AI properties research

Yes, getting the AI to function correctly has been a major pain of modders in this game. And while I am certainly not an expert (and I'm not sure if there are any), I think I can answer some of your problems (hopefully correctly).

Roletypes: Okay, first of all there are two values that the AI uses in determining what ships do, roleType and statCountType. I believe roleType determines how the AI uses the ship, while it is the statCountType that determines the AI build order (and possbily other things). I don't think you can give two values to either of these attributes (though I haven't tried). Also, it seems most if not all statCountTypes that are used by the normal Sins races are needed for the AI to run efficiently, whether the ship's roletype matches this or not.

Two roletypes: It is probably the statCountType that determines how the AI build things, so I'd make sure this line correctly labels your ships before comparing how the AI chooses between similiar ships.

Reserchable Capitalships: I am unsure why certain mods have this problem (I suspect it is poorly defined capitalships), but the mod I help with (Requiem) has reserachable capitalships and has always worked fine for me. Both new races have at least a colony capital and battleship avaliable at the start, with a carrier and a better battleship avaliable after research. The result is the AI building both the starting capitalships and the reserachable ones before too long (though it is only a level 3 research, if you put it too high the AI might never research it), at similiar rates as the regular AI

Good luck with your research, and please share anything you discover.

Excellent information. This gives me some more info to work with. I didn't look at statCountType, I'm definitely going to check that out and see how the AI behaves with that.

It's also good to hear your mod is working that way as well. I suspected that there has to be certain capital ships available immediately, particularly the two you mentioned, and possibly a carrier as well. So I'm aiming to set all 3 initial capitals to those, and the second tier to those that aren't met, and the third tier to whatever seems suitable since hopefully the AI won't be trying to max the tech so quickly.

Once I've modeled enough ships to get the basic specs of a race laid out then I am going to really start chiseling at these values and see how they handle the new costs and such. Hopefully this will produce some tangible results I can use to formulate a plan for everything else.

/e I see a line...

typeCount 1
frigateRoleType "Heavy"

Hmmm.

One other thing to keep in mind. There are some frigate types that the AI will die without. There always needs to be a colony frigate, otherwise it will never expand. Scouts and siege frigates I believe are also pretty important to the AI actually doing something.

However, you can use the roletypes to "make" the AI do things you want it to. In the current version of the game, the AI has a preference for building lots and lots of cruiser carriers. So if there is a ship you want them to build a lot of, just make it the "carrier" type, and they will build it en mass, even if it doesn't actually have any strikecraft.

Also, in Diplomacy, the AI will do a lot more research (at least the two new ones do) GoaFan mentioned how if tech is too high in the tree, the AI won't get to it, but that seems to be solved with the new AI's. I believe someone made a post earlier today saying that they had an AI finish the civ and military trees in under an hour.

EDIT: I just checked, a ship can have two RoleTypes. The Advent carrier has both the "carrier" roletype and the "minelayer" roletype.

Aha. I guess I'll need to get some money on my credit card and get my hands on diplomacy, then. Not sure when that'll happen, but hopefully soon. I did notice the Ai *never* built the big siege guns, so hopefully I can encourage them to do that in Diplomacy somehow since they do get max tech now.

I'll check the advent carrier, too. If the AI reads two roletypes then we'll be in business.

And yeah I noticed that they love carrier spam. I guess I'll have to give that roletype to a few of the Destroyers and Heavy Destroyers, since those will be the most used ships in late-game, and set the battlecruisers and such to Heavy frigate and see how that works. That's my initial plan, anyway. Maybe if I just give all of the major ships the carrier roletype they'll make a bunch of all of them.

All stuff to try out as I start adding ships to my races.

And yeah, I found out that having no scout = a nice big crash from the AI.

@Goa&kyogre- I've made ships with 2+ roletypes before. Generally I do so because the particular ship is actually designed to be similar to several ship types.

Ah yes, I see that now. I checked a capitalship file instead of a frigate and they only have one role type, so I missed the count line. Glad to know that can work.

Test report -

Last night I added the Vykalis Corvette. This is a corvette with the ability to colonize. It is classified as both a Colony and a LightFrigate. I removed the Phase colony ship from the PlayerXi.entity file in turn. I set the Gorekhan to use the "Carrier" roletype and stattype. Since the Vallus was already classified as a LRM frigate, I removed both of the Phase variants of these ships from the Xy file.

