How to win in B2

I have seen the AI using Battleships and other military vessels regularly, although in my current game, the Arceans do seem to really like the BattleAxe.

The AI will use any ships which are there,, even ones you design yourself. I believe it makes some calculation as to what's best. I don't know if Stardock will tell us how it calculates this though as it could lead to creating ships which the AI will always choose but which have a major vunerability.

I also assume a player cannot make such a ship, have the AI build lots of them and then half way through a game change the support costs to some high number?

Paul.

Right but by all accounts if I come up with a ship that does not exist, no picture, then I can basically prevent the AI from moving forward. One part of the program knows the ship exists but because it can't display it, it is never created and the AI isn't intelligent enough to pick another ship. I found once the battleaxes were built it would move to other ships provided it had the technology to do so of course but it really really wanted the battleaxes first.

This is otherwise known as "cheating". If a player wants to win the game enough to monkey with the underpinnings of the game program or data there is really very little that can be done to stop them.

I think it is a bit early to talk about what is "cheating". To my mind this is a weakness in the AI that needs correction. It is only right that we try to find these weaknesses now and report them.

The case here is that the AI might be building up its military too early with so many weak capital ships that it undermines its own economy and therefore can't build up its tech knowledge to the stronger ships.

It is also important to note that Brad has stated that the AI code is still rather primitive. Finding these weaknesses can help guide him in making the AI much stronger.

I agree with your points about the AI in relation to the current state of the game but I still think that twiddling the game's data files for the express purpose of causing the AI to do or not do something is something that there is no way to _really_ code against.

Not without removing the flexibility of having user designed ships, starbase modules, techs, etc..

The person that is going to go into the data files and make their scout ship the equivalent of a Terrorstar is going to do so no matter what roadblocks the game designers put in their way.

Well, we could put checksums on the files and then if we find a file with an invalid checksum or a file that we don't have a checksum for, then we simply don't let them submit their score.

and then they would have to submit their modified files to us in order to be able to submit their scores.

the whole point of posting this was so the AI and error coding could be improved not to cheat. There should be some form of checking to make sure that someone didn't download a file from the library and fail to apply it correctly, i.e. only copy one file to the correct directory not two. This could derail the AI, unintentionally.

The AI should also realize that hey my ship isn't being built should i pick something else.

I don't condone cheating and don't encourage it. The whole point of the beta is to point 'flaws' 'errors' out to the developers so they can fix it.

Given I didn't realize I had to download the files separate until CariElf told me I was none the wiser. It wasn't intentional by anymeans.

It was never my intention to imply such and my intitial comment seems to have sidetracked the intial point, which I did and do agree with.

My apologies.

'I also assume a player cannot make such a ship, have the AI build lots of them and then half way through a game change the support costs to some high number?'

I'm not certain, but it appears that the game saves the stats for anything already in the game seperately from the base items. If someone tried to do that the ones already built would retain their old costs, but new ones would match the new values.

I don't know if this can still be done (and I am not about to try) but early in the Alpha I changed the costs of some of the techs to test out a problem after saving a game. When I restarted the game the new research costs were used.

Hmm...maybe when we're reading in the file definitions we should be checking to make sure that the needed models are there...