Dynamic AI

[Jay2Jay]

So after thinking about how I am going to change T to be better for a few hours, and after making dozens of unique items and then doing them over and over again, I realized what T was missing. Its not graphics, its not ship variety, its not item diversity, its not anything like that. Its the AI. The generic T battles are all the same, very straightforward and painfully boring. So this is my idea, a simple variety for the AI in ships so that they don't all do a suicide run with emphasis on the suicide.

The only problem is that I have no idea how to do this and lack both the motivation and knowledge to do this.
So now I must ask you, the members of Trans for this one simple thing, motivation.
The main thing I like about a community is feedback about my ideas, even if the feedback is "your idea blows" or "sounds good", and lets face it, you guys suck at feedback. I am not talking minor floor-cleaning vacuum suck, I am talking industrial strength, overpowered, alien tech infused, mother of all vacuum cleaners kinda suck. The kinda suck that comes from a singularity with a mass of 2 Universes. If you want me to make stuff then I need responses, please, I beg you. Comment.....

Note: I do not mean Fourfire, Digdug, RPC, PM, Refu-I mean Pixelfck, Sungslaver, etc that are actuvely in the community, but if I got one comment from each of you, it would make my Millennium.

[RPC]

There's only one real source for motivation and that's yourself. Everything else fades away.

[FourFire]

Note: I do not mean Fourfire, Digdug, RPC, PM, Refu-I mean Pixelfck, Sungslaver, etc that are actuvely in the community, but if I got one comment from each of you, it would make my Millennium.

I find it funny that you immediately exclude me from your list of people who can help, but anyway I agree a variant of AI would make the game much more interesting.

for a start: frigtates, crusiers and worldship class ships fighting from a disctance: near the edge of their weapon range.
the default AI is much suited for the majority of ships ingame: the fighters, gunships, pewpew classes but this causes the rest to be effectively crippled tactically.

Another thing is missile ships/gunships supporting eachother: many factions would gain up to an order of magnitude in player combat effectiveness if two or more ships of different types flew and fought in concert: a long range missile ship provinding covering fire for a shorter ranged gunship, gunships shooting down anything trying to blow up a missle ship.
Gunships orbiting crusiers, and worldships providing cover fire for their fighters.

Having said this Wolfy (who seems to have dissapeared) has written a great deal of new AI behaviour for TX2/TXII and if you can, you should probably contact him about it, or look through the code of whatever beta of TSB/TheStarsBeyond (the new name for Transcendence X Two) you can find for download

Otherwise good luck, and I do hope you can make an AI upgrade mod work well, because if you do I'll use it all the time and make succession game with it and so on
(Note: RPC has made alternate shipclasses in his Dysys xml file "Vanilla Override" and I'd appreciate it if any overwirtes you do is compatible with this file)

[sun1404]

Vanilla capital ships do try to fight from afar, I believe. The problem is that they are much too slow to gain distance or close in. The player is the only one who can control the fighting range in a fight against a capital ship. What they need is some kind of distraction or hindrance to slow down the player. Maybe make the capital ships always spawn with many fighters (and by many I mean about as much as the Xenophobe Ark's fleet, or it would be simple to just skip past them and take the big fish first.) Make those fighters very weak, but with moderate weapons so that they become a threat if not destroyed quickly. Or maybe equip every capital ships with mine layers, with hard to see mines with low damage but great knockback. That way the player must either proceed slowly, or be blown back every two seconds. Also, the capship's weapons should have at least moderate knockback, that way it would be harder the player to just plough through the projectiles rain.

Another important thing for capships would be point defense, though that would be too much derailment from AI problems.

But if you talk about AI problems for every ship, I think there should be an AI for every types of weapon. One for howitzers, one for rapid-firing cannons, one for missile ships, one for area-effect bombs ship. Another factor would be shields. I think I have seen some supposed-to-be-frightening ships powerless because they try to run every time their shield falls below thirty percent, and they happen to spawn with low hp-fast regen shield.

[Jay2Jay]

Sorry fourfire, I should have made my intentions clear.

That post actually spawned from riding in a car doing nothing all day then staying up all night on a coffee high, so I was too focused on what I was trying to get out, than what was actually coming out. Excuse the rudeness and exclusion of you, that was to excluded you from the people that suck, not exclude you from the people that could help. You too sun, you are one of the perhaps ten people in this community that are awesome. I was talking specifically to the perhaps 50 lurkers that do nothing but stare at the posts and do nothing all day.

I plan to make some kind of WIP mod that showcases the advantages.

Also Fourfire, I will try to make it compatible with DynSys, mainly because it is a major mod in the community and is practically an essential mod.

EDIT: dang RPC, that's deep.... wonder why I didn't see your comment until later.....

[pixelfck]

I think your observation is correct, the AI is what keeps the game intersting, or turns it into a repetitive exercise. So it sounds like an interesting mod idea.

You can create (way) more complex AI behaviour with behavior classes (search the vanilla source for ' attributes="behaviorClass" '). Behavior classes can only be assigned when a ship is created, so unfortunately, you cannot apply the class retroactively.

[digdug]

Better AI is definitely something that would improve the game.

Currently ships have a few fighting behaviours (standOff, indiscriminate attack and so on) and they behave much better than pre1.0 versions of the game. Ships now try to escape and recharge their shields before attacking again, which was a major AI improvement when it came out. Ships now actively avoid enemy stations when travelling a system.

What I would like to see ? Customizable AIs. I would like to customize parameters like the distance at which the AI ship consider the player a menace, I would like to see defenders going towards a ship bombarding from a distance and engaging it, I would like to see AI ships forming gangs and asking for support if the adversary is too hard.

One last observation, Wolfy was working to make an AI library, he might add some more insight to this thread.

[sun1404]

Yes, yes. Fighters persueing ships sniping their capital ship would be great, but I think ships calling for reinforcements would be too hard, and could become endless, like in some old DySys version where one Dwarg colony would call about five behemoths when destroyed, and we'd have about twenty following us after we destroy one set of colonies