Extensive 1.3 thoughts

[Please forgive me for making many posts in a row, I have tried many times to post the entire first part of my thoughts as one post, but have been unable to make it work here].

Still, the new AI behaviour caused me to use some new ship designs. I designed a recon ship with good speed and sensors, and used these at my borders to notice possible troops buildups or approaches. The fact that I found this useful clearly shows that the AI has improved. By the way, a badly needed feature is a patrol order for units (unless I missed it, which is not impossible). It gets annoying moving a ship along the border manually back and forth to observe more space – the ship should be able to do it automatically and stop if something gets spotted.

AI ship designs have once again definitely improved, as I’ve seen better mixing of weapon types, and I’ve definitely seen the AI adapting its defenses very well when I only used one type of weapons.

I loved how the various difficulty levels no longer mix different AI intelligence levels together. Previously, I often found it ridiculous choosing a difficulty level that should provide a challenge only to find that some AIs are strong, whereas others are absurdly stupid. This sort of a thing always benefits the human more. When there are some weak/stupid (which is the same, essentially) AIs, they can be exploited. And the human is always better at exploiting, so I’m glad to see this behaviour gone – or rather, made optional.

Warfare is still extremely advantageous, as I commented in 1.1. And the attacker still has the advantage in war. Allow me to quote myself from my 1.1 comments. “Star systems have planets that are within one turn, two maximum, of each another. Therefore, once you have your fleet at a planet, you essentially are threatening all the planets in the system – and if you have enough ships to do so, you can take over an entire star system in one turn. Just need to have enough Transports.”

I think Transports don’t work well enough in the current implementation. The thing is, you can put Transports back on a planet, which makes the planet’s population go up. What this really means is that you can’t have too many Transports in a war. If you built 4, and only needed 2, then you can put the surviving 2 on your newly conquered planets – boom, a gain of population! OK, you had less population while they were in space, but chances are, it didn’t last quite that long. In fact, after you conquer a planet, it has low population. Population grows in percents – that is, a planet with 10 billion will gain a billion quicker than a planet with 300 million. That makes sense. But it also encourages to execute “population relocation” moves after conquests. I just put some Transports on my newly acquired planets, and it gives a great benefit. If no Transports survive, I’ll actually build one or two on my high-population planets and move the population to the newer planets. This results in an overall boost.

That’s the sort of thing which I don’t think is good for the game, however. It’s extra micromanagement, and it’s something that the AI doesn’t seem to understand. This is one of those cases where I would advocate changes in favour of streamlining the game. Specifically, I would make Transports unable to return / land on a planet. Once a Transport is in space, that’s it. It stays there until destroyed. Such a change would serve to improve the game in two separate ways. First, it will get rid of the “silly but beneficial” population-moving aspect. Second, it will make war slightly more of a gamble – if you build too many Transports, well, that’s basically some population you’ve wasted.

Approval still doesn’t matter nearly enough. Very low approval (below 40%) will stall your population growth, but as it stands, it’s still a good idea to ignore approval and tax your people a lot. More taxes = more money = ability to allocate more spending = more research and stuff built. It’s something that should be a strategic decision but isn’t really, because you gain much more from taxing your people to 41% approval, and not enough by keeping your approval high. Having 100% approval is great, but having 80% doesn’t bring enough benefits. So approval still only matters once you gain the ability to switch to advanced governments.

Sadly, the problems that existed in diplomatic negotiation process back in 1.0 still persist. I’m not talking about the AI decision making now, but rather the process of negotiating itself. It’s still tiresomely difficult and annoying to get a good deal. Offer to trade Advanced Trade for Laser II, that’s a deal. Now see how many credits they’ll agree to throw in addition to that. 100bc? Yeah. 110? Yeah. 120? Nay. 119? Nay. 118? Nay. 117, yeah, commence trading! Brad said, if I recall correctly, that there’s a can offer anything for anything system, which makes any “best deal” hard to interpret. I agree with that, but that’s still no excuse for having such a tiresome negotiation system. At least as far as money goes, there should be a “how much you’ll give” button. In the same box where you select how many bc you want them to play.
See, gaining money in tech trades is currently a purely mechanical process. There’s no strategy involved. You have a green deal, but can add something else to it while keeping it green. Clicking on buttons to get the biggest number with which the deal stays green is a completely mechanical process, which is also entirely boring. But from an abstract gameplay perspective, that’s what it makes sense to do, because, abstractly speaking, it’s better to add 118 credits than 110 to your treasury. I know that I can myself be accused of micromanaging too much given how I bother with such details. Maybe. But I don’t even always bother to narrow it down to 1 credit, I often go in tens, like see that they’ll give me 210 but not 220, so I take 210. That’s still not good.

