Hehe, still here? And BSG? What is that?

Nice seeing you.

Tobias

Testing is going well, found and corrected many minor and several major bugs. Will send a commit shortly.

Edit: I am my own worst enemy...

Vorlon and Shadow corvettes are dangerous to large frigates and capital ships but are generally overwhelmed by Younger race corvettes due to the superior firing arcs of those ships.

I'm still tweaking but can state the following:

Shadow Assassin = 5 log points (down from 6)

Shadow Assault Scout = 15 log points

Vorlon Heavy Drone = 7 log points (I'm still playing with this as the results are very inconsistent thus far). Edit: Decided on 8 log points for the Vorlon Heavy Drone, but 8.5 is closer to the truth.

Bug hunting also continues.

Thanks to Cybertx who behind the scenes is doing good work chasing down and verifying the existence and nature of various bugs which has thus far proven very helpful in correcting and documenting the issues in the latest internal build.

TobiWahn,

EA Victory hangs when ~80% complete even when all prerequisites and resources are available. I've tweaked a lot of the variables to no obvious effect. An EA Victory can be spawned but it won't finish building via the titan factory. I've no idea what is causing this.

Edit: Gah, this engine might just yet drive me to drink. Issue resolved.

Good Job at testing! We really should do a FFA with eachother

Meanwhile, latest work on Shadows, a cruiser (flagship/scout controller/envoy?) and a small but armored one (corvette). I'm wondering about Shadow orbital structures but perhaps first continue with boxed models.

Might be worth keeping an eye on this.

Buff Builder ...

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/455984/page/1/#3479109

Also still intriguing read.

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/451274/page/5/#replies

boshimi336,

Thanks the site has changed since I first read it. We have definitely seen this behavior in the AI and is a source of endless frustration:

 Once a titan is in a build list, it is hardcoded to have a higher priority than even capital ships, so gathering enough resources for it usually is not a problem for the AI.

Since SotYR titans are all late game and are high resource, (this is esp true for the Vorlon and Shadow) this has the effect of paralyzing the AI. Since the other constraint is 3 cap of level 3 and fleet sizes in SotYR tend to be more capital ship intensive than SoaSE it only compounds the AI difficulty.

I've tried adjusting the tech path to force AI behavior but the AI can research out of order which renders this an impractical approach. I've considered sprinkling modifierType "TitanConstructionCap" across many more techs but as we recently discovered modifierType "TitanConstructionCap" is a bit different in how it is addressed by BaseValue and PerLevelValue the would make such an effort for each race rather a lot of work.

While titan use by the Younger races is generally not an issue, Elder race titans are game changing OP. On a big enough map it may not matter unless capital victory is enabled but for medium to smaller maps... It is an unpleasant catch-22.

TobiWahn,

It may be worth tweaking the game constant files. The problem I foresee are Younger race fleets are generally much larger than Elder race fleets.

I'd love to, perhaps once the next build is up as it fixes a lot of issues. Since there are still open tickets there are issues yet to resolve but stability is improving. One comment I have is MP game pacing is still a bit slow. I addressed last summer and it is much improved but pacing still needs more work, so keep good notes.

The larger model is creepy, but role doesn't immediately spring to mind, I'll defer to what you and TobiWahn come up with. The smaller model doesn't really strike me as all that Shadow like. I always think spiders when seeing a shadow ship, perhaps viewing a bunch of different spider pictures may inspire? https://www.google.it/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1333&bih=627&q=spiders&oq=spiders&gs_l=img.3..0l10.1399.4320.0.6536.10.6.2.2.2.0.204.675.4j1j1.6.0....0...1ac.1.48.img..0.10.708.SXlz2jkcrBE

 Edit: Crabs are also good inspiration for Shadow ships: https://www.google.it/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1333&bih=627&q=spiders&oq=spiders&gs_l=img.3..0l10.1399.4320.0.6536.10.6.2.2.2.0.204.675.4j1j1.6.0....0...1ac.1.48.img..0.10.708.SXlz2jkcrBE#hl=en&q=crabs&tbm=isch

If aiUseTime is set to Always on the explore ability, the scout ships will waddle back and forth between trying to scout a gravity well and trying to assist an allied fleet; though this is still no solution, it is better than nothing, and there is little modders can ultimately do to fix the scout grouping bug.

This is precisely why I created the Shadow Assault Scout. Shadow Scouts while dangerous can not be counted on to be useful as combat ships. This was proving detrimental to the Shadow faction as the Scout is the only ship available to the Shadow in the early game. Shadow Assault Scout at level 1 tech seems to sufficiently mitigate this.

Due to set-in-stone ideal resource allocations and the fact that only Credit spending is kept track of, the AI will prefer ships and structures that cost less credits but more metal and/or crystals over those that cost more credits.

This observation will force me to do some additional work on ship resource costs. And also explains some AI spending behavior. A lower credit cost ship (disregarding any additional costs required to overcome metal and crystal deficiencies) will be prioritized. That means that those more useful ships should have a lower credit cost in comparison with other ships. I already feel the headache resulting from this balancing effort. At least I already have large spreadsheets built to help with this.

