Save Our SOTS2 - A Fan Made Patch

[BlueInstinct]

OK, so i just took the AI slot to see whats going on.
First of all, their economy management is spot on, they even have over 900K in trade income (i have barely 300K) and they dont waste money on stimulus, nor do they waste production on unfilled docks, very good! They do have more docks than frighters and could do with a tiny bit more stimulus but thats peanuts really!

As suspected they have problems surveying and gating. They have only 3 gate fleets, 2 of them show strange behavior as the return from a gate mission, but have aparently not deployed the gate upon arrival! (screenshots below). They also tend to send survey missions before gating missions.

Their design and prototyping is also abit strange as they aparently delete designs very quickly after prototyping it. I have spotted 4 different DN designs are built, but non of them is still available as design (already deleted) the design screen only shows a new not yet prototyped design.
Same is true for cruisers.

Screenshots:
2 Gate fleets return but planet is not yet gated,



another gate fleet is on the way to the same target



Survey fleet is on the way before gate has arrived



Only 1 not prototyped Design


2 different DN designs in this system



They could have easylie sent gates everywhere by now but they have not reached over the middle of the map yet



Conclusion: Surveying and gating is their main issue, they actually have no more gate fleets at this moment even though they can easylie afford tons.
Given that they started with 6 systems, they have expanded very slowely due to this issue

hope that sheds some light on things.

Cheers and as always: much much apreciated, you are a code magican and iam curiouse if you can work your magic on these issues aswell

[willdieh]

Thanks for that feedback! I had seen similar behavior as well with the gating problem. It's probably my fault as I introduced something somewhere when I was playing with the mission system. I'll try and debug it / track it down.

As for the gate fleets... yeah, so this is tied to the fleet_templates.xml file. Right now I have it set for 4 gate fleets (the vanilla game had 2 I think? Maybe 3?). The AI is tied very closely to the template system when it comes to building fleets. It uses the template weights and counts to know how many fleets to build during each type of stance. I can up it more, and that actually sounds like a good idea anyway, but it might throw off the balance of building other fleets keeping in mind that each gate fleet is filled to max with COMBAT ships so it's not super cheap. If this were a non-AI player, they'd be smacked hard with the fleet maintenance for having so many gate fleets. AI's only advantage (unless given more by setting difficulty higher than Normal) is that they don't pay fleet maintenance so they can afford to spam fleets like that.

Thanks for the feedback though! I'll get to work. In the future, if you could avoid giving examples from Vanilla, it'd help me keep your reports straight. I tend to get confused when you throw in specific behavior from Vanilla and worry that you're still seeing it in SOS Patch

Thanks!

[BlueInstinct]

The vanilla AI had similar problems with expanding especially as they did also use survey fleets without gating the system before hand so it might not be entirely on you!
OK, i will avoid references to vanilla behavior from now on, promise! i just felt there is an overlapping issue at hand

As for the templates, i think they need more than 4 gate fleets in general, even though, if used corectly, on maps like this, 4 should be enough really.
The economy is not the problem, and i dont think anyone should use the AI without setting it to very hard. Allthough, if you manage to iron out this last issues, we might actually have to tune it down a notch Cant belive iam saying this

any ideas on the designs?

cheers

[willdieh]

Ship Designs... I think the best I can say about it is "don't worry about it"... at least until you see an AI faction in debt. Even then, they'll stop producing fleets until they're in the black again.

But here's the logic in case you wish to provide some feed back...

The AI will design a ship for every combination of weapon role and ship type. For example, one design for Armor Brawler and one for Armor Planet_Attack. Sometimes the designs end up being almost the same (usually one will have missiles the other cannons of some kind, but as technology progresses planetary damage by cannons exceeds that by missiles), so you'll see what seem to be multiple designs for the same ship.

Now, the AI should only BUILD a design if called for by a template. Most of the combat templates are Armor Brawler but the Invasion template is Planet_Attack and the Survey fleets are Carrier_Drone. Some templates have Boarding, Gate, or Scavenger in them as well. Prototyping should only occur the first time a fleet is built using a template calling for a new design which in turn is based on template weights.