On the same diplomacy screen, there are still no tooltips, for which I have been asking since my first posts on this game. When moving the mouse over possible techs to trade, there should be the cost of that tech displayed. I can figure out that Laser III is a more advanced tech than Laser II, but is Soil Enhancement or Planetary Invasion more expensive to research? I don’t know the tech tree by heart, so such tooltips would be very nice to have.

Now some more positive comments. You can no longer form alliances at “Friendly” relations, and this is one awesome change. Previously, I would often research the yellow tech branch until “Alliances”, making it my goal to have one or two civs Friendly by the time I get the tech. That was usually not a problem – it was merely a matter of selecting the right civs, taking in account ethical alignment and other stuff. Some trading, and you’ll have Friendly relations no problem. This no longer works, you need Close relations to form an alliance, and that’s considerably harder to get. Thumbs up on that one, absolutely.

However, with relation to alliances, I’ve also noticed a negative thing, that reminded me of vassal states in Civ4: Warlords momentarily. I was playing a cakewalk game as Terrans, where I went ahead of the other civs a lot at one point. Everyone either loved me or feared me, due to my impressive lead in all areas. Now, I signed an alliance with the Drengin. They had, strangely enough, been the weakest civ that game – well, they failed to gain any planets, so only had their two initial ones, and no one else liked them much, given how no evil civs were on the map. And there comes the shocker. The Torians declare war on the Drengin. Uhh, hello, lost your marbles anyone? The Torian military is more than capable of handling the Drengin, but they’re my allies. I declare war on the Torians in response, and send a few of my ships to the Drengin system. Given my extreme technology lead, my “BaltarStar” class ships handled the Torians with ease.

What happened was that the Torian AI absolutely ignored the Drengin allies when considering war. It only considered the actual Torian-Drengin balance of power (which was very much in Torian favour), without considering possible allies. Matters didn’t become any better when the Arceans (who totally loved me) also joined the war vs. the Drengin. I’ve seen AI dogpiling behaviour in 1.3, which isn’t a bad thing, but again, think of the alliances! If the AIs are so afraid of me that they regularly send me gifts, they damn sure shouldn’t be declaring war on my allies. This is an oversight which I hope to see corrected, thankfully, that part shouldn’t be too hard.
I did, though, see several examples of better AI decision making in warfare. The AI has become much better at figuring out which target to attack, or when to retreat instead of attacking. It seems that the AI generally prefers fleets of more fighters than of fewer frigates. Maybe this varies with the specific AI, I don’t know yet. Either way, this is an observation and not a criticism.

Oh, the new combat system. Well, there’s another huge improvement. The attacker no longer fires first, which means that a powerful attack fleet can no longer destroy anything without taking damage. There isn’t a lot to say about this change other than that it’s a great one. It removes some of the tremendous advantage that attackers used to have, while not shifting the balance in favour of the defenders too much. Thumbs up.

1.3 had a few other random moments that made me happy. One was messages from civs that were not trade proposals – such as a warning that the Arceans are getting too much influence. It really brings the game to life when the other civs say something to you – say as in send a message and not a request. That’s good. Another happy moment was when I saw that the AI, at least sometimes, does decent research of the yellow techs – one of my past criticisms has been that it’s usually ignored, giving the human a huge diplomacy and influence advantage.

Speaking of diplomacy. I think it might be a good idea to add periods of time when you can’t declare war against some civ. That would be good merely for the sake of exploit closing and generally adding strategic quality to the game. For example, prevent redeclaring war for 10 turns after signing peace, for 10 turns after receiving tribute (which was asked for), and 5 turns after receiving a gift. Currently, it’s a good idea to ask a civ for tribute just before you attack it. Get the tribute and still declare war. I really don’t see why this should be the case.

