AI War:Capturable Locations

Are The Capturable Enemy Ships Always Away From My Starting Position?

Unity 4.0 makes scouting more critical than the pre 4.0 game as you no longer know at the start of the game what type or how many capturables there are on your map. The placement logic described below is still valid until you get to very small maps where depending on the map style only the AI home worlds might be more than 2 hops away from your start and the goodies available obviously have to be closer.

Q: I'm in a 80 planet game (with 79 unknown planets). There are 18 Data Centers, 5 research stations and 2 factories. I have searched through 15 of the 79 unknowns and found none. The probability of this, given a random distribution, is lower than 1 in 1,000,000. So I suspect the distribution may not be random. Are the goodies somehow distributed further away from me?

A: Yes, there is some logic in that for data centers in particular. Data Centers will be at least three hops away from you, and the majority of them are always clustered on the planets nearest to the AI home planets (these are the "core" AI planets). Figure that half or more will be on the core planets, depending on the map, and the rest will be scattered around not just directly near you.

For the advanced factories and research stations, those are also going to be at least three hops away from you in most cases, but they won't ever be on core or home AI planets. Their distribution is otherwise random, though, aside from just not giving them directly to you at the start. If you've got a lot of wormholes on your starting planet(s), that might make more planets closer to you and thus the selection of planets at which the goodies can be found a bit more distant and smaller.

AI_War:Fleet_Command