The AI will attempt to RE-design a combination of some weapon role and some ship type almost every turn. If the RE-design has different weapons, engine, options (eg, armor), or class (CR, DN, LV), a new design is created.
Old designs are retired as obsolete if an upgrade in engine technology or ship class is made. Old designs are also retired if a new design is created and the old design had the same weapon role and ship class (this allows alternative command and mission sections to be used for the new design without keeping tons of old designs around). I played with keeping the old designs around until they matched both the weapon role, ship class, and the mission section but this still resulted in way too many old designs lying around.

Since new designs are rejected until a new engine, weapon, or class is included in the design the effect on the AIs economy is minimal as new designs don't happen unless the AI selects the new technology as better than whatever was in the previous design (which, for example in ballistics favoring races, won't happen just because fusion cannons are researched because ballistics are still scored higher to the AI and so ballistics continue to be used in the design [until very powerful energy weapons are researched]).

Hope that helps... I'll double check the multiple design thing though on a standard game without any AI bonuses just to make sure there isn't a negative impact on AI economy.

[BlueInstinct]

What you are saying makes perfect sense and i cant add anything to that, it just seemed wired that the AI didnt have a buildable design in the DN class.
But not having enough ships certainly wasnt the issue here

one more thing i noticed was that the AI didnt fill out all of its 66 CP, it kept the fleets at 54, it lookes like it ignored the gaind 12 points. That could be a small issue.

[willdieh]

Hmmm, interesting. I'll look at the CPs too... I know the AI checks for gate compliance when building a fleet but that shouldn't be an issue unless all your gates are gone and you're trying to jump a fleet of LVs.
The AI also lets some wiggle room exist in a fleet before trying to re-fill it. In Gate fleets, one of the two gates in the fleet can be gone and it will still run another gate mission before heading back to get more gateships.

Can you clarify by what you meant about not having a DN design to build? I assume they had the DN tech (as you mentioned they had DN fleets), so they must have had a DN design at some point. Is it possible they just upgraded to Antimatter and new engines were available causing the old designs to be marked as obsolete?

At any rate, I'll do an AI session as Hiver tonight some time.

[BlueInstinct]

Can you clarify by what you meant about not having a DN design to build? I assume they had the DN tech (as you mentioned they had DN fleets), so they must have had a DN design at some point. Is it possible they just upgraded to Antimatter and new engines were available causing the old designs to be marked as obsolete?

At any rate, I'll do an AI session as Hiver tonight some time.

i was referring to a not yet prototyped design as shown in my screenshot. As in, they did have a design, but they still needet to prototype it and they deleted the old ones (at leas 4 from what i can tell)
the old designs have been drone carriers, while the new one is an armor. I was wondering why they would not keep the drone carrier design arround

[willdieh]

Okay, so yeah, there are still some issues with AI building.

The biggest issue, particularly noticeable on the small two player maps, is the lack of Admirals. You only get 1 admiral per planet and Hivers really struggle against an early agressor that steals all their non-homeworld planets. Without any free admirals, the AI (and a real player) cannot create any new fleets. I'm playing with a few ideas such as creating free Admirals for all the initial fleets rather than using existing admirals from the three planets you start with. This would apply to both AI and standard players. I'm not sure how much of an unfair advantage that might turn out to be, but if it applies to all players, perhaps it's no big deal. Alternatively, I can work on the AI logic to expand the initial starting fleets to full sized fleets like a real player would. Problem with that is they're based on a smallish sized template with only a few ships and no FILLs so any solution would be pretty hackish.

Next were some bugs that I found with template scoring. The stanceWeight values weren't being considered, only the minToMaintain counts per stance. So for example the DEFAULT_GATE fleet, with already starts with 2 fleets would always be behind other templates that had no fleets built yet regardless of the stanceWeight I added to it. I'm working on some solutions to that problem, but balance is tricky.

I've changed the logic that was deleting old designs to only delete if Mission section, class, and weapon role match. This leaves more older designs around but I think this is better over all. It will introduce more variety as the AI will keep designs with the same purpose but different Command sections so you might see Shields, Torpedoes, Absorbers, etc. rather than the one design that wins out in the design logic and nothing else.