Bad idea. Without that colony ship in the file, the game minidumps on startup. With a sigh I returned it to its place and ran a game.

As it turns out, I forgot to give the Vykalis mana. So it couldn't colonize. Perhaps this is why it crashed? Through a process of elimination, I had disabled my fleet.entity file telling the game to set default fleets to "loose". So, those computers who built capital ships still had their guys trying to move inside of them and never attacked anything.

But the Xy computers did some really weird things. They did not build any more than one capital ship, which they never used. Instead, they used the tiny Vykalis corvettes for their flagships. The Vallus long-range destroyers chased the Vykalii around since they still had fighter AI on them, and never fired on the enemy except when enemy ships came into their firing cones for either the PTA or artillery cannons. It was retarded.

I saved the game and restored my fleet.entity file, then restarted. This had no effect on the AI's fleets. They still chased around the Vykalis corvettes. I hope that this was because I was restoring a save file and not because the file has no effect on the AI.

Other than that, they were happily spamming Vallus' and Gorekhans. Not as much as I wanted them too... but they did build them. As a side effect of the Vykalus not being able to colonize and them not building any capital ships, they did not expand very much. Neither Gorekhans nor the Vallus require researches atm because I am too intimidated by research files to start messing with those at the moment.

For the time being I have removed the colony roletype from the Corvette and will remove the ability as well. I've also decided that I will not be giving dynamic AI to any of my ships at all, while previously I was going to give it to corvettes. It just screws with the AI too much, and they rarely ever get a chance to fire at targets, even with the side guns the Vykalis has.

My changes for my next test -

- We'll hope the fleet.entity effects the AI. If not, we're going to be having SERIOUS issues with AI-controlled fleets, as many ships get extremely large, and even the small capital ships are giving us problems.

- We'll see if they stop using the Vykalis as their flagship and start producing capitals again. As well as expand - they seemed very lax in getting the required tech for colonizing ice planets ect. I've only been playing on single star large maps, I might expand my tests to multi-star maps for better large-scale testing.

- We'll see if, with the Vykalis dynamic AI removed, the computers will keep a cohesive fleet formation and properly engage the enemy.

- I did not get to see if the AI was using the Xy fleets correctly in terms of aggression. There was a battle between a TEC and a Xy with about 3 Vallus' and 2 Vykalis corvettes, but since the Vallus' were too busy chasing the corvettes around to fight properly, I couldn't properly gauge if it was an even fight or not. The Xy was losing. Very, very slowly. Those TEC frigates were taking a long time to punch through 6k health and 3k shields with massively increased regeneration, but there was quite a lot of them. But the Undead remain to be modified correctly to this end.

Until the next time, gentlemen.

/edit

Well, my fleet.entity is changing nothing. They are still trying to move inside each other. I tried to form a fleet myself and... hey, look, a minidump. Ugh.

/edit 2

Removed my entity file, went back in and formed a fleet with a bunch of ships about half the size of a Kol. Surely enough, they're all trying to move inside each other. If I set the formation to "loose" there is absolutely no change.

This could be a crippling blow to my mod.

/edit 3

Yeah... formationRank doesn't do anything to alleviate this problem, either. In fact there doesn't seem to be a difference between a value of 0 and a value of 3.

I guess there's no way to make them separate their ships? They're fine when they're moving around or jumping, but they keep trying to move around each other in a battle and it really, really makes a mess of things, plus only a few of the ships can fire because they are generally facing away from the enemy or are too far away period, ignoring the battle and trying to 'reform fleet'.

I hope someone has an idea how to fix this. It doesn't seem to matter how big or small the ships are, even the tiny Vykalis (which is smaller than a construction drone) keeps flailing around.

Probably better to simply class the Vykalis as ONLY a colony frig. This is actually rather important as the AI NEVER USES colony frig types for combat. EVER.

Perhaps you should have 2 versions; also, the minidump from removing the Vasari colonizer may have been because an AI player needs to have a colony roletype in its build menu (and presumably that is ONLY a colony roletype).

Ah. Okay. That clears that up. I thought that may have been the reason. It's good to know for sure.

This is just a guess on my part, but the AI is probably using some other peice of information to determine how to reform fleets. In fact I think the fleet.entity file is only used for formal fleets, which from what I can tell from the screenshot you didn't make.

