Great initiative Wanabe! And even better to hear you are interested in consolidating input from Shark7 and others!
There are some suggestions I've made on Base Designs and Policy Files in the Distant Worlds AI thread. Have you considered the changes not made by the Developers so far? Or are you waiting what happens with the next patch given Erik mentioned there maybe more changes coming?
Do you have a changelog for the template files? Very happy to comment and also test once consolidated with Shark7.
One of the limitations with the design is the lack of conditional logic. However, we could do some really nasty designs customised for a scenario, either to support a scenario developed by the community, and even the Ancient Galaxy Storyline.
[DWU] Ship design templates
RE: [DWU] Ship design templates
Thanks Icemania,
I pretty much just want the game to be as interesting and also challenging if possible. I'm quite positive that Shark7's designs should be better than what I've done so far as he is more experienced with the game and probably also more aware of how the AI decides to change your design when it can't fit or when it changes it based on personality.
Yes I saw some of your suggestions indeed and I had implemented a few of the ones I hadn't done yet. Others (like suggestions on raising docking amounts) I had already done for all the races and gas mines.
There is a pretty basic changelog which I included with the download and then I also have a file I use which is an absolute mess with the list of races, some vague description of their design changes and their personalities/policy settings for research. But otherwise no, I don't have an overly detailed changelog and a lot of my own personal notes are even out dated.
I'd agree that the lack of conditional logic is quite a downside to the design templates. It's difficult to balance for multiple stages of the game, and it's not currently possible to prioritize how the design keeps certain modules or dumps others when there's not enough space available
There are a few rules for the AI like it'll always drop off any spare armour modules when it is unable to fit your design template to try to fit other thigns on, it seems to do this for fighterbays sometimes and weapons sometimes aswell but I havn't quite worked out all the rules as they stand. I do agree designs setup for specific galaxy scenarios are very very possible as you can control a lot more in those scenario...scenarios (lol)
It has been increasingly tempting to look at the policy files aswell but I'm trying to just stick to the designs for now. I also do wonder if a policy has multiple of its "ResearchDesignTechFocus" values set to the same tree/value if it would super emphasize that tech line.
I pretty much just want the game to be as interesting and also challenging if possible. I'm quite positive that Shark7's designs should be better than what I've done so far as he is more experienced with the game and probably also more aware of how the AI decides to change your design when it can't fit or when it changes it based on personality.
Yes I saw some of your suggestions indeed and I had implemented a few of the ones I hadn't done yet. Others (like suggestions on raising docking amounts) I had already done for all the races and gas mines.
There is a pretty basic changelog which I included with the download and then I also have a file I use which is an absolute mess with the list of races, some vague description of their design changes and their personalities/policy settings for research. But otherwise no, I don't have an overly detailed changelog and a lot of my own personal notes are even out dated.
I'd agree that the lack of conditional logic is quite a downside to the design templates. It's difficult to balance for multiple stages of the game, and it's not currently possible to prioritize how the design keeps certain modules or dumps others when there's not enough space available
There are a few rules for the AI like it'll always drop off any spare armour modules when it is unable to fit your design template to try to fit other thigns on, it seems to do this for fighterbays sometimes and weapons sometimes aswell but I havn't quite worked out all the rules as they stand. I do agree designs setup for specific galaxy scenarios are very very possible as you can control a lot more in those scenario...scenarios (lol)
It has been increasingly tempting to look at the policy files aswell but I'm trying to just stick to the designs for now. I also do wonder if a policy has multiple of its "ResearchDesignTechFocus" values set to the same tree/value if it would super emphasize that tech line.
RE: [DWU] Ship design templates
Please keep developing it Wanabe!
I'll give it a crack after you update for the next patch as mods that improve the AI are always top of my list!
I'll give it a crack after you update for the next patch as mods that improve the AI are always top of my list!
RE: [DWU] Ship design templates
Hopefully this might help you on your journey [:)]
Having made a good 2000+ Optimized Designs I had to scrap them as Shadows moved the goal posts and relegated them in favor of the Design Templates.
I was a bit OMG at first but I applied the level 7 Optimized Designs theory on the new templates and other than the PreWarp being a little off as the design did not fit the size for some of the classes it seemed to work fairly well.
Start a custom game.
Choose the race you want the templates for.
Ramp the tech level to the highest possible, which is currently 7.
Go straight into the design screen and design each class of ship, state and private, to how you want them for that race, remember you are designing at the end level.
If you have a second monitor open each class.txt and note down what the design consists of like 10 engines, 5 thrusters etc, the designs will then scale down to the construction size and level during the game but is working from the best possible design so any designs made from it that have less components are only a diluted version.
If you haven't got a second monitor then just make a list of components out and print it out and laminate it so you can wipe clean or just print copies or photocopy the sheet.
