Test Games . . .

Sounds like you guys are doing it the hard way.  I don't actually play out my test games.  At first, I was using the cheats to let them auto-play, but that breaks down between year 2230 and 2231.  The game just can't handle it.  Then I had a good idea.  I used the cheats to create a pop-up minor, then used the cheats to take over said minor.  After that I could just hit the turn button over and over again.  Takes about 10 minutes to cycle through a year after 3-4 years.  I also use the cheats to reveal the whole galaxy and remove the fog of war.  That way I can see how the races colonize, trade, and go to war.

Looks like you started taking over races to see their tech advancement, qrtxian.  You can go one better.  If you take over the race, quicksave, then load the quicksave, it will be just like you were always that race.  That means you can go to the Events log in the Civ Manager and it will list the order in which they researched their techs.  No guesswork, no overall picture, but an actual tech-by-tech list of what the AI priortizes.

Doing it this way, you can knock out a test game in one or two sessions, rather than taking a week or so to play out a game.  It also keeps your development and trading from influencing the game.  Also, I usually use the cheats to grant my minor all techs, then auto-build a tricked out dreadnought.  That keeps the AIs from frelling with me while the game plays out.  It's about a close as possible as I can get to removing the player from the game.

Iconian Test 1, year 5

I played out another 8 months or so of my previous test just for fun.

• They researched Scatter Blaster 3 immediately after they finished the tech they were researching previously.
  
• They moved on to miniaturization and 1 or 2 others.
• The Gnolams - a custom major race - declared war on them.
• Gnolams were 7th out of 7, Iconians 6th - Iconians seem to be perennial poor performers.
  
• Due to war, they returned to weapons, advancing through AMDs and Pulse Cannons, continuing on to Graviton Driver 2 by the time I left off.
• I don't know why they were 6th, the Gnolams were the superior race.  The Iconians put up a good fight, but looked to be on the losing side by the time I left off.
• Although they went back to weapons, their poor research and development left them in a bad position, with -346 income at the end.

By this point I declared Test 1 conclusive and moved on.

Iconian Test 2, through year 4

I took a different path than TOV regarding Xeno Coms and the UT.  Comparing the Iconian techs to the TechTree showed that Xeno Coms had cost increased from 25 to 100, and UT from 50 to 55.  Rather than try to force the Iconians to research the overly expensive techs, I removed the Category and Cost tags from the Iconian tech tree.  How would they react to normal category and price?

I changed their Econ tech categories to Economics, then bumped up the AI values.  Int Barter - 20, Merchant Emps and Complexes - 15.

For Organic Materials, I changed the Category to Miniaturization, since that's the bonus it gives, leaving the AI value at 15.  I did that in Test I and they research it.

Of course, I corrected the category for all the other techs.  I've mostly left the AI values alone so I can see how they research the techs as they are.

Also, I reduced Space Mining 1,2, and 3  AI values from 30 to 10 in the TechTree.xml.  All the AIs spend too much effort on those techs.

• Researched XC and UT fairly quickly, progressing to Diplo I and Trade
• They went on to establish a couple trade routes
  
• Researched Interstellar Construction, but not Expert Engineering
• Researched Int. Refining, building Refineries like usual
• Built the Restaurant of Eternity
• Haven't researched econ techs
• 7th out of 7 - again poor performance
• Researched Mass Driver Theory - no biggie, the other races are about the same
• Drengin declared war with 2 weeks left in year 3.  Drengin are 6th.
• Everyone exchanged their treaties with someone else, but the Iconians got none.  Their economy and research were the worst.
• I think they researched Organic Materials, but I know they didn't go on to Organic Hulls
  

Don't have access to my game.  That's just from memory.  Other research seems fairly normal for them.  Lots of colonization techs, Fleet Battle Tactics and Fleet Defenses (these techs are too high priority for all AIs, I think), and Planetary Invasion techs.

I conclude that the Iconians have enough going against them that they don't need an overly expensive Xeno Comms blocking them from critical techs like Diplo, Trade, and their econ techs.  My next step will be to boost AI value of Interstellar Barter to ensure they research it earlier.  Well, first I'm going to let this one play out at least another year or two to see how the war with the Drengin goes.

Final, non-Iconian notes from Test 2

• Arceans also never researched XC or UT, thus no Diplo or Trade.  Similar issue?
• Drengin researched Slave Pits and Slave Canyons, upgrading manufacturing
• Drengin didn't research any of their laboratory upgrades (Diabolical Research, etc)
• Korx reliably research Mercenaries, Cut-Throat Competition, and Fortified Freighters, building Mercenary Academy and Freighter Command.

