ToA AI Civ's Not Building Any Planetary Improvements AT ALL

I was just wondering this in my last game too... Large map, abundant stars and planets. The Torians had 20+ planets. As I took them, the first ones were built up pretty well, but as I got towards the center it was a ghost town. PQ 16 planets with 8B population and a single charge stalk. PQ 12 planet with 8B population and nothing at all. Their last two planets didn't have anything, until they built a starport on the 2nd to last and started rush buying a ship a turn, alternating fighter troop transport. I blew them up before they left orbit... Still. All those tiles just wasting away. I can understand doing this in the beginning to keep cash coming in, but not many years into the game.

The Yor need help. Serious help...

Stupid question, perhaps, but do you have the techs required for their unique civ buildings?

ijust completed a game like this..i took 50 of iconians planets, no improvements.  i assumed it was because they were going for a super colo rush, so they werent building anything.

however, that is a stretch.  i think theres a bug in there somewhere

   In my game, i know all 3 AI's had many of their unique buildings, since they had them built all over the place on planets that did build. Eventually I ended up having many of their unique buildings myself from tech steal while conquering, but not until near end game. Do you think unique civ buildings are related at all to AI not building?

Yes I did notice a few planets where Torians built only a Starport and nothing else. Then the ship they were building showed it would take 268 turns to complete lol. Probably because they had focus on Social Improvements <shrug>. Masochistic is not supposed to be 'easy'. Anything above masochistic is supposed to be incredibly difficult, but with this non-sense going on, I found even this difficulty pretty much the same as normal.

I cannot believe that Stardock is absolutely 'Clueless' to this issue. It doesn't exist in Dark Avatar, I'll probably have to go back and play DA, because these things literally break the game.

My question was this.

Do you conquer planets from the AI that have little or no improvements when you have the tech for said improvements?

Or do you conquer planets from the AI when you do not have the techs for said improvements, and then do not notice any improvements on the planets?

Because in TA when you take over a planet and don't have the tech for improvements that have been built there, those improvements are destroyed.

An easy/easier way of verifying that the AI is actually building planetary improvements is to scout out their planets with a couple of spies.

I've seen this too.  I've been looking at some planets in the game I'm doing an AAR on right now, and I noticed one Torian planet that they colonized years ago.  I checked it out and it has nothing.  8b pop, not one single improvement, not building anything.  Total waste.  I even notice some home-worlds or core planets that have a few empty tiles and nothing building.  It seems that when the AI gets too much on its plate it just stops doing some things.

I understand what you are saying, by late game, i had race-wide spies set out on all civ's so i could look at all of their planets. When improvements are destroyed, it gives a pop-up when they get conquered letting you know how many, for the most part the planets that were not building were not in the initial starting place of the civ, but were planets they expanded too. Not too many planets were 'taken over' by the AI civ's in this game, so I can say it's not from improvements being destroyed. I simply brought up the planet screen for the AI's as I would my own planet through espinage.

I've seen this randomly through the entire development of GC2.  The iconian's are basically a wasted race, on larger maps they never develop correctly.  (everyone knows this, and I think it's gone from a bug to a feature in most people's minds)

I think the crux of the problem, is that the AI does not make any periodic checks on it's planets.  Hence if it takes over planets or misses the fact that it finished building, it never wakes up to redevelop it's planets. (or develop them)

What I don't understand is why so much effort was put into having all these unique AIs.  I'd be happy with just 3-4 AIs, if they were just decent.  Hell, i'd be happy with 1 if it played well.

Who ever decided the iconian's were good enough to ship?  I'd rather they weren't in the game at all than their current state. 

And this game wins game of the year?  Come on.  With some polish it would deserve it, but with gaps like this it doesn't imo.

Okay, just checking.

You did say it didn't exist in DA, so that was my first guess.

 It's probably something very simple like that, a mistyped letter in the code somewhere. I don't remember this ever happening in DA, perhaps it did. I think 2.0 was the last major update for ToA, so if they have not fixed this or even acknowledged it to date, it's unlikely they will at all. It would be nice if Stardock would drop in and let us know, as I am afraid to even play immense or huge galaxies for the fear of finding half the map uninhabited.

@galacticdoom: Did you ctrl-n when you started the game? There is still a bug in the game that may reset the intelligence of the AI to drooling idiot, especially if you do this multiple times.

In a game I'm playing, I've seen something similar happen (huge map, abundant stars, abundant habitable planets, though difficulty). The thing is, I'm guessing it has something to do with races surrendering to others.

In my game, the Drath and Korx surrendered to me and when I went over there planets, they were all developed. The only free plots probably came from tech mismatches.

The Terrans, however, surrendered to the Drengin, a race with a seriously different tech tree for manufacturing, research and economy. I can imagine that those Terran planets may have been wiped clean because of this tech mismatch but the receiving AI may not notice this for some reason.

The same happened when the Altarians surrendered to the Drengin. Every planet that got into my hands was empty except for a starport.

It's just a guess but so far, the results I'm seeing and some of the anecdotes I've read here don't disprove this. Does anyone remember whether those empty planets didn't belong to someone else at first - either through surrendering or through conquest?