Also, formation rank is used to determine the releative position of ships in a group in regards to the front. For example Carriers are in the last rank while heavy cruisers are in the first rank (0), which keeps your main combat ships in front and your support ships in back.

Edit: are you getting these formation troubles even with a group of nothing but your smallest ship?

If it's nothing but the small ships it's not as bad (unless of course they have dynamic AI on, then everything goes straight to hell as soon as they find a target). But anything bigger starts having problems with 3+ ships. The AI likes to set the corvettes as their flagship in the fleet as well, adding to the problems when 2+ of the larger ships try to converge on this tiny little corvette and get in the way of each other, meanwhile the corvette is moving around as enemies slowly die.

I never used fleet formations in the game before, so I'm not familiar with them. I always hand microed my ships. But I know the AI always uses them, and I wish there was some setting in the ship files that determined their acceptable radius from the leader (later modified by the formation setting perhaps). This is a really, really depressing problem when they won't even target enemy ships because they're trying to get inside each other.

This doesn't seem to be a big problem with the larger capital ships, but rather the small ships trying to move into formation and getting into each other's way. They are constantly resetting their position around each other and constantly clashing into each other, because they're all trying to fit into an extremely tiny space, or they're all trying to move inside the flagship. This explains some of the oddities I've seen in vanilla sins, but having ships even slightly larger than frigates compounds the problem ten fold.

Also, here's a look at another extremely weird and hilarious bug I've been routinely having.

Yes, those are fighters about midway between the two star systems. And, yes, those are multiple fleets chasing after them.

^Lol, I've gotten that too, if I remember correctly it was because I had put fighter points on a ship that had no Hangar hardpoint, thus the squadrons spawned at who knows where. Though occasionally frigates have broken through gravity well restrictions as if they want to get to a planet without phase drives as well.

I know there are a couple of mods (Sins of a Galactic Empire) who have ships that are well above the normal size, and while I haven't really played them to know if they got around this problem or not, it might be worth looking into.

Aha! None of these were intended to be carriers and thus they have no such points. The mystery of the astral fighters is solved!

Noted, I'll check them out.

/edit

I just checked out Galactic Empire. In contrary, the ships are actually very small. Everything except the Executor and such are actually pretty small, much smaller than say a Kol. I think this is how he got around the AI problem. I think I'll have to do the same. Though my friend is not going to like being told we have to resize all of the models... dealing with XSI is extremely painful (and it doesn't work on my version of windows 7 woohoo I am so screwed when it comes to getting models into the game). I think there's a mesh resize tool somewhere... if I can find that, I'll give it a shot.

Plus it'll make my superships look even bigger.

The Fear will truly dominate the battlefield if I do this. And I have to do this, because it looks like it's the only option to get the Ai to function correctly.

/e

Found the tool. I'll have to resize all of my custom particles, too. And I made a lot of them. So this is going to take a while...

/e42

Excellent! It doesn't work. This is going to put a dent in my progress.

What's your problem with it? I had some issues with the mesh resizing tool when I first used it, it gave me some error about something not being found (I know, that's very descriptive ) I had to look around for a while, but eventually I found the file online, installed it, and got the tool working.

There is a particular .dll file you need to use the resize tool if I'm not mistaken; unfortunately I'm not sure what .dll file it is (as in: I don't remember what file, and you'll probably have to Google it)

Why can't you export them yourself again?

Yes, there's a dll file it asks for. I spent about a half-hour googling my way around until I discovered I actually do have the file. It just doesn't seem to like it. Also, I can't re-register it. So, I tried compatability mode. When I do that, the program sits in memory and does nothing. Just like Titan Quest, Supreme Commander, ect. ect. Basically, it's a problem I am well acquainted with by now. About half my games have the exact same problem, along with a good portion of programs.

As for the XSI mod tools, they do the exact same thing except they don't even sit in memory; a dos window pops up and then nothing happens. Horray!

I'm gonna try getting my hands on XSI softimage itself and see if that will give me any better results. If not, then we're in a bit of a pickle.

Man, it takes like 10 tries to get a post through on these forums. I wonder if they just hate firefox.

/e Yep, worked first time in Maxthon.

/e 2

YES I got XSI 2010 to work *fistpump* now I gotta get all the files for the meshes from brohalla and I can totally faceroll my way into this trainwreck in full burn.

Aaand now I can't get the forum to post in maxthon.

