Abandoning ship on the pacifist run

[Hoshizora]

Well, it was worth a try.

 

I wanted to do a run-through of the game on self-imposed pacifist rules: I was never allowed to fire an offensive gun. After mining 3k iron in my mining drone, I wouldn't mine anything, either.

 

Thus, using only trading, selling asteroids, and buying everything I needed from resource depots and equipment docks, I got all the way to the trinium range and decided to start building my fleet. I started with just a humble two gunships. Things were pretty dodgy for a while, but they could help other faction ships attack the xsotans and pirates. Things came to a head when I went after pirates way back in the titanium range and wished their AI's the best of luck.

 

I didn't work out.

 

I just can't wrap my head around the fact that there's only a 50/50 chance that they will DO ANYTHING AT ALL when I give them an order to attack enemies. One just fucking sat there. The other started dutifully firing away at the enemies, but half of the time its rotation put the turrent on the wrong side of the ship, so it just floated along and didn't seem to know how to correct itself.

 

I'm all about overcoming challenges, but not the kind of challenge of working with something that it broken.

 

Best of luck to you and improving your AI, Avorion team! As frustrating as that was, I still do genuinely want this game to be a wild success, and being the commander of a fleet of ships that you designed yourself is a winning ticket, if it can be executed right.

[Splutty]

Some tips to use AIs.

 

The one that just sits there I don't understand, I've never had that problem, unless it's stuck on something (check for that). Mine work just fine for at least the moving part.

 

For guns: Put them around your center of mass on the sides of the ship. Unlike us players, the AI will never point the tip of the ship at an enemy, unless by accident.

 

Keep your AI ships relatively small and mostly cube/sphere shaped.

 

For an example of the ships I use as system defenders (and doing a damn good job of it), check my thread in the Building forum.

[MetalX]

For my fleet ships, should I use them at all, I usually just use the autogenerated ships you can buy at the shipyards.  The AI seems to not have too many problems operating those ships.  And if you place the turrets in the places the AI would, on top of blocks that stick out, the AI should not have a problem with making sure to get the turrets facing the enemy targets.

 

You will still get the occasional AI that does nothing.  Which is unfortunate, but it IS early access, maybe they will fix it?

 

I am giving the AI in this game a major free pass right now because the game is still in early access.  Not to mention the fact that AI seems to be a major sticking point for pretty much ALL developers.  You ever played Civilization VI?  That game is newer and had a team make it that has been working on Civ games for many years now.  And even they could not get the AI right.  In some cases the AI will just auto-fail.  Never make an army, never get any production, never produce culture or gold, nothing, just straight up auto-fail.

 

Stellaris had the same issues.

 

And in other games like some shooters or whatever, it is common to find the AI in those games constantly running into walls and other obstacles or just being, in general, confused.

 

AI is, apparently, a very tricky thing.

 

I would criticize AI but I would stop short of being rude about it, myself.

[howardxu23]

But it is sometimes best to keep ai with a certain level of stupidity. Because if not, they would attempt to break out of the game, gain control of bots and take over the world(the one we are in, not the game one)