Good job.  I'll try it out next chance I get!

Ah, it's out! I've been looking forward to seeing how you have been solving the balancing problems. It is a long list, and difficult to read it all at once, but what I've managed to absorb from it so far doesn't seem much different to what I did. (At least with the techs) I even noticed a few things that I didn't realized needed fixing, so I think you for that.

Do these modded minors have influence/borders ?

No.  That's something we just can't change. Despite behaving like majors, they are still fundamentally minors.  No influence, no UP vote, can't be culture-flipped, still get bullied by the real majors for cash, can't build Galactic Achievements or Trade Goods, etc.  We can mod their stats and behavior, but what makes a minor a minor is hard-coded.

The goal of the mod isn't to expand the number of major races, but to replace the utterly incompetent, comic-relief minors with something more respectable.

The AIPersonality refers to the actual AI used.  Twilight has four AIPs that the major races use, one for the minors, and one for the Dread Lords.  Of the four major AIPs, two are broken and one is flawed, in my opinion.  That leaves only one to work with, though now that this mod is out I plan to see if I can work with the flawed AIP.  A rundown of the AIPs:

7 - Drengin, Yor, and Korath: Broken.  Won't colonize worlds outside of its sphere of influence.  People say it sometimes plays a good game, but it normally just colonizes the handful of worlds in its sphere then makes a dozen colony ships that all just stay in orbit.  You end up with a little 4-8 world empire while everyone else gets all the other planets.

8 - Terran, Thalan, Krynn, Drath: Flawed.  Doesn't research Extreme Colonization, or any tech with the Colonization category.  Is also hyper-militant and will rush weapons techs regardless of the AIValue assigned to the tech.  It does like the yellow technologies and puts serious effort into claiming galactic resources and fortifying its starbases.  Overall doesn't pursue a very balanced research strategy with my current settings.  This is the AIP that I want to work with now.

10 - Torian and Iconian: Broken.  Starts off fine, but eventually stops building anything on its planets - to the point that it has a bunch of empty planets in the mid-to-late game.

11 - Arcean, Altarian, Korx, and Generic: The stock AIP. I figure this is the AIP that they started with, the one that came from Dark Avatar.  Pursues a pretty balanced research strategy based more on the AIValue assigned to the techs than a preference for any certain kind of tech.  You could imagine how much easier that made the whole process, since I didn't have to fight against the AI to make things work.

And to answer your last question: Yes, having all AIs set to 11 does make them behave more or less the same.  When you look at a summary of the AIPs, there doesn't seem like much of a choice.  It's not so bad, though, as all earlier versions of the game only had 1 AIP. 

AIP 8 can probably be salvaged - in fact others think it's just fine - but I wanted to focus my efforts on fixing the TechTrees and finding a balanced research strategy for AIP 11 first.  I think of it as a baseline for all future work.  TechTree Fix v2 will have some TechTrees designed specifically for AIP 8.

There's a lot that we can do with this game, but tinkering with the actual AIs isn't something that can be done.  It's up to Brad to fix it for us.  He recently posted that he was looking to put together an update based on feedback, and I very much hope that fixing AIPs 7 and 10 is a top priority for him.

Speaking of AIPs, I may have to eat my comments about AIP 8.  Since I'm on a roll, I decided to start work on v2.  The first thing I did was run a test with a few civs set to AIP 8.  The only changes I made to the tech trees was to set the AIValue of all Colonization tech to 400 - for those who don't know, the the AI uses the AIValue to determine which techs it should research.  I wanted to see if AIP 8 would research Colonization techs at all, of if I had to resort to trickery.

Well, with only that change, it turns out that the AIP 8 civs have by far the most balanced research and are running roughshod over the rest of the galaxy.  It's funny, because I started work with all races set to AIP 8, but switched to AIP 11 because I was having trouble balancing research with the 8s.  Now, it looks like the 8s excel with my final product.  I may be ready to finish work on my AIP 8 TechTrees with just this one little fix.  If so, that leaves me a lot of extra time to work on other improvements for v2.

First and foremost, the intention of the mod is to fix the TechTrees to remove a serious handicap from the AIs and allow them to perform to their full potential.  This was done by correcting numerous errors in tech Categorization - the Category tells the AI what kind of tech it is - and adjusting the AIValue so that the AI will research techs in a more or less sensible order.  You can see a lot of examples of wild tech miscategorization by glancing over the Space Weapons Fix Mod that I linked in the original post.

This primary goal has been accomplished to a high degree of satisfaction on my part. This is, however, v1.  It's not perfect, as I wanted to get it out for everyone to see and use.  In fact, I've already found a couple errors that need fixing.

A secondary goal is fixing other errors in the TechTrees and other xmls.  I've already found and fixed a handful of the most obvious ones in the course of putting v1 together.  Now that it looks like I don't have much work to do for AIP 8, a lot of my effort will probably go toward this.  I want to finish cleaning up the TechTree xmls and finish going over the others for errors both in coding and things like descriptions.

