This sounds like a great idea, moving this post to TWGS Beta.

I'll look into this. I think a reasonable behavior would be that positive aligned aliens are aggressive against negative aligned players and not against positive ones, but negative aligned aliens would probably be willing to attack either positive or negative ones. I don't know that this is how the AI is intended to behave, but that seems most consistent with how the game limits combat for players.

Thanks for the response John. I know that the extent of what I'm trying to achieve will be limited (as you can't move into the positive alien's home sector whether you are positive aligned or not without tripping their fighters, mines, and quasars. But I really liked the idea of throwing in a positive ferrangi (so to speak) so that you aren't forced to gain +###### alignment for invading Ferangal.

I've been using my father to help test some ideas with the positive alien aggressiveness. I know that if I disable "Aggressive" in the editor that they will not attack positive players but at the same time they won't attack negative players either.

It really doesn't seem consistent with "good" alignment to have them attacking other good players. But I need to look and see what the rules are, and try to make them follow the rules of players as closely as possible.

I'll post what I find out. I don't know if anything will change here, but it's worth double-checking to make sure it's working like it is intended to work.

I have had several alien races running scince dec in the beta, the good aligned races will attack good players (and evil) at anytime. By the same token the evil custom races will attack evil aligned players(and good).
You can reduce the attacks on players a bit by disableing in ALein Edit (2) Behaviours, then (C) Xenophobic
(L) Aggressive.
Also reducing the values for fighters and upgrade level in Section 3 of the alien editor.
I think you have a few of the .twa's JP (game d) if you want to download the .twa's used during the beta and the latest edits. You can do so from the file area of theswampbbs
http://theswampbbs.net then select files,then twgs

I am working on a new edit with a lot of aliens. Some of these races will be very aggressive, and I would like to be able to control if they attack good or bad players.

I know JP is striving to preserve the old game, but the Gold AI is a more recent addition so to speak.

The original aliens never did attack, only the ferrengi would.

It makes sence that good should not attack good, just as we're discussing alignment swings and such. If you want to remain on the blue side you only attack red.

Now this brings up a question, does alignment swings effect AI as well? If a low aligned blue AI attacts a high aligned blue player, does that AI become red? Humm... interesting can of worms I've just opened!

Do stock Gold Alien Traders attack? Stock Ferrengi should, but not Alien Traders. I think the issue we're debating is whether aliens that do attack should be able to attack blue vs blue. I agree that they probably shouldn't. But maybe that's a new setting.

A "good" alien may play well with members of their own species, but not play well with others. We see that in real life.

If you are seeing it as "good" being blessed by Zyrain, then it would not seem to make sense for them to attack - except blue players attack other blue players all the time. The storyline is what makes the most sense - blue aliens have an alliance with blue traders or red aliens with red traders.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

As a setting it might not be bad. Would blue traders be able to cap blue aliens and/or their homeworld? Would the aliens "remember" if a blue trader attacks and retaliate even if the trader's alignment goes back to blue (or was high enough he didn't go red)?

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

Good point, it would be cool if you could define axis and allies between alien races. I think it would also be cool if aliens could hold grudges against a traders corp instead of just the trader that attacked them as well.

I actually started writing a BBS game back in 1994 called Galactic Solar Quest. It was a space trading MUD where you could choose your race, and rolled your character, etc. I could really kick myself in the butt now for not finishing it.

That is an excellent point, Prom. Which supports making this a new option, but not standard behavior.



And my goal all along has been to make Alien Traders follow the same rules as players. So whatever rules govern blue vs blue combat should (optionally) govern them as well. I think currently blue aliens can attack blue players without consequence.



That's an interesting possibility, that if blue aliens are allowed to attack blue players, blue players should be allowed to attack blue aliens. Hostilities between aliens and players should preclude considerations of alignment, as well as the fact that "good" in one culture is different from "good" in another. Of course, I do consider the asignment of alignment in the game to be one standard, the Zyrain standard, so to say that an alien is blue is to say that the alien abides by the code of behavior of any blue in the game.

Such nuances of alignment are probably better left to true rpg games. But the problem we have is that blue aliens in TW currently attack blue players, and while I should probably change that, it should be optional in order to retain the long-standing behavior as well.

@Micro, I don't recall hearing about that project. Sounds interesting.

Ok, I had a look at the AI code and there currently is no consideration of alignment in attacking. So it's not a bug. This just was never implemented. So the next question is, for this setting, maybe "Limited Aggression", what should the rules be?

Should a good alien never attack a good player? Or only attack a less good player? I'd prefer to have a simple rule rather than "the alien could attack, but would take an alignment penalty". I'm not going to implement any kind of decision-making based on alignment. An alien won't take actions based on a desire to increase or decrease alignment. So I'm talking about something basic like the two options I gave above.

Aside from attacking players, are there other restrictions that should apply to an alien based on alignment?

This is awesome, I never expected to have this many responses in reply to my post (Especially from JP). As you mentioned, you won't make a decision based on alignment alone. In response, I have no idea what variables should be considered when going about making this change. The fact that you are considering implementing something that I brought up astounds me.

You caught me at a good time :) I've had the good fortune to be able to immerse myself in TW dev for about a year now, though it was unexpected. I've started another "day job" project now, but while I have momentum and am immersed in the code, I'm trying to do as much as I can. Once I move on, it's always a huge barrier to get back into it so I can make changes quickly without relearning everything.

There are actually so many things I'd like to do with Gold aliens. But honestly, I'm working on a new approach to customizing the game that will really open it up. It will work in conjunction with the Gold asset editors, but provide gameops the ability to basically drive the behaviors of these assets themselves. I'd rather work on that than spend too much time fixing/improving Gold aliens. No matter what I do, they'll always be aliens in a box, just behaving in the limited ways I have allowed. But this isn't that hard to do, so I'll take a crack at it.