Testing is going well, found and corrected many minor and several major bugs. Will send a commit shortly.

Edit: I am my own worst enemy...

Thanks to Cybertx who behind the scenes is doing good work chasing down and verifying the existence and nature of various bugs which has thus far proven very helpful in correcting and documenting the issues in the latest internal build.

Good Job at testing! We really should do a FFA with eachother

Meanwhile, latest work on Shadows, a cruiser (flagship/scout controller/envoy?) and a small but armored one (corvette). I'm wondering about Shadow orbital structures but perhaps first continue with boxed models.

boshimi336,

Thanks the site has changed since I first read it. We have definitely seen this behavior in the AI and is a source of endless frustration:

 Once a titan is in a build list, it is hardcoded to have a higher priority than even capital ships, so gathering enough resources for it usually is not a problem for the AI.

Since SotYR titans are all late game and are high resource, (this is esp true for the Vorlon and Shadow) this has the effect of paralyzing the AI. Since the other constraint is 3 cap of level 3 and fleet sizes in SotYR tend to be more capital ship intensive than SoaSE it only compounds the AI difficulty.

I've tried adjusting the tech path to force AI behavior but the AI can research out of order which renders this an impractical approach. I've considered sprinkling modifierType "TitanConstructionCap" across many more techs but as we recently discovered modifierType "TitanConstructionCap" is a bit different in how it is addressed by BaseValue and PerLevelValue the would make such an effort for each race rather a lot of work.

While titan use by the Younger races is generally not an issue, Elder race titans are game changing OP. On a big enough map it may not matter unless capital victory is enabled but for medium to smaller maps... It is an unpleasant catch-22.

TobiWahn,

It may be worth tweaking the game constant files. The problem I foresee are Younger race fleets are generally much larger than Elder race fleets.

If aiUseTime is set to Always on the explore ability, the scout ships will waddle back and forth between trying to scout a gravity well and trying to assist an allied fleet; though this is still no solution, it is better than nothing, and there is little modders can ultimately do to fix the scout grouping bug.

This is precisely why I created the Shadow Assault Scout. Shadow Scouts while dangerous can not be counted on to be useful as combat ships. This was proving detrimental to the Shadow faction as the Scout is the only ship available to the Shadow in the early game. Shadow Assault Scout at level 1 tech seems to sufficiently mitigate this.

Delnar-Ersike said: EDIT #2: Some missionTypes are more equal than others. If you redirect certain missions to certain other missions, the AI will bug out and not know what to do. A nasty side effect is that its mission queue keeps growing, meaning you'll get ungodly lag within a few minutes of gameplay.

Hmmmmm, I have not directly made changes to mission offerings however I've also never checked that changes I've made have impacted the mission queue. Cybertx for those games were you noticed extreme lag could you check the mission queue and see if it might be the culprit of what you're observing. I personally think we have one or more abilities that are largely to blame (since I;m not seeing it and I'm running a really altered build at the moment) but it is a possible source I have not pursued before.

TobiWahn,

Sent you a large commit.

Yeah i checked that. The lag that i was experiencing was due to something with the centauri, the issue with the missions is that if you request something like send an envoy from the vorlons or shadows, it will take them forever to achieve it(it gets on the queue) since both the vorlons and shadows tend to try to get the titan first(Good luck with that, it takes forever to build it)  by consequence they don't build civilian labs until they get 8 military labs.

They(Vorlons, Shadows and Minbari) don't expand as fast as the other races, I think that's due to the AI, the AI always try to colonize the asteroids first(even if it has an ice planet next to it) by consequence they can't since they haven't done any civilian research.

TobiWahn,

Was doing some AI testing and noticed the Narn were not making use of the black market. Does BlackMarketBuyPriceAdjustment simply alter prices on the black market or does it allow access to the black market? If it does not allow access then we need another ResearchFloatModifier.

The AI seems to take the following in priority order:

First capital ship

Titan

Remaining capital ship (any will do)

Access to a bombing frigate

Any other tech path that unlocks a ship

Any other tech that unlocks a structure (planet or starbase)

Any other tech that leads to an ability unlock

Any remaining tech

If a tech has a negative or 0 priority the AI will never select it.

Conversing with Delnar_Ersike the AI will also place the Capital ship constructor on the top of its build queue to the detriment of other activities. This would in part explain why Vorlon, Shadow and Minbari AI shutdown so frequently. If the AI gets lucky and hits on the combination to build the capital ship constructor then game on. Also, the AI will act wonky until it can build it's first capital ship. The following link has been quite insightful: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/451274/page/5/#3479524

TobiWahn, based on what I'm learning we are going to have to redo the Vorlon, Shadow and Minbari early tech a little bit to correct recently identified AI priorities.

So how about having the game scenario such that each capital planet starts with a capital ship factory?

I agree! Edit: That it looks nice and Shadow like.