Peace deals. Ugh. The AI still doesn’t understand them. It seems to be rather stubbornly insistent on not signing peace too soon after a war begins. I fought a war against the Drath. They controlled two star systems. One had decent planets and also had two resources, the other was somewhat crappy – well, mediocre. I declare war and take over their good star system on the same turn. The planets become mine, their mining starbases are gone. Next turn, I go to see if they’re willing to sign peace. They’re not. I’m curious as to why – really, what is the AI thinking? Is it under the impression that I’m chickening out if I want peace on the next turn or what? They’ve just gotten a beating in one turn, sounds like they should be begging for peace so that they can live, but not.

On the other hand, there was that Torian war I mentioned above, the one where I interfered on the behalf of the Drengin. I didn’t contact the Torians for peace for quite a long time. I refused their first peace offer. Now, some time after that, I contacted them, and was able to extort a huge sum of money for peace. However, I hadn’t taken any of their planets or destroyed any of their starbases – I had merely kept destroying ships they were sending to the Drengin system. I’m not sure what happened – maybe the AI gets more willing to pay up after longer wars, or maybe it uses ships killed as a measure of how it’s doing in a war. If it’s the latter, a false estimation of success, then the AI should understand that losing a planet is a bad thing, and losing a whole system quite likely means that they’re screwed in that particular war.

I’m finishing for now. 1.3 is a great update, even better than 1.1, for which I had a lot of praise. As always, there’s still room for improvement. And as always, my goal remains not to criticize or praise, but to attempt to provide objective and constructive insight about the game. Thanks to Stardock and Brad again – it’s a particular pleasure for me to see that a whole bunch of things I mentioned in my previous GalCiv2 posts got some attention in 1.3.

[What follows below is an update I originally posted two days ago. These tend to come as I play.]

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Time for an update! Gah, what have Firaxians and Brad turned me into, some crazy analyst who can spend more time writing than playing .

Getting straight to it, comments on minor civs. I like those folks, even if they are just asking to be eliminated when they’re located close to you – what not with the high planet quality they always have. But they can actually be good trading partners, so eliminating them isn’t always the best idea. That’s good. I noticed, though, a couple of strange things in their behaviour.

First, I saw on a few occasions minor civs build influence starbases. Seems to me that they never should – after all, they don’t have any actual influence as in they can’t flip enemy planets. And, if I understand correctly, their planets also can’t be flipped. It’s possible that I am missing something here about how they are supposed to behave, but influence starbases seem rather pointless.

Second, I had a minor civ trigger a false smart alarm for the AI. The GalCiv2 AI is programmed to, at the higher intelligence levels, recognize troops buildups as a sign that an invasion is imminent, and respond appropriately. So I had a minor civ’s planet in one of my star systems (I controlled the other 2 planets in it). I was fighting a war with a major civ, and preparing a number of Transports at planets in that star system. Just as I was preparing to send them to the front lines, the minor civ saw that there’s a bunch of Transports lined up and declared war. Those Transports were intended for my ongoing war with a major civ, but there you go. This is something that I don’t expect to happen very often, though, and it’s sure impossible to avoid – after all, you can’t have the AI know the player’s intentions.

Which brings me to a thought, I have to try a feint someday. Put some troops near a civ’s planet to make them thing I’m going to attack, thus detracting their attention from their economy and making them build military. Scare tactics.

Next up, influence victory and planet flipping. I got so excited by trying out influence in its various shapes and forms that I am now trying to win by influence all the time. And it is my belief that the 75% threshold is too high. One of my games, I was aiming for influence as the Torians. I wiped out some evil civ militarily, build a load of influence starbases and everything. The remaining civs in the galaxy had excellent relations with me. At controlling more than two thirds of the influence, I saw that I’m vastly more powerful than the others, but can’t win an influence victory until I eliminate some other civ. So I ended up eliminating the Arceans through culture – which allowed me to get to 75%.

My point is, currently, the influence victory doesn’t require just great influence. It requires you to wipe out some other civs, militarily or culturally. Otherwise, in a galaxy with 6 more civs, and you need 75%, you’re talking about you having three times as much influence as those 6 civs combined. Ack.

One option is to simply lower the threshold to 66% (which still takes effort to achieve), but I have something else in mind. I believe that, if you sign an Alliance with someone, their influence should count towards yours, for purposes of the Influence victory only, no UN combination or anything like that. That would be a good addition to the 1.3 change to Alliances, which are now finally hard to get. Then, one option to win an influence victory would be to get to close to 70% yourself and sign an alliance with someone.