Update

Today is a dark day. Any day I cannot write on my novel is a day dark, a day of sadness. But it is not a day that this mod will die on.

I am now fully self-sufficient for the most part. I have resized most of the trouble ships and have experienced positive returns, though have yet to make large-scale tests. More ships must be added, which I can now do.

Our research shall continue.

Notice

To all hopefuls watching this thread for my observations,

I just bought Diplomacy and am now trying to port my mod over to it. As expected, it's just minidumping over and over and over again and I have no idea why. I might need to rebuild the mod.

When/if I can fix the crashing, all further updates and observations will be made from the perspective of Diplomacy exclusively.

I have my model pipeline all sorted out and will be adding new ships and thus progressing forward and a steady pace.

Chances are all of my AI tests will be at maximum difficulty settings as well.

Regards.

If anyone knows which files changed, that will help me out. Currently I'm only modifying ships, gameplay constants (which I have disabled atm), sound data, some planets, and some player* files.

/edit

Mod is now updated. Research continues.

Oooh, nice pictures.

I hope the resize works for you. I didn't realize the SOGE ships were actually smaller, I couldn't really tell from the screenshots lol. Hopefully it was worth trying though.

So you got your mod updated to Diplomacy? Do you mind if I ask what you did to do that? I haven't had time to work on my mod yet, but it would make my life (and I'm sure the lives of a lot of other modders) a lot easier if I knew before hand what I have to look at changing.

And those are some awesome pics

Sure! My mod is very small yet so I don't have a lot of files changed.

Diplomacy added 1 line to the end of the Ship files;

allegianceDecreasePerRoundtrip 0.000000

entity.manifest had a large amount of new content, so I copy-pasted my lines to the end of the new one and updated the # accordingly.
Gameplay.constants has a bunch of new stuff, so I just used the new one and set the AI values to Build ships: 50 and most of the others to 30. I also set all damage values to 1.0 for every armor - I absolutely despise hard counters based on damage types. I also set all of the influence-related stuff to 0.0 since I'm going to be removing that from my mod and focusing on RTS-styled gameplay. Anyways, all of these races hate each other's guts, and they're not inhabiting planets, they're taking over gigantic monuments in the Abyss/Shadow Lands/Land of Loss. So that stuff doesn't make a lot of sense canon-wise.

The Player* files have all seen significant additions, largely with diplomacy-related stuff. I just ported them over and made my modifications (names, ships, and warp FX/sounds).

The pirate base planet file saw some changes somewhere. I didn't know what, so I just copied it over and reset the gravity well to 3x its current size.

Luckily the only sound-related files that got changed were SoundDialogue and SoundMusic which I haven't modified yet.

The string file predictably has about ~1k new entries. I just copied mine to the end of it and updated accordingly.

Diplomacy also modified several abilities, research entries, and stuff like that, but I haven't touched any of those yet so I don't know what's different.

Right now I'm working on super shiny particles for my Anahn ships, then I'm gonna see how the Diplomacy AI handles (MUCH) stronger defenders on neutral planets. I ran a very quick test to make sure my mod wasn't crashing before, and the AI willingly suicided its first capital into these ships with 11.5k health that only did 10x3 damage over the course of like 6-10 seconds. So it was a very slow, very humiliating death. They didn't seem to build very fast or do much despite being on max difficulty with the gameplay.constants changes, but this was very early into the game.

/edit

Looks like capital ships didn't get that line in their ship file? *shrug* I added it anyway and it didn't asplode... eh.

Huh. I thought FiringAlignmentType could make the ship go broadside. But in the Tech ship it's no different than any other. Well fiddlesticks.

/edit

Well now I'm certain that the AI is using damage values to determine ship strengths. It would explain why they suicide starbases.

I gave my Vindicators basic tests weapons and tried to make them go broadside by giving rightside weapons .1 more damage. Now the computers immediately flee the neutral systems.

But what's really annoying is that instead of going broadside, my Vindicators charge full-speed and ram into enemy ships and push them around. If two Vindicators fight each other, they circle each other endlessly. Why won't they just sit back at weapon 3 range and go broadside like they should?

Oh. I think I know why. Because the weapon range is starting from 0? lawl! How did that not crash?! Let's try this...

Yep, that worked. Now they broadside. But they also wiggle. I have no idea why they wiggle, but they wiggle.

Thank you for the info That helps a lot.