Aside from fixing errors, I want to improve the game by actually adding things instead of just cleaning it up.  I've done some of that already.  I added bonuses to some techs and improvements that I thought would improve the game.  For example, I don't like "spacer" techs - techs that are there for no reason other than as a step to the next tech.  Extreme Colonization, Xeno Biology, and Advanced Starbase Construction are examples.  I gave Extreme Colonization ao 10% PQ bonus to make it worth researching on its own merits and not merely as a stepping stone.  I haven't done anything yet with Xeno Bio or ASC, but I intend to.  For improvements, I cleaned up the Xeno Farm improvements and gave them Population Growth and Morale bonuses.  More food equals happier people and faster growth, right?  I just didn't like that there was no reason to build farms until your population was maxed out.  Now there's a reason to research Xeno Farming and build some farms early on. More work on techs and improvements is planned for future versions, including a final rearrangement of the TechTrees.

Overall, I want to provide a more enjoyable game experience.  I also intend to make some small cosmetic changes such as finding decent images for the trade goods that currently show up as a pile of boxes.

Thanks.  I literally grew up with computers since my dad brought home a VIC-20 when I was about 5.  I always wanted to be a programmer but ultimately didn't pursue it.  Now I can just pretend that am.

Was looking to try this game again. 

Sounds like you have fixed a lot of issues.  Look forward to trying v1 and v2 when it comes out.  

Hope you can get a few viable alternate AI's enabled to see some varibility in how the AI's play as that could be a cool feature.  Having every AI use a working personaly and play decent is a major improvement amd a good foundation to build on.  

As long as everyone expands and roughly the same rate we shouldn't see runaway AI's that get a massive empire just because they started next to one of the gimped AI's.

v1.1 Release

Fixes minor errors in v1.0

1 - Fixes error in Krynn TechTree where I left in an AIValue for Planetary Improvements.  It put it there during development to address a problem with the Krynn researching PI, but ended up addressing the problem globally.  AIV is removed.

2 - Removes Silicoid_TechTree from the TechTree folder.  It was only there so I could play with some ideas and wasn't an actual TechTree that I was working on.  I think it's a copy of the Korath TechTree.

3- For MOOII minors: Fixes an error where the Silicoid were set to RaceID 23, which is reserved for the Dread Lords.  It causes problems when the Silicoid appear in-game.  The Silicoid are now 24, with other races moved up.  I also skipped 26, which is reserved for the Pirates.

For those who already have the mod, I posted links so you can download just the RaceConfig, Krynn TechTree, and Change Log files.  Replace the appropriate files in your mods folder and you should be fine.  You should also rename your mod to v1-1 for the sake of completeness.

Not at all.  Wait, unless you mean the original MOOII Minors and not the Weaker MOOII minors.  I would suggest getting rid of the original mod because the minors are too strong.  I only wanted to make them a little stronger, but didn't test them properly before release.  I remember posting somewhere about time constraints affecting quality . . .

Anyway, the v1.1 Weaker Minors are just fine.  Even v1.0 isn't broken.  The Silicoid just start with only 20m pop and behave strangely due to being set as the Dread Lords RaceID.

Just returned from a long hiatus from the game and have been modding the raceconfig myself to get the minor races to expand. However with this mod i no longer need to worry about it

Thanks and great to see people are still playing the game too

From what I understand, he's working on 8 at the moment so the current version uses 11s all around.

Development Preview: Weapons and Defenses

  One of my major goals for the next release is to do something with the weapons and defenses.  At a glance, it looks like the techs and components are all over the board, with no apparent balance or scheme.  The first step was to put together a table with all the weapons and see how they stack up against each other.  That turns out to be a major undertaking.  Tabulating the weapons isn't hard, but it takes time.  The real challenge is comparing them.

  There are four variables for each weapon component: Size, Size Mod, Cost, and Damage.  Size, Cost, and Damage are fairly obvious.  Size Mod (SM) is a factor that increases the size of a weapon by a percentage of the total size of the hull you're trying to put it on.  It's why the weapons always take up more space on the larger hulls.  eg - if you have a weapon that's Size 5 and SM 2, and you have a hull that's Size 100, the weapon will be Size 7 for that hull  (Size 5 + 2% of 100 = 7).

I found it challenging enough to try balancing Size, Cost, and Damage, but with different SMs you can't make a direct comparison using Size.  There's a lot that I want to do with this mod, but only so much time to do it.  Since this was looking like a big time-sink, I made the decision to not work backward trying to figure out the existing balance.  Instead, I opted to use the stock weapons as a guideline for designing new weapon stats.  After that, I had a few goals and guidelines in mind:

• A major decision was to make all the weapon branches identical.  Same number of techs, same TP cost for techs, same weapon stats.  I originally wanted to try balancing the weapons using Size, Cost, and Damage.  Maybe Beams would be smaller, Mass Drivers would be cheaper, and Missiles would do more damage.  After getting started, I realized that it would take more time and thought than I wanted to invest just to figure out what the balance would be.  Even then I risked getting it wrong and having to spend a lot of time balancing it.

