AI Drop

Potential manifestations of that are the subject of numerous threads on this forum.  Examples are the threads discussing certain AI empires not expanding, some or all of them not building improvements, illogical surrender behavior, and building the wrong improvments on bonus tiles (a problem that has long existed).

I did not saw this problem in the normal non 2.0 TA.

I'm pretty sure these things have existed in every version of ToA, and were actually 'introduced' in ToA. The most serious ones that Mac mentioned above, AI's not expanding, and some civ's not building social improvements (have been acknowledged as bugs by Stardock) mostly only happen on large and the largest of map sizes. These will not be noticed on smaller maps that much.

One way to 'correct' this behavior is to set all civ's to "Generic" personality setting (during game setup under opponents, i think). This makes all civ's expand much better, and also seems to make certain civs (such as Torians, which are notorious for not building any social improvements at all on a large % of their planets) build social improvements on all their planets... although I am still verifying this in my current game.

Odd they seem to build the improvements generally on the right spots for my version (1.23 i think, aint got round to updating it yet) and the AI is generally very fast at expansion, BUT they dont seem to research weapons very fast (they got planet invasion, but no weapons??)

In my current game, I finally have high espinoge level on all civ's... and by setting their personalities to Generic, the Torians and Iconians have been building social improvements on every single last one of their planets... they also have been putting improvements in the correct spots (special tiles) as well.. except for the occasional time, where they build other stuff on 300% farm tiles (which is good that they do).

Hmm, thanks for the tip galacticdoom. In all of my games so far, the Altarians have had the silly habit of buying lots and lots of troop transports, but not even researching the laser! I guess this is to do with their personality? (not to mention the countless other civilizations who declare war on the arceans before they even have a ship with a particle beam)

I caught the Alterians in my current game with 6 transports on the other planet in their homeworld system (not Alteria, the other little planet), but the population was only 4+ billion. If they did decide to go to war, they wouldn't even be able to launch them all with a full 1 billion complement.

I just finished the 2cnd dread lord campaign scenario. I think there were about 8 mining resources and 3 planets available to colonize. The AI didn't make the first starbase until I had all but 3 of them mined, with the starbases themselves upgraded with 9 or so modules. The AI didn't colonize a single world, and only launched 2 heavy fighters from his home planet the entire game.  The game difficulty was set to challenging. By the time I felt like finishing the scenario, I had 2 planets with 30billion+ population, my research was 231 compared to his 95, and my economy was something like 250 to his 75. The only improvements he had were research and morale, split almost 50/50 on the single planet he was working.

Please tell me this is a product of the scenario and not what a "challenging" game is supposed to be. This is my 4th time playing, and I have to say that so far I'm underwhelmed by the AI.