That's it, for now.

PS - qrtxian, post in the Kushana Initiative!

True.  I categorized Organic Hulls and Self-Healing Hulls as Hull and they don't get researched.  Thing is, the Iconians aren't researching Expert Engineering or any of their other Hull techs.  They're only 1-1 on researching Interstellar Construction in my 2 test games.

I'm wondering if not researching hulls is a symptom of their poor overall performance.  In my two games they've been at the bottom of the pack and their research levels are always very low.  My working hypothesis is that their weak economy is stunting their development which, in turn, prevents them from proceeding to Hull techs.  It's like you noticed with Xeno Comms - if it costs too much the AI won't research it no matter how high the value.  Either that or maybe they're so weak Hulls never become a priority.

I'm going to proceed by upping the AI value of the economic techs and fixing the Barter Station upgrade like you suggested.  I'd like to see how they handle themselves given a functioning economy.

I test games with the following steps: 

-start a new game in cheat mode

-use the reveal map cheat (ctrl+u)

-create a new minor (ctrl+shift+d)

-take control of that minor by selecting their planet with the mouse, and hitting ctrl+shift+z

-go to the foreign policy tab and leave the u.p.

-destroy your colony

-click on a nearby sun, and hit ctrl+z

-hit the next button, and the game will play out as if you had hit ctrl+z at the start, but it seems to go further before hitting the overload stage without the u.p. interruptions. You can check in on a race by hitting ctrl+z again to interrupt the autoturn (but only at certain times). Take control of the race with ctrl+shift+z to see what it's building. 

here's a status report on the Drengin: contradicting my earlier post, I now think it isn't necessary to change their ai away from 7. 

In my last two test games with all 10 original races on a large galaxy, the Drengin using AI 7 came to dominate the galaxy with their allies the Yor in the first game, and the Thalans in the second. Unfortunately I'm not sure what the critical change was because I changed more than one thing at a time. The main things I did were to alter their tech tree to emphasize their unique manufacturing and research buildings, increased the aivalue on ultimate shock troops a bit too. Probably more importantly, I also cranked up their aggression from the default value of 70 to 80. It makes sense for them to declare war early and often to get the most mileage from the Super Dominator ability. They still aren't great colonizers, but now they can conquer people effectively enough to make up for it. (caveat, it's also possible that the last two test games were outliers). This was probably supposed to be the way AI 7 works- it's either going to expand by killing you or not at all. But if it doesn't win some early wars, it's screwed, so increasing aggression helps.

By the way, I tried uploading my tech tree changes to i-mod productions, but couldn't get it to accept my upload, just got an error in German. 

Tried a test game with that method myself. I'm up to year three and will be continuing, but I've made a few conclusions:

• The Altarians and Arceans are "fixed". Both are researching all their techs, normal and unique, without difficulty. They're the 3rd and 4th rated civilizations.
• The Thalans and Torians are fine as is.
• The Yor are finally researching Stellar Streams, but are on race personality 7 and so aren't doing well at all. I'll have to try them next time with a different one.
• I'm having trouble getting the Korx to research Cut-Throat Competition and Mercenaries. Are you sure all that needs to be done is switching them to Economics, or is there something else like bumping up the AI value?
• The Iconians are fairly solid in terms of colonization, economy, etc. However, they still won't research Expert Engineering and haven't built anything larger then a fighter. They are ranked #2, however.

I wonder what AIs 6 and 9 do? Odd that 5, 7, 8, 10 and 11 would be used but not 6 or 9.

An unrelated but interesting note: using the cheat to take over AIs is starting to make me wonder whether some of the AI's more ordinary "mistakes" may not be mistakes at all.

For instance, often AIs seem to pursue wars in less-than vigorous fashion. They don't use a majority of their fleets, or they don't invade planets even after destroying the defenders. However, looking at a couple of the test games where an AI was doing this, and studying their fleet positions, rally points, and active spies, suggests that the AIs consider their biggest threats to be races other then the ones they're fighting. Their behavior seems to mimic mine in situations where I only fought a race to keep it down, while actually planning for war with a neutral or supposedly friendly civ. I don't know whether I'm giving it more credit then it deserves, but it's hard to shake the feeling that sometimes, the AI isn't trying its hardest for a reason. Particularly when all of the races I've seen doing this are ones that use AI personality 8, which always seems to be the subtlest in terms of its long-term strategy.