Hiver (and others I presume) still doesn't respond well defensively, so I need to implement some logic for that. Ships should be relocating defensively when inbound fleets are detected, but I'm not seeing it... Would also be nice to have some logic for Intercept missions, but they're a bit tricky as you have to weigh which fleet(s) will intercept.

There's a bit of work involved with this next set of fixes, so I'm not sure when I'll be able to post a new release, but hopefully soon.
Cheers!

[BlueInstinct]

Hi, thanx for the dev update.

I can see how admirals are a problem for the AI, so i think increasing them for all players might not be a bad solution for now.
This mod aims to improve the AI and if this does in fact improve it, its a good choice imo.

I like the changes you are doing to have the AI keep some older designs arround, sounds solid.

Have you figured out yet, why the hivers would sent a gate mission but not actually deploy the gat at arrival? how is that even possible in the first place i was wondering

iam looking foward to the new build.

as always, much apreciated

[Starknight]

Hi, thanx for the dev update.

I can see how admirals are a problem for the AI, so i think increasing them for all players might not be a bad solution for now.
This mod aims to improve the AI and if this does in fact improve it, its a good choice imo.

I like the changes you are doing to have the AI keep some older designs arround, sounds solid.

Have you figured out yet, why the hivers would sent a gate mission but not actually deploy the gat at arrival? how is that even possible in the first place i was wondering

iam looking foward to the new build.

as always, much apreciated

Hmm. Gate fleets that are interrupted by combat and lose either the gate or the command ship will cause an aborted mission, without the gate being deployed, but other than that it should deploy if they were actually on a gate mission. It's also possible that they aren't replacing their gates, but they shouldn't be able to be dispatched on a gate mission without a gate-ship.

As for survey missions, even in vanilla the HIver AI does this. I dunno why, slowboating a survey fleet seems to be a bad idea. When I play, I combine my gate and survey fleets into gate/survey fleets - slowboat out, gate the system, do a survey, come back and get a new gate-ship.

[willdieh]

Have you figured out yet, why the hivers would sent a gate mission but not actually deploy the gat at arrival? how is that even possible in the first place i was wondering

I'm working on it... It's a supply problem near as I can tell. When a gate mission doesn't have enough supply to reach the target system it will cancel the mission. It's tricky. Originally I had too few supply in the Hiver fleet templates (I dropped them from 2 to 1 since they have good supply to begin with) but even reverting back to 2 is giving me supply problems with largish fleets. Two things should probably happen to fix this... better mission control (mission should not wait until it reaches target to return, and shouldn't launch to begin with) and better ship designs (need some camels?). I already have supply ships default to camel modules, so I'll have to dig into module logic again.

As for survey missions, even in vanilla the HIver AI does this. I dunno why, slowboating a survey fleet seems to be a bad idea. When I play, I combine my gate and survey fleets into gate/survey fleets - slowboat out, gate the system, do a survey, come back and get a new gate-ship.

I too noticed the Hiver AI uses separate survey fleets after a system is gated to survey. I might try and consolidate the survey and gate missions. I think Loa do this already, but not sure.

[BlueInstinct]

Hey Willdieh, i think you are right about the supply issue, as shown in my screeshots documenting the problem, the supply (on the returning fleets) is outlined in red color,
So they might actually ran out of supply. I just wonder how you can even order a mission thats not going to work.
Anyways, this suggest that i could get trid of that problem by increasing hivers general supply by using the supply modifier in the Strat modifiers. Ofc thats a rather hackish solution as you would put it, but it would serve me fine

from my MP experience, i remember putting on alot of Camel modules at the start. I think this would generally help all of the AI races, as the supply mechanic is a big factor when it comes to early expansion. And early expansion is very important as we all know.
So i think focusing on Camels could go a long way.

cheers

[Starknight]

Have you figured out yet, why the hivers would sent a gate mission but not actually deploy the gat at arrival? how is that even possible in the first place i was wondering

I'm working on it... It's a supply problem near as I can tell. When a gate mission doesn't have enough supply to reach the target system it will cancel the mission. It's tricky. Originally I had too few supply in the Hiver fleet templates (I dropped them from 2 to 1 since they have good supply to begin with) but even reverting back to 2 is giving me supply problems with largish fleets. Two things should probably happen to fix this... better mission control (mission should not wait until it reaches target to return, and shouldn't launch to begin with) and better ship designs (need some camels?). I already have supply ships default to camel modules, so I'll have to dig into module logic again.

