Mods' impacts on AI Strategic Behaviours (Research Orders/Build Preferences, etc.)

from Sins Forums

Hello,

I am a new player of rebellion, and recently uploaded the mod "Trivial Options".  I have noticed something about modding and AI.

It seems modding can potential "breaks" the original per-faction AI and make it fall back to some kind of generic AI.  I stumbled on this by accident: When testing my mods (which removes some research items from player entity files), by pitching AIs vs AIs, I noticed each AIs skipped certain ship prototype researches for a very long time.  I did not realize it is the vanilla behaviour and thought my mod had broken something.  So I went further and removes the production items and titanInfo from player entity as well, and it became much "better", in that the AIs builds more variety of ships earlier and being more active (more, larger battles raging around the map).  Then I eventually realized this "better" AI is NOT the vanilla behaviour.

Apparently some changes, such as removing the titanInfo, make the game not to realize it is a original faction, and uses a very generic AI profile.  Comparisons:

Original per-faction AIs:
- It researches various weapon upgrades, and upgrades that are specific to that faction, at the cost of delaying ship protoypes researches.
- It is more likely to research non-combat researches.

Generic AI:
- It tends to research ship/structure prototypes much earlier, and consistently fields heavy cruisers and utility ships earlier.
- It also aggressively researches diplomacy items, and fleet size when it reaches limits.
- For civil researches, it does the essential ones, such as ice/volcanic exploration, wormhole, and unlocks trade posts and refineries.
- For other items, the generic AI only researches very sparingly.
- It is not selective of what ships it builds, and the fleet composes of all types of available ships including command ships and repair ships.

As a result, the generic AI spends much less time and resources on researches, general expanding the fleet at a faster rate than the per-faction AI, and the fleet are more varied.  When I pitches the two types of AIs to each other (large/single star/3 AIs vs 3 AIs), the generic AI tend to and dominate the war with heavier and larger fleet.  It seems to me that the generic AI might actually be more fun for SP game (!).

In reflection, the per-faction AI might be too keen to bottleneck itself by spending so much time and resources on weapons and long-term upgrades too early, instead of fleeting up.  Their long-term civil researches might pay off in a long game, but in my test they did not seem to have time for that.  Afterall, for an upgrade to be worthwhile you first need to have the scale (eg. a 5% dps upgrade would not worth the cost of a ship until you have more than 20 ships).

What is your experience with AI-tweaking?  Is there more information out there?

Cheers,

(Note: If you wants to see the generic AI, you could try XATHOS's mod at the bottom of https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/427353 .  It is exactly the same as mine after I removed production items and titanInfo; I did not notice until today).

modding
4,091 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

you need to lead curtain researches. I notice in diplomacy that the AI goes for SB upgrades to early for my liking so if the ai wants armour on the sb it needs to research armour on the combat tree 1st, same with SB shields. So if it goes for titan research to early, force it to research other ships 1st using prerequisites. 

AI will always prioritize structures and ships (somewhat randomly) 1st and yes the Dip research is sorta borked, why research envoys in a 1vs1 match?

 

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Interesting insights. Will have to pay attention to that when working on Distant Stars.

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

This thread will be of interest to you. By making offPage copies of existing frigates, and putting every research item in a long chain of research prereqs with those being on the offPage ships, you can get the AI to eventually research everything in the game. I've found there is a way to get the AI to build more capital ships, explained in decent detail in the aforementioned thread.