The release was delayed a lot longer than I had anticipated. I was tracking an intermitten bug and I thought I fixed it a few times, turned out that the culprit is in more than 1 area. Finally, a member reported a bug which turned out to be a variant of the same bug, allowed me to isolate the problem.
AI Stuck Glitch
This glitch is not really mod related b/c the original game had it. However, there is another place in the mod that made it worse. I will discuss both places here.
Symptom
The AI refuses to place the units they have already built. It is stuck in the queue and eventually they just lose. The bug is intermitten, so it happens on and off. The game may start out correctly, building small ships, etc.. but mostly by mid to late game, the AI may stop producing units completely.
Primary Cause - Found in the Original Game
This problem is found in the Tacticalmultiplayerbuildspaceunitsgeneric.lua file. Any unit not enabled in the space skirmish needs to be removed from the lua. I honestly do not know why, when it should simply ignore them, but this has been tested several times. Specifically, Fleet_Com_Empire_Team and Fleet_Com_Rebel_Team needs to be removed. When they're in the lua, they stall the AI. Other ones include Jedi_cruiser_R, Executor_Star_Destroyer. The reason the problem is intermitten, is only when the AI is looking for these units and since they're not enabled, it stalls. The more of these disabled units, the more chance it stalls.
Secondary Cause - Found only if you modded the game
When creating a custom upgrade, etc... Make sure you do not make any errors. I created a few custom upgrades and had very very minor errors, one of which was an "extra space" after the tooltip name. This causes the AI to stall whenever they encounter the upgrade.
Wrong Death Scenes
This one is not a big glitch, but a minor one. When we make a variant of a ship, the death scene clone code doesn't override, but it adds to the list. So Home_Two had 2 death scenes, 1 which was made specifically for it and the original Home_One death scene.
The only way to go around this, is not to use the variant coding when you have different scales or different models. Just copy and paste the whole code. Alternatively, one can create a "generic" ship code which leaves out the death clone, then program all other variants base on this generic ship and then put the death code in the variant coding.
The same thing applies to the fighter compliments of capships. This is why the original coder coded generic SD with no fighters.
Multiple Hero Units in Galactic
If you wish to create a hero unit to be built in galactic conquest mode, you must set the "lifetime" allowable to 1. All heroes in the GC mode will have that respawn timer. If you didn't, then the player would be allowed to build another hero while the dead one is respawning.
The problem is when you want this same unit in the skirmish, but didn't want it to be limited to 1. In which case, simply use the variant coding. This one will override, so you don't have to worry about it. Or simply put the limitation on the one you want for the GC mode and don't include it in the skirmish star base.
Difficulty Adjustment
As mentioned in the changelog, I've always disliked how the difficulty adjustment originally was based on adjusted damage, HP, and shielding. The whole point of the game is about matching which ships with which, so it seems to defeat the purpose if on Hard level, the enemy gets 60% damage increase to all units. I changed the difficulty adjustments to solely credit gain and build time.
However, it should be noted that any minor changes in these areas would significantly be multiplied in the difficulty multiplier. For example, the AI has more than 5 queue slots. So they can queue up to a lot of units. If we increase 5 second build time to a unit and say it was queue up to 10 of them, that's a 50 sec time increase for this set to come out. Also, the AI seems to queue up units before they have the credit to pay for them. They would queue up the unit and it would hold the queque until the credit is met. If during those time the AI loses some asteriod mining facitilies, those units would be stuck there for a long time.
Adjusting the credit_accumulation_factor also makes quite a significance even with little change. The credits in the game is accumulated through a lot of different variables and multipliers. In the hard difficulty, I set the AI credit gain to 4x, which furthers increases any minor changes.
Faction Balancing
This is perhaps the hardest to do. The reason is because there isn't 1 specific area to balance, but a multiple areas which will alter the game quite a bit - build time, cost, AI combat power, etc.. of every unit in the game.
The AI runs on a series of subroutines and is different every game depending on the situation. Generally, it likes to get to Starbase 5 as fast as possible, but when it is attacked, it will build units at its currently level to defend. It also has a lot of other factors which made it difficult to really balance out. But generally, you want all of them to stay within the same general star base level.
For example, by moving the Mc30 from tier 4 down to tier 3, I didn't anticipate that it would stall the AI from upgrading to level 4 star base. The reason is in tier 3, we have Victor SD at 3400 and 25 sec build time, Assault Frigate at 3000 and 23 sec build time, and Vengeance at 3300 and 18 build time. If they were not attacked, it wouldn't matter and they would try to reach level 5 star base. However, if they were attacked, they need to build units to defend and the MC30 at 4000 and 28 sec is way too slow and expensive in comparison to the other units of that level. For this reason, I reduced the MC30 cost to 3500 and build time to 25 sec.
There are still a few behaviors I haven't quite figured out. I've seen a few times when Rebel AI would stay at level 4 and just pumps out fleets and fleets of Light Calamari Cruisers, eventually winning the game. I suspect it is for the same reason described above, that when attacked it simply builds the units they have available at that level. Since it built so many of it, it never had the chance to upgrade to level 5. I've seen the Consortium do the same thing, but so far didn't observe the Empire AI doing it.
The AI combat power is another fun thing to play around with. Mostly it just determines which ships to build for the AI, but it also affects any battle situation, when the AI will retreat and when they will fight.
