[Disclaimer: Stardock does not endorse or support this mod. This thread has merely been stickied so users can more easily direct comments or questions to the authors of this popular modification.]
Some time ago the modding community started poking around in the TA tech trees to see why the AI was reluctant to develop certain techs. We found that some weapons techs were categorised as PD, instead of Military, meaning that unless missile weapons were deployed, those techs would never be researched by the AI. Obviously, an AI that can't fight back isn't much of a challenge.
The idea behind this mod was originally just to get the TA AI on the right track as far as weapons are concerned. However as suggestions have been put forward by the community, more improvements have been made to the tech trees. Some features have been driven by my own need to fix annoyances.
For example there is the AI's passion for spamming factories or labs onto every tile, crashing their early economy. These basic improvements would get upgraded and then cost the AI even more in terms of miantenance and production cost, forcing the AI to run inefficiently with the production slider at far less than 100%.
So my approach has been to deprive human and AI alike of early structures that can cause economic meltdown, and in their place have Super Projects which allow for some single-planet focus.
N.B. Use the external link above or choose one of the versions below. The successive versions are not patches, they contain all the features of that version of the mod. Extract the ZIP folder to your mods folder - if one doesn't already exist, create it. If your mod select screen in-game is broken, see here to fix it.
For a video overview of mod installation, see here.
For gameplay examples, check the new YouTube channel here.
Recent versions
v5G:
v6:
v6A:
v6B:
For obvious reasons, updates to the mod are on hiatus until the community update is completed.
For a full version history of the mod, see here.
For download links of older versions, see here.
It's good to see this generating some interest. My mod will be delayed slightly on account of the tech trees needing some cleaning up. I'm doing this for reasons of aesthetics and ease of working. Wouldn't it be nice if the various tech trees had a similar organization? Sure helps with surfing the TechTree files and keeping notes.
There is also an issue with how certain tech trees divert research from basic infrastructure techs. A major example would be the Torian TechTree. Whereas many races have their infrastructure techs, engineering techs (hull, mining, etc), and colonization techs on one branch of the tree, the Torians have three separate branches. This leads to them researching various techs in the hull and colonization branches while ignoring the infrastructure and propulsion branch. They aren't the only race with this problem.
Faced with the prospect of another round of AIValue tweaking focusing on each individual tree, I choose to simply make the tech trees more uniform in layout. Does it reduce the uniqueness of the tech trees? Sure, but we can hardly complain given the state of the tech trees as given to us. Having unique tech trees was a great idea; but, frankly, it was only half finished and widely bugged when released. My goal is to put out a mod that lets people play with functional tech trees. After that's done, I'll worry about spicing things up. I may focus more on creating my own unique tech trees than returning the stock ones to their original layout, though.
I had an interesting realization about AIPersonality 8. So we've noticed that it's pretty much hyper-militant. I remember before the last patch to v2.03, there was concern about the Terrans not building up a military. Brad claims to have addressed that in the patch. We know now that the Terrans failed to militarize due to the Space Weapons Category bug, but I think Brad attacked the issue by making AI 8 more focused on weapons techs. So much, in fact, that I think AI 8 is a bit broken now. Some may argue that it's ok to have a militant AI, but I think rushing to Nightmare Torpedo by the end of year 2 is just a bit over the top.
Edit to add - OK, maybe it's a little later than year 2 end, but still . . .
Yeah it is a bit much. Not that Nightmare Torpedo isn't pretty good in terms of bang for bc, but while you're getting there you aren't advancing your hulls, defence technologies, or anything else for that matter. And because for the most part the AI likes to stuff ships to bursting, you can be sure that its first ships with NT launchers are going to be hellishly expensive to build, and it doesn't necessarily have the infrastructure to crank them out quickly.
Of course if you could get the AI to just put a couple of those launchers on ships and not saturate the design with other modules, that would be a great design to take advantage of getting to the end of the weapons tree first.
