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Just a question if anyone else have seen this in their games... but in my last games the AI seem to all be railgun and missile heavy, to the point they almost equip their ships all the same. Not sure if this is some research issue or something else.

I have done some modding of the XML files but I have not changed any of those values in the Policy files and they do seem like they should favour different modules.

I'm just wondering if somehow railgun and missiles are prioritized in research and then all the AI trade those technologies with each other and all end up using that technology as that is the latest.

It feels a bit stale when this happens... there are small variations but not much.

I can only see ships from 2 other empires currently, both Ackdarians. Their frigates have the following weapons (same for both empires):

- Concussion Missile (M)
- Rail Gun (M)
- Sentinel Multi-Beam Defense (PD).

But their destroyers have different weapons altogether. One of the two empires has a cruiser, which is of course very different.

So yes, it would seem that there might be a pattern, at least for frigates...

I also see other weapons on other classes but missiles and railguns still seem to be the main, most common weapons, then they use a mix of some ion, area and tractor beams... I really think they need to give the AI some proper templates and principal doctrines when it comes to ship design and what components they use... as the AI trade technology their ships is very similar.

The Zenox in my game is the only race that seem to have abandoned missiles for torpedoes, so I think this is some sort of research issue of some kind.

But anyway, AI ship templates are very bad... they need to be a bit more coherent... they also need some form of doctrinal templates they can shift around based on technology and preference and build their ships more around that.

maybe something like we had back in DW1 could be usefull...
where you can set in the auto designer what components you want to priotize. (atleast i am pretty sure something like that existed in dw1)

so the ai empires could have these priorities kinda randomly generated per empire and per game... maybe with a little "bonus race weight" on some things.

so priorities might end up as :
shields, rainguns, fighters
engines, shields, missiles
fighters, point defence, torpedos

maybe research would also have doubble weight priority for the empires on these fields then.

Lunalis wrote: Thu Aug 18, 2022 8:35 pm maybe something like we had back in DW1 could be usefull...
where you can set in the auto designer what components you want to priotize. (atleast i am pretty sure something like that existed in dw1)

so the ai empires could have these priorities kinda randomly generated per empire and per game... maybe with a little "bonus race weight" on some things.

so priorities might end up as :
shields, rainguns, fighters
engines, shields, missiles
fighters, point defence, torpedos

maybe research would also have doubble weight priority for the empires on these fields then.

They already have this, this is on each races policy xml files... but I think it has more to do with technology sharing which sets most AI on the same path, that means they usually take the most technologically advance weapons over the preferred one.

This in and of itself is not bad, but it becomes a bit boring when everyone run around with the same weapons most of the time. So far I also have seen mostly railgun and missiles as the most advanced weapons in the last two games I have played.