Major races slow to expand

That's odd. I can say that it doesn't happen at higher difficulty levels though.

You have to play on a higher difficulty than cakewalk if you want the AI to play and expand! lol

He said he's on normal - that's why it sounds a little odd.

He said he was playing on normal. That's interesting... I don't know if I've quite seen that happen. In several games I've noticed that the computer will ignore some pretty decent planets near its homeworld. Once there was a planet not 6pc away from the Iconian homeworld of class 9 that they just didn't colonize... probably more than 60 turns into the game! Maybe it just overlooks them sometimes and then switches to another mode of strategy. Who knows?

I noticed the same thing, playing on normal (large galaxy) with common numbers of planets but uncommon habitable ones (?more realistic? anyway ). Found the Torians at the end of the game, stuck on their two original planets. I think the Altarians took the only other close planet to them. It was kind of amusing, descending on their pitiful little fleet with a squad of battleships


I think in my game it was a lack of planets rather than the actual AI issues though.

maybe the scout just never discovered those nice planets near their home planet..

i mean when we set the scouts on auto explore, they do some whacky things

On Normal some of the AI's intelligence levels are set lower then others. You have to set the intelligence of each AI seperatlly.

right out of the box Gigantic Universe Normal setting default 4 players ive never had that problem they actually expand quite quckly try starting a new game Bill im sure its just a fluke

I have the same problem on a gigantic galaxy, normal difficulty with all races enabled. Only the Altarians and the Drengin are really expanding, most of the others are just sitting in their home systems with class 19+ planets right next sun and spamming scouts.

The auto-explore scouts seem to have a really sub-optimal exploration pattern. They seem to do a grid sector at a time. This is great for late game coverage, but in the early game the scouts should be directed straight to the nearest systems. I hope the AI isn't using the auto-explore algorithm for its scouts (I don't think it is).

I've observed the AI sometimes being VERY slow to expand, even when set to 'Intelligent'. Playing on a higher level, I haven't seen it happen yet...

I had the same experience as the original poster playing a game with huge galaxy, all races, on tough (started with patch 1.09, finished with 1.0X). Again the Drengin and Altarians expanded as you would expect, but the others seemed to ignore pretty good planets near them and didn't expand as they would have in earlier versions.

I just finished a gigantic game, started on 1.09. 9 races, all at intelligent. The Tholians started close to me, we shared a good sized cluster, and they were extremely slow at colonizing. They ended up with 4 planets besides their homeworld, all 10-, while I easily took all the rest, more than twenty, including two 18 and one 19 that were in sectors adjacent to theirs. And while I certainly raced to take most of the worlds, I left the ones close to them for last, because I did not want to provoke them too early.

In this same game, the others IA did fine

Could it be the new patch? I ahve only played on the normal settings and it's aleways a race!

I have just finished a gigantic game with abundant everything, and the Drengin, Altarians, Drath, Yor, and Thalans were stuck with little space. The Arceans, Torians, and Korx expanded the most. The Iconians were about average. It is strange that I had the exact opposite happen to me than the rest of you. (The Drengin were all alone in a corner with no-one near them, so it is rather strange that they didn't expand much.)

Sometime AI can have strange behaviors

Sometime AI can have strange behaviors

Some AIs are probably better than others at this, but it could also be that AIs grabbing all the good planets early on smacks of cheating, even if they do it legally, and "isn't as fun" as a slower expansion rate. I know this was something that was discussed previously on the GalCiv forums. If this is the case, it might be possible to put more of a "killer instinct" for planets in on the higher levels.

I once won a game in a little over a year with a culture victory simply because none of the other civs expanded. I even obtained planets that were clear across the galaxy before the civs that were right next to it could approach. Once my influence began to expand, I was told I was about to win a culture victory. I wound up winning with about 2000 points or so.

i had a some different situation in a normal difficulty game, gigantic map with all the races. one of the race expanded so fast that 70% of the map is conquared by that race in 5 years and no war happened.

ive had that issue, a gigantic galaxy, all on sub-normal, Arceans Iconians and Altarians are the only ones expanding. drengin and terrans and torians are ignoring everything. there is also this huge area completely unpopulated, like 1/9th of the map

I started a game with the exact same settings and the AI is expanding fine.