OK, this is what is happening:
The AI personality used by the Drengin, Korath and Yor is not colonizing planets in space where the influence ratio is high enough to cause a defection. So if they started out with a good position, this wouldn't show up as a problem immediately, but as the other races start colonizing planets closer to their space, that would limit which planets are available to them.
Since it obviously does hamper their ability to expand, we may have to add an additional check for how far out of the AI player's ZOC is the planet, etc instead of just the influence ratio.
I've been playing TA 1.96 for a while now and well .. I got used to this "new feature". My playstyle is normally Huge galaxies, lots of stars, with lots of races (8-9). With this settings evil races do well since each race only grabs a set of 4-10 planets tops which makes the game extremelly playable and enjoyable (engaging).
So in this sense I'm doing ok with TA 1.96 in which concerns evil races by now. But I have to confess that sometimes I put Yor or Korath a bit smarter just to give them an extra edge. It works for me though.
As I mentioned by me in a different thread before. The colonizing problem is not only with the evil races (at least for me). Quite a lot other fractions are affected as well - same behaviour I saw with Drath, Arcean and Alterians on severall games...
As stated by inches I wish the evil races were so slow to expand. In my games the evil races are usually knocking on planets in my area of influence often before I even know a planet is there that can be colonized without special research. I usually play immense and normal with everything else set to random with 3 or 4 other races.
Ok,
It's been 4 months since the last post and v2.02 is out. The same thing is still happening. COME ON STARDOCK! Did Brad ever correct the Drengin, Korath, and Yor personalities? (I know he puts alot of time still into working on this type of stuff, so not to sound like I'm being impatient) They still do not expand out anywhere that could 'possibly cause a defection 2 game years down the road'. Aren't the Yor Immune to defections (or very very difficult to make defect), so why on God's Green Earth would an AI trait like that be on the Yor???
This bug completely destroys the game when playing on anything of a map 'Large or larger'.
FOR EVERYONE WHO READS THIS POST:
I'd recommend emailing them the bug report here: support@stardock.com. If they receive enough emails, they may try to get it fixed asap.
FEEL FREE TO POST THIS MESSAGE IN YOUR E-MAIL: Dear Stardock, as of version 2.02, evil races still do not expand. Per the thread on the forums at: https://forums.galciv2.com/318189/page/3/#replies, Stardock has acknowledged it is a bug and not a 'feature'. Stardock stated: "The AI personality used by the Drengin, Korath and Yor is not colonizing planets in space where the influence ratio is high enough to cause a defection." and Stardock stated as a proposed fix: "Since it obviously does hamper their ability to expand, we may have to add an additional check for how far out of the AI player's ZOC is the planet, etc instead of just the influence ratio." This is, to many players, a game-breaking bug on largers maps. Please post on the forums the status of this issue, or what was done, or if anything will be done at all. I urge you, along with the others in the community, to correct this issue.
'EDIT: I had an issue after copying the above text, and pasting it into an email msg in Outlook, you may need to copy and paste to Notepad, then copy from Notepad and paste it into your email message.'
If you do not e-mail Stardock, the game may continue to stay broken. V2.02 is one of the last Major updates. Since it's been said only game ending bug fixes will be addresses, and no new functionality, I am assuming they will get to it eventually.
It's too the point where I almost don't feel like starting a new game ever, because I know it's going to be a test between me, Toria, and Terrans, and perhaps Thalan, with everyone else being useless fluff in the way. I know there will always be bugs, and AI is no easy thing to program, and usually I just don't mind them, but after a while when it starts to feel like I'm playing a broken game, the 'enjoyment' of the game starts to fade away. But all in all, Stardock still did a great job on GalCiv2 and they are very supportive and actually care about the games they make.
Just to add an extra comment in here, instead of doing all of the 'check the influence ratio' non-sense, just make the AI build a culture building and keep building them if the influence ratio is over the 4.0 mark, to keep their planets from flipping. This would let the Evil Civ's expand to where-ever the hell they want to (no pun intended) and also make it not so easy to flip planets.
Just to add my two cents worth. The last two games I've played I've seen the same problem. I always play immense, with abundant everything. None of the evil AI's are expanding past their starting sector. It ruins the game.
I recently had a game where I discovered two uncolonized habitable (not extreme environment) planets in a corner system at a stage of the game where I was using Quantum Drivers and Huge Hulled Ships, i.e., the late, late game. What empire were they behind? The Drengin, of course. In fact, the Drengin were the only race even remotely in range of those two juicy (did I mention that one was a PQ 13 and the other was a PQ 9) planets for the vast majority of the game because of the two planets' location in a far corner of the galactic map. Despite that, the only two planets the Drengin ever colonized the entire game were the two in their home system.