I'll write out a full update tomorrow, but in short, Diplomacy really did fix a lot of oddities with the AI. Between Diplomacy's fixes and my resizes, the Ai is performing VERY nicely.

More screenshots and info to follow!

/edit

Update

Imageshack just crashed firefox. Under normal circumstances, this is okay. When I restore firefox, I get my post data back. But not on these forums! Oh no! ... Gotta rewrite everything.

*sigh*

My friend and I played a nice big game on a single-star map last night. At about halfway through, the game dropped to 10fps, and then eventually to a steady 5. On my i7 and his Core 2 Duo that never went past 70% usage according to Sins itself, and my cpu only had one core at 50% and the rest at like 5% according to task manager. This is what we call inefficiency and a bunch of factors all knifing the game at once. No, this was not the graphics or the particles. It lagged no matter where you looked. I conclude this is from a few sources;

- Ironclad Online routinely gave us 1200 ping on our 15mbit connections and adjacency to each other of about a mile. When it gave us major lag, the game would "freeze" and we'd get 50+fps even in the biggest of battles.

- The AI and their damn fighters! All of the comps had sooo many fighters it was ridiculous. I'm going to be cutting down fighters down to 10-20% their original count per my GEC, but still... they lag. Especially when they all fire missiles; missiles seem to be a big strain on the cpu.

- Each comp had over 200 units in about 2 hours. Big units. The 1.5k Grand Vindicator with its 500 metal cost, and the smaller Thunderhead. Most comps were TEC, which will become the Anahn, and only have those two modded units. There were a few Vasari (to become the Undead and have some placeholder units), 1 Advent who somehow held off a Xy`Kranasha until we got an Armament and Structure pact and he just massacred the poor dames, and our Xy ally.

- I had increased the gravity well sizes 3x their existing sizes previous to my rescales to give each "planet" (which will become monuments) a bigger battlefield since the vanilla game is just way too damn even for Sins itself. I think the pathfinding for the AI started chugging on this when it hit a critical mass of units. I'll reduce them a little bit and see what happens.

The AI itself? Diplomacy has improved it. Yes, it still does stupid things. Here's a few quick observations;

- The Undead fleets whose ships I did NOT resize were moving around a lot more easily, except when Blood Moons showed up because since the Blood Moons still don't have modded costs or anything the comps got a LOT of them when you should only have 3-4 max at end-game. This made jumping difficult, but their fleet formations were definitely working better. Even the Crusaders were at the front of the fleet leading it into battle! Only to die instantly because they still only have 5k health at level 7.

- The AI is still notably lethargic sometimes. Our Orange ally was sitting on a tremendously huge fleet of Thunderheads and Vindicators and did not want to aggress a nearby Vasari who would have been easy pickings for the new ships. I told him to attack it with the AI commands and he acknowledged them and did nothing. With the crystal market bloated to 2k a pop, I offered him 20k crystal on numerous occassions through the offer mission dialogue, which he did not even attempt to do.

- Once when I gave an AI a mission to bomb a guy's homeworld I wanted them to clean up, the mission instantly completed, taking my 30k credits, and the AI did not even touch the planet. Something tells me AI and missions are still in dire need of bugfixing.

- With Vindicators and Thunderheads having both damage and health attributes, the AI's strength calculations worked decently well for the most part, except for Orange.

- The AI routinely ignored bringing capital ships or siege frigates into planetary engagements and his gigantic fleet would be standing around doing nothing until a lone level 1 capital appeared to slowly chip away at the planet's 6k health. Man, bombing in this game is slow. 1 ship takes like 15 minutes to blow up a planet. I dunno, watching a Zeral`Motakk that could vaporize a star in a few seconds sit there for that long barely scratching a planet makes me giggle. Hopefully when I add my new flagships and beef up their stats the AI will be more enticed to use them.

- Green had a fetish for me. He had little diplomacy ships at each of my planets molesting everyone who came by, and worked his way up to a Structure and Armament pact. Holy hell... those diplomacy buffs are INSANE. 55% bonus health?! 20% fire rate?! That's just ludicrous! I'll need to nerf those for sure later down the line. Imagine Vyru getting that bonus health. You'll see smaller ships with millions of health flying around. My vindicators got pushed from 18k to 23k and their DPS sky-rocketed. That's just crazy. All of his weak vasari and Undead ships suddenly became monstrously powerful.

