Evil Races not Colonizing like Good and Neutral Races?? -please help

I'm noticing that in my ToA 2.03 campaigns that the "evil"races (specifically the Drengin, Korath, Korx and Yor) aren't colonizing more than 1 or 2 planets during the "colony rush" phase of the game; while races like the Altarians will colonize a dozen planets. In my current campaign, the Altarians have 13 planets; while the Drengin, Korath, Korx and Yor each have 2 or 3 planets total (including their homeworld).

Is this just a coincidence? or is this an every game problem that I can somehow fix? Thanks in advance 

7,240 views 5 replies
Reply #1 Top

I do not play TA, but I do recall threads on this, so you might look in the thread history.

IIRC, posters believed that the behavior was due to the evil AIs being unwilling to colonize planets in Influence zones of other empires (due to flipping concerns in the strategy math).  Thus, the evil AIs would seem to stop expanding as soon as they reached a border.

Reply #2 Top

Whould setting The Drengin and Korath to "generic" personalities solve this colonization problem? 

Reply #3 Top

You could try this.

However I did have evil civs colonizing quite fine in a number of games, although they sometimes do seem to take a bit more time to do so.

Maybe they just ended up with bad starting positions?

Reply #4 Top

Quoting ElZoido, reply 3
You could try this.

However I did have evil civs colonizing quite fine in a number of games, although they sometimes do seem to take a bit more time to do so.

Maybe they just ended up with bad starting positions?
End of ElZoido's quote

It's been happening in every game I start, so I don't think it's bad starting positions; unless they've really been consistantly unlucky. Maybe The Drengin and The Korath are only suppose to colonise the one other planet in their homeworld system, and then get other planets solely through conquest. The problem with this theory is that, with only two planets, by the time they start attacking civs with nine or more planets -they'll be unable to compete, even militarily.

by the way: I'm playing with a gigantic galaxy, with all 9 civilizations enabled. Planets and stars are set to uncommon; so on average each civ should have about 5 or 6 planets. But the Drengin and Korath always have just two, The Yor usually get three and the Thalan and Altarian usually have about nine or ten. I wouldn't want every AI to have the same amount of planets, as that would be boring. But two AIs only having two planets, seems like it could really upset the balance. Other that this problem, I'm really enjoying my current campaign; so I'm wondering if I could somehow fix this problem in mid-game, without having to start over and to assign generics personalities to the Drengin and Korath.    

Reply #5 Top

Hm, maybe their personalities are indeed too bad at coping with Altarians and Torians?
They do colonize quite aggresively in the early game, evil races not so much it seems.

The last games I played did not have Altarians or Torians (instead 5 out off: Korx, Yor, Korath, Arcean, Drath, Krynn, Iconian, Drengin).
Korx did pretty well after a while, although they had some troubles in the begining. Yor where big once, not so much the other times. Korath did okay to good, especially after developing the evil-only weapons, at which point they were able to wipe out anyone else in one game.