Another example in another recent game was the PQ 14 barren world located just outside the Yor's home system sphere of influence. Despite starting the game with barren colonization they never colonized the next door neighbor planet and were instead content with the two planets in their home system. In fact, I ended up developing the tech and colonizing it myself even though it was located on the other side of the galactic map from me.
In both cases, the games were set to crippling difficulty and I gave all of the AI powers extra point picks, while denying my custom race any "Super Ability." The game is the latest version of TA available. I don't think either the Yor or the Drengin AI are working as they should. That said, I love this game and still enjoy playing it when I have the time.
I just had another game where the Drenin left a PQ 8 planet uncolonized for the whole game. The planet was in a corner sector neighboring one of their colonized planets. It was well within range of even the most short range colony ship. I didn't discover it until after I conquered the Drengin's last planet. Of course, I promptly colonized it. This was on crippling difficulty, and just to give an idea of how long this planet was left uncolonized, at this stage of the game I was using large-hulled ships and graviton guns as my primary weapon system. By the way, the Korx and the Yor were also well within range for some time and didn't colonize the planet either.
I am playing a suicidal game currently, and as was mentioned somewhere around here, I changed the personalities of Drengin and Korath to (can't remember the name) 'neutral' or 'common' or w/e it is. The Korath expanded pretty well, Drengin were stuck in a corner, but appeared to do ok. Alterians expanded absolutely crazy bad, they were right in the middle of huge clusters along with Torians, but Torians took them all and Alteria just sat there and did nothing. Who knows anymore, I think I will just let it go and try not to care. Be optimistic and look on the bright side.
I don't mean to pile on but the latest example of this just took the cake. In fact, it was so egregious that I had to check to make sure the Drengin intelligence level had not been reset to a lower level than the difficulty level I was playing. The game was set on masochistic and I ended up right next door to the Drengin. It was mid colony rush and I had already found a healthy little cluster of planets surrounding my home system. After exploring all of the immediately neighboring systems, I sent two colony ships through Drengin territory to explore those systems. Everyting seemed normal.
My empire was on the center of the upper edge of the galactic map and the Drengin were immediately below me. My ships passed through their territory only to discover that the only inhabitable planets within the Drengin sphere of influence were in their home system, which were colonized. However, there were two systems just below their territory that I sent my colony ships to investigate and lo and behold there were two inhabitable planets in one them. One was PQ 18 and one was PQ 9. They were uncolonized by the Drengin despite them being the only power in range (other than me) for some time. The system with the planets was only one sector away from the Drengin home system.
I had already colonized several planets before even investigating that system so the Drengin had more than adequate time to colonize these planets. These planets, like in both of my previous examples, were not anywhere close to the sphere of influence of any power other than the Drengin so this does not appear to be a problem with not colonizing planets based on influence as has been pointed out.
I think there's something screwed up with the AI.
I'm also having these three evil AIs do essentially nothing. I've run through multiple immense galaxies with abundant everything, the Drengin rarely take more than 5 worlds.
I don't use Ctrl-N.
The reason I think there's something screwed up with the AI in general is the Torians. They are super-aggressive. I've been in a game where they have declared war on half the galaxy by the end of the second year.
Glad to see others are discussing this apparent problem with evil races on another post. I just wanted to bring this one back up to the front so that others could read and maybe help to find a customizable solution. I hate to set the evil races to another personality to fix but are there any other suggestions or methods? Thanks in advance. PS: Read this post for some history on this problem which was identified a long time ago.
In my experience, like some of the other posters noticed, the Drengin are hit much worse then the Yor or Korath. In twelve or so games I have had exactly one where the Drengin successfully expanded. The Yor and Korath expand much better and more frequently; so far I had one game where the Korath didn't expand and 2 or 3 where the Yor didn't expand. However, I've also had another problem with the Yor recently where they don't build colony ships at all. Unlike the "normal" bug where the race in question builds colony ships but doesn't launch them, there have been two instances now where the Yor simply didn't build a colony ship at all. I am convinced this is a seperate issue of some kind, one I've never seen with any other race.
I would like to say, however, that the experiences others have reported where the galaxy is always dominated by Terrans, Torians, or Thalans don't seem to occur in my games. In my experience any race not affected by this bug has a chance to do well, although the Drath have done poorly on several occasions.
I sprang for Twilight a few weeks ago after picking up Galactic Civilizations again after a long hiatus. It's a great expansion in that it makes all the races truly feel unique, but I too quickly found that all my games were being dominated by Terrans, Torians or Altarians. All the other races tended to do okay, but the Yor, Drengin and Korath consistently failed to do anything (I have been playing gigantic maps on crippling).
So I spent a few hours running some play tests this afternoon. To see what the AI was doing under various settings, I turned off production and docked my starting ships so that I could click through a bunch of turns without the trouble of running my "empire." Here's what I noticed:
1. With just the 3 evil races in the game, all three eventually expanded.
2. With the 3 evil races and the Torians in the game, the galaxy turned into a sea of green and none of the evil races went beyond 3-4 planets.
