FreeOrion

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revision 4732
I've added Exobots to the game and they work!

Exobots are predefined "species" that anyone can research and get. (Start with Robotic Production) They have fewer pics than an imperial species: they are terrible at Farming and Science, and average at Mining and Industry. But they would be able to thrive on planets normally hostile to organic species. The concept is not robot "people", i.e. sentients, but fancy machines with AIs sophisticated enough to let them run a mining colony (for instance) without any organics needed to be present.

They are terrible at Farming and Science, and average at mining and industry.

For the future, i think they would be completely loyal, though possibly vulnerable to an espionage "hacking" attack. They are a way for a xenophobic organic species (or an organic species that hasn't found a suitable minor species) to take some advantage of Barren/Radiated/Inferno planets.

Possibly the exobots will be upgradeable in the future.

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Is it the only “artificial” specie you plan to add? IMHO, other species with better EP on ocean/terran/desert, or a better farming/research/ground troups, or maybe even more contrasted productions could be interesting.

It also seems your exobots can colonize asteroids and gas giants, and are able to have a significant population on those? Seems a little strange.

Nice tech eleazar!

It would also be interesting for the player to meet Exobots as natives, which could be explained with them being abandoned by their previous masters. Are they generated as natives at the moment?


I would love this. In some games the player will never research or build any Exobots (because he found a minor species to do the task), but sometimes he can try to max out their techs (going the Exobot route). A possibly big strategical decission that helps replayability.

It should be easy to make an effect that gives a population based bonus to all your planets inhabited by Exobots. Lots of design space here.

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I tested a little, and AFAICT, they don’t appeared at the start of any game.

Also, I couldn’t build an exobot colony ship. The structure built and removed itself, but no ship appeared after that…

Maybe. This is basically a proof-of-concept that precedes serious though on what to do with them.
Multiple species are more likely if none of them are upgradeable.


The gas giant thing was a mistake.


It should happen. I don't know how to prevent it. There's just one big list of species-- the only distinction on where they appear is if they are "playable" or not.


If we made other population bonuses not effect them.


That's odd, it works for me. You should get a building, and on the next turn, it should destroy itself and give you a colony ship.

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Since species always spawn on a good environment planet (or rather, change the environment of the planet on which they spawn to a good environment), perhaps changing their EPs to Adequate for everything, then giving them appropriate bonuses for adequate planets would cause them to not spawn on universe generation (or crash the game, due to trying to change a planet to a species' Good EP when there is no such EP, or maybe have no effect at all).

This is a really clever idea, btw. I don't think I would have thought to do it like this.

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Yes, I know. I read the code, but the colony ship didn’t appear, and I tested several times. However the structure is built and destroyed without any problem.

Odd. Works for me, too.

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What FreeOrion version are you using?

Sorry. It seems I had a parsing error due to a patch I applied… I promise I will always use a clean checkout before saying anything next time.

So, now that I have tested:

• They are great, and allow colonizing more planets without building outposts. So it adds the “transform planets”/“adapt inhabitants”/“create new inhabitants” strategic choice. \o/
• They are not biologic, so I think all the researches to improve the population on adequate/poor/hostile planets should not apply to them.
• I suppose they can’t terraform planets, nor decolonize, which is not really a problem but could maybe be frustrating.
• They have a great strategic interest, so I wonder if putting some more prerequisites wouldn’t be a bad thing. At least enough to have as much prerequisites as Xenological Hybdridization which also allows colonizing poor and hostile planets.

As for the ability to colonize asteroids and gas giants, I wouldn’t be against it, but I’d prefer that only a new tech allows it. (semi-autonomous aerobots, or something similar?)

Hmm, with testing it appears there are 2 reasons why the exobots don't appear as natives.

1) There's a bug. Species with "can colonize" and "can build ships" don't appear in the galaxy.
2) Apparently they also need a "Good" EP. I set the Exobot's best EP to "Adequate" because i wanted to handicap them a little, and because i wanted them to be equally useful in barren, radiated, and inferno planets, without making them extra powerful as 3 "Good" types would.

I'm not too concerned with weather the exobots appear as natives, since at least 3 of the robotic species text implies that they are "abandoned by their previous masters".

They should be able to terraform, but not "decolonize" since we haven't yet added a feature that allows you to remove a species from a planet. There is agreement that such a feature is needed.

Yeah, they are probably too low on the tech tree.

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I wrote a diff that adds two new techs: aerobots and spatiobots. Both increase the max population of exobots on certain types of planets (aerobots increases it on gas giants and “common” planets, and spatiobots increases it on asteroids and gas giants only). It’s maybe a bit unbalanced (to say the least).

Here’s the diff:
http://lukc.upyum.com/freeorion/aerobots.diff

If you are interested, I’d be glad to edit the xenogenetics/symbiotic biology/cyborgs techs to make them ignore exobots.

EDIT: Here it is: http://lukc.upyum.com/freeorion/exobots-population.diff

Idea: instead of having to specify "exobots" in the techs/buildings.txt file every time, we could make a macro "robotic" or "abiotic," which would have "Not Species SP_exobots" in it or something like that. The advantage is that we can handle all robotic species identically -- and thus logically -- while only needing to change in one place in each *.txt file every time. This could a possible long-term fix for the problem that was being debated in another thread a while ago, of how to deal with extremely nonhuman species.

In my diff, aerobots and spatiobots are also exobots. The two techs only increase the max population on some environments. But if other artificial species are made, yes, that could be useful.

Qsswin: good idea, but it's not a long term solution-- unless non-organics are going to be permanently second class citizens. Ultimately we want a system where the player can start as a custom arbitrarily named robotic species, and still have all the normal non-organic rules apply.

But it is the best we can do for now. Lukc feel free to make the non-organic exemption to techs, buildings.

We already have about 6 robotic and 6 other non-organic species. Since none of them are imperial species, we can start exempting the from effects that make absolutely no sense for them.

But at this stage of developement I think we should NOT start developing alternate techs to replace the function of the organic techs for non-organics. Thats better considered after the main tree is more complete and polished.

(poster from mobile)

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