Hope that helps, I am no expert, Haree78 is the dude for the theory as he made the ones for Shadows and tweaked them for Universe.
Darkspire
Having made a good 2000+ Optimized Designs I had to scrap them as Shadows moved the goal posts and relegated them in favor of the Design Templates.
I was a bit OMG at first but I applied the level 7 Optimized Designs theory on the new templates and other than the PreWarp being a little off as the design did not fit the size for some of the classes it seemed to work fairly well.
Start a custom game.
Choose the race you want the templates for.
Ramp the tech level to the highest possible, which is currently 7.
Go straight into the design screen and design each class of ship, state and private, to how you want them for that race, remember you are designing at the end level.
If you have a second monitor open each class.txt and note down what the design consists of like 10 engines, 5 thrusters etc, the designs will then scale down to the construction size and level during the game but is working from the best possible design so any designs made from it that have less components are only a diluted version.
If you haven't got a second monitor then just make a list of components out and print it out and laminate it so you can wipe clean or just print copies or photocopy the sheet.
Hope that helps, I am no expert, Haree78 is the dude for the theory as he made the ones for Shadows and tweaked them for Universe.
Darkspire
RE: [DWU] Ship design templates
@Icemania
Yeah I'm likely to keep churning along here and there depending on how inspired I feel at the time. Am definitely interested in feedback, at the very least confirmation that the designs are actually better rather than worse [;)].
@Darkspire
Well done on making the 2,000+ designs on the previous design system, that would have taken some serious amount of time.
So far my process is a combination of just altering values without checking if I am am at least a little sure it won't stop the AI from building it at certain stages of the game (I tend to check these eventually and tweak if needed). When I'm looking into it a bit more I"ve been starting the game for each race I'm editing several times in several different tech levels to make sure the design is buildable at certain levels as well (also making use of the ship designer, just gotta double check it uses the designs "properly" aswell). From what I can tell if the AI decides it can't ditch certain non-essentual modules it won't try to fit the ship and it'll just design it to be the same as the design template which is the primary reason for possible redundant game restarts to check. It's also useful to just play a new game after enough changes to the designs to take note of consistantly poor or consistantly strong factions but that's difficult due to all the many many factors involved in an empires success or failure.
An example for the AI not always reducing modules down to a size that can be fit. I could be a race with a current size of 500 and have a ship designed at size 650 or some other much higher size value. The AI decides it can't drop enough non-essentual modules to fit the ship into size 500 and so the ship stays at the designtemplate version at size 650. In that case sometimes dropping a single shield module changes the AI to deciding "I can now fit this within 500" so thus the ship is now 500 or slightly below even though I've just removed the one module. It seems a little inflexible in terms of dumping certain modules in favour of being able to fit some sort of skeleton version of the ship design. Design templates at the very least could use the additional ability to set priority values for varous modules so the AI can decide to ditch different modules based on your prioties rather than the current built in behaviour.
Thanks for the posts guys, appreciate it.
Yeah I'm likely to keep churning along here and there depending on how inspired I feel at the time. Am definitely interested in feedback, at the very least confirmation that the designs are actually better rather than worse [;)].
@Darkspire
Well done on making the 2,000+ designs on the previous design system, that would have taken some serious amount of time.
So far my process is a combination of just altering values without checking if I am am at least a little sure it won't stop the AI from building it at certain stages of the game (I tend to check these eventually and tweak if needed). When I'm looking into it a bit more I"ve been starting the game for each race I'm editing several times in several different tech levels to make sure the design is buildable at certain levels as well (also making use of the ship designer, just gotta double check it uses the designs "properly" aswell). From what I can tell if the AI decides it can't ditch certain non-essentual modules it won't try to fit the ship and it'll just design it to be the same as the design template which is the primary reason for possible redundant game restarts to check. It's also useful to just play a new game after enough changes to the designs to take note of consistantly poor or consistantly strong factions but that's difficult due to all the many many factors involved in an empires success or failure.
An example for the AI not always reducing modules down to a size that can be fit. I could be a race with a current size of 500 and have a ship designed at size 650 or some other much higher size value. The AI decides it can't drop enough non-essentual modules to fit the ship into size 500 and so the ship stays at the designtemplate version at size 650. In that case sometimes dropping a single shield module changes the AI to deciding "I can now fit this within 500" so thus the ship is now 500 or slightly below even though I've just removed the one module. It seems a little inflexible in terms of dumping certain modules in favour of being able to fit some sort of skeleton version of the ship design. Design templates at the very least could use the additional ability to set priority values for varous modules so the AI can decide to ditch different modules based on your prioties rather than the current built in behaviour.
Thanks for the posts guys, appreciate it.
RE: [DWU] Ship design templates
Thanks for putting the effort into this looking forward to trying out the better AI challenge!
RE: [DWU] Ship design templates
Thank you very much for working on this, all mods that help improve the AI will keep the game interesting.
