next turn so the AI (and governors) can do their job.

The governors are not the problem here. It's the execution of orders for their ships. So while they build up all their systems that they already have, they won't colonize any new ones, won't scout, won't attack.

This could be exploited if you are going for one of the peacefull victories and just need the time for it to finish.

Lay some heavy stuff on the Enter-key and the AI cannot attack you cause it won't move their ships.

Ok, i'm asking who are playing my mod some feedback: did i get the weapon balance right? Are any of the weapon too good, or too hard to defend against? Like my recent changes to the missiles, are the flaks too inefficient at blocking missiles?



Well, i'm asking because in my current test, i realized i could not slap just a few flaks and hope most of the missiles would go down; that mean i actually need to redesign my ships if i want to block missiles effectively. Now, how much flaks are needed, i haven't fully tested. For sure, armor got a lot more useful because of this, as well as cards that improve defense. But still, is it too much?

It seems much better than original, but it's kind of hard to test against AI.

If you want to MP test it, i'd be up for it anytime.



Any of you tried to write a combat simulator?

I get a crash when I try to launch the mod from inside the game. Not sure why. It looks like it's trying to boot up the mod separately, but then it crashes.



Edit: Nevermind: I verified integrety of local game cache in steam options for ES and that fixed it.

The Cruiser tooltip seems to have an error. One of the entries says "+20% (Health/"plus" symbol) ON %SupportModuleCompoundTitle"

Aureon wrote:
It seems much better than original, but it's kind of hard to test against AI.

If you want to MP test it, i'd be up for it anytime.

Yeah, an MP test would be nice, just need to find the time to do it. But i believe the AI does a lot better combat wise than the stock one, especially with the tweak to ship designs and combat cards choice (the AI counter my cards half the time :P).

of you tried to write a combat simulator?

Who knows, 4x tend to attract all kind of people, surely some of them did.

Bridger wrote:
The Cruiser tooltip seems to have an error. One of the entries says "+20% (Health/"plus" symbol) ON %SupportModuleCompoundTitle"

Yeah, i forgot about that one... I need to write some text for the +20% health on Armor modules. Not sure, might rethink that one, not sure if it works.



Edit: Seem that bonus not only don't show up properly, but doesn't work as well. Will change it for next version.

The AI does kick butt, or at least the Cravers do... They are twice as strong as the others in my current game, and everyone beat outclass my empire... Either i play really bad this game, or i did something right (playing on normal btw). For sure i have quite a few back and forth with the cravers, but i lose ships each time and last battle i lost a whole fleet... Need to build a bigger, better fleet ASAP...

Foraven wrote:
Who knows, 4x tend to attract all kind of people, surely some of them did.

I meant one of the ES engine, for combat testing purposes. The info about combat mechanics we have seems to be pretty conclusive. (I guess a console in-game would suffice, but still)



Btw, i think i've got a bug for you: second-to-best missile tech has a damage range of 300-1000, vastly outscaling the best missile tech, which has 500-620.

Yeah, in the normal game they have the same values but the difference is: The second best missile has 0% Crit-Chance while the best has 25% Crit. In the mod both have crit.

Aureon wrote:
Btw, i think i've got a bug for you: second-to-best missile tech has a damage range of 300-1000, vastly outscaling the best missile tech, which has 500-620.

Yeah, i never really checked the stats, i assumed (wrongly) each new missile was better than the next. But i should have known the devs love to throw weird numbers around, forcing us to compare weapons and modules to see if they are actually better for our purpose. Sadly, when we auto upgrade our ships, all that subtility is thrown out of the window. I will check both lasers and missiles to make sure the progression is clear...



Edit: Yup, there was a few issues. I will work on that and release a new version soon, probably tomorrow.



Edit2: If there is any other issue, please tell me so i can fix them too.

Okay, merge completed.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/783175/FairFight.rar , if anyone cares - it also includes Thaix's anomaly mod.

Gotta say, you both did an incredible work.

I really hope Amplitude can swiftly pick up the slack, tweak what's needed, and reach this level of playability.

I'm still not completely sure about weapon balance, it really begs for further testing (was Barrier modified at all? Destroyerspam is still pretty efficient i'd say, although beams aren't what they used to be)

. I may write the combat sim, after all.





HOW DID TWO PIRATE FLEETS OF 17/17 SPAWN WITHIN MY BORDERS AT TURN 50 OH I'M GONNA DIE

Ahem.

The files that modify the pirate behaviour are? PirateDifficulty i suppose?

Darn, there are many oddities that i left behind. Like the armor cost and weight; vanilla values are wild, this make difficult to know if the armor piece is worth it's price and weight. Since i have streamlined the armors, i now streamlined their cost and weight so it makes sense (and avoid the AI filling it's designs with useless armor pieces).