So after finally getting Armada to work without crashing at the first sign of a major battle I went ahead and installed the Project Armada mod along with the 5.03 patch.

It works great! There's one issue though that I've noticed....

When I used to play this game way way back the game was relentless with the AI sending wave after wave after wave of enemies (this was particularly the case with the Klingons). We're talking HUGE chunks of red blocks suddenly making their way across the map and me trying to hold them off at all costs. I had to set it on easy just to give myself a chance! So I was looking forward to that challenge again but this time the game was fairly tame. The difficulty was set to medium and it's like they give up after a while and they only build like 5 ships at a time. I could try playing on hard but I have my doubts that will change anything.

Is anyone familiar with this mod and/or what could cause the AI to just... stop? Is there a setting that can be changed to make them more aggressive?

I used to mod this game (and Armada II). Modding the AI is very difficult and tedious, because you have to test each change a lot in-game. But the mod would just overwrite the AI-files even if GOG did change those, so they're not the problem. My guess is GOG changed the RTS_CFG.h file in the game's main folder (you can open that with Notepad++). If it's anything like Armada II you can easily give the AI more teeth by changing stuff like the AI_SPEED_HANDICAP and STARTING_DILITHIUM, while AI_GRID_SIZE has an influence on how the AI implements what's in the AI files.

That does sound like a good idea except this mod comes with a replacement RTS_CFG.h file, so I'm guessing those settings are right where they're supposed to be. Still, I'll take a look and see if I can change it up without breaking anything!

There's a lot of things that can cause the ai to be very tame.

If ai personality files are changed to de-emphasize attacking.

If ai run out of any resources: dilithium, crew, officers.

If the ai cannot build an item in its build list, then it wont move on to building things farther down the list.

If the ai cannot build fast enough to advance down its build list, before the assets it already has are destroyed. As far as I can tell, in order for the ai to build the next thing in its build list, it must currently own ALL of the things that come before that item in the list. For example, an AI that suicides all of its ships might not own enough ships to build things farther down its build list.

Wow. I realize this is a more-than-three-year-old thread, but I couldn't resist replying to it, since the OP is asking about a mod that I was largely responsible for creating.

Project: Armada is one of the great regrets of my life (at least in the realm of gaming), as I had such great plans for it, but never got past finishing the Federation and Klingons, which is why version 5.03 was only ever released as a beta, and originally meant to be sort of a preview of what my little modding group had planned.

In a perfect world, I would get around to finishing the mod someday even though not many people still play the first Armada. But I have long since lost all of the materials I had, including new ship models for the Romulans, Borg (and the Dominion for a planned Dominion Conversion alternate version of the mod, to be titled "The Order of Things"). I had the Romulans more than half-complete, with the existing ships and weapons revamped, new ones added, and the main remaining work on them being to rebuild the Romulans' AI (to make it better and also allow it to build all the new stuff) and try to get some of our ideas for them working (cloakable starbases and other stations being one of the big ones).

As for the OP's question, from what I remember, I'm pretty sure kyfwana has it right. Armada's AI is very linear; it goes down a list building one thing after another as long as it has the resources available. If an item it has already built is destroyed, it has to rebuild that item before it can move on down the list. Our reworks of the AI for the Feds and Klingons included MUCH longer build lists than the original game, the idea being that they could build up much larger forces if you let them do so.

I do remember that we explicitly specified in our readmes that you needed to set the resource limits to infinite or whatever the equivalent options were called, because the "Standard" resource options would result in the AIs (and the player, for that matter) quickly exhausting the available resources, in particular dilithium if the moons were not set to infinite. Because our AIs built a LOT of ships. Especially the Klingons, since we redesigned them to have cheaper, more heavily armed but less durable ships than the Federation (the logic being that the Feds prioritize the lives of their crews, so Fed ships were more expensive but also had better shields and hull strength). Our Klingon AI could build dozens and dozens of ships to swarm you with, making defenses much more critical than in the unmodded game.

Again, I know the topic is more than three years old, but in answer to the OP... For the AI just "stopping" in Alex_Bales' game, the only thing I can guess at is that something was preventing the AI from building the next item on its list, which will cause it to hang. I know we tried to cover the various options that the player could choose from when setting up a game, but it's entirely possible we missed something in one or more of the build lists (since there are several different ones that it will use, depending game setup).

Alex_Bales, if you're still around these forums, do you know of any sites where the Project: Armada mod is still available for download? I've tried to find it, so that even if I can't continue working on it I would still have a copy of it for myself. I have copies of all of my old mods for SimCity 4 (the only other game I was ever a major part of the modding community for) but I've not been able to locate the Project: Armada All-In-One.