Spacedock: Adaptive AI Ship Design

"Spacedock" improves the ship designs the AI creates.

In vanilla Stellaris, how much armor or shields an AI puts on its ships is determined solely by their personality. Erudite Explorers for instance want 70% of their defenses to be Shields, and only 30% as Armor. Even if they had level 5 armor technology and only level 1 shields, they would still only dedicate one defense slot to armor, and put lvl 1 shields in all other slots, in an attempt to reach 70% shields at all costs.

Spacedock changes this. There are now five variations of each AI personality, covering the spectrum from a heavy shield focus over a balanced approach to a heavy armor focus. Which personality is picked, changes during the game based on two main factors:

1) What technology does the AI have? If it has better shield tech than armor tech, it’ll obviously be tempted to use shields more.
2) What weapon technologies do its rivals, enemies, and neighbouring purifiers have? If for instance some or all its rivals had missiles as their best weapons, the AI could be nudged in the direction of armor, countering the fact it might have better shield technology.

At the moment you can see on the F1 Contacts screen which defense plan the AI is currently going for. D for Default/Balanced, A or AA for an armor focus, S or SS for a shield focus. I’ll probably remove that at some point. For now I’m using it for myself to be able to observe AI behavior more easily. It’s also a way for you to verify the mod is in fact active and enabled. That can sometimes be a problem these days with the new launcher…

In vanilla Stellaris, similar to with defenses, some of the AI’s weapon preferences are hard set by its personality, and often it just uses a random mismatch of whatever weapons it has available.

Spacedock on the other hand follows a similar principle as with shields & armor – now its weapons choice is determined by two main factors:

1) What technology does the AI have? If it has better lasers than mass drivers, it’ll obviously be tempted to use lasers more.
2) What ratio of armor and shields do its rivals, enemies, and neighbouring purifiers use? If for instance some or all its rivals primarily use shields, the AI will be tempted to use more missiles and torpedoes.

There are various other factors going into its decision making, too many to list here. Some examples are:

– The more hostiles have explosive weapons as their weapon of choice, the more likely the AI is to use point defense.
– Like a human it will jump on the chance to equip proton launchers or XL weapons.
– Under the right conditions the AI will opt for a pure disruptor fleet. No random mixing with lasers or mass drivers.

For an even better AI challenge, I can recommend my other AI combat minimod: Make the AI Doomstack. It makes the AI concentrate its fleet in a bigger stack, instead of sending several tiny fleets to their doom.

I’ll probably release a companion mod in the future that applies the same principles to the weapons added by the "Extra Ship Components" mod. Unless someone can convince the mod author to do it himself of course. 😉

Spacedock overwrites the following vanilla files/folders:
00_utilities_shields.txt
00_weapons_***.txt
diplo_phrases
personalities
section_templates of the corvette, destroyer, cruiser and battleship

Due to the way I named the personality and template files, it shouldn’t matter where you place this mod in your loading order, and it should be compatible with other mods such as Starnet.

This mod comes included in my larger Planetfall overhaul mod. That mod doesn’t have the ambition to be light weight and compatible with as many mods as possible, which allows me to do a few more things:
1) Planetfall edits the country_types file, which allows me to experiment with the ratio the AI builds of the various ship classes. For instance if it excels in torpedo technology, it could go for a heavy corvette fleet. While if it excels in XL weapons, it could go for a heavy battleship fleet.
2) Planetfall also changes tech AI weights. If the AI for instance doesn’t yet have a level 3 weapon technology, it will attach extreme importance to researching one. It will however attach less importance to the next level 3 weapon tech that becomes available. I can’t do that in a maximum-compatibility mod, because for instance an AI tech weight of 10 would be very high in vanilla, but extremely low in Starnet.

You can activate Spacedock in an ongoing game. You’ll see the AI switch to their new personality in February of the next year. After that it might take several years for the AI to change their ship designs, as I believe the AI only updates its ship designs when it researches a new military technology.

This mod is updated for Stellaris version 2.7
Thumbnail by http://www.shaunsgallery.co.uk

I am only one man, and don’t pretend to be the best fleet builder ever. I’m sure some numbers can be tweaked to further improve the AI logic. So if you observe some crazy AI ship designs, or have some ideas to refine the AI logic, please do comment! I’ll probably type out the current logic in a Paradox forum thread, so you can know in detail what the mod is already doing.