This may be a factor, thought this was supposedly corrected for TA... It would explain alot...

I do know when I've come across planets that HAD buildings, I was told some were not useable due to race/techs. I can understand having 5 of 12 buildings being destroyed, having a odd building or two left that's from their tech... However, when you take multiple planets and don't get that message, and there's nothing on the planet but a starport... I have to believe there was nothing there to begin with.

T

I've heard that causes what you mentioned somewhere else here on the board, I used to do it, but now just start a new game. The game does say 'Incredible' for the AI's on the foreign relations stats screen.

In my game, the Drengin were in the bottom right corner, and torians pretty much expanded to a large porion of the left side of the map (except for the top of the left side, where I expanded too). The Torians were only at war with the Drengin (if i remember correctly) but were at war with them for a very long time, for almost the whole game. At the end of the game, the Torians did have a pretty high soldier casualty number (200 billion or something). so it's likely Drengin were using invasion options that destroy planetary improvements, which makes sense for the evil race. But the fact that there are no improvements plus they were NOT BUILDING any new improvements was really what made me wonder. All the planets I found in the game not building any improvements did not do so for the last 1 1/2 years of the game, if ever. I remember the time because that's when I really started just conquering everyone, and it took a while just from the sheer size of the immense galaxy.

As far as Torians gaining planets from surrenders, they may have in mid game. But even if many of those improvements were unusable and created a barren planet, it's still strange they would not build new improvements on those planets.

I just had an instance of inheriting a planet by influence flip that was 8b and empty. This time around it was Altarian. It was far enough in the game for alot of techs to be out, I was building medium frigates with 2nd gen missles and beams, as well as 3rd gen sheilds and armor. I was trading away ethics at the time to get some background techs, one away from the mini and logistic tree ends. There should have been something on that planet by then. It was a PQ8 with science and manufacture 100% bonus tiles on it, along with an ambassy tile. What a waste of a planet for them... made a nice frontline fighter factory for me.

Just for the record: Virgin start, no ctrl N on tough. Everyone does seem to be expanding OK, and the Torians maxed out an influence base up to their tech levels in my front yard. They aren't happy that I've parked a fleet of ships right next to it either...

T

I've checked back with my game and saw the empty planets were the ones which changed hands between nations with very different tech trees. Occasionally, there were buildings present that were not native to the owning nation but the tech was acquired (either through trade or conquest I can't say). I think the AI has a few steps mixed up, perhaps like this:

1) Take planet? Check

2) Is the planet built upon? Check and perhaps add a few upgrades.

3) Game wipes out all improvements and the AI never checks back to see what happened.

I have seen the AI trying to build ships from those planets with just a starport on them so he knows the planets are there but I doubt he knows they are empty.

  I checked on my game, and from the planetary screen, then the 'details' it gives a planet description, and tells if that civ colonized it and what year, or if it was conquered or surrendered. The torians had colonized all of their empty worlds several years before the game ended. They lost some of their worlds to the neighboring drath and iconians. But perhaps my situations only happens on the largest of map sizes.. because the only worlds that are not building improvements are the ones way far away from the civ's inital 'sphere of influence' (with a few exceptions here and there).

I just played a game on a "large" map, average difficulty, and it seemed to happen here as well.

I invaded some Torian worlds that have been Torian for several years and have never been invaded before as far as I can tell. Many of them showed only very few developed zones when I surveyed the planet before invasion (int rating maxed out).

When the Torians surrendered to the Thalans some months later they started improving their newly acquired planets.

Is this supposed to apply only to invasions, or culture flips as well?  I've been culture-flipping planets as the Krynn and have received several that had improvements past my own researched abilities (industrial sectors when I can only produce manufacturing centers, for example).  Not only did the completed improvements remain, all improvements that were queued for upgrade (I suppose my opponent had only recently researched the new tech) continued to build until they were complete.  Of course I couldn't build any new of the advanced improvements.

I lose structures during planet flips all the time. I think the more vanilla buildings might be immune (factories, stock markets, etc). Most if not all one-per-civ and one-per-glaxy buildings are also immune.

I've run into several undeveloped/underdeveloped planets during my game, and I know without doubt that only one race has owned the planet.  It's not a case of structures being lost to invasion tactics or tech incompatibility.  It's just AI bumbling.  Those same planets will sit and sit and no new project will ever be started.  They've all been Torian planets so far.

Kinda like the 7 Terran fleets I have just parked in my space.  They were en route to war on the Drengin, but they made peace and now they just sit even though the Terrans and Thalans are now at war and my space is right next to both of theirs.  The AI just never reevaluates what to do with them.

Well, apparently Stardock is aware of this issue, and it sounds as if they attempted to fix it. This was back in April 2008 by the way. Some of problems with it must have just been overlooked.

By Frogboy found in forum thread https://forums.galciv2.com/308553:

I have gone in and set all AI civ's to personality setting 'Generic' instead of their own (done at beginning of game setup). I do this to help alleviate the expansion bug, and I will check to see if it solves this problem to an extent as well.

Perhaps there is hope for a fix for this yet.

When I use Ctrl-N and get a universe I want, I always check the debug.err file to

see what level the AIs are set.  Look at the last grouping in debug.err.