Gameplay queries

[HarryMudd]

Another query, if I may.
I'm playing a Klingon session at the moment, still using the ECM 5 version of the latest release.
I have conquered all the Cardassian worlds that have dilithium and I hunted down all their ships some dozen or so turns ago.
According to the Empire status page, Cardassia has zero dilithium. With that in mind, over the last 2-3 turns, the Cardassians have started producing ships. Is this a glitch? The only thing I notice is that 3 of their worlds have the asteroid symbol.
Brian

[thunderchero]

AI does not need dilth to build ships (known AI cheat)

[justanick]

AI does not need dilth to build ships (known AI cheat)

Is this also true for ECM5? I always assumed that a dilithium mine is required.

[Spocks-cuddly-tribble]

I have conquered all the Cardassian worlds that have dilithium and I hunted down all their ships some dozen or so turns ago. According to the Empire status page, Cardassia has zero dilithium. With that in mind, over the last 2-3 turns, the Cardassians have started producing ships. Is this a glitch?

A quite complex matter. Usually the AI needs dilithium sources for ship production like players, however:

- Dilithium refineries for all AI extra starting systems even if no dilithium present (ECM retains this vanilla feature): viewtopic.php?p=18256#p18256
- some mods like UDM 3 disable the dilithium requirement for ship production in trek.exe
- sometimes there is strange bugs with AI data out of sync e.g. for production (build queue is a player only feature)

Is this also true for ECM5? I always assumed that a dilithium mine is required.

In latest tests the AI stopped the ship production when losing all dilithium sources in ECM. But the new extra codes do not cover all unanalysed AI glitches.
Sporadic bugs with AI data are hard to fix. Most cripple the AI but sometimes it 'appears' like AI cheats:
E.g. in vanilla the AI can upgrade main buildings beyond the cost limit, we don't know how (unanalysed AI build data): viewtopic.php?p=6293#p6293

[Spocks-cuddly-tribble]

I retested the issue with latest ECM and found that the strict 'Phantom-Dilithium Bug (fix)' needs an update to prevent the AI ship production from getting stuck when losing a subset of its dilithium sources: viewtopic.php?p=15170#p15170

The AI cannot handle the strict phantom dilithium fix since it cannot remove surplus ships under construction when losing dilithium sources.
So the AI can get stuck indefinitely without any ship production (even with dilithium) and also loses the industry outputs of said systems.

All mods using the old strict patch (ECM and UM5 I think) should remove it (and delete from patch database) and use the new version with AI workaround !

Old patch to remove:

phantom_dilithium.patch

(748 Bytes) Downloaded 17 times

New patch to add:

phantom_dilithium_with_AI_workaround.patch

(1.09 KiB) Downloaded 18 times

Fixed a bug with custom station names for the next ECM update and added some special names:

ECM_shipnames.png (88.72 KiB) Viewed 598 times

[thunderchero]

All mods using the old strict patch (ECM and UM5 I think) should remove it (and delete from patch database) and use the new version with AI workaround !

ECM, GALM, AAM, AFC, FDA, UM5 all use that patch