Is there a mod or a setting that make them a little less stupid and a little more productive? I remember stories of minors taking over the galaxy but really I'm just wishing that they weren't completely worthless.
As an example, in a recent game one of the majors declared war on a minor i was trading with so I gave the minor enough ships to hold off the major for a couple turns at least. The minor in it's infinite wisdom left all the ships where they were and the major landed it's transports without firing a shot.
I think the only version where a minor race could become that powerfull was DL 1.0 (and perhaps 1.1).
You could try editing the RaceConfig.xml file, increasing the minor race's abilities.
And when you gift a ship it is best to move it right next to a planet of the race you are giving it to. The farther away it is, the more time it will take for them to actually get to it. And if it out of their range, they will never get to it.
Yeah - I find it annoying myself, simply because the major/minor dichotomy is so arbitrary. One of the relatively few things I don't care for.
Jonnan
This is kinda digging up an old one, but I was thinking . . .
Has anyone tried changing the minor races personality in the .xml file? I'm not sure exactly what personality will change, but minors are all set at 5 while the other races have different designations. Been thinking a bit about this one myself lately.
Replying to myself, hmm . . .
Anyway, I actually did some playing around with the minor races and managed to bring them up to speed with the majors. I changed their personality to 11 (same as Generic, Korx, and a couple other races) and gave them super abilities, max AI abilities, max CPU usage, and gave them a financial resource setting which I left at 100 (financial resource is a measure of how much tax income they get relative to the player, in percent, and is set by the difficulty level). Not sure if the financial resources will actually change for the minors, but I moved it from the major races to the minors along with the other stats.
I did some playtesting with the Ctrl-U cheat and had fun watching the minors pound out colony ships and expand with the rest of them. The Super Dominator and Super Organiser abilities worked fine - imaging my disappointment when every neutral civ declared war on my for picking on the Carinoids! I didn't play long enough to see how they'd act in the later game, but it looks like they're behaving like majors except that they aren't in the influence game. It looks like the minors are hard-coded to not project influence, and the IP ratios for all their planets are stuck at 99,999.00, as opposed to the 0.25 required to flip. I guess that may make them a bit too powerful, but I still need to try it out. I'm thinking of taking away the super abilities to balance it and make a difference between major and minor.
That's all I've done so far. Could this be a return of the significant minors? Looks like I have something to focus my next AAR on . . .
Interesting research, I too am dissapointed by the weakness of the minors so I'm probably going to beef them up the way you did, but I don't want them to be quite as powerful as major races.
Agreed. Given their immunity to influence, I figured taking away the super abilities would help distinguish them from the majors. Also, their racial bonuses are pretty low and they don't have customization points. I don't know if the AI would properly use the customization points for minors, so I was thinking of giving each minor some small bonuses and leaving it at that. Oh, and I wanted to set their political parties so they're not all just Federalist.
I tried again last night, but couldn't replicate my results. I finished modding the minors so they each had their own super ability, political party, personality, and all that, but when I playtested they didn't do any colonization. I don't know what the magic is. One game they weren't, then suddenly they were, then they stopped the next game. I'm going to test some more tonight to see if I can get consistent behavior from them.
Please keep us up to date with this and if it does work let us know what to alter (or provide a modded xml for d/l).
Looking forward to this as expanding minors is something i thought we would get but never did
So far no luck. I have no idea what I did to make the minors colonize in that one game. I had just given up on them, figuring that there was something hard-coded against building colony ships, then I tried a game and suddenly they were colonizing like mad! I had the Akilians and Carinoids fully modded, but the others were only changed to have AIPersonality 11. There has to be something holding them back, but I can't figure it out. Yet.
It's interesting to note that they'll use colony ships that you give them just fine. They won't build their own, though. Even if you take them over using Ctrl+Shift+Z and set them up to build colony ships, they won't use the ones they build.
Edit - Of course, no sooner do I post this than I go back to try again and now they're colonizing. I was messing with the cheats, but I didn't do that last time. Let's try again . . .
So I have 2 games going with the same conditions. In one game, the minors started colonizing around september, in the other they haven't started yet. In the colonizing game, I gave the Carinoids and Akilians a bunch of colony ships so they took some planets. I then designed a different colony ship for the Carinoids. Right after that, they all started going at it. I don't think it was the ship, though. Tried it on the second game. Sigh. Better luck tomorrow.
PS - In the very first game where they colonized, it was right away with no prodding from me. So I'm not sure what could be the trigger.
Nonetheless, *very* cool info. I love the concept of having the minors be more than a group of people I have to start wars with because they don't even have influence but are hogging infouence resources I could be using.
Just got my PC back up after a few weeks, so I'm going to start a new game (since I only vaguely remember where the unimatrix was at at the end of my last one - {G}).
Thanks - Jonnan
Problem solved!
