cyberj914

Maybe they've added a percentage chance to have tidal disruption lower the PQ of the planet. That would explain the disappearing tiles. Going to have to look next time I play.

I've come across the ethic situation where tiles were upgraded but didn't register as having used the soil enh building for instance. So when I took over the planet it looked as though the AI had built on a tile that it shouldn't have. This I'm pretty sure is known and been around for a while. This honestly sounds different to me and should be easy to replicate. If in fact the tidal disruptor which basically wipes the planet clean is removing those tile enh buildings too I can see th

Yep... I got this one after restarting a game with a tiny map. I decided I wanted a few more planets on the map so I restarted the game by clicking Options->Main Menu->New Game. I changed the planetary settings (stars, planets, habitable) from common to abundant. Everything else was the same as the previous game. Well when I started the new game it took me a turn or two to realize something is strange about my home system. It has 3 habitable planets instead of the usual 2. Also my home wor

Hmmm... I don't remember having the scout core ship either. This is with a custom race using Korath style for my ships. Also just for the heck of it I scanned the DarkAvatar\Data\ShipCfg directory and found a listing for Scout.shipcfg for everything from S0-S11. Curiously though S12 was missing all except for one definition: S12_SolarFox.shipcfg. Then S13 lists all the same as S0-S11. No idea if this is intended or not. Will have to pay attention to see if other race styles

My $0.02 1) Sure but I doubt they would. Also aren't those in an XML file? If they are you can mod them to fit however you feel they should work. 2) Are you talking about the planetary improvement that boosts ship HP in orbit? I don't know about you but I've built that in several games when I've got a world that is vital to protect. I think a set of planetary improvements that give planet based weapons for attack ala MOO2 would be cool. If you don't want to send ships out

Sounds about right to me. I've won games before without building a single combat ship by either a diplo or tech victory. The AI is designed to play the game. This means it treats the player just as another empire and not something special. Depending on their initial setups I've had games where the AI spent probably 80% or better of the game fighting amongst themselves. If they don't see you as a threat they don't bother with you. By making those early treaties with the Drengin you

You're welcome.

Cools... Well thank you both for your time in clearing this up and giving us players a glimpse at the under the hood fleet combat system. Much appreciated.

Ok, the military bonus is applied in its entirety to the first weapon of each type that fires. So in your first test, the first laser would roll 1-8 (1-1 +7 bonus), then all the rest would roll 1-1. If you'd had, say, 13 mass drivers on those ships as well, then the first mass driver to fire would also get a +7 bonus to its max roll. Gotcha. And

Well thx for clearing that up Kryo . I know those were extreme cases since once you've gotten better weapons it makes more sense to up your damage potential. But I wonder how well it works out More Guns vs. Better Max Damage. I guess the ideal is lots of guns doing lots of damage

Quite the opposite actually. Your test ships had 13 guns each, and never dealt less than 13 damage per round (final blow excepted). The only variance lay in the extra provided by your military bonus. I'm not entirely sure how that is applied on a per-weapon basis in the DA system, but I'll try to pin CodeCritter down on that. <br/

So I figured maybe the flaw in my test above was that I had multiple weapons on the ships. I went back and tried it again this time with only one weapon on the ships. Setup: Large Hull 1 Missile No Defense. I'm not going to list the combat rounds since the battles went to max. Now heres the confusing part. Same naming as above so AD had 58 HP and TD had 56 HP. In the first test TD won by 8 HP. What I'm confused about is that AD (who attacked) got 50 shots off w

Ok in another thread there is discussion about whether or not an attack roll is computed as 0-Max or 1-Max on a per weapon basis. Well I did a quick and easy test in game (so no outside confusion) and this is what I found. First the test setup: Large Hull with 136 Space. 13 Rail Gun V - 1 attack rating. No defense. I built two of these ships named one Attack Drone (AD) and the other Target Drone (TD). The target drone I gave to another empire just so I could attac

