First, I'd like to thank everyone for answering my previous (seemingly endless) questions. I'm especially happy that you folks are so helpful given the apparent difficulty of running the Dynaverse games so many prefer under Vista and the age of the game in general. On to the short version of my question. I've not been able to generate a good answer either through forum searches, visiting their sites, or playtest.
Short questions:1. Do Dave ("Nuclear" or "Evil Dave") Wessels' or Evil Karnak's scripts generate large numbers of floating AI opponents that continue to run around the map after you finish a mission in single player campaign games?
2. If they do generate AI that hang around, will the KillAIFrequency and MaxAIsToKillPerTurn settings keep the AI population down to the level set by the TargetPopulationToEconomicRatio in Metamap.gf?
Background/Why I Want to Know:I am (as described
elsewhere) doing my best to make myself a single player campaign that does as good an impression of the operational part of the boardgame
Federation & Empire as I can. What it boils down to is using a larger-than-stock SFC map (paper version depicted
here and
here) and (the hard part) trying to tie the player's tactical/operational victories (i.e. flipping enemy hexes and denying them the economic points) into strategic benefits (i.e. fewer enemy ships for the bad guys, more ships for your side). Since the game determines campaign map AI population as a fraction of each empire's total economic strength, I just beefed up the TargetPopulationToEconomicRatio in Metamap.gf to something much larger than dynaverse server admins with lots of human players use. This seems to work relatively well...in part.
I've got lots of AI running around the map (~2000 total of all empires if the db report can be believed). This is the right rough order of magnitude for the "historic" fleets in F&E games.
The problem I'm trying to avoid is having missions introduce a big imbalance into the game world by generating lots of extraneous AI every turn or at least knowing whether or not the KillAI end of turn routines will get rid of them or not.
v/r
feld