I've heard that ships en route to a battle location also affect retreating....I cannot personally confirm this but that is what I have been told in previous discussions....

I think numbers do play a role, but it's a bit hard to predict how they'll act. In Black Sun, there's several very strong ships with high aoe special abilities. The way the AI handles these threats is kind of weird. Sometimes they seem to realize how strong these are and will engage high number targets with them. Other times they will not attack even with two very strong crusaders in their group. With numbers and roles as massively homogenized as vanilla sins this is going to be a lot harder to really see, but I run all of my recordings/tests on a bloodbath map with 1 central planet connected to all homeworlds, so I see a lot of really weird attack behavior.

I would guess that the behavior is partly based on fleet supply. The AI is definitely able to recognize that raw numbers of ships are not the important thing, I've seen mod factions with fleet supply numbers two or three times as vanilla, yet the AI doesn't seem any worse and judging its fleet strength.

If your units fleet supply values do not accurately reflect the unit's true strength however, it is easy to see how it may misjudge enemy ship strength. It would also entirely explain why the AI doesn't take starbase and planetary fortifications into account.

I have buffing AOEs (based on roletype) on capital ships affecting small parts of the fleet in my mod.  The AI likes sending clusters of frontline ships (including caps with that ability) supported by lots of LRFs.  Works really well.

Works fine with two weapons. The only caveat I am aware of is only FRONT weapons are fired. Entering values in the other banks just get ignored.

Use Eclipse and my Solar Empire plugin to avoid frustrating mistakes with syntax.

Wintercross, if you want a combat platform that will be used by the AI, and players, like a regular weapons platform/turret, you can make a hangar defense entity that has a weapon defense statcounttype and roletype and no fighters. I've done the weapon defense statcounttype and roletype bit myself for a structure without any issues with the game, the AI also builds them as if they were turrets, as intended.

The trade off is pretty small if you follow Lavo's suggestion. 

Turrets can rotate but only fire forward.

Hangars can't rotate but can have 4 banks of weapons and strikecraft.

Well, rotation is required for this turret, it's just aesthetically I would have liked 3 weapons, but 2 seems to be the limit on turrets...

You can always have abilities act as fake weapons like with the TEC turret upgrades. 

It's allright, it wasnt really required just an asthetic thing to make weapons appear to fire in a certain pattern.

I'll just stick with two weapons.

What is the subExplosionCount limit in explosiondata with Rebellion?

SINPERIUM IS MY HERO!!!!!! ANYONE WHO HATES HIM IS WORSE THAN A THOUSAND MILLIONS SPAECE HITLERS!!!!!!!!!!!!

he's also my secret butt fun buddy

Twilight Sparkle is best served well done after being tenderized and sliced then cooked over a hot open flame.

Serves four to six persons and is well complimented by greens and white wine.

Rather than discarding the head or using it for soup/stew stock, it can instead be stuffed and mounted tastefully on a dining room wall

Actual question by me...is it possible to make a  pirate race that is NOT affected by TECs rogue treaties and pirate pacts and have it work in tandem with "normal" pirates?

I'd like to have both.

The Stars mod had an interesting way of dealing with "pirates"...I don't know exactly what he did but the mod had "pirate" factions that acted like normal players and would go out and attack you....I don't recall how they were set up but you may be interested in checking that out...

I don't know what you are trying to do, but you may also consider the IsPsi Boolean in the player file...the only thing that I know of that uses it is the synergy ability on the advent beam platforms...

The reason why I bring it up is because you can easily make it so that certain things affect (or don't affect) a faction of choice....

Yeah--that is a possibility--those things.  I know how it was done with making the pirates attack.

I need a set of pirates in the game that aren't affected by the pacts so that they will attack everyone at all times but they are a minority to the regular pirates that i would want to retain so as to not screw TEC.

Well...I don't think TAR allies you with the rebels at the occupation planet...but I don't know if their behavior will work for you...

I'm afraid none of these things will work Sinperium. I tested it quite extensively as TAR was quite a problem with my mods random encounters, and my results were later confirmed my zombie. TAR will always ally you with every neutral and pirate faction, so simply changing the pirates to a militia faction (no matter how it acts) will not work. The Occupation player should have been the answer to the problem, but for whatever reason they will not spawn outside of the occupation planet, making them useless for any other purpose.

In the end I just changed TAR to do something different, the original modifier was not salvageable.

Faction carries through remote ship spawns, ala phase gate spawn types even if you can't get them to initially spawn elsewhere.  You can't do an actual raid, but mimicry of the rebel mechanic is a simple matter of giving them system vision and an explore style autocast.

And that's where I found the IsPsi Boolean to be helpful...made only pirates psi.....

Dang missing modifier...

Well, carp.  Filthy, stinking carp.

Is the "isPsi" still valid or are you implying it is now unusable too?  

On the bright side--thanks to you guys:

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 Nicely done, OMG gentlemen!

Also curious what file controls the spawning of dust clouds and asteroid doodads, and if it's possible to increase the amount and determine a min/max radius.

Look at the Synergy ability...it has a target filter that makes use of the IsPsi thing....

If you made only the pirate faction(s) Psi (you'd have to change Advent and then synergy, not too hard) then you could do things that specifically target them...

For example, you could make an AoE like armistice that only affects psi ships....or allow a player to "bribe" ships/planets, but only those that are psi...

Not that you couldn't do the above with complicated buffs, but IsPsi is easier....whether it works for you depends on what exactly you need and how much jerry rigging you are willing to do...it isn't perfect and does not directly solve your problem but I figured I'd mention it since it may provide some work arounds....

Some people have asked me, "Lavo, why don't you use the debug features of the dev exe?" or "While ShowErrors doesn't work well, why not enable logging?" before, and the possibility of this picture occurring again is why.

On an unrelated note, has anyone else here experience the every single ship and structure being invisible glitch? I've had it reported for SoGE before, and I have personally experienced one single time. This glitch, and the "all ships of X faction being a single solid color" glitch, which I have personally never seen, are baffling me as I have absolutely no idea how and why they occur; they did not happen on Entrenchment, or in the case of the latter, not this frequently.