I'm catching up with the discord and I've seen a few posts relating to concerns I might dumb down the AI because its too good to allow me to 'role-play'
Firstly, I do believe the AI is a lot better than C# but my player-AI battles haven't been that extensive, so its early to make any definitive estimate on how much better. I am sure it will still do dumb things that I will have to fix after V1.0. Secondly, the whole point of my AI work is to make the game more interesting for single-player-race games (as opposed to me controlling several factions), so I will be trying my best to make the AI as capable as possible.
Based on the comments I have read, there seems to be some confusion about what I mean by 'role-play'. Role-playing isn't the opposite of optimisation. Role-playing doesn't mean deliberately designing terrible ships and therefore requiring a dumb AI to beat. Role-playing means starting with a general theme for your race, which might result in terrible ships, depending on how the theme affects design, but could also result in reasonable ones too. Future ship designs are based on the experience gained by that race in the game. To make that work you have to ignore your own knowledge and instead design ships based only on the knowledge-base of the race you are role-playing. That knowledge-base only changes when the race learns from experience in the game. It also means charging out into the galaxy before you are ready and losing ships to higher tech NPR enemies. I realise from many years of debates on these lines that this concept is completely alien to some players, who cannot understand why anyone would not simply use their own knowledge and experience to design the most effective ships they can. Despite that, I thought it was worth explaining even if my motivations seem strange to some players.
However, my focus on role-playing doesn't mean I am not interested in balance. I strive to make sure different weapons and other systems offer real choices. In my previous post about the changes to mesons being relating to campaign play, I was referring mainly to the effect on NPRs. Mesons were overpowered against NPRs, so I never used them. It made life too easy. That is why they were changed. Players are far better at designing ships to combat a specific threat, such as mesons, so the balance was different for human vs human. However, I am designing for human vs NPR play so weapons are balanced against likely NPR designs, not all potential player designs. BTW please don't take this as a signal I am re-opening the meson debate. I am just trying to address some misconceptions being debated on the discord