Re: Robot Ship Rules for solo play

At 09:40 20/02/97 GMT, you wrote:
>Robot Ship Rules
>=================
>
>These rules relate to SIMPLE robot ships for solo play and are adapted
from
>the SFB training manual. The robot ship has a designated target ship
for
which
>these rules apply.
What would be good, therefore, is to allow a robot ship to change it's
target ship  if and when appropriate - how about this..

0) The Target ship is defined as the nearest ship in the forward or rear
arc of the robot ship OR the most recent target ship if no ship is in
either arc.

That gives it a sort of attacking focus, but also allows it to react to
people trying to get into it's rear arc.

>1) The robot ship moves at its targets current speed every turn. 
>The robot ship will will try to fire every weapon every turn. 
in FT you need to define this in terms of points and numbers of turns, I
suppose. Better to say that is the targets speed is greater than it's it
will accelerate to it's targets speed or by as much is possible.And so
for
deceleration.

>2) The robot ship fill follow the target ship like a seeking weapon and
will 
>move after it has, it will attempt to close the range to the target
ship.
The 
>robot ship will move to enable the maximum number of active weapons to
bear on 
>the target ship.
How about this also - the robot ship will not move into the targets
ships
forward firing arc. If the move causes it to do so, it will attempt to
'veer' into the nearest p/s arc instead.

If you hgave this rule, it's still possible to get the robot ship into
your
forward arc (where, lets's be honest, all the nasty pointy things are)
but
you have to move so it doesn't have a choice.

I've seen decision trees similar to this used for computer wargames
(there
was a mac aircraft one, can't remember what it was called..) and while
on
paper they look OK they tend to produce unsatisfying opponents - they
tend
to 'spiral in' on you and you can beat them too easily. You can build a
certian amount of tactical awareness into the robot with a few simple
rule
additions - i.e. 'don't make any move which would leave you staring at
your
opponents nova cannon barrel with a plaintive grin'.

					TTFN
						Jon
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