AI Fleet Intelligence & Deep Space Operations

Greetings, Commanders.

Picture this: you've heavily fortified your primary production asteroid. Missiles silos are loaded, point defense is online, and a sizable fleet is anchored in orbit. You feel secure. Then, your deep-space scout spots movement on the edge of the sector. The enemy isn't coming for your fortress. They've bypassed it entirely, using extended fuel tanks to loop around and hit a newly established, lightly defended mining outpost on your flank.

To make an RTS feel alive, the AI can't just throw waves of ships at your strongest point. It needs to look at the board, assess its options, and strike where you aren't looking. Over the past month, we completely replaced the old fleet AI dispatcher with a Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planner.

The HTN Planner: Thinking in Steps

To make the AI more human-like, we moved away from simple "if/then" scripts and built a Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planner.

An HTN planner works by breaking down high-level strategic goals into a tree of smaller, executable steps. The AI starts with a Complex Task—like "Eradicate Player Colony." It can't just execute that directly. Instead, it runs a decomposition method that splits it into sub-tasks: "Locate Colony," "Assemble Fleet," and "Attack."

If "Assemble Fleet" fails because its forces are scattered, the planner breaks it down further into "Designate Rally Point" and "Move Ships." These finally resolve into Simple Tasks—the actual mechanical actions of issuing movement orders.

Before and during every step, the AI checks a series of strict conditions. If you destroy a critical AI ship while it is rallying, the "Assemble Fleet" integrity rule fails. The AI doesn't stubbornly continue a broken plan; the task collapses, and the planner dynamically rewrites a new strategy based on its remaining ships.

This means you won't just face a steady, mindless trickle of skirmishers anymore. You will face coordinated, massed fleet movements that react when you disrupt their logistics.

Survey Tools and The Fog of War: No Cheating Allowed

The AI's intelligence is useless if it can't see the board. This brings us to the new deep-space operations systems: Survey Tools and Fuel Tanks.

One of the most frustrating things in strategy games is an AI that magically knows where your hidden bases are. I hate that. So in this game, the AI does not cheat. It operates under the exact same Fog of War rules and information constraints that you do.

Information is no longer free. If you want to know what minerals are on an asteroid, or if an enemy has established a foothold, you need to send a ship. The SurveyTool module can be installed on any hull. When a ship arrives at an uncharted asteroid, it generates a SurveyVehicleMission that takes anywhere from 10 to 20 in-game days to complete.

The AI uses this exactly like you do. Its FleetScout task constantly pushes idle scout ships to the edges of its known space to gather telemetry. If you destroy an enemy scout, you aren't just killing a cheap ship; you are literally blinding the AI's HTN planner to that sector of the map. If the AI hasn't surveyed your colony, it cannot target it. You can use this to your advantage: aggressively hunting enemy scouts is a viable strategy to hide your expansion.

Fuel as a Strategic Constraint

Every ship has a base operational range, governed by its internal fuel. We've introduced the Fuel Tank module, which dramatically increases that maximum range.

This creates a brutal trade-off in the Shipyard. A frigate loaded with armor and weapons is a lethal interceptor, but its short range means it is permanently tethered to its home base. If you want to project power across the sector or strike deep behind enemy lines, you must sacrifice those defensive and offensive modules for Fuel Tanks.

The AI understands this. It calculates interception routes (FleetIntercept) and patrol paths (FleetPatrol) based on the maximum range of its available ships. If it detects an incoming hostile transit toward one of its colonies, it immediately scrambles the closest combat ships that have the fuel to reach the intercept point.

The belt just got a lot more dangerous.

Signing out,

  • Jari