- Lol @ the pirates. I bribed the pirates with about 30k credits into launching an "overwhelming" attack which tallied up to about a hundred ships. Pretty surprising for the pirates, but hardly a threat to the unmodified Advent I targeted. When I convert the Pirates to Nightfall, I wonder how they'll calculate the strength for Nightfall ships? If they launched any more than 10, whoever is targeted will die horribly. Nightfall ships will be... um.. crazy.

Oh. I did promise some screenshots, didn't I? The TEC computers for the most part participated in some utterly massive brawl and my new ships were used to their maximum potential.

I bought sins, Entrenchment, and Diplomacy pretty much exclusively for modding. So this was a very rewarding experience. And yes, I realize that sins mangles screenshots with no AA on. Oh well. I have some video footage too, buuut I'll wait until I make the trailer to show much ingame video. SC2 beta is announced to be coming out this month; this project will go on the backburner when it comes out because I'll be extremely busy with articles, video productions, PR, ect and coverage and stuff.

^ A Grand Vindicator. Yes, he's about half the size of a Kodiak, but this Anahn Heavy Destroyer has enough firepower to lay waste to an entire TEC fleet in a few seconds. If we talk on canon terms, the Grand Vindicator is a Heavy Destroyer in the Anahn fleet, about standard in size of around 100km in length. Anahn ships have different "engagement" zones - Vindicators' Slag Cannons are long-range weapons. Currently their beam weapons were way too long ranged so they ended up using those as well. The challenge of these ships for the AI was the broadside property. I wasn't sure how they'd react to all of their ships going broadside. Turned out quite well, actually. Here's some shinies.

^ Inside an Undead fleet late-game. Blood Moon spam turns their fleets into a giant ball of black, glowing marshmellows when they get into a good spot, tucking away dozens of transporters and harmless Blood Gorges, who are also pretty big. Their movement in Diplomacy is much better than it was in Entrenchment but I'll still be resizing their ships anyway since Undead are a race who can potentially get thousands of ships.

^ Huge Anahn broadside battles really brought back visions of the second-generation civil war that is a key part of Anahn history where warlords engaged in tremendously large battles with Adashim's Royal Family when he rose to take back his race. Virtually every effect on my new ships are custom, and all have custom sounds. Beam textures, the works. I dunno what causes these gigantic flashes and explosions on the ships randomly, though. It's not my guns, but it's really annoying and obscures the tiny vessels.

^ The Anahn scourge their nemesis, the Undead. But only now will they find the demons so frail and meek... for my next updates will grant their ships their rightful place as hell's knights.

Minor Update

As mentioned above, the AI wasn't too keen on bothering with Capital Ships with the Vindicator and Thunderhead in place, except for Carriers and Colony ships.

But when I added the Knight with its 1.5 million health and insane damage values (in comparison to the other two ships), the AI suddenly started building more capital ships. Every Anahn wanted a piece of this new toy before I nerf the crap out of it.

Now, there was something I noticed.

When I first added the Vindicator, the AI went berserk with it and threw lone Vindicators into the homeworlds of other computers and demolished everything they had.

But when I added the new, ridiculously overpowered battleship, they didn't do that. Yes, they still threw lone Vindicators into homeworlds (who would now die horribly to Gorekhans and Vallus'), but they didn't aggress with the capital ships that could easily solo entire fleets. Despite the capital ships have 2k-3k damage a pop for both beams and cannons, plus a practically inexhaustable amount of the health, I didn't see the same aggression with them. They did go from planet to planet wasting neutrals, but for the most part left the enemy computers alone.

I wonder if it's even possible to make them more aggressive. When I left my homeworld, the Xy computers immediately backdoored it in the absence of my giant pow-wow and tried to bomb my planet with their one destructor. Meanwhile I wiped out two of their homeworlds. So they definitely wanted to aggress me, my allies just didn't want to aggress them.

Odd. Perhaps tied to the new AI pinging planets when they attacked? Maybe this signals other computers to do the same? Because 2-3 computers a time would suddenly show up at my lone homeworld when my Knight left. But my allies for the most part avoided contact except for suiciding lone Vindicators.

The main problems are that Sins (and all 32-bit games) have a 2GB of RAM limit, and Sins can only really use one processor. I think if you have 2, it uses the second for some basic texture rendering stuff, but not much else. Since Sins was designed to be played on a wide range of systems, they had to compromise on some features, like dual-core (or more) support.