Worth consideration.

My current game played on my custom epic map I made, as I was sick of smashing ctrl+N just so I would get an even playing field map for all the races.

Every square is consisted of either one pq10 habitable or pq 8 I think and the far outer rim parts of the galaxy are radioactive and barren or dead worlds.

Screenie shows every race is expanding evenly by turn 92.

http://d.imagehost.org/view/0540/GC2TA_Orion_Empire_1293498424

8 Ai Races in my map are..

Drengin (red) generic ai

Korath (orange) generic ai

Yor (purple) generic ai

Thalan (dark green)

Torian (yellow)

Terren (dark blue)

Iconian (white)

Krynn (light blue)

me (bright green) tiny blob

Current Galaxy settings -minus preset custom made map design..

Biggest custom map created in editor used.

Alliances,Influence,mega,super,techstealing - habitable planets abundant, number of plantes rare,stars abundant, anomalies abundant,asteroids rare,tech normal,minors 8,extreme planets uncomman,random events random.

Difficulty Painfull

ai cpu max

I am using the marklar mod with some of my own race abilities tweaked like +10 speed for all etc.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/382002/page/2/#2665126

Interesting post, qrtxian. I would add that ai 7 is the "transport/spore-ship rusher", or something along those lines. They have to conquer another race relatively early in the game to compensate for their failure to colonize aggressively. But if they can do that, they can be very tough. The Drengin can do very well on personality 7 provided you turn their aggression very high (I'm using 80) and increase the aivalue of their manufacturing/research techs to 25. Since making those changes, I've seen them win out as part of a victorious military alliance in three of my last ten-or-so games. These test games were all on Large maps against nine other races using their default personalities (w/ no mega events, no surrenders, tech trading and tech stealing enabled, and no tech brokering). 

I'm trying the same thing with Yor, but so far they still seem to be struggling on 7.

I just noticed that the Torian's Cultural Enlightenment, which leads to Healing Pools and other morale techs, have a really low AI value (5). This prevents them from researching them, at least, not early. I've bumped up the value considerable, and they should research these techs on their own in my next test game.

Also, I've always pronounced the Arcean's name as ar - SEE - ans

It's interesting, because the Korx were originally one of the most successful races when I started with TOA. Lately, they have indeed been doing badly.

However, I've just started up a normal non-test game against mostly custom opponents: Altarians, Torians, Krynn, 2 Thalan civs, 2 Korx, 1 Terran, and 1 Arcean. Both Korx civs are doing quite well and have gotten their techs fine, although AFAIK they have yet to build the Fortified Freighter Command. This pretty much confirms that the Korx's previous behavior is due to their poor position. Hard to tell what the problem with it was, although I would guess either position or no tech trading - my customization of the Korx has little to no research bonus.

As for the others, the Altarians and custom Arcean opponent haven't yet been met but seem to be doing well, judging from reports of wonders and so forth being built. The Altarians appear to be ranked 3rd and the Arceans are ranked 6th. Also successful are the Torians (1) and Krynn (2). One Thalan civ is unknown, but the other is a total disaster - only four planets colonized and almost no development. Almost certainly not because of a bug with the AI, though, but simple luck of the draw.

I don't have any trouble with the Torians researching their morale and research buildings. They've developed Universities, which is around par for the current time period. They don't have Healing Pools but did get Cultural Enlightenment - I suspect they're ignoring it because someone gave them the normal Xeno Entertainment techs.

This is my first real test of the Krynn, and they seem to have no problems. They're up to The Way in terms of research, and have built a Super Spy Training Center on their HW. They also are researching down the Terror Star path (!), although slowly. That could be interesting, given their highly aggression behavior... So far, anyway, the few changes I made to the Krynn at the beginning of this project(fixing some odd categories and tweaking a few values) have been enough. I'd say they're fine.

Edit: I also say "Ar-SEE-ans".

Also note that in the Drath tech tree, healing pools are categorized as "Medical" instead of "Entertainment", explaining why they never research it.

Sigh.

As a short note, I went through the entire tech tree and made subtle bumps in AI value for all the culture and government techs.  Now I've got Star Republics and Star Democracies popping up, and the Torians have even built their political capital.  Incidentally, the Torians researched their Cultural Enlightenment followed by Healing Pools.

It's like a whole new game even without having two more AIs.  So cool to see them work around the tech tree and actually develop a bit.

Aaaand, my change-log just broke onto page four.  TechTree takes up just over a page and Iconian TechTree just under.  Good times.