Bingo, you hit it in one.

I did think it might be something similar but what was throwing me off was seeing the AI go directly to a planet/resource regardless of whether they have uncovered it in the FoW (they definitely have knowledge of the uncovered map even on normal). I tested by adding large sensors as you suggested and they will start to use their starting colony ships as long as they find a planet before turn 12/13.

All I can think of is the FoW is being unlocked for the AI at turn 20 on normal, 10 on genius and turn 0 for above. Since at these checkpoints all the AI would start colonising no matter how little they have scouted. I still wonder why the Drengin seem to be excluded from this.

Knowing this actually complicates matters from my viewpoint  , the logical reaction would be to make scouting a higher priority for them, but I'm not actually convinced that will be useful, since at turn 20 it becomes irrelevant and it takes that long for them to build a fleet of scouts (not to mention AI has a limit to the number of scouts it will produce)...

R

Yes, this seems to be the case. The AI colony ships are very bad at running into pirates and getting blown up so I'm more than inclined to agree that the full FoW isn't being lifted. However these 'inspirations' definitely kick off the colony spam at turn 20. That's when all races are starting to build colony ships (the AI refuses to build a colony ship if it doesn't know about a habitable planet).

The AI also will not build more than about 3-4 scouts in the early days, which is a bit of a pain.  I'd rather they built those instead of too many constructors and then get bogged down trying to build durantium refineries as a first building on a new colony.

I've come up with a compromise and have made them hold back most of their starting cash (I left enough for them to buy a couple factories). Then I've forced them to rush buy colony ships at turn 20. This stops them blowing it on scouts/constructors and is working quite well so far.

Yup, it's easier to tailor to one group of settings, I'm trying to keep mine as encompassing as possible at the moment but we'll see.

R

I tried that early on, and due to the AI refusing to build more than 3-4 scouts the shipyards sit idle, I'd rather them do something :-/ I might divert a bit more production to social for that period.

Not yet, it's on my list of 'to figure out' but I've got side-tracked - Probably do it tonight or tomorrow, I'll keep you updated if I learn anything.

What happens to the AI's current building if it changes strategy?

For example, the AI is building a colony ship, but then switches into a new strategy. Does it finish the colony ship, cancel it, put it at the bottom of the queue?

Yup, it does. Each time the shipyard becomes idle it checks the strategy for the next item to build.

Precedent goes to the last strategy defined in the AIStrategyDef.xls which meets the factions criteria.

Also, the <TechAge> is not the current age the faction is in, it is a check to see if the faction has unlocked that age or beyond.

In the vanilla xml these two reasons are why Aggressive_Strategy_General is never used. ExpansionStrat_Aggressive is defined afterwards (it should have appeared before) and takes precedent, the AgeOfExpansion requirement for it has been met.

Therefore if you want to define 'background' strategies you must ensure they appear earlier in the xml so that more specific instructions supersede them. Strategies relating to later ages must also appear later than earlier ones.

Careful consideration will be needed to separate factions with multiple personality types (I suggest not running too many 'flavour strats' during the same turn periods.)

R

For some reason, the AI has stopped moving its scouts in my current build; it builds them and just leaves them parked immediately outside the shipyard. Are you seeing anything similar, or is this a result of something I've changed?

Well, from another soak I can see a few things:

The base-game AI is massively weaker than the ones I've written. Seriously, the AIs do very well upto turn 100 and then falls off a cliff as it reverts to the 'normal' AI pattern. This is probably partly due to my other changes (the expansionist AIs cut very close to bankruptcy and in my first soak actually fell into the hole, with their budget becoming hopelessly in the red from colony maintenance), but the generalist strategy is a very sudden change of priorities. I think the AI needs to be scripted end-to-end. My first 100-turn strats have a plan and follow similar priorities all along; the base-game strategies are pretty vague and wishy-washy by comparison. 

However, the fact that I've managed to improve AI performance in spite of making some pretty far-reaching changes to the game is hugely encouraging. In my present build, I've implemented a number of anti-spam measures, rewarding 'tall' play against 'wide'. The AI needs to be able to afford stacking maintenance without collapsing. Every colony costs 3+(0.1*X) in maintenance, where X is the total number of colonies; this makes colonies past 50 or so very expensive. The AI is blasting through that barrier with no issues. I've also tweaked the population model to max at 100 and population produce half the production; with sufficient tweaks, the AI has taken this in it's stride and is producing growth buildings (which are practically required) and and generating high-pop worlds. I'm seeing the top spot changing hands regularly between half a dozen or more empires, following various strategies.

I'm gonna dive in and play a game now; see how it compares to what I can manage myself in comparison to the AI.

Ah, might be due to the fow command thing.

EDIT: Yeah, definitely was, I'm now seeing the AI moving scouts around happily. Weird that it turned theirs off too; it didn't seem to make them any better at spotting planets in the early game.

It's looking very promising indeed thb.

Last night I ran a couple of proper playthroughs rather than soaks. In both, at least one AI managed to get much larger numbers of plents than me (Iridium in the first game had 3 times as many as me by turn 150, Krynn in the second had twice as many) while most other AI players were at about level pegging with me. Now, I wasn't playing all-out - no cheese tactics or super-min-maxing - but the difference in the AI's performance was pretty extreme. I had genuine military threats to worry about early (aggressive races start military build-ups by around turn 30, and by turn 90 are pretty heavily armed); I had enemy empires with bigger economies than me (greedy empires make pots of cash); I had enemy empires which were much larger than I was (expansionists go wide very, very fast); and I had enemies competing with me on tech (scientist and peaceful empires). And all this, again, on Normal difficulty. 

It's worth noting that the AI was fleeting its ships. The big empires will tend to churn out 100+ ships in a very short space of time and then amass them; the improved performance of their economies has resulted in a much better military performance in terms of numbers - though not in terms of tactics. In the first game, the Iridium DoW'd me when they had no warships near me, and I was able to quickly overrun half a dozen of their worlds.

Maintenance is presently working, but may be a little low. I set it down to 0.1 stacking on top of the base 3, in order to make sure that expansionist AIs didn't kill themselves; I don't know if that's still needed since I slightly buffed production (it's at 0.5 per pop; in vanilla this is 1 but I'm letting populations grow to 100 rather than 30 so this means an effective 66% increase...eventually).

Rescaling farming, incidentally, works wonders. It allows you to leave growth very low and then put the real bonuses on the growth building line, so that mindless colony spam is no longer the best way to grow your pop. Since farms are giving 10 food, and approval 10 morale, it's now very important to get a colonial hospital down ASAP - which the AI does. It's all looking very promising.

Tonight, I'm going to go through some of the techs and traits which I've made obsolete with changes; once that's done, I'll be ready to upload for some wider testing.

I'll be putting the WIP version of IAB on dropbox probably tonight, provided I have internet when I get home - I moved house last weekend and have been connecting through a very limited hotspot from my mobile phone for the last few days, but should have unlimited fibre online today. They said 'any time between midday and midnight', though, so I may have gone to bed by the time they put us online. If so, I'll just upload the AI files before bed for you guys to look at; do remember that they've been preped for different mechanics though (I wouldn't have them building hospitals on normal, and would have less social consolidation phases). It would be interesting to see how the AI strats do in a vainlla game though.