A strange thing playing with no pirates

from GalCiv3 Forums

Obviously there are no pirate bases, but if you manually direct your surveyor to a ship graveyard there will usually be pirates there. This is understandable, but if I put my surveyor on auto survey, there are no pirates in the graveyards. I can understand that the game AI knows when a ship is on auto, but I don't understand how it removes the pirates from the graveyards.

When you change to auto survey, your ship initially seems to avoid the graveyards for a short period, but after it has been on auto for several turns it goes right into them and gets the lost ships and movement bonuses that come from the graveyards. I do not understand how the pirates are magically removed for an auto surveyor and when I take over and manually direct the ship the pirates are suddenly back. If anyone know how that works in the game mechanics please explain it to me.

Another thing that happened to me while playing tonight. I was getting erratic pops from my speakers when I went to the shipyards and the diplomacy screen. It was just one pop when I opened a shipyard screen but in the diplomacy screen it was a persistent popping noise. It was so distracting I turned off sound effects in the options screen and that stopped it. No problem with the music just the special sound effects,

I also noticed that my surveyor was moving erratically when I started the game, and there were no exhaust trails coming from the ships. I soon got engrossed in the game and stopped noticing whether this erratic behavior continued. In fact I forgot about it until I had saved and closed the game.

Tonight is the first time I have had problems like this and before I turn it into a support ticket, I figured I would ask if anyone else has had similar problems. 

EDIT: Oh well , fixed the sound by switching from system configuration to stereo and the ships seem to be running smoother after reloading. I am still not getting the exhaust trails that I see on the streams and YouTube.

15,260 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Ghost Pirates

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I think this is an example of a mechanic that has been outfitted so the AI doesn't get screwed up. They put their Surveyor to auto and forget about it, now with Pirates in these anomalies they'd loose their ship which means that most anomalies will belong to the player in that game (do they actually build replacement surveyors at all?)

Although a bit unrelated but this is /az least a very minor) proof that the AI might play to different rules here & there in order to be able to keep him running. A player that uses auto-survey essentially uses a mechanism that was designed for the AI. I have no idea how to settle this logically unless the graveyard pirates are taken away

Thinking of this, why not integrate the space monster from GalCiv1 again (which was actually coded in GalCiv2 as well, but not fully as the game would crash), that red spacesnake dragon whatever which gave the SurveyShip a headstart of several turns until it started to move (so the Surveyor will live but the thing might attack somewhere else)

Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I think you're right Maiden - in both that it's done to save the AI survey ships, and also that they never build replacement / additional surveyors. Makes very little difference as sooner or later they will hit a wormhole to the other side of the galaxy and have to spend 50+ turns getting back in to range.

All anomalies belong to me, of course, so that is acceptable XD

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Yes, the reason for it being this way is as stated above. I just don't understand the mechanic of how they can have pirates if the surveyor is on manual, then BAM, they are gone when the ship is on auto. I seems like some complicated coding to me.

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Magnumaniac, reply 3

I think you're right Maiden - in both that it's done to save the AI survey ships, and also that they never build replacement / additional surveyors. Makes very little difference as sooner or later they will hit a wormhole to the other side of the galaxy and have to spend 50+ turns getting back in to range.


All anomalies belong to me, of course, so that is acceptable

XD

Seriously, it would be nice if the AI became smarter in that regard (better challenge)

- depending on the number of available anomalies & opponents, an AI should consider building additional Surveyors

- depending on the largeness of the map there should be a tendency that wormholes are ignored

The auto-survey also needs some tweaking:

- First off, always heading towards the closest anomaly isn't automatically the best choice (eg. when this is a single anomaly which could detract the surveyor from a cluster of anomalies in another direction)

 

- a sub-option which could command that specific objects would be ignored could be handy, just like "don't survey wormoles/graveyards etc". As for me, I always ignore wormoles, and this has the additional effect that if AI surveyor survive + anomalies become short, it often goes for wormholes which throws it off-track giving me even more time to round up the very last anomalies.

- a sub-option making the ship avoiding all enemy confrontation at all cost

- and perhaps a tendency to rather survey into regions whic are already known to be friendly (cleared of enemies) instead of unknown space even if the first option takes more movepoints or nets lesser anomalies

Quoting Franco, reply 4
I seems like some complicated coding to me.

Donno about C++ but I can program (Schneider) BASIC and there this would be a single line, and I assume that logical operations work basically the same in most languages. Dependant on the return of a single variable, which determines if auto-survey is set or not, the code executes a line or a sub-routine that either will delete the pirates or create them, and then simply proceed.