Is AI chained to SOI?

I'm a little surprised by the muted reaction to this. Has no one ever seen the AI engage a player fleet in another SOI?

Maybe an analogy might help to explain why this is so weird to me: imagine that CMANO marketed itself as The Most Scientifically Accurate Naval Warfare Simulator ever, and that its mission statement was to generate a plausible model of what Near Future Naval Warfare would Really Be Like. Imagine, then, that you were interested in the possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and you wanted to experiment with different mixed Taiwanese/American/Japanese battlegroups. How impressive would it be if you discovered that the only way to actually get a fight going in the game was to:

A) Place a Chinese battlegroup in a mainland harbour, sail into the harbour with a Taiwanese battlegroup (if the Taiwanese battlegroup doesn't come to anchor, the Chinese will not attack but will rather attempt to hide in nearby coves and inlets while launching the occasional desultory airstrike)
B) Place a Chinese battlegroup unscathed in a Taiwanese harbour

Most people would think that this was not, in fact, a good representation of Near Future Naval Warfare, no matter how detailed the models of the weapons platforms themselves were. I don't think this is a bad analogy for CoaDE either, since the game represents combatants nuking each other's civilian populations- letting an enemy fleet actually establish an orbit around a militarily relevant body before attempting to intercept them is an absurdity in this case, in the same way that letting a carrier battlegroup set up shop in one of your harbours is- of course you want to intercept somewhere where they can't easily bomb your military and civilian infrastructure!

I think the lack of concern over this may arise from the fact that the community here is primarily interested in ship/component design and less interested in larger questions of strategy (one doesn't necessarily come before the other, but they have to be in conversation with one another to end up with any kind of reasonable picture of how the systems would "really" be used). This proceeds to some extent from the game design itself- if you want to play the game as a wargame rather than an engineering simulation, there's not that much to do after you've completed the campaign. IMO this is why building up a robust library of custom levels is important to broadening CoaDE's appeal- but as far as I can figure the AI design prevents anything more interesting or complicated than what can already be achieved in the sandbox.

What's driving me nuts about this is that CoaDE is riiiight on the edge of being so much more than just a spaceship sandbox. I mean, if the game was just the ship designer and the tactical engine, I still would have bought it and played it, and none of this would be bothering me, because I would say, you're right, it's just a toolbox with a bunch of arbitrary assumptions. But we got n-body physics and a turn based 3d maneuvering engine that should make the Kerbal devs green with envy. I had more or less the same thought the other day- "is the n-body physics engine really just there to make us solve a maneuvering puzzle before we get dumped into the tactical engine?" It just seems crazy that the AI doesn't know how to use it, to the point where I'm half-convinced I must be wrong.

One way or another, I have no complaints about what I paid for- I put 90 hours into the campaign, designer, and sandbox before finally deciding to move on to do some mission editing. As fun as the ship designer is, without particular roles, particular missions, particular conflicts to be involved in, ultimately it's all just kind of contextless and drab. But by point of comparison, I have almost 900 hours in ArmA 3, most of which is mission editing time. I love scenario design, I love taking people's content and putting it in a cool context and seeing how it all works given some explicitly designed war scenario, and I really, really wanted to do that with CoaDE. And it's so close- so damn close. The AI doctrines do most of what you need them to do for this kind of thing (if they applied on a per-fleet basis they'd be perfect)- except, except... the AI can't get from here to there! If we just had some kind of scripting, or if the AI could use the automatic-orbit-matching tools that are already in the game.... *sigh*.

Perhaps qswitched could open the inner workings of the game's AI more, so volunteers can improve it?

