Dogthinkers wrote on Wed, 26 July 2006 04:28

I really like the idea of having a single AI start with 12+ HW. Or maybe have 2 AI (one AR, one HE) start with 6 each, although then there's the risk they would fight each other If you placed one in the east and one in the west, with the humans in the middle, there wouldn't be too much danger of that though... I definately prefer the 'One Monster AI, Multiple HWs' idea, with 'Sandwiched Between Two Massive Beasts' (game title?) coming in second. If you decide to do it this way, then I'm definately up for playing. An effectively 12x accelerated AI should be a nasty threat - we'd be out resourced and out teched for a long time, I think.

I rather like that sandwich idea too, but the problem I see in this are the ARs. As I understood from some posts on modding, I think it's not possible to change values for the AR. but I could be wrong. On the other hand, their starting res. will be far lower than the HE's... I guess they will develop their colonize rather slowly, I personally never saw AR AI move population around... So defending against that one in the early years should be easier, though no tec gain due to popdrop
Therefor I'd say as these both are the only alternatives, let's go for your sandwich set up, but with 2 HE's...
As this will split their allocated resources into two as compared to my crazy idea
What about granting them still some improvents on their HWs?
- max factories (buying turns for AI)
- max mines (buying turns for AI)
- max defense (fits with "origin" idea, see below)
- max surface minerals (buying turns for AI)
- max mineral concentration (mid/end game viability for AI)

These improvents could be split up to different HWs, like one HW got the surface minerals, another one the factories...
Or only applying these changes to a restricted number of HWs, as only on one, which then is supposed to be their origin. This could also become some kind of winning condition, like killing of the two (unknown or known?) origins and/or a defined number of AI HWs.

Crappicus: Is this still to your liking, or did I overdo it, thus ruining it for you? I'd be sorry if that's the case. But as it's your game, you'll have to decide on the setup, so

Looking forward to this one

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Crappicus wrote on Wed, 26 July 2006 17:48

No way, this sounds insanely, retardedly fun and difficult, and if someone can finagle the game files to do this, I'm all in!

Hhhhmmmm, what about this for a qwik testbed of what it would be like?

* Huge/dense univ.
* You, one Expert HE AI, one Expert AR AI.
* No Random Events, and Max Minerals.
* You tweak your own race to have LSP, ARM & OBRM, and inefficient mines. So the AIs get a lot of HWs, and you get next to one.
* Force-gen the 1st 20 or 50 turns and see if your HW has survived.
* Have fun conquering 800 strongholds!

No special modding required, AFAIK. Even if you're not exactly in the middle of the action, both AIs should still devote enough of their skirmishers to you as to make it *almost* worth fighting against.

PS: Perhaps I should be trying it myself, too.

[Updated on: Wed, 26 July 2006 12:55]

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hiunmaiden wrote on Tue, 25 July 2006 17:41

I didnt even know you could merge several races into one giant computer race that pools all the resources, ships, research etc together!

Hhmm. Not exactly, not. One giant AI would definitely have fleet & minefield caps, shipdesign cap, and only one research path active at once.

Which might explain why actually playing against too few AIs in a big galaxy to try 'n give 'em more strength could instead result in fewer total (and not necessarily bigger) AI fleets challenging the human player(s).

So, perhaps a better bet would be playing against at least 4 expert AIs, restarting the testbed until they got each one corner of the map with the human(s) in the middle.

By the way, does anyone know what bits to tweak to actually *force* the AIs to ally?

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m.a@stars wrote on Thu, 27 July 2006 03:13

Hhmm. Not exactly, not. One giant AI would definitely have fleet & minefield caps, shipdesign cap, and only one research path active at once. Which might explain why actually playing against too few AIs in a big galaxy to try 'n give 'em more strength could instead result in fewer total (and not necessarily bigger) AI fleets challenging the human player(s).

Hmm, good point. Just two AIs could suffer badly from fleet caps. With this in mind I agree that game should be played against four AIs instead of two. We could either have each AI starting with 3 homeworlds thanks to hst tweaks; or +maxmins, +LSP, +OBRM, halved mine efficiency (i.e. pay points for twice the eff you actually get,) and a 20 year force gen. The second choice is slightly easier to set up as we wouldn't need one of the HST file experts to do any modding for us. I was planning to take AR though, which is precluded by that method (no way to reduce the mining eff for AR, although perhaps OBRM is crippling enough.)

BTW, there seems to be about twice as many people interested in this laugh as there is room for... I don't think the concept is suited for over three people, but if six signed up there's no reason two games couldn't be started.

[Updated on: Sun, 30 July 2006 21:46]

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