AI only ships in human hands and other impossibilities

[TechSY730]

I'm just wondering what would happen if you did some stupid, supposed to be impossible stuff, like,

• an AI warp gate in human ownership
• an AI eye in human ownership
• an AI guard post in human ownership
• more than one command station on a planet with different owners
• Spire city stuff in AI ownership

And other such stupidity such as this that can only be obtained via cheats, poking around in memory, debugger madness, or save game editing.

[x4000]

AI Eyes and such would continue to work for the AI rather than you.

AI guard posts would shoot at the AI ships like they normally would shoot at yours, but otherwise would do nothing.

More than one command station would work, but would leave planet ownership on whichever one was built last, I think.

Spire city stuff I'm less sure about, but probably nothing.

[TechSY730]

AI Eyes and such would continue to work for the AI rather than you.

AI guard posts would shoot at the AI ships like they normally would shoot at yours, but otherwise would do nothing.

More than one command station would work, but would leave planet ownership on whichever one was built last, I think.

Spire city stuff I'm less sure about, but probably nothing.

So warp gates and reinforcement warp gate always give "warp covereage" to the AI, regardless of who owns the gate. Hmm.

So for the command station case, if would be in the ownership of whichever command station is processed last. (Generally build order, but things can get hairy if they were "
"built" at the same time, like in save game editing. As a user of an API (in this case the game program), I avoid making any sort of assumptions on processing order, as those tend to be messy details, implementation specific, and if I care about it, I'm doing it wrong)

One last thing. If an AI command station or the AI home command station somehow gets into human hands, would the normal command station build options be available to it, or would they provide planetary ownership and supply only and you cannot build using them?

[x4000]

I doubt the normal build options would work, but I've no idea.  You're asking about cases that really aren't things we've tested.

[TechSY730]

I doubt the normal build options would work, but I've no idea.  You're asking about cases that really aren't things we've tested.

Yep, that's why I said these were stupid questions, because they are totally impossible in supported gameplay. 

[Diazo]

Well, the game continues to work, kind of...

For my work on the wiki I've been playing around with cheats and 'gimme absolutely positively everything' mostly works.

There is plenty of odd stuff happening mind you, such as your dyson sphere spawning hostile dyson gatlings......

Also gives my computer a fit for a bit, and as that's a high-end gaming rig that's rather impressive.

D.

[Commiesalami]

I think a warp gate under player control would be theoretically safe.  There was a long standing bug (not sure if its still around) where the warp jammer command station had the [AI - Reinforce] Warp gate ability.  I tend to unlock the warp jammer pretty often (any game where my 5 warp jammers could block 15+ planets total, 5000K for heavily reduced AI progress is fine in my book) and I've never seen any of mine spawn any AI ships

[TechSY730]

How about if I go into the save game file and incresase AI difficulty to something outside the normal range (like 10.6 "Rommel" or 11 "Sun Tzu")

Would the math scale properly, or would the game crash?

[x4000]

It would probably scale.

[keith.lamothe]

I forget, but I think the deserialization logic would snap the difficulty to a real setting.  But if not there are some things that could crash at certain specific values because "11 - Difficulty" is used as a divisor in a few places.

[Volatar]

I forget, but I think the deserialization logic would snap the difficulty to a real setting.  But if not there are some things that could crash at certain specific values because "11 - Difficulty" is used as a divisor in a few places.

  So these AI's don't go to 11?

The music industry would be disappointed with you.

[keith.lamothe]

I forget, but I think the deserialization logic would snap the difficulty to a real setting.  But if not there are some things that could crash at certain specific values because "11 - Difficulty" is used as a divisor in a few places.

  So these AI's don't go to 11?

The music industry would be disappointed with you.

No, it goes to 11, but the AI is just so awesome on 11 that your computer divides by zero to protect you from it.

[x4000]

Best response ever.

[TechSY730]

No, it goes to 11, but the AI is just so awesome on 11 that your computer divides by zero to protect you from it.

Yes, lvl 11 AIs would be so insane, that dividing by zero is safer than trying to fight them...

[Vinraith]

At 11 the AI becomes self aware and starts actually trying to wipe out humanity.