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bugbear777
- Posts: 24
- Joined: Thu Jun 12, 2014 5:49 am
RE: [DWU] Ship design templates
Thanks a lot for your effort Wanabe [:)]
RE: [DWU] Ship design templates
Here's another version of the design templates I've got so far. I've also fiddled with the policies a little bit seeing as though this week the official patch was more about bug and crash fixes.
"Design Templates Version 7
Significantly reduced armour on gas and mining stations, went overboard on this on the first pass. Slightly increased their shields.
Slightly increased Zenox fire-power
Tweaked Dhayut warships
Tweaked defense bases
Resupply ships are now basically heavily armed mobile bases/capital ships
Reduced luxury miners from 3 to 2 on gas miners (how often are luxury resources on gas sources, in the base game?)
Tweaked Keskudon and Lipid warships"
"Policy Version 1
All races have construction as a tech emphasis where there was room to add it.
Ikkuro now also has Armour as a tech emphasis
Sluken and Lipid board ships if stronger
Keskudons always try to board ships
Population required to construct most facilities doubled
Increased population threshold for space ports (generally doubled)
Passive races have reduced tax rates on Medium colonies
Races with migration bonus and/or tourism bonus also reduce taxes for medium colonies
Race military ratios altered to generally favour larger ship types.
Races with military size bonuses favour larger ships more than smaller (set to values suggested by IceMania)
Caleph favour building more carriers compared to capitals"
"Design Templates Version 7
Significantly reduced armour on gas and mining stations, went overboard on this on the first pass. Slightly increased their shields.
Slightly increased Zenox fire-power
Tweaked Dhayut warships
Tweaked defense bases
Resupply ships are now basically heavily armed mobile bases/capital ships
Reduced luxury miners from 3 to 2 on gas miners (how often are luxury resources on gas sources, in the base game?)
Tweaked Keskudon and Lipid warships"
"Policy Version 1
All races have construction as a tech emphasis where there was room to add it.
Ikkuro now also has Armour as a tech emphasis
Sluken and Lipid board ships if stronger
Keskudons always try to board ships
Population required to construct most facilities doubled
Increased population threshold for space ports (generally doubled)
Passive races have reduced tax rates on Medium colonies
Races with migration bonus and/or tourism bonus also reduce taxes for medium colonies
Race military ratios altered to generally favour larger ship types.
Races with military size bonuses favour larger ships more than smaller (set to values suggested by IceMania)
Caleph favour building more carriers compared to capitals"
RE: [DWU] Ship design templates
This is probably for ice worlds, which can have tyderios gas and luxury resources on them.ORIGINAL: Wanabe
Reduced luxury miners from 3 to 2 on gas miners (how often are luxury resources on gas sources, in the base game?)
RE: [DWU] Ship design templates
ORIGINAL: Ardryn
This is probably for ice worlds, which can have tyderios gas and luxury resources on them.ORIGINAL: Wanabe
Reduced luxury miners from 3 to 2 on gas miners (how often are luxury resources on gas sources, in the base game?)
Aah yes of course. [;)]. I would of left them on anyway seeing as the maintenance cost is very small, but the size was my main concern. The AI has no concept of trying to make sure the gas mines and regular mines are functional at all times and can end up designing them in sizes it can't even build, which has the potential to absolutely destroy an economy, what a pain.
Cheers for the reply.
RE: [DWU] Ship design templates
I just wanted to say thanks to the modder and everyone who helped so far! It is a great addition 
Please continue your effort
Please continue your effort
RE: [DWU] Ship design templates
ORIGINAL: Tanaka
Ah well now these all have to be redesigned with the new patch crap...
Absolutely, the last two patches have changed the ruleset the AI uses for setting up their design templates quite a lot. I haven't had a good look at the new rules but they do look better than previous rules assuming the design templates are made with them in mind. It should now be possible to put reasonable amount of shield/speed/weapon modules on the designs even if they may not quite fit at the initial sizes you want the ships to be fit on, would absolutely take a bit of time to test it all once again though.
I can't recommend using these designs and at the moment I'm having a break from working on designs/fixing them up. They could probably become workable again if the armour counts are reduced significantly across the board as I used armour more as a "filler" item to get the AI to build bigger ship sizes on previous patch even if it wasn't exactly efficient
I've gone ahead and uploaded what I've done on the main download link. I did begin to start to change the designs based on the new rules but I don't think I got terribly far frankly with that. The previous version is still attached to the first forum post just in case.
Fortunately Icemania is having a go at a more comprehensive mod for AI improvement which is absolutely worth looking out for. It's looking to be very good right now but these things take quite some time to develop and lots of testing.
RE: [DWU] Ship design templates
Yes I've included changes to all of the Ship and Base Design Templates (for the races done so far). Observations are very welcome.