Has anyone encountered the AI not using all of the weapons placed on their ships?

I'm designing a complete plug and things have been working pretty well until now.
I have several different civilizations and, of course, they all have their own technology. Now, I have ships made for each civ using the weapons of their own civ. This works as it should. The problem comes when I have a ship come with weapons from different civilizations. They choose one over the other. Oddly enough, they choose the weap native to their home culture. I have no idea why this should be. weap resources are not associated with govt IDs, so why the bias?

Let me give an example:

Govt 1: Freedom Group: Humans, a rebel government.
Govt 2: Belshin: A friendly alien race, that's been in contact with the humans for generations. There is plenty of trade between planets, even weapons exports.

Some of the human weapons use Blasters and Blaster Turrets. Pretty much your standard EVO weapon. An energy weapon with unlimited ammo. (think blaze cannon)

Some of the Belshin weapons use Gauss guns and Gauss Turrets. A magnetic accelerator that fires solid slugs at extremely high velocity. A standard Gauss gun holds 1000 rounds of ammo. (think Emalgha gun but with limited ammo)

So the Freedom Group produces a Warship that has Blaster Turrets and a Gauss gun imported from the Belshin. Except, that the Warship won't use the Gauss Gun, Unless it is the ONLY weapon.

So I tested to see what would happen if I gave the Belshin Enforcer ship some Blaster Turrets. And this time it only uses the Gauss guns! Except when all the Gauss guns are removed, then it uses the Blasters.

I tried changeing the order the weap IDs appear in the weap slots on the ship resources (in res-edit). no effect.

I tried making the Gauss gun as an unlimited ammo weapon. no effect.

I'd would greatly appreciate any insight someone could give me as to why this crazy behavior is occuring.
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Oh, a another question:
Can the AI use flares? Successfully?
Can they use something to create the same effect?

Thanks,
Desprez

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Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Oi vey, I have no idea. That should not be happening. It might be... Do Gauss guns have longer range than blasters? If they do, then the enemy might be just using those because they can hit the target sooner and the "shoot" algorhythm is triped sooner and it forgets to fire the others...

As for flares, I don't think so, no. I've never seen an AI even use bomb-type weapons, let alone flares.

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Dan! The food's gone!

i've encountered similar problems. as far as i can tell, the ai will ONLY fire one turret at a time. (at least until it runs out of ammo). so giving an ai ship even two unrelated turret weapons won't do much good (a "main" weap-say laser cannons-and a turreted rocket or something.) it will still only fire the "best" one, probably the rocket, until it runs out of ammo. not the desired affect.

and no, ai doenst seem to understand bombs. the workaround is to make it a freefly rocket, with a VERY slow speed. sometimes setting the inaccurracy to 360 will give you a turret affect too

hope this helps...

Do AI know how to use tractor/repulsor beams?

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"The impossible is easy; it's the unfeasible that poses a problem."

Quote

Originally posted by Chrestomanci:
Do AI know how to use tractor/repulsor beams?

As those are just wëaps with different impact, yes, I've seen Rim Prospectors using tractor beams in FH.

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AIM: evandrewm / xaeomega

How about ramming weapons then? I came up with this cool plugin idea, but I don't know if it will work, and I can't test it because I am on vacation with no access to a mac.

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"The impossible is easy; it's the unfeasible that poses a problem."

ramming type weapons (Collision in FH) is basicly a rocket with a very short life that fires really fast. The AI can use them. Think Asteroids in FH.

The only problem with that is now, in EVO 1.0.2, the inanimate rocks will perform advanced flight combat manuvers to try to kill you. Anyone thought of that?

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Dan! The food's gone!

I was sorta under the impression that you could set the guidance field of the wëap resource to "2", which is the same as the Forklift, and it would take that to be a ramming weapon. Is that not correct? I know it says "unused" in the EVO Bible, but I thought I heard that somewhere...

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"The impossible is easy; it's the unfeasible that poses a problem."

I did this test a while ago, I made 2 similar weapons, both laser turrets, one with a green laser and one with a blue laser so I could tell them apart, then I gave them the same attributes, do the same damage, same speed, etc... and I put one of each on a ship. I then attacked it and it would only use the first weapon, the weapon with a lower id number, so i switched the id numbers in the weapon resource and it used the second laser only. So maybe you should try switching the weapon id numbers.

Chamrin

The AI uses whichever weapon it deems to be better. For example: give a ship blaze turrets and phase turrets (like Captain Hector). If the target ship has shields, it will use the weapon best against shields (I don't know about damage/second, of if it just checks damage/bolt), but when the shields go down it switches to the weapon best against armor. I've seen Captain Hector do this, back before I registered.

I don't know about weapon order. I do know that it won't use 2 turret types, which would be superior to either one at a time.

All of what I know only relates to 1.0.0, though. I don't know if it's changed.

I created a fast, homing decoy flare to an EV plugin a long time ago, designed to swarm the enemy ship and intercept whatever missiles it launches at the ship. The AI uses it just fine.

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Thanks to all the info I was able to figure out what was going on.

The AI will only fire one turret weapon at a time. It should be noted that the AI considers both 360° turrets and the 90° swivel turrets as turrets, also turreted beams and rockets. In other words, guidance types 3,4,5,7,8 all count as turrets and the AI will only fire ONE.

Furthermore, it is the guidance type that counts. The outfit flag to designate as filling a gun or turret slot on a ship has absolutely no bearing on computer firing choice whatsoever. So even if YOU consider a swivel turret to be basicaly an enhanced gun in your plug (and designate it as such) the computer still compares it to turrets when deciding which weap is better.

This is what happend in my plug. The Gauss Guns were front-quadrant weapons. While the Gauss Turrets and Blaster Turrets were full 360° turrets.

Since the list damage of the Blaster turret was higher than the Gauss gun, the Human warship choose the blaster turret. But since the Belshin ship was using a both Blaster and Gauss turrets, the Gauss turrets came out ahead. So it was just bizare coincidence that there seemed to be a govt bias towards their own weaps.

I'm not sure if the AI figures firing arcs when choosing which turret to fire.

So far, there seems to be no problem with different gun type weapons (guidance type -1). The AI uses both.

Thanks again,
Desprez

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