AI mining problems

posted on June 21st, 2003, 8:57 pm

I have been playing the AI for a few days now with this mod and I have noticed something that effects the easy, medium, and perhaps hard AIs. The AI seems to trip over the fact that it has to mine from two moons now (Trinium and Dilithium) and thus ends up doing a rather pathetic job at getting those resources. I first noticed this when I am ravaging through the enemy's base and I notice that there is about 20 resource collectors around the dilithium moon and none around the Trinium moon (noticed this at easy, medium bases). To see if the AI was really confused, I started a hard game, map totally revealed, and watched the AI set up resource collection. My way of getting resources is to give each resource type its' own resource station and 4 resource collectors for each moon. The AI builds one resource station, builds a ton of resource collectors, and has them mine the dilithium moon. If the resource station is in a good area, then some of the collectors might run off to the other moon and balance between the two (one race (Borg, lower right on fluidic combat map) built the resource station inbetween two moons and for some reason it worked out). One race (Klingon, at the top right of the fludic combat map) kept putting all of its' collectors at one moon and then after while at the other moon and then after awhile switched things back. The third race I was watching (Federation, at the middle bottom on fluidic combat map) built the resource station near the Trinium moon, sent the resource collectors to the dilithium moon, and with the exception of 2 resource collectors, all of the collectors were on that dilithium moon!

Considering that it requires a LOT of Trinium to research technologies and build your base, it might be in the AI's best interest to collect both resources, yet the AI makes some stunningly stupid mistakes. Thus, their base will run into issues as they don't have enough Trinium. Before, in the normal Star Trek Armada II game, the AI didn't have to worry, because a little satelight would get the metal for that race... for all races except Species 8472, and they didn't have to worry about metal anyways (everything was the same to that race). I don't know how much you can control the AI nor if this problem can be resolved, but I thought to point it out. If it can be solved, then all I ask is that you do a bit of playtesting with the map shown and with the AIs declaring war with one another (make a map where one race can not be reached by the other races on the map and place your player race in that area. You won't die and you will get to see how the AI manages on its' own). If you can't solve it, at least I know that you know about it!

Awesome game modification, keep up the good work!