After hours of frustrating trial, I've figured it out. All you need to do is reload your saved game. That's right, start, immediately quicksave, return to main menu, then load quicksave. I stumbled on this while testing because I saved, edited the raceconfig.xml, then reloaded. Bam! Minors colonizing.
I checked the debug to see what's up and it was interesting. When starting a game, it says
Debug Message: Creating CivsDebug Message: Terran Alliance: Intellence -> 80Debug Message: Drengin Empire: Intellence -> 80Debug Message: Altarian Resistance: Intellence -> 80Debug Message: Arcean Empire: Intellence -> 80Debug Message: Creating Civs... DoneDebug Message: Updating ZOC.Debug Message: Creating 8 minor races
When loading a saved game it says:
Debug Message: Loading player civ Terran AllianceDebug Message: Loaded Civ Drengin Empire who has intelligence 80Debug Message: Loaded Civ Altarian Resistance who has intelligence 80Debug Message: Loaded Civ Arcean Empire who has intelligence 80Debug Message: Loaded Civ Akilians who has intelligence 85Debug Message: Loaded Civ Carinoids who has intelligence 99Debug Message: Loaded Civ Scottlingas who has intelligence 95Debug Message: Loaded Civ Jessuins who has intelligence 90Debug Message: Loaded Civ Paulos who has intelligence 86Debug Message: Loaded Civ LentzLandians who has intelligence 83Debug Message: Loaded Civ Dark Yor who has intelligence 90Debug Message: Loaded Civ Snathi who has intelligence 92Debug Message: Loaded Civ Pirates who has intelligence 1
I'm guessing that the game creates them as minors, and that's how they act until you save. When you load the game, it must reference the raceconfig.xml. I mean, it uses the raceconfig to set them up, since they'll have any super abilities, race bonuses, and description mods you make. There must be something in the startup that designates minors as AIPersonality 5, but when you load a game it references the raceconfig and uses whatever you have there - AIPersonality 11 in my case.
Anyway, that's it. I don't know if it could ever be fixed, but it's easy to work around. Just start a game, quicksave, then reload. Instant modified minors. I gotta run now, but I'll drop back for discussion on modding them up. It's pretty easy to do.
While you may have found a way to stop having the minors act stupid it doesn't seem to elimitate another problem. I havn't downloaded the latest patch I don't think but here is some information I have noticed (I and others have mentioned this around but alas things get buried eventually).
Minors are hardwired to a major (1 minor to 1 major). For example the Snathi may be hardwired to the Drengin, what I mean is the snathi will use the same logistics capability as the drengin. By logistics I mean supply lines. Therefore Snathi ships will only go where drengin ships can go. When the drengin are dead the snathi will no longer move (though they may still build ships and perhaps kick them out of orbit). New minors don't ever seem attached to any major and never do anything (with exception, it seems, to the Jagged Knife event or similar events if they still exist, such as the one that used to create fundamentalists but I think it is gone and my fundamentalists never did much anyways, the Jagged Knife goes on an immediate colonization binge). I can't see why any of this is the case unless it was intentionally done this way to somehow make the minors more stupid. As far as I know minors would always build colonization ships it was just extremly rare. I played about 50+ games before the Snathi one day up and decided to colonize the other inhabitable in thier system I had never seen it before that but when I mentioned it others said they had also rarely seen it. It's some sort of priority assumedly related to the aforementioned AI intelligence settings that keeps them from colonizing (seems logical considering on easier settings the AI seems far less interested in expansion).
Far from me to claim i was there first... but in X-Worlds, the Minors are far from being pointless since their "behavior" depends a lot more on the altered values than whatever function loops were hard-coded by default.
Consider this;
- Once triggered by an intervention from YOU (the human player) through tricky diplomatic trades, they will react as if they are Majors with one single exception -- Colonizing; but that too can be arranged *indirectly* since i've seen them grab a planet in their systems a few times from a dealt ship by an AI Major.
- Given the proper modded Party, they can compensate a few weaknesses also.
- The key figure is Logistics, the next twist is partly made off two ability boosts; Social & Research.
- Finally, their customization points while being stuck at Zero aren't a clear handicap anymore since with that many 'data variations' even their Homeworld is rapidly becoming a fortress.
Feeding them some power helps... but once in awhile, GOD or the Ducks can fleet out an extremely tough wave of tricky ships and won't give up on anyone.
I don't think this is the case anymore. I play with range restrictions and haven't noticed the minors behaving that way. I'll test it tonight, if I can. Should be easy enough.
Also, thanks for reminding me to extend my range restrictions to the minors. For some reason or other, I don't think they made it into my finished product.
While I am still uncertain whether or not it continues to be a problem I can give you some advice on how to test it. Use the cheat to switch yourself to the active player on the minor. When controlling the minor see if your range restrictions make any sense at all and then see if they make sense for one of the majors instead. You may notice you can traverse the whole board if it is tied to a big major or not move at all if the major died out. This explains the weird stuff minors used to do such as grab a resourse WAY outside the range they should have or stop moving ships around for seemingly no reason (When actually the major they were tied to died out).