I'm all for that, as well as having more behavior options for specific modules to help AI use them better. That said, there is a limit to what parameter tweaking can do. Ultimate solution would be to allow us to write AI behavior code and provide interfaces for that, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Even having some comments in the data files detailing what all those values mean would be extremely helpful. For example, Distant Worlds doesn't support plugin DLLs either (to my knowledge), but here is what its data files look like:


'Distant Worlds Resources - 1.9.5.0



'each line defines a single resource with comma-separated data, up to a maximum of 80 resources (0-79)

'Basic Information:

' - ID: numeric ID value of resource

' - Name: text of resource name

' - PictureRef: index value mapping to image used to display resource (\ui\resources folder)

' - BasePrice: base price of resource when buying and selling. Note that the actual price fluctuates based on galaxy supply and demand

' - Type of Resource: 0=Mineral, 1=Gas, 2=Luxury

' - SuperLuxuryBonusAmount: numeric value that indicates special development bonus for colonies with this luxury resource, range from 0 (no bonus, i.e. not a super luxury resource) to 50

' - IsFuel: Y/N value indicating whether this is fuel resource used in reactors

' - IsImportantPreWarpResource: Y/N value indicating whether this resource is important to have in home system of prewarp empires

' - ColonyGrowthResourceLevel: numeric value indicating level of resource required for growth at colonies, range from 0 (not required) to 1.0 (lots of this resource required)

' - ColonyManufacturingLevel: numeric value indicating whether resource is a manufactured resource at colonies. When greater than zero then resource is not naturally occurring but rather is manufactured at sufficiently developed colonies. Value indicates required population and development level before resource may randomly appear at a colony: value = population in billions * development level

'Distribution and Prevalance Information - Multiple entries allowed, each with 5 values as follows:

' - Type: 0=Planet/Moon, 1=Asteroid, 2=GasCloud

' - SubType: 0=Continental, 1=MarshySwamp, 2=Ocean, 3=Desert, 4=Ice, 5=Volcanic, 6=BarrenRock, 7=GasGiant, 8=FrozenGasGiant, 9=Metal (asteroid), 10=Ammonia, 11=Argon, 12=CarbonDioxide, 13=Chlorine, 14=Helium, 15=Hydrogen, 16=NitrogenOxygen, 17=Oxygen

' - Prevalence Value: chance of resource appearing at this type of planet/moon/asteroid/gas cloud. Range from 0 (0% chance) to 1.0 (100% chance). NOTE: when resource is super luxury then Prevalence Value instead indicates how many sources in average galaxy of 700 stars, i.e. 1.0 means single source in 700-star galaxy

' - Abundance Minimum: minimum abundance of resource at this type of planet/moon/asteroid/gas cloud. Range from 0 (0% abundance) to 1.0 (100% abundance). Actual abundance is random value between Minimum and Maximum

' - Abundance Maximum: maximum abundance of resource at this type of planet/moon/asteroid/gas cloud. Must be higher than Minimum value above. Range from 0 (0% abundance) to 1.0 (100% abundance). Actual abundance is random value between Minimum and Maximum



'NOTE: be sure NOT to define both gas and mineral resources at the same location, e.g. do not set Gas Giant planets to have both gas and mineral resources



0, Emeros Crystal, 0, 5.0, 0, 0, N, N, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.102, 0.2, 0.7, 0, 5, 0.25, 0.3, 1.0,

1, Nekros Stone, 1, 5.0, 0, 0, N, Y, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.136, 0.2, 0.7, 0, 5, 0.408, 0.3, 1.0,

2, Osalia, 2, 5.0, 0, 0, N, N, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.102, 0.2, 0.7, 0, 3, 0.231, 0.3, 0.9, 0, 5, 0.306, 0.3, 1.0,

 P.S. They also have a hundred pages long modding manual.

You know, this is kinda why a play CoaDE much less now. The battles are unintresting, and rediculously easy (when ive build my custom ships). I could try to give the AI my custom ships, but it doesmt use them in the roles intended.
The whole battle doesnt even give any sense of satisfaction.
I could try to keep up with the current meta, cutting edge custom ships here, but tbh, i dont have that much time to devote to this. I think many of the other veteran players feel similar, as i hardly ever see them post on here, and some veteran players have gone completely and are never on.
I really hope this game can get updates, or even a whole new game. I really like the idea of CoaDE