How is AI ship design handled? Thinking about ascension perks nut unsure how it affects AI

[Pancakelord]

So I am looking at making my first proper content mod - one that adds ascension perks (and 2 civics) which will add some variety / distinctiveness to different empires in the galaxy - as the AI all builds its ships in a very "samey" kind of way right now.

I'm essentially looking at imposing buffs/nerfs on different classes of weapons & armour via ascension perks / national modifiers. But am unsure of how to guarantee this will work for AIs too. I've copied in below the stats of the perks I'm planning to create to give a rough idea (numbers unbalanced) of what I'd be trying to do + get the AI to adhere to.

Ascension perks - Military focuses

Spoiler: Weapons Focus Ascension perks (mutually exclusive)

• Energy weapons.
  • Energy weapons consume 35% less energy.
  • Energy damage +50%, fire rate +30%, tracking +20%.
  • Non-Energy fire rate -50%, damage -35%.

• Kinetics.
  • 5% of kinetic shots will bypass shields and do direct damage to armor.
  • Kinetic damage +50%, fire rate +30%, tracking +20%.
  • Non-kinetic fire rate -50%, damage -35%.
• Missile Supremacy.
  • +20% missile range.
  • Missile damage +50%, flight speed +50%, fire rate +30%, tracking +20%.
  • Non-missile fire rate -50%, damage -35%.
• Carrier doctrine.
  • Unlocks "Skip-interceptors" - ultra low-mass strike craft fitted with micro-hyperdrive cores, letting them 'skip' across a system, emerging (at 2x strikecraft weapons range) to engage the enemy.
    • [this is gonna take some reading up on to figure out]
  • Strike craft damage +25%
  • Strike craft squadrons are twice the size.

And

Spoiler: Defence Focus Ascension perks (mutually exclusive)

• Shield focus
• Research into advanced shield technologies has made our shield technology the envy of the galaxy. We have no need for anything else to defend our troops.
  • Shield module capacity +50%
  • shield recharge rate +60%
  • Armour module values -100%

• Armour focus
• Enhanced armor plating, redundant bulkheads & ablative armor turn our ships into Mobile bunkers.
  • Armour module values +100%
  • Hull points +20%
  • Shield module capacity -100%
  • Ship movement speed -25%
  • Ship evasion -10%

• Evasion focus
• The enemy will never hit us, why would we need large, clumsy ships?
  • Cannot build battleships or Titans.
    • [I think this can be done via a Boolean check - IF Evasion focus = true, disable BBs /Titans]
  • +25% evasion.
  • -50% armor and shields (0.6x multiplier)
  • -25% hull

Spoiler: Civics (mutually exclusive):

Quantity over quality civic
Our fleets will block out the stars
(You have many ships but they're all of sub-par quality - you win through overwhelming numbers)

• Fleet capacity: +100%
• Fleet command limit: +100%
• War exhaustion from lost ships: -60%
• Ship Upkeep & cost: -50%
• Build Speed: +50%
• Ship SP/AP/HP: -50%
• Ship Damage: -45%
• Ship movement speed +20%​

Quality over Quantity civic
We may not have many of them, but our ships are second to none.
(You have few ships, each one is expensive/precious/valuable and hard to take down but you'll feel the loss of each one more)

• Fleet capacity: -50%
• Fleet command limit: -50%
• War exhaustion from lost ships: +30%
• Ship Upkeep & cost: +75%
• Build Speed: -50% (i.e. 50% longer)
• Ship SP/AP/HP: = +50% (50% more "spongy")
• Ship Fire rate: +50%
• Ship movement speed +25%​

Now for a lot of this, its just a case of applying modifiers (i'd have to look up exactly how, probably by copy pasting what other ascension perks do, or adding a national modifier), and weighting them for the AIs to pick too.

But what I'm interested in understanding, is how the AI/AI ship designs will adapt to changes in ship module stats (imposed via ascension perks/ national modifiers) - if at all.

For example if an AI takes the Armour focus AP, which makes Shield capacity -100% (i.e. worthless)

1. Would the AIs still want to put shield modules on their ships (even if they don't do anything?)
2. Or does the AI/Ship Designer already automatically calculate what gives it the best survival odds? (and it would see shields are worth 0 SP so armor is a better pick)
3. Or would I also need to add scripting instructions to somehow, for example, forbid an AI from using shields if they've taken that Shield focus AP?
   • I.e. some Boolean check to prevent it selecting shield modules if it has the Armour focus.

