AI very clever indeed

The only way to make racial techs is to make a root tech that has IMPOSSIBLETECH as the prereq, and give that tech to the appropriate race in its RaceConfig entry. You can then branch your new techs off of that one, and disable tech trading to help keep the trees isolated. But other races can still steal it with a lucky invasion or espionage.

You can also add a tech to the end of a tree and make it hugely expensive to research, and give yourself that tech at the beginning.

The AI will eventually get it, but it will be late in the game when they do.

lol, Thats one heck of a ship- Thanks for posting it

O wow, I almost fell out of my seat laughing there.

And THAT is why the GalCiv AI isn't scripted but rather is adaptive.  No scripts needed, it adapts on its own.

If you use custom hulls with custom models, can the AI use them as well? Because I noticed in my mod that the AI seemed to use what looked like normal hulls, even though it was using the new hulls I had modded in, it just wasn't using the custom appearance.

Thanks for the tip with ImpossibleTech. I have set it as the required tech, and it seems to work. Can the impossible tech itself be also stolen? Also what would happen with pirates that already have the impossibletech?
The civ series used to have a dynamic research cost system. That is, if you gave yourself a advanced/costy tech at the very beginning (by scenario, cheat etc.) the research time for the same primitive/cheap technology got higher. If this is not the case with galciv2, I will generate a new tech, set as prerequisites impossibletech and one from the end of the techtree, and give this to the civ at the beginning (and hope it would not get stolen during the game).

For the reply of Wilson: I think AI calculates the advantage for using a part (ie. cost, size, firepower etc.) rather than how its appearance, but still has some sort of script, as the ship had an additional engine although the hull had a speed of 400 itself.

Well, the techtree tweak wirh impossible tech did not work as expected. The AI has stolen the tech, and here is the result:


You can also see from the military graph when the red's have stolen the tech and started building several ships.

lol

btw. there is the AIValue flag in the techtree. As I set the value for this tech to zero, the AI did not steal it until very late of the game, but still did steal and created ships with this hull.

LOL indeed.

Now that the aim is no more creating a race specific advantage, but gaining advantage against AI only, I have set everything back to original, and created a structure (actually copied the blue light) and set its cost and size to negative. Assuming that AI would not check cost/size of the structures, and not terribly interested in using modded/added structures on adaptive ship creation, this tweak would give only the human player to cheat (only a little bit where necessary) when designing ships.

So I have learned from AI to use the same module over and over as long as size and cost is not a problem, and created me a constructor from a tiny hull and 56 hyperdrives: