![]() One does not simply overcome the Chaos Cannon (anymore!)Īctivity #1 – Revised AI Strategies & Tech TreeĮach race now has its own technology strategy. ![]() During this time, he worked with us to make some critical engine changes that opened up the possibilities for an AI mod. We were spurred into action because StarDrive 2 developer, Dan DiCicco, was patching the game like crazy following Sector Zero ’s release. Hence, the Community AI Improvements & Balance Mod was born. I say all of this in the past tense, because Icemania in eXplorminate’s Steam Group led a charge – aided by fellow StarDrive 2 modders Crunchy Gremlin, Marcos, CblHoK, Gut, and yours truly – to rectify the problem. Disruptors, Phasors, Cruise Missiles, and Singularity Cannons were good, too (the latter being ridiculously over-powered), but just about everything else was garbage or outright broken upon closer scrutiny. Rockets and lasers, which require no research, were among the most effective weapons in the unmodded game. Even if the AI managed to build an advanced warship, chances are the high tech weapons it was sporting were actually worse than the lowest level weapons in the game. This meant, coupled with the essentially random AI research behavior, it was a total crapshoot as to whether or not the AI could even build these advanced designs in the first place. Those that did, often had competing technologies installed on the ship. More egregious, is that very few ships featured advanced or higher tech weaponry in any significant capacity. Each design was a smattering of different weapon systems that rarely managed to gel into any sort of effective combat platform. Second, the AI ship designs (all 1,500 of them) were mostly terrible. Fusion Engines) were often overlooked by the AI, whereas the player could navigate the tech tree more intelligently and trade for what else they needed, leading to optimal ship designs. This issue was further exacerbated because key technologies (e.g. Moreover, the files just abruptly stop part way through the tech tree, leaving the AI to randomly pick research in the mid-game and beyond. there was no strategy) as they didn’t define a clear sequence. But in the unmodded game, these strategies didn’t lead in any coherent direction (i.e. There are these fancy XML files that define different AI strategies in terms of which research it pursues. The AI’s flaccid performance in the base game was due to a few compounding factors:įirst, the AI didn’t have a very good research strategy. Thankfully, enough other people in the eXplorminate family saw the same problem – and also saw a way to fix it. In my review for StarDrive 2: Sector Zero, the big thing holding the game back was how the mid- and late-game AI struggled to put up a decent fight. We here at eXplorminate like to take matters into our own hands.
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