AI War:Hybrid Hives

What Are Hybrid Hives?

Hybrid Hives are an optional AI Plot introduced in the Children Of Neinzul micro-expansion. They are commonly called simply "Hybrids".

If you have not played with Hybrid Hives yet and like interesting surprises, you may want to go do that before reading further to avoid spoiling that initial discovery.

What Do Hybrids Do?

In a game with Hybrid Hives, you will encounter hybrid AI-ally Enclave Starships flying around with escorting subfleets on various missions intended to make your life difficult, like:

• Pile up on AI planets they think you will want to attack.
• Coordinate (sometimes multi-front) attacks on human planets they think are critical to your war effort.
• Not implemented yet (as of version 3.173), but a host of dastardly and inconvenient things like build defensive structures on AI planets, and recolonize neutral planets (by rebuilding the command station and warp gate).

What's Actually Going On?

It's pretty complex, actually.

During Map Generation, if the plot is enabled for an AI player, the following objects are placed on that player's planets:

• Hybrid Hive Spawners, placed on AI Home, Core, and MkIV worlds.

• Drone Spawners, MkIV versions placed on AI Home and Core worlds, MkIII versions placed on MkIV worlds, MkII on MkIII, and MkI on MkII. Not all eligible worlds are thus seeded; the number is influenced by the AI's Difficulty level, and the higher Mk versions are seeded less.

• Equipment Module Factories, MkI-IV versions placed in the same way as Drone Spawners (but not necessarily the same planets, when the amount-to-place is reduced).

• Construction Module Factories, MkI-IV versions placed the in the same way as Drone Spawners (same on the randomization).

During play, those objects do the following:

• Hybrid Hive Spawners accumulate build points over time, and when it hits a defined threshold, it creates a new Hybrid Hive nearby. These spawners (and drone spawners, and both types of module factory) temporarily suspend operation if there are more than 100 hostile ships on the planet.

• Drone Spawners accumulate build points over time, and when it hits a defined threshold, it creates X drones of a psuedo-randomly picked ship type of the corresponding tech level (MkIV Drone Spawner = MkIV ships) that is available to the spawners' owning player. X is the number of Hybrid Hives on the planet that are not already coordinating their maximum number of drones. Each drone is assigned to guard and be coordinated by its corresponding Hybrid. It should be emphasized that these drones are perfectly normal ships (fighters, bombers, cruisers, laser gatlings, whatever) except for the few special code branches that apply to coordinated ships.

• Equipment Module Factories don't really do anything per se, but their presence is required for Hybrids to create their weapon and forcefield modules.

• Construction Module Factories are very similar, except they enable the creation of a separate set of modules that are not used for combat but only to create other structures (like command stations and warp gates for the colonizers, and various turrets and defensive structures for the "builder" class). These aren't fully implemented yet.

The Hybrids, in turn, do the following:

• Periodically, the each Hybrid evaluates its situation and "class" (or "personality") to determine what it should do. Mostly, this means determining what mission to do next, and when a mission is complete or should be aborted. The logic roughly works out to:
  • If I'm on a mission, and it's not done and I shouldn't abort, no orders.
  • If I'm not a mission or it's done or I need to abort it, pick a new mission:
    • If I have module slots that are empty or contain modules of a lower level than what I'm eligible to build, assign RefitModules mission.
    • If I'm coordinating less than half the drones I can coordinate, assign ReplenishDrone mission.
    • If I can take AttackPlanet, DefendPlanet, or ColonizePlanet missions, evaluate each planet for strategic value and use a random number to decide between them, and assign the corresponding mission (I'll be adding a mission for building defensive structures for the "builder" class, etc, this is just what's there right now, though Colonize is currently disabled).

• Hybrids accumulate "Maturity" points over time. These are basically "experience points", and when the Hybrid hits a threshold defined by its current class it randomly picks one of the classes it is eligible to upgrade to and becomes that class (resetting xp to zero). Classing up changes which missions can be taken (and generally cancels the current mission), increases MaturityLevel which roughly corresponds to Mark level and controls the highest Mk of module and drone that the Hybrid can build or coordinate, and also (generally) increases the number of drones that the Hybrid can coordinate. The class "path" is basically:
  • All Hybrids start in the "Neophyte" class, which can only take DefendPlanet (all can take RefitModules and ReplenishDrones).
  • Neophyte can upgrade to "Attacker", "Defender", or "Builder" (I also have "Nurturer" defined but I think I'm going folding that into a sub-path of "Builder")
  • Attacker can only take AttackPlanet, and can upgrade to "Captain" (which upgrades to "Admiral") or "Beseiger" (which upgrades to "Annihilator" or "Ninja"). The distinctions between the upper tier classes are not all implemented yet, but there will be a general distinction between "can control more drones" and "is more powerful personally", and which specific dastardly nasty things it can do to overly stubborn player defenses.
  • Defender can only take DefendPlanet, and upgrades into "Stalwart" (which upgrades into "Champion"). These will be less interesting than the Attacker or Builder types, but serve a very important role of clustering around and defending planets it expects the humans will want to take (Advanced Factory planets if the humans don't have an existing means of producing Mk IV ships, ARS planets, planets that threaten lots of human planets, etc).
  • Builder types are currently disabled and less worked out than the other two, but will be able to build low-level defensive structures to harden planets, and will lead to types like the "Architect" (higher level structures), the "Colonizer" (obvious), the "Matron" (builds drone spawners and other Hybrid-serving facilities), and perhaps the "Sapper" (builds nasty things on human planets, if it can).

And that's basically it, other than the details of each mission's logic, and the few special code paths used by coordinated ships. More info will be added on specific mission behavior and whatnot later, as the implementation is not yet complete.

Strategy

Info to come on how to avoid Hybrid-induced Game Overs :)

Why Add This Feature?

This is basically the confluence of a number of fairly long-standing requests from various minority groups of players. Requests that honestly don't fit into AI War's existing design and scope, specifically:

• They want the AI to be more active and dangerous, with the ability to take the tempo away from them if they don't handle it right. Typically their suggestions involve traditional-type AI logic that would horribly mess up the existing emergent-AI architecture. Gap-in-the-wall and all that.
• They want to be able to smash up the AI's economic/industrial infrastructure to hurt its ability to wage war.
• They want units that gain experience and abilities.
• They want the AI to use "formations" and "fleets".

Basically we haven't been able to do most of these without ruining the game, or at least changing it into something totally other than what the majority of the existing customers thought they were purchasing. Aside from that, the implementation effort-and-time involved in most of these simply falls outside the reasonable scope of free DLC.

So our solution was to take advantage of an expansion's development budget to create a sort of minor-faction-ish "add-on" to the existing AI that can scratch the real "itch" that's driving these requests, without actually modifying the existing AI or potentially depriving it of in-game resources. Even if it falls on its face, the main AI won't be hurt much, and if it works it is a more dangerous and proactive opponent than anything previously available in AI War.