Unique Tech trees would be a plus. I pretty much play terran exclusively, and one of this games(many flaws) is the underlying structure of the weapons branch. The way it is set up now, the weapons techs make it useless and costly to build ships that basically have no offensive strength at all. What this means in practical terms is, there is zero benefit to building a costly and inneffective miltary in the early and mid-game. In fact, until im near the ends of the tech tree, I dont build a military at all. There is simply no reason to. Laser 1 2 3 4 and 5...perfect examples. Every one the those techs is near-useless(except as a stepping stone of course) and each "incermental" step is so slight as to be meaningless. There are no decent mid-level weapons. unless you consider something with an attack rateing of 2 to be a big improvment over a rating of 1, then....
I just ran a game with the torrians and iconians as custom races, I added the suffix (fixed) to replicate them in the oppoents list. Good that they were finally building things. Inexuseable that Galciv 2 is such a sloppy release, despite have a few redeeming features to it. Even tho they built stuff, even on obscene it was pretty easy to win. Of course haveing to reload constantly due to the games inability to handle immense games without constantly crashing is always fun...
I'm new to ToA, been playing DL for a couple or years, but this is my first post---bought the ultimate addition about two weeks ago, and noticed ToA had poor AI--Thanks for the Weapons mod, it makes the game much better--but I think I found a little bug with it--I usually play the Terrans, and when I build ships, the range of all new ships are reduced by 1pc compared to playing without the mod--the starting core ships are correct, but any new ships I build, the range is reduced.------Really looking foward to these mods you guys are talking about being posted as I think ToA could be the best of the three if the AI gets mostly fixed, I appreciate your efforts --a fasinating thread.
2/12/2011--I don't think the bug is related to this Weapons mod anymore--I changed a couple of game set-up parameters and my new came acts normally--strangely I never messed with the Range parameter in setup at all.
This Weapons mod does seem to make the races more aggresive though--maybe beacuse they all have better military units earlier.
I need to read up on this!!
A brief update with some good news. My tech tree rearrangements seem to be working nicely so far. I'm only two years into my first playtest, but two years is all it takes to see if the critical issues are being addressed. Now I just need to run it out a few more years and see how the overall research picture looks. I already know it'll need another round of tweaking, but simply rearranging the trees changed it from something I was ready to walk away from into a matter of fine tuning.
Phew.
I've added a link to an updated Space Weapons Fix mod that I came up with tonight. Check out the original post for details.
In recent news, I solved the long-standing mystery of why the Iconians were still doing badly despite a fixed tech tree today - I had inadvertently left them on AI 10. I switched them to AI 11 and the Torians to AI 8 - I feel its behavior suits the Torians better. On the subject of the Iconians, I noticed that now that they're researching Organic Materials, they're trading it freely to everyone. Not sure if this is behavior I want from them or not yet. I may make it untradeable.
Another update:
I finished my last test and did a little tweaking. After a couple years into the next test, it's obvious that I'm at the point where the smallest tweaking, ie changing the AIValue by only 1 or 2, can make a big difference. I also have slight reason to suspect that changing the AIValue of a tech far down the line - say Star Federation - can affect how the AI pursues the preceding techs. My scant evidence is that I slightly reduced the AIValue of Star Republic to slow down government research, while slightly increasing the AIV of Star Fed because it wasn't being researched even in the late game. Upon testing more than one AI ended up rushing the government techs even more than they had been in the past. Interesting.
So, as it stands I'm a playtest or two from being satisfied with most tech trees. Unfortunately, you can only test so many at one time. Wish there were a quicker and easier way to do it, 'cuz I gotta say fatigue is setting in. I'm being forced to lower my sights so that I can get something out. By that I mean that most of the extra, non-TechTree work that I had planned will be put off for a separate release.
Here's hoping for TechTree Fix v1.0 sometime in the next couple weeks.
Tolmekian - really appreciate the effort - I know whatever you put out - great or small - will be worth the wait however long it is.
To MarvinKosh kudos for the new Space Weapons fix! I'll go ahead and try it in the next few weeks.