Sounds about right. Even though Hivers have very good supply ratings, the early game - and Hiver affinity for ballistics - isn't friendly to large fleets. Anything with decent combat ability has high supply requirements, which drags the fleet average down. I generally have 2 or even 3 supply ships in my gate/survey fleets, depending upon distances - SotSverse is a pain in the historical spot, and so is crossing between clusters on some other maps.

As for survey missions, even in vanilla the HIver AI does this. I dunno why, slowboating a survey fleet seems to be a bad idea. When I play, I combine my gate and survey fleets into gate/survey fleets - slowboat out, gate the system, do a survey, come back and get a new gate-ship.

I too noticed the Hiver AI uses separate survey fleets after a system is gated to survey. I might try and consolidate the survey and gate missions. I think Loa do this already, but not sure.

I know that at one point, the idea of having a way to chain missions - or even just making a 'gate and survey' mission - was considered, but I don't know if any work on that ever made it into the game. It seems such an obvious and natural extension - gates are holy objects to most Hivers. Sending them out without a proper escort doesn't feel right - and since they're already there, the escort ships might as well survey the system before gating back. At least, that's the way I see it.

[willdieh]

New build released...!

Hivers are now at 3 supply ships for Gate and Invasion fleets. I tried to fiddle with supply modules, but Supply ships are already maxed out on Camel modules, Gate ships [cruiser] don't support them, STAND_OFF Command ships already have them, and I can't justify putting them on all COMBATs.
The three supply ships will help early game and become less and less necessary as time goes on, but not much else I can do. 2 Supply work for like 90% of system distances, but it's map specific. See fleet_templates.xml if you want to change it up.

AI fleet building budgets have been modified considerably. Previously the AI would only build non-defensive combat fleets once a high amount of savings was available (something like 4,000,000 I think). Now it will begin building all fleets (starting with mandatory defense fleets for each colony) as long as it has at least 500,000. This means the AI (at "Normal" difficulty) will be cash poor and even go into debt slightly early game. It also means research will be very low during this time. However, a significant improvement in fleet responsiveness should seen and once the AI gets going, their research will stabilize at normal. AI stops building new fleets if funds are <500,000 so long-term debt shouldn't be an issue. Overall, I have seen much more efficient spending under these conditions.

AI fleet template logic has also been updated. It now respects stanceWeight whereas before it would build at least one of all non-combat templated fleet types ignoring stanceWeight. StanceWeight now means something (and Hiver DEFAULT_GATE fleets are weighted very high!) and higher weighted fleets will build up before lower weighted fleets. The formula is something like (#avail / minReq'd * stanceWeight). As more fleets of a particular fleet are built, the stanceWeight is reduced, allowing other fleets to eventually be built but also allowing strong fleet preferences.

Also fixed a crash bug with Loa fleet maintenance logic. Hope somebody can try Loa out or at least play against them as an enemy. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Some minor tweaking in section_preferences.csv to set defense station preferences more towards monitor, torpedo, and heavy missile and to the mission section preferences. Finally, added another chance for AI to research Heavy Combat Laser in order to open up better mission sections by adding "EMPIRE" to the tech attributes. Some tech tree balancing needs to be done I think. Eg, how important is it for AI to research political stuff??

Defense response still sucks. Beyond the solitary defense fleets built at each colony, I'm not seeing any fleet relocation to meet incoming enemies, so I still want to work on that. Also I really want to dig into the combat simulator. The old-fashioned one (like SOTS1) still exists and is available to AI for non-player battles. If I can get it balanced out, it might be a nice substitute for the time-intensive fully simulated "auto resolve" option we currently have.

Let me know how things look!

[Slashman]

I will try this out and I will play the Loa for you!

I hope they aren't overpowered!