Planet flipping I have grown very fond of. I love researching the yellow techs and putting two Influence starbases in such a way that they would flip a neighbour’s star system to me eventually. On my luckiest attempt, I’ve flipped four planets with two starbases – those four planets belonged two to each civ, and thus both of them were wiped out. Wow. It costs money, but not that much money. 1000bc for starbase modules, to push them to maximum influence, and possibly the starbase initial construction costs. I would say that isn’t so expensive for a method of absolutely peaceful conquest.

The AI doesn’t respond aggressively enough to this. Yes, I’ve received warnings from them that they don’t like my starbases (though not always). Still, they don’t seem to declare war over it, and I have even managed to maintain Friendly relations with civs up until the moment they’re wiped out by my culture. The AI should probably consider influence starbases near its planets as something more dangerous. To the point of declaring war if they feel up to it – after all, a lot of resources spent on influence also likely means a weaker military. Having a civ send a stern warning about a starbase, but then being able to assimilate them, doesn’t feel right – particularly when you manage to do that to different civs, several games in a row.

On a related notice, it would be great to see this strategy added to the AI’s arsenal. It will place influence starbases in its systems if these systems are at the risk of being overran by foreign influence, but I haven’t really seen offensive influence starbases – after all, they have to not only be close to a rival planet, but equipped with a considerable number of modules.

By the way, what’s up with the AI preferring to build several Economy star bases per a star system? I usually see something like 2 Economy starbases placed close together, instead of 1 with good upgrades. According to the documentation, the bonuses stack, but wouldn’t it make more sense to first fully upgrade the first starbase before building a second? Two weak starbases seem a worse solution. However, the AI definitely loves its mining starbases – I always see it going for resources only, and see its mining starbases equipped with additional modules at a good pace. That’s nice.

I finally got around to playing with the governments some. Previously, the situation wasn’t quite right for that. The idea is very neat, particularly that of the Senate. However, there’s a problem. You need control of Senate, which is determined at the elections. The chance of losing control is the one and only drawback to running an advanced government. Elections are determined by your approval rating. In theory, this should force you to pay more attention to your approval when running an advanced government. In reality, you can keep watch on when the elections are coming up, and lower the tax rate dramatically the turn before the elections. That should let your party win the elections alright. I’ve also used this when the Senate disapproved of a war I wanted to start. I lowered the tax for high approval, and could declare war easily. I think the optimal way to handle this is by having mean approval between the elections matter. Thus, when new elections happen, what matters is your approval throughout the entire time since the previous ones. The having high approval for one turn won’t help you if you are running low approval for the rest of the time.

Another thing is special planetary attacks. You know, Mass Drivers, Tidal Disruption, whatever. As the game progresses, you became unable to take larger planets with traditional invasion technique – at least not without losing a bunch of Transports first. So you have to resort to some of these special tactics. These, in turn, have a disadvantage in the form of loss of planet quality and/or planetary improvements. However, it turns out that there is a problem – these negative effects do not happen if the invasion fails.

Basically, here is what you can do. There’s some planet which you can’t really conquer just yet. You estimate you need three Transports with special tactics – with just a little experience, those estimates are pretty easy to make. You send in two Transports, choosing a powerful special tactic, such as Mass Drivers. You lose, taking out many of the defenders. Then you send in another Transport or two, using a non-damaging tactic – either the standard invasion or Information Warfare. Yay! Planet taken, no damage to planet quality or improvements!

This ain’t good. By sacrificing a few Transports here and there, you can take planets without having to face the negative effects of special tactics. If you had used enough Transports in the first place, you’d still likely lose at least one, so your Transport losses don’t increase by much with this tactic. However, you do get enemy planets intact – and in the long run, it’s definitely more than worth it. After all, capturing a class-20 planet is so much better than having it reduced to class 11!

Unfortunately, the obvious solution also has a flaw. That is, if special tactics are made to damage planets regardless of the invasion’s outcome, that is also a possible exploit. Send single Transports (one troops module) at enemy planets, use Mass Drivers, fail, but considerably weaken the enemy planet at the cost of just 500 million population. Launching such attacks against key enemy planets would also be a very powerful tactic. On the other hand, you can’t invade a planet unless its orbit is empty, so you wouldn’t be able to just send Transports all over the place. And the AI puts a very high priority on maintaining some ships in the orbit. So maybe it wouldn’t really be much of an exploit. I’m unsure, though it would be interesting to test.

