This is a spiritual successor to the (now outdated) Autonomous Ships mod, providing AI personality overrides and configurable automatic retreats. All settings affect AI-controlled ships (including the player ship, if on autopilot) in the player fleet; ally and enemy ships are unaffected. Each order will only be given once to each ship for each reason: for example, if a ship starts to retreat due to low PPT and you cancel the order AO will respect that, but may still issue a retreat order because of low hull or expended missiles, if those are enabled.
There are two primary sources of configuration:
- automatic_orders_settings.json (in the mod folder) allows setting default retreat thresholds for CR/PPT and hull damage, and whether personality hullmods override officer personalities.
- A range of hullmods (all under the “Automatic Orders” category, for easy filtering), including:
- Personality overrides: override faction doctrine, but not officer personality unless the relevant setting is changed in the settings file.
- Retreat threshold overrides: these override the defaults (I advise setting a high default and overriding it to a lower threshold for disposable or SO ships).
- Retreat when all missiles are expended: compatible with other CR/PPT/damage retreat options.
- Search and Destroy: gives the ship a S&D order when it enters the battle (or, if the flagship, when first turned over to the autopilot).
- Escort (small/medium/heavy): give the ship an escort target order on battle start (applies to the flagship even under player control). The AI will automatically fulfill these orders; you can use S&D orders to prevent ships from being assigned to escort.
Mod integration
Most mods should work without configuration, Automatic Orders does have two extendible CSVs for additional configuration:
- data/config/automatic_orders/ship_blacklist.csv: Add hull ids for independent ships that should not be given orders. Fighters, ships without AI, and modules are already excluded; this should be used for independent frigate+ sized ships, such as deployable platforms.
- data/config/automatic_orders/missile_regen_systems.csv: Add systems that regenerate missiles, such as Vanilla’s Autoforge. This is used to avoid ordering missile ships to retreat when they are out of ammo but have system charges left.
Edit*
Can you also adds the Auto retreat when HP is at a certain percent back? It seems to be missing from this version. It is really helpful to not have to pause the game and look for a tiny frigate that is about to die to issue a retreat. However, I found this to be unreliable in my own homebrew version. It sometimes doesn’t register properly or too late. Auto retreat at HP % function also doesn’t work with Combat Chatters. Still, it is much better than micro managing dumb AI that doesn’t understands and fear death like a normal human crewed ship would. Thanks for the work.
There already is auto retreat on hull damage, configured by the settings file–this defaults to 50%, but can be set to any percentage. I know it works with combat chatter–if you can reproduce any oddities please let me know.
I had experienced save breaking the other day while trying to access Prism Freeport from SCY – the problem had faded away after reactivating the automatic orders mod. But now with the AO, I can’t for example do a ForceMarketUpdate command anymore. At all.
As for the mod itself… It’s radical, I love elements of it. I would be testing more out of it – if we could add and remove it at will from the save. Though one can definitely appreciate the automatic disengage orders upon taking a certain amount of damage.
If I can give any pointer, if you’d tried to restructure the setting file to not be a one continuous line in notepad – it’d would make it easier to get around the various options. A small thing, call me nitpick’y but user experience matters too.
Use notepad++ and you’ll never want to use notepad again.
Fair enough. I’ll give it a try~
I use n newlines; the latest Notepad, and essentially all other editors, should handle it fine.
Some minor fixes:
– Remove the utility tag (incorrect since adding hullmods)
– Exclude ship modules
– Allow other mods to extend the missile regen system list
– Add retreat threshold override hullmods
. – Disregard missile regeneration when deciding whether to retreat due to expending missiles.
And being new, this mod is a life saver – I have no idea how I’d stay on top of everything with 5 ships let alone 30!!
Thanks for catching that! I’ll look into that and possibly remove one of the tags.
Having been irritated by said issue myself, I got rid of all of the first column instances of the ‘Automatic Orders’ tags in hull_mods.csv.
This leaves behind just one ‘Automatic Orders’ category behind, and can be properly excluded from being lumped in with the other categories.