preset ship blueprints only use point defense

Interesting... i noticed that in a recent game as well. I thought it was my research, but the game ended with the "stuck turn" bug before I could confirm it.

I also noticed this in a recent game. The system equipped ships I had started with armor but changed over to point defenses once I researched the technology and stayed that way the rest of the game. Not that it matters much since I customize my defenses based on my current enemies but it seems to be a bug nonetheless.

I think it may be related to the change in AI design behavior: The AI now tries to use "the best defense", but I suspect it may be determining this in on a purely numerical value and if 2 items happen to have the exact same value it will simply choose the last/first one every time.

This happened to me as well.  Even though I started a new game and only researched shields, it still defaulted to point defense.  I don't believe that it is an example of the game using the "best defense".  A saved game that I loaded form the pre patch version where all the ships had shields, was converted by the new patch version to point defense.  I contacted support at Stardock and they say its a game play/mechanic issue.  It';s very annoying to have to redesign every ship depending on which opponent I am facing.

Same.

Also, 'miniaturization' is misspelled in the tech trees as 'miniturization'. Less catastrophic, I know

I hope they fix this soon.  I thought it was just something I was doing wrong.

The ship blueprints should update all the time when I research tech, but they stop doing so after they had point defense, even if I research shields or armor.

Hey Stardock

I only just registered to emphasize this. Please fix this quickly!

I am not THAT much into micro managing, and having to redesign all the ships each time i research something new, makes the game very tedious. To the point where i just don^t play anymore. So for me it is pretty much a gamebraker

I am able to push the other defense tech tracks and cause it to design other defenses, but then it maxes out that other defense blindly.  It isn't an improvement over the previous behavior.  And it goes back to point defense the moment you give that tech parity with the others.

The reason for this behavior is the new BestDefense tag in the ShipBlueprintDefs xml file. With this tag it will always pick the defense which has the highest numerical value. An example:

<ShipBlueprint>
<InternalName>SniperBlueprint</InternalName>
<ShipHullType>Tiny</ShipHullType>
<Role>Interceptor</Role>
<RequiredComponentType>BeamWeapon</RequiredComponentType>
<ComponentType>BestDefense</ComponentType>
<ComponentType>BeamWeapon</ComponentType>
<ComponentType>BeamWeapon</ComponentType>
<ComponentType>BestDefense</ComponentType>
<ComponentType>BestDefense</ComponentType>
<ComponentType>LifeSupport</ComponentType>
<ComponentType>InterstellarDrive</ComponentType>
<FillerComponentType>BeamWeapon</FillerComponentType>
</ShipBlueprint>

The tiny size sniper. You can see the basic requirement is to fit a beam weapon. Once that's on it will go down the list of component types adding what they call for until they are all added and then any additional space will be filled with beam weapons as per the filler component tag

So if we manually delete that tag it'll make the problem go away?

No, deleting it will make blueprints have no defenses. You need to go through and add in all the defense types again.

Yuck. Good info, but I think I'll wait on a patch fix rollout. It's interesting to play a bit with a handicap like this though it does tend to homogenize usable fleet configurations.

I am no programmer, but to me that does not explain why it pickes the point defence only.

Do you mind explaining that? I do like to learn something new

I don't know the code, but by observation my guess is that the present AI behavior will make it pick one and only one defense because it is the "best".  For some reason, probably order of listing, when there is a three way tie in available defenses, point defense wins the selection tie.  It is one of those situations where an AI decision can be perfectly sensible and slightly ridiculous all at the same time.  Some of my decisions are like that, too, but I am less consistent about it.

In my game on "normal" no blueprint has any defense. And no AI ship has any defense.

There are so many things wrong with this game, I think the resources of stardock should go into repairing things first instead of adding better AI. Because some things at the moment are just plain broken.

By the way, the alterian "Sudden Storm" has a description which says: "reinforced with thulium defense", but it needs durantium.

miniaturization also needs an 's'

Nope, can't there isn't and never was even before this bug any enumeration for that. The Best defence code simply had something that made them split defences. No idea what broke unfortunately.

Not sure what you're talking about, Karl. Prior to 1.1, 'bestdefence' wasn't used; the blueprints just listed either shield, armour or PD. There very definitely are enums for them, and re-adding them to the blueprints will revert back to how it was before SD find-replaced them all with 'bestdefense' in 1.1. This is exactly what I have done in my mod, where they're working just fine.

Which enumeration file is it hidden in then because way back during 1.1 opt-in i tried setting specific defences and it just wouldn't have with the copy paste definitions from the components def's and i couldn't fine an enumeration. Also didn;t the whole thing break with the 1.11 patch?. I'm pretty sure everything ws honky dory in my games in 1.1 that's why i assumed the edit took place then, (i never accessed the BP file pre-1.1 opt-in).

<ComponentType>Armor</ComponentType>

<ComponentType>PointDefense</ComponentType>

<ComponentType>Shields</ComponentType>

These all work just fine. It will pick the current best of that class with the above, where as 'bestdefense' is supposed to pick the highest out of all classes. Both myself and Vid are avoiding BestDefence atm, because, well, it's not actually a very useful component.

Cheers Naselus . Like i said because best defence only broke more recently i assumed it had been like that from day one and it was a backround code change that broke things.

Quoting KarlBar99, reply 21

Cheers Naselus . Like i said because best defence only broke more recently i assumed it had been like that from day one and it was a backround code change that broke things.

End of KarlBar99's quote

I'm not convinced bestdef is actually broken tbh - I'm not 100% sure how it calculates the best-ness, and there's enough people saying they've managed to push shields etc over pd and then it starts using shields. But it's frankly just ridiculous for 'Bestdefense' to be on EVERY ship, since it'll make the AI's defenses incredibly one dimensional. I could see it being useful on one blueprint per size, rather than being spread all over everything. It feels like a rushed change that hadn't been properly thought through, tbh.

Well thats the thing back in 1.1 i saw AI ships with mixed defences and they weren't my custom designs. Best defence actually worked, it had some kind of basic check where it saw which defence type was lowest and applied the best defence of the lowest defence type on the ship. But now it just goes with best module.

I just wanted to note that in patch 1.2 we made a fix in reference to the ship blueprint issue.

Good to hear!  I did note that in my game tonight, as soon as I researched Kevium (sp?) Armor, that initiate a whole mess of blueprint changes.  Upon looking them over, I found that now every design had all armor and no point defense, presumably because now enough would fit on the ship hull to outstrip the point defense.

It seems to be selecting whatever gives the highest total armor score.  Looking forward to the fix.