[Mod] Advanced Ship Behaviour Modules

[Issen.]

Steam Workshop link
V 1.0 For Stellaris 1.3.1

Advanced Ship Behaviour Modules is a mod that aims to improve the current state of ship combat maneuvers.

If you are unhappy about corvettes always charging forwards and battleships always sitting in the back, or you would like to have an artillery and a brawler cruiser variant, this mod may be for you!
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Features

• Decouples the Ship Combat Computer stat bonuses from the ship behaviour, so you can now choose the computer based on the bonuses given.
  
• Adds universal ship combat behaviours that can be used with any ship class - no longer do battleships have to sit in the back.
  
• Adds a variant of the Fighter Hangar that keeps the strike craft near the carrier for added protection against missiles and bombers.
  
• Should not affect AI ships, so no unexpected or erratic behaviour from other empires.

This mod adds the following tactical behaviours:

• Follow - Ships follow the rest of the fleet, similar to vanilla 1.3 destroyers.
  
• Charge - Ships close distance to the enemy and engage at point-blank range.
  
• Artillery - Ships move up to a predetermined distance (120, 100, 80 or 60 range units) and stays there while firing at the enemy.
  
• Flanking - Ships circle the enemy fleet at a certain radius (100, 80 or 60 range units), while firing.
  
• Hit and Run - Ships follow a pattern of fire and retreat, moving up to a certain distance (100, 80 or 60 range units) before breaking contact.
  
• Default - If you wish to use the vanilla behaviours, use the vanilla computers and this behaviour. Basically a blank entry in the behaviour list.

This is my first mod for Stellaris, so some parts might still be suboptimal. Please let me know if some features do not work properly, or are broken.
No AI support for now, because I doubt the AI would be able to choose the proper behaviours on their own - any help or pointers on that side would be appreciated.

 

[folk+]

I wrote a guide about how to make the AI use specific components here on the forums.

There I explain how I made it work in my Aggro! tank computers addon.

I started documenting the ship_behaviors a bit, but I am far from done and testing it is really boring.

This is what I wrote so far: http://www.stellariswiki.com/Ship_modding

 

[Issen.]

Awesome work!
It's a shame that there isn't a better documentation for so many of the features yet, and a lot of it is still down to trial and error. Wish I had seen your documentation earlier, that would have saved me a lot of time.

 

[folk+]

Hehe, thank you
That's the whole point of the docs. But I haven't added them to the wiki or anywhere else because they are not complete enough yet.

 

[Shuul]

Hey, this seems incredibly useful, will this work with ISB? It seems to me that there can be some conflicts.

 

[folk+]

I'm almost done testing component_target_weight_mult, and it was not what I thought it to be at all. I've updated the docs in my initial post.

EDIT: So, I guess, for the general mod-author public out there who doesn't want to read the docs, or who struggles to get a takeaway from it, the most important ones seem to be this (for me, at least, right now ):

The primary targeting={} value that can impact whether or not your ship will target the "largest" enemy, is armor_focus_value. But that will only kick in if your ship is equipped with a weapon that has shield penetration (like a torpedo, for example).

The secondary one is component_target_weight_mult, but that will only kick in for weapons that have defined target_weights. In 1.3.1, this includes all torpedoes and all XL weapons, but no other weapons.

The third value that can impact it, is distance_to_fleet_penalty, since most Battleships tend to have sniping behavior that keeps them in the distance.

The fourth would be, you'd think, size_difference_penalty, but that provides a penalty for any ship that is not the same size as you, so set it to 0.

Other than those, which are very unreliable indeed, the ONLY way to ensure that a ship will focus the largest enemy ship, is to have complete control over the weapons used in the game, so that in weapon_component_template, you can set target_weights={}.

EDIT 2: So I've confirmed that you can set target_weights={} on any utility component, and as long as the weights you set are higher than what vanilla torpedo and XL weapons set (5000), the ship WILL give priority to the ship types you set here. Provided you set component_target_weight_mult obviously.

 

[folk+]

@Issen. okay I'm done for now.
If you (and others!) can just read through the docs and then ask any question you might have, I will know which parts need to be clarified or added/removed.

Then we can add it to the wiki

Here's the target_weights I will most likely use in my tank non-XL computers:
For XL, no weights can be above 1000.

	# These need to be higher than
	# the target_weights set by vanilla weapons,
	# to take precedence over what those weapons
	# want. Vanilla weapons use 5000 as the highest priority.
	target_weights = {
		# Vanilla
		corvette = 6000
		destroyer = 7000
		cruiser = 8000
		battleship = 9000
		# ISBS
		titan = 10000 # 5000 hp
		leviathan = 11000 # 6000 hp
		# Realistic Ships
		rs_battlecruiser = 8500 # 2000hp
		rs_dreadnought = 9500 # 2800hp
		rs_heavy_dreadnought_type_a = 9750 # 3100hp
		rs_heavy_dreadnought_type_b = 9750
		rs_heavy_dreadnought_type_c = 9750
		rs_heavy_dreadnought_type_d = 9750
		rs_heavy_dreadnought_type_e = 9750
		rs_heavy_dreadnought_type_f = 9750
		rs_heavy_dreadnought_type_g = 9750
		rs_ea_cruiser = 7500 # 1500 hp
		rs_support_cruiser = 7200 # 1200 hp
		# New Ship Classes & More 3.0 beta
		Frigate = 7100 # 600hp
		LightCarrier = 8100 # 1500hp
		StrikeCruiser = 8800 # 1800hp
		Battlecruiser = 8500 # 2100hp
		Carrier = 9500 # 3500hp
		Dreadnough = 9500 # 4500hp
		CommandDreadnought = 10000 # 5000hp
		Flagship = 7500 # 18000hp, but dont focus this one because it's too strong anyway
	}

 

[folk+]

I posted it to the wiki at http://www.stellariswiki.com/Ship_modding - maybe someone will move it or whatever, or maybe someone will format it better. The most important thing is that it's there and editable.