Speaking of exploits, what’s up with selling the AI obsolete techs? If you put Laser II and Laser III in the same deal, the AI smartly recognizes that and tells you that Laser II is useless if you’re also selling Laser III. Great. But what you can do is sell the AI Laser III for whatever, and then, separately, sell Laser II for something else (you can at least get a sum of money out of it). Why? Many older techs are indeed useless if you have the newer ones. There are exceptions, but in the situation above, the AI should see it already has Laser III and refuse to give absolutely anything for Laser II.

On a positive notice, I recently noticed the Terrans research the mass driver tech branch well, being ahead in it of everyone else. In a smart move, they refused to trade those techs point blank. I hope it wasn’t a fluke but instead the AI actually trying to maintain a monopoly on these techs it’s well ahead in.

I complained, in my first 1.3 analysis post, that the AI is sometimes weak at figuring out when to sign peace. I’ve got a suspected reason for it today. It seems that the AI, when deciding about peace (and which side should pay for it) uses the comparative ratings of itself and the civ it’s at war with. That is, say, you’re at war with the Dratha. Later, if the Dratha have more population and economy than you do, they’ll think you should pay for peace – possibly even if you’re kicking their butt. I don’t have access to AI code so I can’t check anything of course, but this is really the only explanation I can come up with for some of the AI peace-making decisions I have seen, in wars against me and other AIs alike.

A good measure of who’s winning/losing the war would be just that, relative increases/decreases in various numbers since the war began. When a war starts, the AI should memorize its population, industrial and military strength, the number of planets it has, and such info. Then, when considering peace, gains/losses relative to that should be considered. If the AI loses three planets and 20 billion population in a war, then it is losing, and should understand so – even if its research or industrial capacity outstrips that of the enemy. At peace time, capacity matters. At war, it’s the actual losses or gains you have that matter.

And I just became even more assured that forced peace periods are needed in some circumstances. Being able to declare war the turn after you sign peace just isn’t right. If you’re close to exterminating an AI, you can sign peace, take all / nearly all their tech and money for peace, and then just redeclare war and finish the job. At the same time, if you pay a superior AI for peace, you can’t even be sure if you bought yourself any time at all – which is why some forced peace period seems like a good idea.

My final point for now is regarding the whole life support thing. It would be better if life support ranges scaled to galaxy size. Playing a Huge galaxy, life support technologies become important, and there are indeed many places you can’t reach. Playing a Medium galaxy, I put a low priority on those technologies, and have never used a life support module on a ship. Scaling would simply make life support range relevant to any galaxy size.

Oh, another possible tweak would be to make influence / economy starbases not extend your range. Only planets and military starbases. Not a major thing, but I’d have a good feeling about such a small tweak.

For now, that’s it. As always, thanks for reading!

Good to see your enthusiasm, but I don't have the time or energy to reply to every point you make (though I could). No offence, but the truth is that I don't think there's anything you've said that hasn't been dealt with by numerous people in this forum with much more experience with the game. If you'd search the forum for a particular topic amongst your vast list, review the debate so far, and then see what you have to add, we'd all have some time saved.

You may have partially missed my point - I am not being critical of GalCiv2 (at least not anymore), I am merely trying to highlight what I think can be improved. I had not, prior to a few days ago, read the debates on this forum, and am looking forward to doing so - but please do not mistake my lack of experience here for my lack of experience with GalCiv2. While I won't claim to have played GC2 as much as many of the people here, I humbly believe my experience to be sufficient for having at least some useful comments .

I have not read the entire thing yet, but I thought I would mention something.

The minimap problem was related to dual processors, and restricting the game to a single processor/core bypassed the problem.

And, it was taken care of in 1.31. I have not had it happen since updating to 1.31, and I saw it in virtually every game since 1.2 came out.

1.31 was mainly a bug fix, so you may want to update to that version if you have not done so already.

I've updated, but thanks for mentioning it - the post's a bit old. In 1.31, I have not encountered that issue anymore.

You may have partially missed my point - I am not being critical of GalCiv2 (at least not anymore), I am merely trying to highlight what I think can be improved. I had not, prior to a few days ago, read the debates on this forum, and am looking forward to doing so - but please do not mistake my lack of experience here for my lack of experience with GalCiv2. While I won't claim to have played GC2 as much as many of the people here, I humbly believe my experience to be sufficient for having at least some useful comments

Alright, sorry. Just pointing out that I think you could glean a lot from previous threads, especially seeing how you are obviously thinking about these issues in so much detail.

