AI mod question(s)

[Miahp]

So just trying to get into all this, and a few questions about what is hardcoded behavior vs isn't have arisen.

1) are peace time fleet position behavior mod-able? ie, if border friction is high/war likely, AI will reposition ships to border worlds vs keeping them all on home world
1) is there a good resource to get a good understanding of what parts of priority target lists are mod-able vs what aren't?
-- a sub question/example: could you add in distance to the calculation, so that say anything further than 5 jumps away get far less priority?
3) do behaviors factor into targeting/war strategy for the AI? Like pacifists will focus on defense/be less aggressive; swarms will, well... swarm; militarists will behave another way etc
4) how much of the hardcoded behaviors can be worked around with events etc?

just trying to get a good handle on what can and can't be modded as far as target priority and ship movements/positioning vs what can't be, and can't find a good solid tutorial etc beyond finding a few stray comments that a lot of their behavior is hardcoded into the game. so any insights from folks who have tried this before would be great.

*editing to add in a 5th I really want to know: can the AI actually recognize chokepoints and to what extent

 

[OldEnt]

1) You can always issue fleet orders. Aggressive Crisis Engine does it. StarNet/StarTech does it to merge fleets. There are a couple other mods doing this and even a few vanilla instances.

2) You can't influence fleet AI in that manner, mostly. There are a couple defines you can tweak, especially aggression or willingness to follow fleets. Game rules also allow you to force AI to prohibit certain system. ACE completely disables AI and uses its own logic, that's one way if you want full freedom.

3) Check personalities folder.

4) Many fleet orders can be issued with events, those that do not can be reproduced (for example jump drive order in ACE).

5) AI does recognise chokepoints, but mostly for land grabbing and upgrading starbases. Use debugtooltip to see what systems are considered chokepoints.

 

[Miahp]

1) You can always issue fleet orders. Aggressive Crisis Engine does it. StarNet/StarTech does it to merge fleets. There are a couple other mods doing this and even a few vanilla instances.

2) You can't influence fleet AI in that manner, mostly. There are a couple defines you can tweak, especially aggression or willingness to follow fleets. Game rules also allow you to force AI to prohibit certain system. ACE completely disables AI and uses its own logic, that's one way if you want full freedom.

3) Check personalities folder.

4) Many fleet orders can be issued with events, those that do not can be reproduced (for example jump drive order in ACE).

5) AI does recognise chokepoints, but mostly for land grabbing and upgrading starbases. Use debugtooltip to see what systems are considered chokepoints.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

I've been digging through existing mods, moving things around etc to figure out how many work and what the code looks like, but also trying to temper some of my own expectations so I'm wasting time trying to do things that aren't going to work anyway.

happy you can at least influence pre-war movements more, b/c half my issue with the AI is their poor positioning makes first moves after declaring war relatively unchallenged.

But, seems you also couldn't use an event that say kicks off when you take one of their colonies that basically says we need to take it back!

I'm gonna look at ACE, though. I've downloaded startech to dig through it, but hadn't done so with ACE.

 

[OldEnt]

happy you can at least influence pre-war movements more, b/c half my issue with the AI is their poor positioning makes first moves after declaring war relatively unchallenged.

But, seems you also couldn't use an event that say kicks off when you take one of their colonies that basically says we need to take it back!

In peacetime fleets are barely moving so it is quite possible. In wartime though you have no guarantee your order won't be overruled. That's the gist of it.