After the game getting easier against the AI after increasing maintenance I changed my tactic. I've currently reverted to playing on normal difficulty with the penalties to myself, the player, only. This in theory should increase the difficulty of the game, and it does, kinda...

My economy is about 60% wealth, 20 manu, 20 research. With large increases to maintenance I can't have a large fleet, I can't have many research worlds and I can't have high manufacturing. All things considered it's working well to do what I want, which is SLOW down the game and provide a challenge to balance my budget, except...

The AI will not expand, I never encountered this problem on the higher difficulties. Time after time I am out colonising the AI by leaps and bounds even though I have to make most generate wealth and therefore have much slower production than usual. The only two that seem to do better than most (but by no means well) are the Altarans and the Drengin.

Naselus said something about this...

Is there a difference to their expansion techniques on higher difficulties? I might have to look at that strategy file. I had never seen them sit with an uncolonised world in their borders before. Turn 120 and there are still planets free for me to take. I might have to go back to a higher difficulty (although I might have to reduce my penalties a bit or I'll get trounced). Problem with upping the difficulty is it's going to speed the game up again.

Sigh, I really didn't realise how poor the AI is without handicaps (before I had never played on normal difficulty). I didn't want to have to mod the difficulty settings, or much else besides. Guess I'll take a look at them.

I hadn't even looked at the AI weight distributions yet, but indeed makes a lot of sense. I'm going to be out of the country for a week or so - will check it out when I'm back

One thing I'm wondering: how does the AI choose *which* 'assault' ship to build when it finds the assault type is the sort of ship it wants?

Quoting rspiccaver,

reply 30

From the looks of it, all factions should enter the expansion or expansionaggressive stage at turn 31, but I have seen from experience that they don't. I can't be sure without testing, yay, this starting to feel like a job

Hehe I know the feeling.

With all we've managed so far, I think we could probably make a pretty good 'community AI upgrade' mod, if we got a few of us working on the same project. Better ship and collony plans, better AI prioritisation, better weighting of the various variables etc.

tbh, I've been collecting your ship designs and adding them to my games at home. I've been meaning to ask if I can toss them into the insane balance mod.

Would make sense, and would definitely explain the <turnlifetime>. That may even be the intent but the problem is I've yet to see the Thalan use the expansion ratios in the last 3 soaks I've run. They are sitting in diplomatic continually after turn 30 until they reach the victory options at turn 150. This is pushing their shipyard construction of colony ships to 200+ turns, basically they start them and don't finish them until they change at turn 150 to pump out more manufacturing. It also means extremely slow improvement build, their 2-3 worlds are woefully undeveloped. The Terrans are suffering from exactly the same problem. Both factions basically crawl to a stop between turn 30 and 150.

There's something seriously wrong, but we are working in the dark.

'Aggressive' gives access to AggressiveStartStrat, Aggressive_Strategy_general and expansionstrat_aggressive

Benevolent gives Benevolent_strategy_general.

Diplomatic gives Diplomantic_strategy_general.

Cultural gives cultural_strategy_general.

Scientific gives ConquestVictory_scientific.

ExpansionStrat appears to be permitted for everyone, as is Wartime, ConquestVictory, ResearchVictory, ExpansionAscensionVictory, AscensionVictory and StartStratResearchVictory. StartStratResearchVictory may be broken, as it's start date is 150 but it's end date is 30.

Some also require other things - so wartime requires a war, Pirates is only available to the pirates, AscenscionVictory appears to requier all three tech ages (and turn 150). 

It's possible that the specified diplomatic adds some weight over the other strats. Expansion notably doesn't have any traits attached (not even expansionist). We need a wider sample to determine the weighting scheme.

The only faction that I've seen use ExpansionStrat are the Iridium, as would be expected, who do not fall into any of the other categories. I'm beginning to think that ExpansionStrat is just the default. ExpansionStrat_Aggressive is also as expected used by the Krynn, Yor and Drengin.

I've ran about 12 soaks now and I've not witnessed any cycling at anytime to another strat between turns 30 and 150. The only exception is if one goes to war.

So all I can say, with them not being as dynamic as hoped, is that the default values are terribly unbalanced

I've ran over 30 soaks now and still have yet to see the AI change to another strategy (only exception is wartime) between turns 30 and 150. They don't cycle between those available, that may or may not have been the design intent, but from observed behaviour it simply does not happen. The AI use the following:

Once turn 150 arrives they start to choose the victory strategies which are more complex.

The problem is turn 31-150 and these need rebalancing in my opinion. The differences are too much for some factions since this a lengthy and crucial period.

Terran and Thalan factions grind to a halt. Their manufacturing ability is crippled, which results in their colonies becoming underdeveloped. Until turn 150 arrives any new colonies they have besides the starting system often have multiple tiles with no improvements. The AI upgrades (very slowly) any improvements they do manage to build before adding new ones to blank tiles, they simply cannot build fast enough and gaining upgrades to base buildings actually hinders them in this situation. These two factions also have no colonising power beyond any ships they manage to produce before turn 30 since they are effectively only pushing 1% of their production into ship building. Their increased research is worthless in the long run since they don't develop. Ironically, if they go to war in this period it helps them, since they switch to the wartime strategy.

The Drengin and Krynn benefit the most during this time, which in theory shouldn't be unexpected, they are aggressive by nature after all. However, building up a viable economy is important for all races and in these crucial early stages no faction should be neglecting social production. The same goes for military production, in the early game it's not actually military, it's colony ships.

The Yor would also benefit like the Drengin and Krynn, however right now they are suffering because of the Assembly problem. Many of their colonies continue to raise their population past the cap at the expense of developing their worlds. They very often queue 2 assemblies, while having multiple tiles unimproved in addition to already exceeding the population cap.

I don't know what they were thinking by crippling the Terran and Thalan as they are, unless they go to war they are likely to be left in the dust. I'm actually astounded that this hasn't been addressed already.

On a side note, pirates cause significant problems during the colonisation stage. All factions play cat and mouse with them, their colony ships repeatedly moving towards the planet, then moving back to the shipyard rally point again and again. While most of the time it's not a huge issue and it just delays them, in some cases I've witnessed it completely blockading expansion, especially if the faction starts out in a corner and the auto path all go through a pirate area.

Agreed, good work rspiccaver  and good points

It's possible that they're just picking the first non-locked eligible category in the file. I suspect that it may qualify as a bug; no-one in their right mind could possible think the AI sitting permanently on 80% research from turn 30 was a good idea.

Also, bear in mind that the FactionDefs.xml also contains some AI weighting; I'm not at all sure how these interact with the strategies (if they do at all - your finding seem to suggest they don't).

EDIT: Scratch that, the factiondefs stuff is tech weighting.

Yeah I've looked at that for a couple other things I was working on but not in too much detail (there's a lot there as you said). I think it was when I was looking into the AI undervaluing a lot of their trades in diplomacy.

The thing that really aggravates me at times is often when you think something does one thing it turns out to be entirely different. Getting the time to test every damn change since we have a limited point of reference... it wouldn't have hurt them to have added a few more comments...

A new thread is a good idea, I've been thinking we are going off topic. I've got my parents visiting this weekend so I wont get as much time as I'd like to muck around.   I'm trying to think the last time I actually just played the game.