This may have been mentioned already, but what version of GalCiv2 are you testing this on?
I'm working with the latest TA 2.02
I've been testing a bit and gotten some interesting results using cheats to see the whole map and take over races. I'm using an immense galaxy with 4 majors, myself included, and 8 minors. I've got a -100 range penalty to all, so our range bubbles are fairly small. For minors, the first clue that something is off is that it doesn't show you your range bubbles on the mini map like it does for the majors. So, you have to look for the lines on the main map. Of the 8 minors, I could only find the range lines for 4 of them. The other 4 had no range lines anywhere on the map. All 4 of the range lines I found were tied to majors. I think it was 1 to each of the 4 majors. Of the 4, 2 of the minor's homeworlds were within the range limit and all their ships were currently within the limit, The other 2 minors were outside their apparant range lines, but their ships seemed to be functioning normally and at least one had colonized a planet near the homeworld, also outside the range.
Not quite sure what to make of it, but from 1 year of game play it doesn't seem to be affecting their behavior.
This might be a stupid question but as I recall in the scenario editor there is an option that allows the minors to both colonize and conquer, my question is wouldnt it be possible to use a scenario map (like the Neutral Territory one in the mods database) with this options on then compare them to the race or the debug on a usual game and see if anything changed? (Icant do it since I dont understand the map editor and I wouldnt look what to look for in the debug and the race config).
I usually reload the game every so often anyways, due to the majors 'stopping colonization'. I have noticed the Thalan do this, Drengin (due to the fact their personality trait is coded to 'fear the influence')... they stack up tons of transports on their planets and they won't leave. A reload sometimes fixes this to make them actually use their transports. As far as I'm concerned, somethings 'bugged up' in the game, certain AI personalities forget what they are doing, quit doing stuff altogether, don't move their ships, don't build... Sometimes a reload is the only thing that helps.
You're probably remembering stories of GC1. In GC1, every game I played, the minors would be just as powerful, if not more powerful than many other majors. If you weren't careful, a powerful minor would become incredibly strong. It's quite humiliating to get destroyed by say 'The Paulos - a spiteful bunch'. Although they in reality would be the ones to do it. (Haven't played GC1 in a while, can't remember if Paulos were even a minor or not).
'For the last 7000 years, their scientists have been struggling to complete their own form of Hyperdrive technology. Then, in a mere 50 years, the Humans swoop in and steal their glory. And seriously, they were like 6 months away from finishing. Our civil researches have concluded that it officially 'sucks to be them!'
@ galacticdoom:
Good idea wih the reloading. I'll make a point to refresh the game every dozen turns or so must to jump start the AI and see how that works. I haven't yet played an actual game with modified minors, but I'll be doing an AAR when I do.
That's one of the things I really liked about GCI - the off chance that a minor civ might "grow up" to be a major power. I often propped up minors against powerful majors just to tie them up. I don't do that much in GCII, mainly because the stock minors are so staggeringly incompetent that it never works. There just doesn't seem to be the variety, like the I-League or the Fundamentalists. I loved when they would pop up and become major powers in their own right. With modified minors I changed their descriptions to something more respectable; some of them were just too much to take. I also changed the portraits for the Snathi and Lentzlandians. No more E-V-I-L space squrrels or posh socialites roaming the stars.
You don't like that they are hoarding their proverbial nuts? haha
Reloading was what seemed to cause it, although I did happen to build the eyes of the universe that same turn when they launched all their swarms of colony ships that were hanging about. So I can't say for sure if the reloading 'was responsible' or not. I'd have to test it out some more in games to come.
So can someone make a guide or something that puts exactly which steps are more or less necessary for minors to expand?
Guide?
1- Give them a Colony Ship.
2- Cross fingers they somehow figure out what to do with it.
3- Loop back to #1 until something weird enough happens.
Not much time, so here's a quick and dirty guide.
1) Edit raceconfig.xml
2) Start game, but don't play
3) Immediately Quick Save
4) Load Quick Save
5) Play.
In detail:
1) Edit raceconfig
Find it at: C:\Program Files\Stardock\TotalGaming\GalCiv2\Twilight\Data\English\raceconfig.xml, right click and select [Edit]. That will open it in Notepad. Scroll down and notice the pattern of each civ being listed with its abilities. Scroll down until you find the minor civs. Notice how each has the entry <AIPersonality>5</AIPersonality>. AIP 5 is pretty much stupid mode. All the majors use a different personality.
The basic idea is the change the <AIPersonality> from 5 to 11 and add a few key lines from the major profiles, specifically the:
Imagine that, a minor with Super Organizer ability! You attack the PAULOS (a pretty spiteful bunch), and cause 12 other neutral majors/minors to immediately go WW2 on you!
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