AI Ship Designer Needs to Consider Resource Sources

[KaiserTom]

The AI Ship designer needs to be a little smarter about resource sources. Or lack thereof. Especially as it pertains to the early game or an isolationist empire where traders from other empires are lacking.

The ship designer puts on the best component it can with no regards of resources. Leading to situations where every single AI designed ship can be unbuildable due to a lack of a specific resource. For instance, I ran into this with Kaldos drives and a lack of Hexo. I had to manually design every single one of my ships for decades before I finally acquired a source of Hexo and could let the AI design them again.

I can only assume the AI empires run into this issue as well, presumably using the same exact AI designer, which is more disastrous considering they can't manually design around it like a human can. This is made a little funnier considering the designer warns humans of a "defect" when you don't have the resource source, but the AI just doesn't care.

There needs to be two things added to the AI Ship Designer.

1) A filter to prevent the AI from using specific ship components for human players. Maybe I want my ships to all use a single drive or not use a specific weapon. I would rather not have to manually re-design every single ship if I could just tell the AI to not use that component.

2) The AI needs to consider resource sources when designing ships. This isn't just a human player problem, AI empires also get completely stalled when the AI designs ships it doesn't have the resources to build. Until traders get around to getting you the resources. Which can take a few decades from the beginning of the game to happen.

[rgbunicorn]

Thanks for writing that up.

Yeah, it would definitely be nice.

If you start a game at max tech level you won't be able to build anything unless you go in and manually design ships.

I haven't really delved into the ship designer yet, so I prefer to have the AI manage that part of the game.