i hear pirates imitate your ship designs

[Fishman]

ORIGINAL: frugaldude

It would only be natural selection if the pirates were able to build its ships from its own design pool. Do pirates retrofit? I doubt it. And if not, the current designs of even the most powerful ships will age and fall prey to newer models. Their replacements will be randomly drawn from the galactic design pool. (admitted speculation)

Actually, it *IS* a sort of natural selection: Anytime pirate ships spawn, and we know they DO spawn, the design that spawns is chosen randomly. The inferior designs are swiftly destroyed in action, leaving the survivors, which will likely be your designs. Replacement pirates to replace the destroyed ones spawn. Some of them will randomly be your designs. Pirates are then destroyed, and the destroyed pirates will predominantly be non-your-designs. Eventually, through this selective process, a majority of the surviving pirates will be using your designs.

ORIGINAL: frugaldude

I like the idea of pirates utilizing player designs on a limited basis.
I think this makes for a smarter AI. You may always start your game without pirates if you don't want to face your own designs.

Well, the kicker is not that pirates use your designs, or even that the AI emulates your designs: The point is that knowing this, the system can be artificially manipulated to favor the player, while a naive player who plays the game in a natural manner will shoot himself in the foot.

Then, of course, there's the annoyance that pirates will receive your top-of-the-line designs, often before you even can build them yourself, like Somali pirates with Zumwalts, even though we haven't finished building them yet.

Plus, the system has a memory leak: A single design can be duplicated, often multiple times. You can see this in the menu in the editor.

[frugaldude]

Please find a different term.  It is not natural selection if all of one's children (ship designs) are all adopted from the general population (Galactic ship pool).  Not even "sort of". 

And what you consider a memory leak is more likely a stack issue.

[frugaldude]

ORIGINAL: VarekRaith

Err, my issue is that the pirates get my latest designs magically. Love to see how they managed that. I don't mind them stealing the designs but, I want my intel guys to be able to counter that. Right now, it's way too gamey. Heck, I've seen them field ships of my design that I haven't even built yet.

I apologize for my callousness. You have a legitimate gripe. In my current style of gameplay I rarely use ship design so sometimes tend to forget about the concerns of other gamers with different focuses.

I'll try to keep my comments focused on game mechanics. Unless someone is trying to make fundamental changes to the game model to support ones own gameplay to the exclusion of others. Arming civilian ships still irks me. Will have to see how Code Force handles this. Well, that's for a different thread.

[Fishman]

ORIGINAL: frugaldude

Please find a different term. It is not natural selection if all of one's children (ship designs) are all adopted from the general population (Galactic ship pool). Not even "sort of".

Natural selection is the process by which organisms with greater fitness are more likely to survive and reproduce, thus, over time, they become more common in the population. As such, pirate ship survival is essentially a form of natural selection: Ship designs with greater fitness (most likely yours) are much more likely to survive. This gives them greater "fitness", which, over time, increases their frequency within the population. Consider: If there are a bunch of ship designs, 10% of which are yours, then in the initial batch, 10% of the pirate ship population will be your designs. If half the pirate ship population is then shot down and replaced, but none of the ones shot down are yours, then 15% of the pirate ship population now is yours. As this process continues, where your designs are shot down far less often, if at all, than theirs, the game will essentially select for your designs. This behavior is seen in other games where killed units respawn as random units as well: In Space Rangers, if you go on berserk killing sprees and shoot down everything you find, there will always be some that are either too fast, or too tough, for you to shoot down before they can escape, and these will start to increase because anytime a shot-down ship respawns, it may respawn as one of these, causing it not to get shot down anymore.

ORIGINAL: frugaldude

And what you consider a memory leak is more likely a stack issue.

"Stack Issue"? Why would there be a stack issue in a ship design list, unless a design is being duplicated somehow multiple times?

[frugaldude]

Fishman,

I see no reason to argue on these points.  Your assumption that sucessful pirate designs will survive and reproduce.  That is natural selection. 

My assumption is a well designed ship will be dominate on the short term but will eventually die as technology improves.  I am also assuming when a ship dies, no matter who designed it, its replacement will be taken randomly from all the designs within the galaxy.  This is not natural selection.

These are speculations. No need to agree.  No need to argue.

I am not going to argue programming issues.  Not being privy to the code it is all pure speculation.  If you have an issue please post it in Tech Support.

[Cindar]

Hmm, are there any limits on the ships that pirates will duplicate? *makes 50 copies of 5k size frigate world destroyers just so pirates build them*. I'll see if the galaxy goes to hell.

[Fishman]

ORIGINAL: frugaldude

I see no reason to argue on these points. Your assumption that sucessful pirate designs will survive and reproduce. That is natural selection.

Well, they survive. All designs reproduce randomly, so the fitness of a design only affects its retension in the population by survival, not by reproduction.

ORIGINAL: frugaldude

My assumption is a well designed ship will be dominate on the short term but will eventually die as technology improves.

Your assumption is that technology improves. However, the tech tree is finite, and therefore, improvement eventually, and when it comes to human-made ship designs, rather quickly, ceases and a "final" model is produced. In the meantime, the pirate designs will still evolve towards the best model, which, in all likelyhood, is yours, as human designed ships have a far longer operational lifespan than AI-designed ships.

ORIGINAL: frugaldude

I am also assuming when a ship dies, no matter who designed it, its replacement will be taken randomly from all the designs within the galaxy. This is not natural selection.

Yes, in this model, fitness will not improve reproductive success. HOWEVER, it WILL improve SURVIVAL, which is part of natural selection. If, for instance, we have a population of red ships, and a population of blue ships, and in the beginning, half are red, and half are blue, but at each iteration, a red ship has a 50% chance of being destroyed and a blue ship has a 25% chance of being destroyed, with a destroyed ship being randomly replaced by either a red or blue ship with even probability, blue ships will eventually come to dominate the population. This is very much natural selection at work.

It doesn't matter if eventually, green ships are introduced the equation and green ships are even less likely to be destroyed than red or blue ships: If this happens, the population of the ships shifts towards green ships, because the environment has selected in favor of the new green ships.

[taltamir]

ORIGINAL: frugaldude

Fishman,

I see no reason to argue on these points.  Your assumption that sucessful pirate designs will survive and reproduce.  That is natural selection. 

My assumption is a well designed ship will be dominate on the short term but will eventually die as technology improves.  I am also assuming when a ship dies, no matter who designed it, its replacement will be taken randomly from all the designs within the galaxy.  This is not natural selection.

These are speculations. No need to agree.  No need to argue.

I am not going to argue programming issues.  Not being privy to the code it is all pure speculation.  If you have an issue please post it in Tech Support.

To clarify, there is sort of "selection" going on based on the dictionary definition of the word selection, but it isn't "natural selection" or any other type of biological selection (aka, the biological definition of selection), because there is:
1. no reproduction of surviving ships.
2. no inheritance (now known as genes).

There is a constant stream of randomly created ships from existing empires designs which then have A selection which is different than natural selection. wherein badly designed ships are destroyed quickly, while well designed ships take longer to get destroyed (but they eventually do get destroyed).

Since its been several hundred years since Darwin first came up with the idea of calling the process of speciation "selection", using the term to describe a fundamentally different process that bears a few similarities is misleading.