Why is every attack wave led by 3 fighters?

[keith.lamothe]

It's hard-coded.  The AI design principle is not to be 100% emergent; the etherjet "tow enemy ships away" behavior is hardcoded, for instance.

[BobTheJanitor]

But the AI taunting me when it blows up a command station, that was emergent, right? 

[keith.lamothe]

I guess we could claim that the hardcoded part of the taunts is keeping it from saying what it _wants_ to say

[zebramatt]

Performance/coding effort/logic/fun tradeoff, innit?

I see no problem!

[keith.lamothe]

Performance/coding effort/logic/fun tradeoff, innit?

I see no problem!

Yea, that's basically it.

I mean, we could make it less of a cheese/micro thing by changing it from a 100% chance to send the lead fighters to a 50% chance to send those fighters and a 50% chance to send some sort of special autobombs that insta-kill stuff that's in low-power mode.

Something tells me that would not cause a net decrease in complaints

[BobTheJanitor]

I mean, we could make it less of a cheese/micro thing by changing it from a 100% chance to send the lead fighters to a 50% chance to send those fighters and a 50% chance to send some sort of special autobombs that insta-kill stuff that's in low-power mode.

Something tells me that would not cause a net decrease in complaints

Well, I won't complain if I get to build those ships too. Oh the AI has 200 ships in low power around that guard post? Hello cloaked assault force!

[Red Spot]

Still waiting for you to implement a 'nuke-spammer' AI .. 

[Sunshine!]

I'd petitioned the devs for giving Neinzul Missile Silos a very small percent chance (1% or so) to deploy nukes, with something like a .01% chance to deploy a mk3 nuke, but they didn't like that idea.

Also, Scorched Earth can be counted as a "nuke spammer" AI, if you think about it.  Thankfully it only targets its own planets though.

[Shrugging Khan]

0.01% chance of getting MNOGO NUKED means that I die. In every game. Completely.

VeryLongDurationGames,hooray!

[chemical_art]

Still waiting for you to implement a 'nuke-spammer' AI .. 

That sounds like a dreadful AI. I mean, like a tactic I would expect at 8.6 or something. Like the AI would only do it if it already lost a world, but it would first try to recapture a planet before even then. Since the Ai currently does not try to retake planets, it wouldn't really want to use nukes compared to EMPs and lightnings.

[zebramatt]

It's not an unworkable idea, mind you.

You could, for instance, have a new AI-only structure with a minimal spawn chance, which is automatically destroyed with the command station and which, upon destruction, causes a nuke to be launched through an adjacent wormhole.

Still not very friendly, mind you.