3. With the 3 evil races set to higher intelligence than the Torians they expanded more, but the galaxy still became a sea of green.
Obviously, none of these were satisfying outcomes! What seems to have finally done the trick is changing the race personalities. By setting the Drengin, Korath and Yor to the Korx personality, all the evil races actually rushed for colonies rather than just sitting there. I ran it through once and the Korath ended up with 30 colonies, the Drengin 19, Torians 16 and Krynn 9. I didn't end up making contact with any of the other races (I was up in a corner) before I quit so I couldn't count their actual number of colonies, but the minimap zones of influence seemed to suggest everyone was doing all right. The neat part was that the Terrans, Altarians and particularly the Torians were held back to a more reasonable rate of expansion because they had to compete for planets. Seemed like a much, much more balanced game. Would obviously be best if Stardock would fix the broken evil race AI, but for now, this seems like a good stop-gap measure.
I recently played a game on "Crippling" on a small map where the Yor became the dominant race. There were minor races in the game. The Yor ended up with the home worlds of the Korx, Drengin, Altarian, Torian and Thalan as well as 3-4 minor race home worlds. I was playing as Arcean. In this case the Yor did expand.
I spent too much time building my economy and my military star bases and didn't pay enough attention to who was becoming dominant to get them to gang up on the strongest members.
I'm finding the Arcean race to be challenging. It is difficult to spread quickly with that race and it is difficult to get their Economy going.
I recently played a couple game on the "nearby star" custom map. That is made to have the Terrans based on Earth, with the Drengin, Korath, and Altairians all in different corners. The map itself is rather huge and difficult with large distances between stars, but the Terrans have an advantage in that the most expansion room and the best star systems with good colonizeable planets are close to them.
In both games, I was playing a custom race based on the Drengin, which, considering the starting position, makes it rather hard to compete with the opposition. I had a custom races based on the Altairians and Korath, leaving a full custom race (Human AI, Torian tech tree, super breeder) with Earth, the Terran start position of course. The Altairian race was essentially the same race with a different name but I tried to customize the Korath race a bit. In the process, I accidentally had their AI set to Human.
Of course, race with Torian tech and Human AI and the good start position expanded like mad and dominated the entire map. The Altairian-based race expanded the worst. The Korath-based race expanded decently and at least controlled their corner of the map, though after my custom race trounced me severely I started the game up again wanting a better go at it. This time I changed the Korath-based race's personality from Human to Yor. I noticed a big shift here. Even with unclaimed planets around them, they seemed to not effectively explore and colonize their corner of the map, with most of the planets in their corner not being taken until late in the game. Given the distance between worlds on that map, and that even the custom race hadn't gotten over there yet, there wouldnt have been any danger of a culture flip from colonizing those worlds. They seemed to prioritize military strength and military buildup and had the earliest military, but they sucked at it before too long because they had no planets to fuel research and an effective military. So yes I saw a rather noticeable difference between Human and Yor personalities that puts the Yor at an extreme advantage.
In my current game, I'm playing as the Iconians on the Milky Way map on challenging. It's been a few months and the Yor, who are next door to me, have 3 planets and I now have about 9. They have built a military of fighters built some colony ships, but refuse to launch them and send them anywhere. I'm probably not helping the matter as I deliberately settled worlds bordering their space, but there are plenty of unclaimed planets on the other side of the ones I took that they could settle on. The Korx have about 4 planets and a custom race with the Drengin personality still has only its homeworld! I mean you'd think they'd use their starting colony ship at least. So yeah I'm definitely seeing a problem with the warmonger race personalities. I don't see why the evil races should really care about the possibility of culture flipping 2 years down the road as you'd think they'd plan to eventually build up and conquer any planet or destroy any starbase exerting undue influence on their worlds long before 2 years.
Hmm, after testing this out with the ctrl + z cheat on a small then gigantic map. On the small map, the Drengin expanded poorly but semi-adequately compared to the other races. The Korath just sat in the corner with 2 planets and did nothing, but the Yor expanded aggressively in their corner. built a huge military, and then went to war with the Terrans and Altairians and just about everyone else. The Altairians surrendered to them and then the Terrans surrendered to the civ I had started playing, despite it being the weakest.
On the gigantic map, the Korath expanded decently, but the Drengin colonized 3 planets then just built colony ships and never launched them, then the Arceans declared war on them and started beating them. The Yor actually did alright and the Korath and Yor both ganged up on the Iconians. The Yor had a huge string of transports headed for their territory before the game bugged on me. It's probably not as bad as it used to be. The feeling I get is that the evil races also don't go after planets that are far from their current influence while the other races are a bit more adventurous. So whether they go into dunce mode or not depends largely on what's available very close to their borders.
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