Is there a specific file for ship designs, or some sort of weight system for the auto-designer?
(i'm not actually sure how the automatic ship designer works - I assume that's what AIs currently use to design their ships).

Note: cant edit title, should say "but unsure"

 

[G S Palmer]

As far as I can tell, weapon preferences are defined in AI personalities (common/personalities weapon_preferences = [insert weapon type here]), and then the AI chooses which section to use in their ships based on that and the weights in common/section_templates.

 

[Pancakelord]

That's very useful to know, thank you.

Seeing as it's all embedded in personalities, I'm not sure if there's going to be a way to edit weapon preferences (or SP/AP distribution) off the back of the AI picking an ascension perk, without writing out duplicate personalities (too many combinations to be feasible :/ )... unless there is a modifier that lets me overwrite "weapon_preferences" somehow, but I haven't seen one so far.

One thing that gives me some hope comes from the wiki (though it lacks a citation for where they found this) https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/AI_personalities#Ships

These preferences determine how an empire designs its ships. They are ignored if the AI is facing an enemy heavily focused on a certain type of weapon or defense.

That would imply that the AI can overcome its personality weights and design new ships... somehow - but no clue what would govern that - if its even true / still in-date. It might be able to adapt and use armor if it sees all shield values = 0

Or perhaps I can somehow script the ascension perk to disable shield technologies for its user - I.e take away the choice entirely. This might be more feasible I guess, it'd be a partial solution though.

 

[M@ni@c]

I'd recommend you read this mod's description and code for an example on how to get the AI to do your bidding.

 

[Pancakelord]

I'd recommend you read this mod's description and code for an example on how to get the AI to do your bidding.

Thanks, I'll look in to that method too, it might be better/more compatible than the solution i've come up with below.

I've spent the last little while digging through modifiers and now understand how the automated ship designer works, more or less. It seems to almost entirely pull from the component templates.
I can now get the AI to just outfit with Armor with my test AP_Armor_specialisation perk
dont mind my AP's comment typos or AI weights, made this in 5 mins lol.

I have added an ai_weight section to each shield component within 00_utilities_shields.txt [unfortunately this is FIOS so no partial overwrites :/ -- why paradox, why?] which gives shields a weighting of 0 if the AI (or me tag-switching via console) has picked the ap_armor_specialisation perk.

• normally only advanced components (tier 3+) seem to have AI weights, usually as they cost strategic resources.

This will then force the Ship designer to re-design the auto-best ship to not use any shields[look at bottom of screen - it's picked 3 armor units!] (either immediately, or on the next month) and all ships get a refit thereafter.

When i run mature_galaxy they are also still using armor-only ships later on too, so this looks to be fully scalable.

however I notice i'll need to also apply my weights to shield capacitors too, by the looks of it.

The problem with this approach is the AI will still be researching shields, even if it cant use them (but they do lead to planetary shield generators - which are also pretty crap), but that's a pretty minor setback these days, given that the economic AI actually works now.

So all in, to get this AP mod working, ill need to:

• Add a LIOS 01_asension_perks file that adds my new stuff
• Overwrite likely all the module files in component_templates .... which will destroy any compatibility with other mods that manipulate existing components (or even add new ones? not checked if you can make a 01_utilities_shields file and use that to add new shields, yet).
  • Ill likely be able to use this approach to prevent AIs building battleships and titans if they pick the evasion focus too.
• Any other additions for other features I put in later (like a "camouflage plating" module that adds +evasion, -hull to your ships and "-tracking to enemy ships", making your ships extremely hard to hit, but weak AF if they do get hit)

 

[M@ni@c]

Thanks, I'll look in to that method too, it might be better/more compatible than the solution i've come up with below.

Nah, it seems like you've already discovered on your own the way to go: set weights to zero in the component templates.

[unfortunately this is FIOS so no partial overwrites :/ -- why paradox, why?]

I may be having a brain fart, but would naming the file !00_whatever.txt not allow a partial overwrite? Still, as you say, there's no way around the fact it'll make your mod incompatible with pretty much any other mod dealing involving ships.

The problem with this approach is the AI will still be researching shields

You can likewise set these techs to have an ai_weight of zero under certain circumstances. With the usual caveat it'll make your mod incompatible with many other mods.

