Feature Request: Select Default AI For Ship Designs

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Space Battles
1

I just bought the beta through Stardock, and have played through several missions. Unfortunately, it’s getting to the point where I somewhat dread starting a new game. The reason is simple: I end up having to spend a lot of time setting up exactly the same AI configurations for various ships as I did the previous mission, and the mission before that, and the mission before that.

If I build an anti-fighter/point defense frigate, I’m always going to want it to prioritize fighters as targets over frigates and cruisers. Fighter chassis configured as bombers, on the other hand, I’m almost always going to want to focus on cruisers and frigates. I usually want most of my ships configured with Cooperative and Vulture AI.

As far as I’ve been able to determine, there’s no way to assign default AI profiles to specific ship designs. It makes setting up each mission really repetitious and drains away a lot of the fun. IMO, the ability to set AI profiles as part of the ship design process would be a major UI improvement.

2

Right click on a deployed ship, select ‘save orders’, those orders will now appear by default every time you place that ship. Escort and formation orders still have to be done manually.

3

Ahh, ok, thanks. Still, that’s a pretty unintuitive location for the option. It would make more sense to have that configurable in the ship design screen.

4

Don’t expect it to always work, though. It generally takes a few deployment attempts for the saved orders to stick, in my experience.

5

Hmm, I’ve never noticed it failing. If you can reliably reproduce that, you should post the steps to do so (probably in the support forum) so Cliff can fix it.

6

Well, it’s quite consistent for me; quite often when I use the ‘save orders’ thing the next few ships of that type I place do not inherit those orders, especially if I have other copies of that ship already deployed. The next deployment, it generally works (by which time I’ve forgotten I set it). I’m not sure what triggers this behaviour, however.

7

Personally, if we can’t have available default order sets to choose from, it would be nice to be able to define them ourselves.

What I envision is something simple like in the ship editor where we can save a set of orders and name it (i.e. Close assault crew) and then later for any given ship we can just grab a set of orders from a drop down. If we then manually modify those orders, the drop down will change to ‘custom’