deweyjohn

65) Sometimes when the ai makes an announcement that it's going to war, it will immediately repeat the announcement at the start of next turn (maybe two go-to-war rules satisfied their preconditions?). 66) Sometimes it seems as if I'm being attacked by invisible AI ships. This might be caused by enemy ships somehow occupying the same tiles as starbases I control. I say this because my starbases look like they're firing on themselves. 67) There's an annoying bug with the priori

Some of the most commonly encountered diplomatic encounters are AI_CRY_FOR_HELP, AI_TEAM_UP_AGAINST_CIV, and ANNOUNCE_RESEARCH. So I would suggest focusing effort adding new race-specific conversations under those tags.

Tolmekian, what galaxy settings do you play on? That could be useful to know if the effectiveness of different AI strategies interacts with things like galaxy size, which I suspect it does. There seems to be a consensus that AI 7 and 10 are not even competitive. But I've gotten both the Drengin and Arceans to win games via military conquest of the entire galaxy using AI 7 combined with a high aggression settings, and I've also seen the Torians and Iconians do very well using the supposedly br

Hey all, I can now confirm that if you change the branch id for the starbase line of techs (starting with advanced starbase construction, through all the starbase fortification upgrades) from 'defenses' to 'weapons', at least a few of the AI opponents will much more eager to research them. This was true even though I left the aivalues at 5. I gave this treatment to every race's tech tree. I started a 10 player large map, did a ctrl+z and let it run until year 2233. At this point, the

Thanks for reporting your findings, Tolmekian. Meanwhile, I haven't had much success getting the computer to construct powerful starbases. I got the Korx (on ai 11) to research StarbaseVictoryStrategy and StarbaseSupremacy by increasing the aivalues to 50, but they didn't build any starbases so they got no benefit from it. I'll try this with ai 8 next, since the Terrans and others who use personality 8 seem to build lots of economy starbases.

Hey all, Another thing for the Korx: they will research Super Trade Starbases if you switch the category from starbase to economics. Which leads me to comment that, in general, the ai players seem to undervalue starbase upgrades. I would be interested to see if AIs would start building powerful starbases if they were categorized according to what they benefit (military, economics, or culture), since anything in the starbase category seems to be ignored until there's nothing else to re

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

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 cha

No comments? I recommend everybody download this mod. Good job. [e digicons]:beer:[/e]

I suspect the Iconian's problem with researching hulls is specific to AI 10. That's the same one used by the Torians, who are known for their swarms of tiny ships. Have you tested them on 11 or 8?

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 s

Let me clarify, in the above post I'm talking about adjusting the parameter for manufacturing and research improvements in the Drengin tech tree, not the values in planetary_improvements.xml (although it's fun to tweak those as well).

Hey qrtxian--in a test game, I changed Xeno Geology's type to Colonization, and increased the aivalue to 50, and it was then one of the first techs the ai researched. In general I'm getting good results from cranking up ai values to 25, 50 for race-specific techs that you want to 'force' the ai to research for its own good. Here's a technique for deadlier Drengin: set their ai personality to 11, and increase the value of their unique manufacturing (Slave Pits, Slave Canyons, D

I use 8 for the Yor and 11 for Drengin. The Yor on 8 do a good job getting to the Barren planets.

I'm trying to get the Krynn ai to pursue an influence strategy, instead of just filling up every planet with generic factories and research labs as they do in ToA. On my first try I increased the ai value of all influence techs in their tech tree from 5 to 15, and increased the value of the consulate to 50 in the planetary improvements .xml. They built consulates on all their planets so that part worked, but they still didn't get JihadOfKrynn until after planetary invasion, so the research te

Fix the bug that makes enemy fleets turn invisible!

Bumping this thread.. It seems worthwhile to experiment with the tech tree categories, as it's already had a big effect on my games. For example, I've always wondered why the computer Korx player doesn't research Mercenaries and Fortified Freighters (in ToA). I noticed these techs were categorized as 'trade'. I tried switching the category to 'economics', and now the ai player will get them. There could be many more examples, we all know how buggy this game is.

This is very interesting. Once I started looking at the tech trees, I saw many other techs that were in odd categories. For example, take a took at the Iconian tech tree--at least on my machine, many techs appeared mislabeled (e.g. Advanced Logistics is categorized as "Biological Warfare"!) Of course it's hard to know which of these are legitimate mistakes, and which were intended by the programmers as work-arounds for undesirable ai behaviors.

Nice observations, qrtxian. A few other things: Drengin and Yor with personality 7 also become more competitive if you set the star density to "tight clusters". That way they start off with more habitable planets within their initial zone of influence, which they will colonize normally. I wish the game's documentation discussed these differences more (or at all

Hi Quaternus, I was curious about the differences between ai "personalities" too, and have tried experimenting with different settings, then running the game with no human player in cheat mode to see if certain races seemed stronger or weaker with different personality settings. Here are some observations: If you switch the evil races to one of the personalities other than 7, they do a better job expanding on large maps. This mainly effects the Drengin and Yor: the Kor

This is great news. Twilight of the Arnor is still one of my favorite games. Here are my suggestions for future patches: 1) There are many spelling/grammatical errors in the text of the game that could be fixed. 2) There's a problem with the priority of dialogue tags that affects the in-game conversations. As a result, many of the prescripted exchanges between particular races (e.g. Drengin making fun of Torian) are never seen, being replaced by the generic alternative

Cool, I've been bothered by the sloppy mistakes in the conversation xml as well. In fact I made my own fix, although I never uploaded it. I'll be sure to check yours out! [e digicons]:thumbsup:[/e]

I think you can get 'they don't trust us' anytime you declare war on someone (not if they declared war on you first) and later make peace. This can happen even if you were just honoring an alliance when you went to war. Example: I was Altarian, and allied with Iconians. The Drengin declared war on the Iconians, I agreed to declare war on Drengin, and when I made peace with Drengin later they didn't trust me. The one that confuses me is 'Militaristic -' because it seems unpredictable.

I don't know how metaverse works, but you can restore the default race characteristics by hitting the 'clear' button when you're setting bonus points. The race configuration files are saved to your C: drive under user/My Documents/My Games/Twilight of Arnor folder, so you can also just manually edit them there. It's a confusing setup, but that's why the configuration stays the same even after a re-installation.

I agree w/ the poster 100% about researching defences. The computer always far surpasses me in weapons research (they have graviton drivers and phasors while I'm still messing around with basic rail guns), yet I can still come out on top in most conflicts because defences are so quick to research, and yet the AI never bothers with it. Re: Zyxpsilon: that's one view, but when gal civ2 first came out the developers made a big deal about the AI opponents having a human-like feel about th