Good gaming!

Love the analysis and for the most part I agree with what you say.

To answer one question, at this time I believe that all allowing CPU intensive algorithms does is allow the AI to redesign its ships twice as much. Thats no small thing but its not exactly a whole lot of extra depth either.

Does anyone know what/if some of the new algorithms will be in the x-pack?

Great reveiw man, can't wait to read your veiws on the x-pack and any other patches.

Since your commentary is so AI-centric, perhaps you should play on tough which runs AI at 100% rather than challenging which handicaps the AI.

challenging = individual AI's are Bright... which means no handicaps.

Nice thread, btw.

challenging = individual AI's are Bright... which means no handicaps.

Yes the AI is handicaped on challenging, they don't play at they're full potential until tough difficulty.

Intelligent was the no handicap level I thought, bright is handicapped a bit. Did this change? So Solver needs to up the level he's playing at to properly crit the game.

Bright is handicapped.

Intelligent/Tough is where they are equal.

But IMO, "Gifted" is where it is most fair (one level above intelligent) because the AI is always going to be slightly more wasteful than a human on a larger scale because it doesn't project force or focus on a specific long-term strategy as much as a human so Gifted just gives the AI a little bit more money which effectively cleans up some of the waste in the AI's resource handling.

But until intelligent, the AI isn't even using its best algorithms. So at Bright, it's still intentionally doing dumb stuff.

A note on AI war declaration; at times when I've had a weak military the AI has quite happily waltzed in and placed fleets near my good planets and starbases just before attacking me, so sometimes the AI is very well prepared indeed.

I've also noticed allys not being counted when the AI decides to attack someone, sometimes resulting in a swift smacking down of the attacker and I agree it needs to be looked at, but honestly, the same thing has happened to me on a few occusions

I'm planning to start playing the Metaverse soon - just seems like a nice feature. So far, I've been going pretty nuts with AI testing, playing Normal, Challenging and Tough for observation of the AI. Normal is surely a cakewalk, Challenging is easy much of the time, but at least the AI can keep up somewhat, Tough seems fair to me, with my current skills.

Brad - the official descriptions say that Bright counters "most human tactics", while Intelligent counters "all human tactics". Is that so, or does Bright actually make mistakes on purpose, like Normal does? I have to admit I haven't noticed much in that regard, except that the AI starts only properly responding to troop buildups on Tough, but not Challenging. Then again, the AI responds to Transport buildups even on Challenging - but it takes Tough to respond to non-Transport fleet buildups, from what I observe.

I noticed something else last night about military power... the AI's power tends to grow more during peace time than mine. Probably because I build few warships when at peace. That causes the AIs to declare war on me (somewhat) often, and sometimes mistakenly, when my industry and population is twice theirs. Which, in turn, allows me to quickly gain the upper hand militarily once the war gets under way. And is it just me, or does military rating care more about the number of ships than the quality? My style is definitely going with fewer high-tech, powerful ships, but it seems to me like AIs that prefer more weaker ships usually rank up higher than me.

Another thing, and a note to self. I experimented yesterday with the impact of galaxy settings (stars / planets / habitables) on the AI performance, and have made some interesting observations. Have to run out now, though, so I should put those up in a few hours.

And is it just me, or does military rating care more about the number of ships than the quality?

The quantity does matter more.

With all due respect, ACS solver, it's clear that you are very enthousiastic about getting to know everything about the game's AI in great detail and sharing that with the Galciv community.
But I have to agree with Cornhuskermac that a lot of things you say have been dealt with before by more experienced people. Even though I am very interested in strategies/AI information, I can't be bothered to read through your extensive posts, especially since I see some things that are either obvious or not correct (and I haven't even played 20 games in total)

I would advise to read more on the forums of the things you encounter before adding something new and play some more of the game to get more feel for all the interactions.

In general I really like all the contributions to this forum, I've learned a lot from all the people who want to share their experience!

I personally feel it's somewhat of a never-ending journey. I'm playing, I hope to get more of a feel as I do, but it is something that really takes years. Take Civ4, I've played that for about a year and a half now, in many different ways and the game's iterations, and I still don't think I have a complete "feel" of the game, even if I have spent hundreds of hours on it.