 

[Pancakelord]

I may be having a brain fart, but would naming the file !00_whatever.txt not allow a partial overwrite? Still, as you say, there's no way around the fact it'll make your mod incompatible with pretty much any other mod dealing involving ships.

I might give that a go but as I need to weight all shields I think it might end up doing the same thing. I just want to "inject" a weight I.e. just add in the ai_weight = { ... } bit for all modules there whilst leaving the rest of it alone.
If I could just apply a weight to the class of components (i.e. anything the game tags as a "shield") that would be a much more tidy approach, but that is non-feasible as far as I can tell.

You can likewise set these techs to have an ai_weight of zero under certain circumstances. With the usual caveat it'll make your mod incompatible with many other mods.

I have been looking at that too, as Technology is listed as LIOS on the wiki, so I could just edit the shield techs (and later on i'll be doing the inverse of all this for armor / various weapon classes) and apply my edits piecemeal. But for now i'll see how the AI performs, just having specialised fleets (rather than jack of all trades) might make them enough of a challenge that a few dead-weight technologies wont matter lol.

Edit: As an aside, I just realised there may be some interesting things you could do with AI weights in component_templates, like if the galactic focus is set to "battling the contingency", this could be built into the weights (make it a factor of 10 for all shield and all disruptor weapons if galactic focus = contingency lol) to make AI weight anti-contingency builds very highly - they'd start to spec for anti-crisis just like a player does.

 

[M@ni@c]

But for now i'll see how the AI performs, just having specialised fleets (rather than jack of all trades) might make them enough of a challenge that a few dead-weight technologies wont matter lol.

Not sure why you think having them specialize like that would improve their performance. At least for a human player, these AIs would be really easy to counter.

Edit: As an aside, I just realised there may be some interesting things you could do with AI weights, like if the galactic focus is set to "battling the contingency", this could be built into the weights (make it a factor of 10 for all disruptor weapons if galactic focus = contingency lol) to make AI weight anti-contingency builds very highly - they'd start to spec for anti-crisis just like the player does.

As a matter of fact, Starnet has been doing this all along, and the Spacedock mod I linked to, takes this reactive approach to ship design to a whole new level. (So check out those mods before possibly reinventing the wheel )

 

[Pancakelord]

Not sure why you think having them specialize like that would improve their performance. At least for a human player, these AIs would be really easy to counter.

As a matter of fact, Starnet has been doing this all along, and the Spacedock mod I linked to, takes this reactive approach to ship design to a whole new level. (So check out those mods before possibly reinventing the wheel )

Its less about them being easy for the player to counter and more about

1. making them snowball amongst themselves more, and
2. actually giving me a reason to refit my ships lol.
   • Right now I have played 5 games in 2.6x to 2500ish and in each one, my fleet load out was identical, which i find boring (after dumping strike craft when I saw they were still meh - just saw the 2.6.2 hotfix, so gonna have to try them again.. again).

My eventual aim is to get to a state where some AI pick both (for example) a Kinetic AP focus and a shield AP focus whilst another might pick, say, missiles and evasion so I constantly have to adapt and it makes the galaxy feel a little more diverse.
And unlike pre-2.6 I've been fighting a lot more fed-on-fed wars, fighting a bunch of unspecialised fleets is one thing but fighting a some unspecialised fleets whilst also fighting a super-specialised missile-armor fleet might actually be a game-changer... that's the idea anyway lol.

In theory I guess I could even weight specialisation against what other AIs in the federation are also doing, but for now I just want to prove the concept.​

It might make more sense to roll these AP focuses into a military weapons / defences policy later on, but ive never touched policies before, and not sure how policy decisions are governed, so APs will do as a test bed for now.

And I used to use starnet a lot pre 2.6 havent tried it yet in federations but never actually saw AIs respeccing for the contingency (which is all I ever seem to get) -- though that may just have been because the economy system was so crap they couldn't support those sorts of fleets. Though your comment makes me think I should give it another go now.

 

[Pancakelord]

One interesting thing i've noticed: I just ran "research_all_technologies 1" and applying those component weights actually edits what the shield technolgies will provide, without me even editing the techs themselves.
https://i.imgur.com/a7ZPVu1.png So i probably will need to do something about them being drawn. (less of an issue for shields - noone will miss a shield planetary generator, but alloy output enhancement techs come after tier 1 armor techs)
https://i.imgur.com/uNJOp6V.png it actually removes those modules from the designer (though deflectors 1 still exists for AIs as a fallback module -though they'll never pick it)