'Fixing' Bigger = Better (open discussion)

[johanwanderer]

One thing to consider: make gravitic weapon deal more damage to "essential" components (command center, hyper drive, repair bots, etc.), maybe scaling that by ship size. That way, the bigger the ship, the more essential components it should have, lest one of them get destroyed and render the whole thing useless.
 
Usually, at some point in my game -- when I can afford it -- I start to double up on command centers and repair bots on the bigger ships anyway, just because it feels better.

[feygan]

I think part of the problem stems from the way travel works in DW. For the most part hyper drives do everything, including inter system movement. If I want to ship my fleet from planet A to planet B they do a mini hyper jump and appear a tiny distance away from the target, their thrust engines are then just used for getting into some kind of formation or moving to drop troops or close in for short ranged weapons.

This basic method means bigger is of course better, it doesn't matter how slow a big ship is made to move as it simply needs some long range weapons and a single hyper jump puts it in firing range totally sidestepping all speed penalties applied. In that instance it just makes sense to throw out anything that doesn't fit into the "that is no moon" category.

If DW could implement a system where you can only enter or leave a system via a jump point or multiple jump points it would help a lot. Many sci-fi shows or films do this but only halfway, you often see ships warp/jump away from earth when just out of orbit, yet when coming to save everyone they always arrive out by Saturn and limp along at sub light speeds. So bloopers aside the arrival part at least makes some sense, we know just about enough about space travel theory to understand the enormous power needs of any FTL system. As such it makes sense you do not want that kind of power use going on anywhere near either inhabited worlds or infrastructure, if needs be perhaps things like gravity wells of planetary bodies can be argued to interfere with hyper drives also.

Now on the one hand this will take away some of the tactical nature of DW in that you cannot simply make a choke point and defend against anything, but then if you just have an increase in how close to a body you can jump in and out then it will still leave lots of possible doors for entry. Maybe if all planets/moons/stars generated their own hyperjump denial zone that was dependent on size. This also then means you have jump points than are constantly changing as the planets orbit.

If this were coupled with changes listed above it would mean you could make effective small fast strike groups that are used to take out mining structures etc. Then the larger ships would be used more for real offensive moves, in addition you could no longer defend systems with just a few huge ships that jump in and wipe out everything with death rays. Instead you would have to think about the tactical needs of each system on it's own merits and fast response craft would become far more viable.

[Icemania]

ORIGINAL: feelotraveller
The other tweak (which won't change the 'bigger' equation though) is to go through the policy files, and probably design files as well, and adjust the AI to build more bigger ships.

Which is exactly what I've done in the AI Improvement Mod.

[Icemania]

ORIGINAL: feelotraveller
The other tweak (which won't change the 'bigger' equation though) is to go through the policy files, and probably design files as well, and adjust the AI to build more bigger ships.

Which is exactly what I've done in the AI Improvement Mod.

ORIGINAL: Ikke
I gather the DW team has no AI experts either - best thing would be to throw the code open for that part. Spring engine (open software rts) has very good AI for example, with automated micro which is pretty decent. Just people jumping in and refining the AI cause they want a better game - would help DW no less I think.

I'm really hoping they open it up and invest more resources in the AI for Distant Worlds 2 ... bigger and bolder while keeping the essence that makes Distant Worlds a great game.

[Ikke]

@ Icemania: I read on some other thread you've got some expertise with AI. Is there any short way of explaining why RTS AI's don't go for the full resources offered by a computer?

I mean, I can envision you re-evaluate the orders at shorter time intervals, throw more factors into that evaluation, etc as resources increase.

[Icemania]

The AI that I work with isn't in gaming, it's in industrial application. Frankly I'd like to use more of what I studied many moons ago as a lot is in the Expert Systems or Intelligent Control space. We also use dedicated Controllers so it's a completely different kettle of fish. So your question would best be answered by one of our IT experts!

What I would suggest is that Distant Worlds simply isn't designed to scale up to use full resources. Each method has a specific algorithm to keep the complexity within limits ... and that is that. It doesn't look at the machine it's running on and say "hey I can use the processing power".

I also thought this article from Frogboy was pretty interesting.

I'm sure something similar could be done for Distant Worlds 2 though. I find the idea that "Extreme" difficulty is different depending on your machine an interesting concept. Looks like we'll have to start to adding our machine specifications when we quote the difficulty setting we are playing!

[Ikke]

I'm rather adverse to the higher difficulty settings, not so much because it's harder, but because it's no new challenge. It's still the same old dumb AI, it just has been buffed up enough, and you're made correspondingly weaker, in the hopes that with enough bonuses it can brute force a win. It doesn't really challenge me to change my approach, throw in the unexpected, but at most force me to optimise my approach more.

Much rather see some scaling AI concept which at max difficulty would follow the optimum strategy. I do belief DW and most 4X games are solvable games given enough resources - everything is predictable. While there are countless permutations on the ground of it being continuous, the optimum is still well calculable in most circumstances. i.e. while the range between two ships and their relative trajectories are pretty much infinite in possible combinations, there is only one range at which one ship deals the most damage while receiving the least in return, and only one trajectory to achieve that range most efficiently. The only factor being imperfect information (on which an AI could cheat at max difficulty).

[Icemania]

On difficulty I agree. That said, I've changed my strategy a lot on Extreme, but that's primarily due to a perverse desire to set ridiculous objectives (like maximising how much bigger my Empire is than any AI after 30 game years) or starting positions (I'm Pre-Warp while others are far more advanced and larger). That said, I invite you to play the AI Improvement Mod on Extreme, if you are so confident. I've certainly had to change my strategy anyway. That said, I don't want to overstate it either, as I still have no trouble winning, but I've had a lot more fun along the way.

A challenging AI requires an investment of resources that Distant Worlds just doesn't have at the moment and using good human strategies is a way to keep both the computational complexity and developer investment under control.