I might as well involve this in the previously discussed MP pacing effort. I'll use an ideal credit to resource exchange rate disregarding the spread that will actually applied at any given moment in time during game progression. All of this will of course wait till we've chased down and fixed all the minidump bugs.

Delnar-Ersike said: EDIT #2: Some missionTypes are more equal than others. If you redirect certain missions to certain other missions, the AI will bug out and not know what to do. A nasty side effect is that its mission queue keeps growing, meaning you'll get ungodly lag within a few minutes of gameplay.

Hmmmmm, I have not directly made changes to mission offerings however I've also never checked that changes I've made have impacted the mission queue. Cybertx for those games were you noticed extreme lag could you check the mission queue and see if it might be the culprit of what you're observing. I personally think we have one or more abilities that are largely to blame (since I;m not seeing it and I'm running a really altered build at the moment) but it is a possible source I have not pursued before.

Hael-sose,

I particularly like these:

Aggression written all over it, note thicker legs.

Does this one even need more explanation? I'm thinking orbital station here...

Legs are folded under with lots of bend points.

TobiWahn,

Sent you a large commit.

TobiWahn,

Since the AI prioritizes the titan and will research anything required to get it. I'll look into spreading the TitanConstructionCap across the key techs for each race. This will significantly increase the chance that those key techs will be researched and will increase the chance that precursor techs will also be researched. I'll need to prove the required route with some testing but I think this may help quite a lot.

Edit: The AI also seems to favor the frigate with planet bombing...hmmmmm.

Yeah i checked that. The lag that i was experiencing was due to something with the centauri, the issue with the missions is that if you request something like send an envoy from the vorlons or shadows, it will take them forever to achieve it(it gets on the queue) since both the vorlons and shadows tend to try to get the titan first(Good luck with that, it takes forever to build it)  by consequence they don't build civilian labs until they get 8 military labs.

They(Vorlons, Shadows and Minbari) don't expand as fast as the other races, I think that's due to the AI, the AI always try to colonize the asteroids first(even if it has an ice planet next to it) by consequence they can't since they haven't done any civilian research.

It is definitely the AI. Both have partial labs in their capital ships with minimal research effort. I've also been thinking about the quest for the titan the AI goes on. If I can sprinkle enough techs with TitanConstructionCap I think I can force the AI to research all of the many key techs I want the AI to research. Not sure I can force it to pursue all the prereq techs as well but it should help. I won't begin that effort till the latest commit is uploaded and we can check to see what bugs survived.

Edit: TobiWahn and I found a new hitch a few days ago when addressing the Victory issue. Research with TitanConstructionCap must be in a sequential chain. Doing what I plan will take a lot of head work and testing...what a new pain.

I still need to do the planet research for each race. EA is correct and I redid the Vorlon but I haven't made required changes in the other races tech tree. Some races are ok but others do need work.

TobiWahn,

Was doing some AI testing and noticed the Narn were not making use of the black market. Does BlackMarketBuyPriceAdjustment simply alter prices on the black market or does it allow access to the black market? If it does not allow access then we need another ResearchFloatModifier.

Darvroth,

BlackMarketBuyPriceAdjustment should only adjust the price, not allow access.  Of the default races, TEC is the only one with a research containing that and yet the others are able to access it just fine.

To note something for you on talking about spreading the Titan research out to get the AI to research other subjects as well, the AI should prioritize all ship/structure unlocks and, subsequently, any prereqs for those.

The AI seems to take the following in priority order:

First capital ship

Titan

Remaining capital ship (any will do)

Access to a bombing frigate

Any other tech path that unlocks a ship

Any other tech that unlocks a structure (planet or starbase)

Any other tech that leads to an ability unlock

Any remaining tech

If a tech has a negative or 0 priority the AI will never select it.

Conversing with Delnar_Ersike the AI will also place the Capital ship constructor on the top of its build queue to the detriment of other activities. This would in part explain why Vorlon, Shadow and Minbari AI shutdown so frequently. If the AI gets lucky and hits on the combination to build the capital ship constructor then game on. Also, the AI will act wonky until it can build it's first capital ship. The following link has been quite insightful: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/451274/page/5/#3479524

TobiWahn, based on what I'm learning we are going to have to redo the Vorlon, Shadow and Minbari early tech a little bit to correct recently identified AI priorities.

It's legs are too wide apart, but with a little tweak I've gotten something like this, which actually looks nice hanging in space ingame:

So how about having the game scenario such that each capital planet starts with a capital ship factory?

TobiWahn,

Can you peak in the constant files and see if we may have inadvertently left something off? I didn't see anything in the race files that would help.

I agree! Edit: That it looks nice and Shadow like.

Yes, well access if not a free fabrication facility but we also have to rework the tech tree to remove the capital ship fabrication facility and clean up the tech pathing from that removal.