Fix Explore's autocast?

from Sins Forums

There are a couple of tweaks which would make Explore's autocast much, much more useful.

1. Don't go back to dead-end planets or asteroids. If there was nothing there but neutral ships before, you aren't going to learn anything new.

2. Prioritize exploring (a) unexplored gravity wells (b ) closest to where the scout frigate is currently.

? ===== A ===== B ===== HW ===== C ===== ?

All scouts at A and C should scout out their respective close unexplored gravity well, instead (a) of taking 5 minutes to go back to the other one, way on the other side of your homeworld, and instead of (b ) stopping to go back and see if the neutral ships at B are still there.

If I start a game put my scouts on autoexplore and am busy queuing up more frigates / more research stations / more research / more rally points etc, it puts a serious damper on my information-gathering if my scouts suddenly decide to turn around and go through the homeworld again to look at an unexplored planet on the other side, one which would be much more easily explored by a closer scout on autoexplore.

It would also be nice if scouts later in the game wouldn't decide every so often to go on a sightseeing tour through the pirate planet, which is nothing more than a suicide mission.

Edit: Reformatted to kill the damn autosmileys.

Yes, yes, I know, "scout manually", but anyone doing their best to expand and colonize as fast as possible (in reasonably spacious maps - not in 5s) is going to have very little leftover time... (and, if the newly explored gravity well isn't a colonizable planet, you don't even get an audio warning)

19,126 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

I will put this in the AI improvement thread.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

I'd like to make the scouts avoid the Pirate Base at all costs unless manually ordered by a player to jump in there.

Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Difficulty is that you don't know what planet is the Pirate Base at the beginning.

However, it is easy to tell once the planet has been revealed.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Well the beginning is understandable, but once found it should be avoided unless it is the only route.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

Yes I think auto-explore should really prioritize going to unexplored planets until there is no more left. Going back to see a random already explored gravwell, in the early game, is nearly always a waste of time...

Avoiding pirates once discovered, and having a better general pathing, would be great too.

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

I've found that in a 1v1, I can almost always spot the pirate planet on sight even if the well hasn't been explored yet. So if there was a more general "avoid this gravity well" option, that would work too and save the scout (which could also be useful late-game).

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

Not pathing through the pirate base is the big one, and to be honest the only one I think will get changed.

The other problem is that two scouts will not auto-explore to the same planet, so if you have only three unexplored planets visible and four scouts on auto-explore, one will backtrack to the planet that was explored longest ago... which is likely to be a dead end behind the homeworld.