Hello,
I am a new player of rebellion, and recently uploaded the mod "Trivial Options". I have noticed something about modding and AI.
It seems modding can potential "breaks" the original per-faction AI and make it fall back to some kind of generic AI. I stumbled on this by accident: When testing my mods (which removes some research items from player entity files), by pitching AIs vs AIs, I noticed each AIs skipped certain ship prototype researches for a very long time. I did not realize it is the vanilla behaviour and thought my mod had broken something. So I went further and removes the production items and titanInfo from player entity as well, and it became much "better", in that the AIs builds more variety of ships earlier and being more active (more, larger battles raging around the map). Then I eventually realized this "better" AI is NOT the vanilla behaviour.
Apparently some changes, such as removing the titanInfo, make the game not to realize it is a original faction, and uses a very generic AI profile. Comparisons:
Original per-faction AIs:
- It researches various weapon upgrades, and upgrades that are specific to that faction, at the cost of delaying ship protoypes researches.
- It is more likely to research non-combat researches.
Generic AI:
- It tends to research ship/structure prototypes much earlier, and consistently fields heavy cruisers and utility ships earlier.
- It also aggressively researches diplomacy items, and fleet size when it reaches limits.
- For civil researches, it does the essential ones, such as ice/volcanic exploration, wormhole, and unlocks trade posts and refineries.
- For other items, the generic AI only researches very sparingly.
- It is not selective of what ships it builds, and the fleet composes of all types of available ships including command ships and repair ships.
As a result, the generic AI spends much less time and resources on researches, general expanding the fleet at a faster rate than the per-faction AI, and the fleet are more varied. When I pitches the two types of AIs to each other (large/single star/3 AIs vs 3 AIs), the generic AI tend to and dominate the war with heavier and larger fleet. It seems to me that the generic AI might actually be more fun for SP game (!).
In reflection, the per-faction AI might be too keen to bottleneck itself by spending so much time and resources on weapons and long-term upgrades too early, instead of fleeting up. Their long-term civil researches might pay off in a long game, but in my test they did not seem to have time for that. Afterall, for an upgrade to be worthwhile you first need to have the scale (eg. a 5% dps upgrade would not worth the cost of a ship until you have more than 20 ships).
What is your experience with AI-tweaking? Is there more information out there?
Cheers,
(Note: If you wants to see the generic AI, you could try XATHOS's mod at the bottom of https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/427353 . It is exactly the same as mine after I removed production items and titanInfo; I did not notice until today).