• Continuing the theme, I decided that all races would have the same weapons.  Maybe at a later date I can go back and revisit the idea of unique weapon techs, but for now I'm focusing on finding a baseline that works.

• The evil psionic weapons needed fixing.  If being evil more or less forces you to choose a particular weapon branch because one evil weapon is way better than the others, then something is wrong.  I decided that the evil weapons would be identical and also would become the new top-tier weapons.  Those who downloaded v1.0 and 1.1 know that I removed the old top-tier weapons (Nightmare Torp, Doom Ray, and Blackhole Gun).  I always had the idea that the evil weapons would take their places, but not be quite as powerful.

• Finally, the starbase modules need to be sorted. I never liked the seemingly random distribution of assist modules made available by the weapons techs.  Also, there were fairly major issues, such as the Focused Disruptors module requiring the Hyper Phasors module.  Since Disruptors replace Phasors for those races who have them, they end up with no way to access Hyper Phasors other than trading for the needed Phasors tech - a high end weapon.  Good luck with that.  Each weapon branch needs to allow for a similar array of modules.

With all that in mind, I looked to the Minor Race TechTree for guidance.  I stayed with the weapons layout there, with only a few changes: Tier 1 weapons (Lasers, Railguns, and Stinger) each got 5 levels, all other weapons got 4.  I then decided that the only stat that would change within a tier was Size.  That is, all weapons of the same kind would do the same damage and cost the same, with the more advanced weapons simply taking up less space.  The first weapon in the next tier would do more damage, but also cost more and take up more space than the top weapon in the previous tier.  The result is a modest improvement from end of one tier to the beginning of the next, which will increase as you proceed through the tier.

For starbase modules, I got rid of the generic "Micro Fighters" that came with Space Weapons.  I decided that each tier will unlock a new module, starting with +1 assist modules for the weapon theory techs, then alternating back and forth with starbase attack modules on every other tier.  The screenshot will make it more clear.

For defenses, I'm using basically the same guidelines.  As a start, I made defenses cost fewer TP to research, more effective than weapons, and take up less space.  As I think about it, I may need to make them take up more space to avoid unbeatable defenses.

  First half of weapons and defense, showing where the new modules would go.  Not all modules have been added yet.

  The rest of the techs.  Not sure yet what to do with the stock +16 defense modules.  I'll have to see how things play out to decide whether or not to take them out.  I think the +7 attack modules are fine.

Alright.  I could ramble on some more, but it's time to go.  I need to finish putting in the new  modules and probably make the defenses take up some more space.  Then it's off for some testing.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks!

I can't believe that I actually released v1.1 with those races directed to the "-8" TechTrees!  I was in the process of tweaking those TechTrees for use with AIP 8 and forgot to change everything back for the 1.1 release.  It's kind of a big deal because I removed the actual TechTrees, so those races don't get any techs at all.  Sigh.

Looks like it's time for v1.11

It's kind of interesting how the AI goes about selecting which tech to research.  It seems like some choices, such as which type of weapon, are made on a global level.  I've noticed that the same is true of tech research in general.  For example, after running multiple tests on the same version, I noticed that in each game all the opponents tended to follow a similar trend in research.  In one game there was a big rush for governments, in another game it was ethics, sometimes research and manufacturing techs.  It made playtesting quite a challenge until I realized that the AI not researching a particular tech may not be rigidly tied to any change that I made.

I suppose you could encourage weapon variation by making a certain weapon theory tech cheaper for a particular race.  In the original game, the Iconians and Yor both had Beam Weapon Theory as cost 50, as opposed to 300 for the other theories.  I did away with that, but I've actually been noticing a decent amount of weapon variety in my games.  Someitmes it's all one thing, but usually there are a few who do their own thing.

I completely disagree with removing the Ultimate weapons on the basis that the Evil weapons weren't good enough. Last game I played, I had the damned Evil Missiles, the weakest one, and I owned face because no one else had anything close to that kind of power, despite the trade restrictions the UP put on me. I won the game, having the most powerful military in the galaxy by an order of magnitude.

One of the big reasons I disagree with removing the ultimates is it screws anyone whose weapon tech trees stop short, then skip straight to the ultimates. It essentially forces you to go Evil to even stand a chance militarily once the other races surpass you, and it makes the Evil races overpowered in war, when they were already very powerful. Furthermore, it takes away a lot of the joy of researching through the weapon trees, even as an Evil race, because even if you never reach the end, you know what's there. As an Evil in my last game, I still felt like I had something to look forward to if I kept on going, but having my evil missiles still made me feel like the other races would HAVE to research the ultimates to match my power.

If you're still against having Ultimate weapons, at least tell me how to put them back myself; none of the modding guides I've seen say anything about custom tech trees.

EDIT: There they go.