[Nostalgic notice]
The fact that I've been, so far, playing GalCiv2 without reading the forum discussions, brings back some nostalgic memories of when I started with the Civ series, and went to figure all of my tactics by myself, without having had the ability to read anything from other players
[/Nostalgic notice]

By the way, a question to the veterans of this forum. Could you link to some great or famous threads here? I'm always interested in learning more, and my experience indicates that most forums usually have a few threads that clearly stand out in their importance and quality.

Some notes on galaxy setup & AI performance. (This may be one of those things that is obvious to GalCiv2 veterans and, if so, my apologies.)

I played two games which varied in the number of stars and planets greatly, on Huge galaxies. The first game was with the largest amount of stars and planets, and a high amount of habitable planets. The map was literally full of stars, most with 4 or 5 planets, and habitables in almost every star system. The AI colonized like crazy, and in the end, all civs had a serious number of planets under their control.

Second game, minimum number of everything. The galaxy was nearly empty. Other than the starting planets, Iconians, Thalans and me grabbed one extra planet each. I was playing with 7 opponents, so the rest were stuck with their home planets.

And, I observed a huge difference in difficulty of these games. The first game was challenging, with a couple AIs being really aggressive, too. The second game was very easy. There, the Thalans and I took a planet in the same star system. I quickly followed with Influence starbases to flip their planet ASAP. That put me at 4 planets, from where I was able to rather comfortably conquer three civs, taking each out very fast, because they only had one star system. Of course, it was then a cakewalk, having significantly more planets than the others.

It really is not surprising. TBS game AIs have one thing in common, and it's that they are worse than humans at doing something with individual assets. They always need slightly more stuff. Give the AI and a human 4 planets each, the human will likely be stronger. Give the AI more stuff (planets, ships, whatever) than the human has, and it will make good use of it.

So far, my impression is, that the most challenging galaxy setup (that is, actual difficulty level aside) is with the largest possible amount of habitable planets. I'm also under the impression that the human player performs better at mining resources - about which I have a question, has anyone seen the AI design "Fast Constructor" ships - Constructors with a few additional engines for speed? Those are really effective at chasing resources early on.

You use terms like Normal and Bright which are not terms from the same semantic categories in this game. Normal refers to something OTHER than the AI's level of "intelligence" performance. There is Bright and Intelligent, not bright and "normal."

Yes the AI over-values its fleets. I posted on this a LONG time ago when we were at v1.0. It still does this. It needs to factor in industrial capacity, your overall tech abilities, and the *quality* of your ships, not the quantity as much as it does. Not sure if Brad is up to making this change, however. Hopefully with the next patch this will get fixed because as it is now it isentirely too easy to cheese the AI in this way withoutintending to do so- humans tend to play for quality minimax-style... the AI should just take this into account when evaluating the human player, IMO.

The old thread:
https://forums.galciv2.com/?forumid=162&aid=102345#805245

My suggestion in that thread is no good, but SOMETHING needs to be done.

You're quite wrong, there is a Normal AI level - it's a level below Bright, and two below Intelligent. Normal game difficulty means all Normal AIs, whereas Challenging means all Bright AIs, and Tough means all Intelligent AIs.

But the way, I have a screenshot (Tough difficulty) of the Arcean AI surrounding its star system with three military starbases, none of them having any modules - hence, all three bases being pretty much a waste of money at that point in time.

Agreed on the fleets... the AI needs to take *two* things into account. First, other economical parameters - population, industry, etc. Second, allies. The AI simply ignores your allies when choosing to declare war on you.

By the way, Dearmad, nice to see you here, too!

Just play the darned game! Figure might as well be as nice and toasty as others are in here! Just enjoy the game, that's what it is there for.

Well, I can only thank you for this amazingly insightful opinion

It will be interesting to see what you think about Metaverse. When I started, I suddenly realized that I had to play games out for the score to count. It sort of changes strategy near the end, when you're clearly in control and want to finish things up ASAP.

By the way, will you be joining an empire? That's something I haven't done yet.

I'm not very competitive in games by nature - that is, I enjoy some competition, but I never have scores or such get in the way of fun. I really can't see myself going for crazy population growth just for the sake of inflating my score through population. But I'll enjoy the metaverse I'm quite sure. No empire for me, by the way .