Well I dug around on the forums and this is the best post I could find that states attacks are zero to max. Reply #13. Its from March. So pretty much day one. Forum Link I know I've seen Kryo post about it as well but didn't feel like searching the 98 pages of replies to find the one post. Anywho... As for realism I seriously wonder how many of you arguing over *glancing* shots has ever actual

Maybe I misread something here but I think the OP premise is off. Attack rolls are zero - max just as defense rolls are zero - max. Its been this way since day one and I have seen posts from CariElf to verify this fact. The change in DA is that defenses now degrade during a round. Meaning that 20 point armor can be whittled down to 0 with enough attacking craft. This gives groups of smaller ships a chance against large capital ships. On the flip side having the game compute

There was a bug fixed a while ago in GCII that caused the AI to *know* something it shouldn't due to garbage in a variable. Not saying that is the case here but it is a possibility. There was also a very specific way to test the theory that I'm sure is still documented on the forums somewhere. I've seen the AI bypass a class 12 planet to colonize a class 6 and scratch my head wondering why. Later I spy on that class 6 and without fail it will have some special bonus tile like a 300%

I had never thought of the farm trick... that cheese definitely needs to be fixed. I don't think I've ever seen the AI build a planetary defense building. They do build the orbital defense one but not very often. Spies are still something I still don't take full advantage of in the game other then having a few around to nullify the occassional spy on a planet without the counter espionage building. Even then I really only bother to remove them if on a key building of a key pl

Nice AAR!... better then 90% of what is on Sci-Fi channel I tell ya Now back to the game... I've got some AI opponents that need to be shown the way

So... ummm... if I understand you correctly there is something bothering you with regards to the rally point cursor right? Seriuosly though I do agree with you. I also play exclusively in strategic mode but to be honest with you I zoom in when I place a rally point simply because it is unclear what the thing is pointing at when it covers a couple of squares. I'm sure there are still people th

Thx Kryo. I figured there would be some wait time involved but just couldn't tell if it actually did anything when I enabled it. I guess I'll pay attention to how long it takes for a few turns to cycle and then enable it to see the difference. Just didn't know if there was some under the hood check for dual core .

Interesting. Except for the one time I reported above I have yet to have the game crash on me again. I do play on the smaller maps typically Medium or Large. The game I had it crash I think was actually a Huge map. There very well could be some memory usage problem here that manifests itself sometimes with the save crash. Going to have to play a gigantic map and see if it happens as well. Off hand how many opponents are you using?

While reading the latest AAR I wondered something. If you select the *Use more CPU* option but don't have a dual core processor does it still work? For me personally I don't mind waiting a little longer between turns if it means that the AI will play a better game. Also does it work on difficulties below Tough (Intelligent)? Thx

I always enjoy these write ups. Gives us a glimpse into what goes on as the AI is tweaked. It really is nice to know that even after all this time the devs still enjoy this game as much as most of us do. I wonder if it would have still been that close had the Terrans actually put some defenses on their ships. The couple of battles that were termed as *close wins for Drengin* were won by the Drengin because of the shields. My next PC is definitely going to be dual core. <img

^^^ That is a possibility Starstriker so I'm not really too concerned at this stage. I've seen the AI not use planetary bonus tiles but to be honest I think some of that is on purpose. I know I've seen posts from Brad about the fact that the build AI is *good* not *perfect*. Yeah I agree with you Zippyriver in that I don't waste tiles on my premier production worlds with things that aren't one of a kind. So again that can certainly be understood here as well. Its the fact th

I noticed this is my most recent game with 2A. The difficulty was set to *Challenging* so not sure if that has anything to do with it or not. Anyway I came across a couple of different planets where the Arcean AI started to build a super project or galactic achievement on a planet that had nothing but a starport. One planet I took over by influence had a hyperion shrinker on it that was going to take over 300 turns to complete. Another had the economic capital on it with still 150 turns to g