Well I've been playing the new mod and well, it really is good to be Good. Though the defence modules take up more space than they did before, if you're fighting against unaligned, Neutral or Evil civs, you have a bit of an advantage early on if you get the Arnorian Battle Armour, for instance.
As of this moment, I think all of the tech trees for my AIs are "fixed". Currently, I'm deciding on whether and/or to what extent I want to tweak things to my own liking, but for now, the tech trees appear to functioning as originally intended. I also split up my malfunctioning AI personalities: the Iconians and Yor are now operating under AI 11, while the Torians, Drengin, and Korath are using AI 8, as I felt its militarism suited their personalities better. I am considering switching the Thalan to AI 11 to balance things out, and because it wouldn't really hurt them (or so I think), unlike with switching the Terrans or Drath.
At some point soon, expect a sample game in the AAR forum with the new tech trees (although first, I need to finish my "Galactic Wars" AAR).
Well, I've finally done it. My mod v1 is done and I just posted it along with my colonizing minors.
Tolmekian's TechTree Fix v1 release topic
Thanks to everyone for your input and support. Now that this is done I can move into the slow lane.
I'm currently testing out an improved Terran tech tree. See the top post for version 3. It's not final, because obviously if this works I need to do similar changes to the other race tech trees.
I've finished my testing for version 3 and I've come up with a version 3A, which has some fixes for ultimate weapons, see top post for more info.
Hello, I've lurking around these mod threads for a while. This topic caught my attention since I've just finished a huge spreadsheet on all the ToA techs, all trees, and I agree with the comments on the weirdness of AI Values, Category, and overall game performance.
I've also analyzed the weapon info in a separate spreadsheet where I calculated space requirements of each weapon per damage point -- pulled from the GCTypes.xml file -- and then compared the research costs to gain the weapons. Now I know why the AI races favor beam weapons: if the AI considers damage output important, then beams are the fastest techs to research, because, by mid-game in comparing Phasors to Quantum Drivers frex, they are definitely *much* easier to obtain for the same damage output! Basically acquired in half the research time! (This is while the AI Values are basically consistent between the 3 weapon types.)
So this Space Weapons Fix Mod thread has ignited major changes for me to implement in my game. Great stuff!
-AB
Version 3A seems to work as intended and I've come up with a version 3B, which adds the same AI valuing changes to the Yor, Thalan and Altarian tech trees. There are some other changes and they're noted in the first post along with the new download link.
I've taken off the link to Version 3B because there are a couple of issues with Terrans and Altarians, they basically refuse to pursue the Planetary Improvements line. That's okay though, it looked like it needed changing anyway.
I've found that Terrans and Altarians tend to have economy troubles because they build lots of basic factories and labs they don't need. When you consider that they also buy ships, this doesn't make for a very good early-game economy, in fact they spend far too long with the production slider yanked to the left. Granted, they do get a fair few colonies, but in my opinion the stagnation of research and the continuing accumulation of inefficient buildings is a major civ killer.
So for the moment what I've done is nerfed both the output and the maintenance of basic factories and labs (which the Terrans and Altarians both use) while making them quite a bit cheaper to build. I've decreased the AI value for those improvements so that the AI will prefer to build something else if it makes sense.
This means that when better buildings come along, that civ's economy has had a chance to stabilise from the colony rush, and it'll more likely be able to support the upgraded building.
I'll be back to post the updated mod when I've run things out past the colony rush.
Still playing around with version 3B. I've decided to turn Planetary Improvements into a group of four technologies, at least for the Terrans and Altarians anyway.
This keeps the AI on track during the early stages of the game. The first stage of Planetary Improvements unlocks the Xeno Economics branch. The second unlocks Xeno Research (which itself unlocks Xeno Communications). The third unlocks terraforming, extreme colonisation, farming, manufacturing, and entertainment. The last one unlocks the Space Warfare branch, Interstellar Construction, and Logistics.
Of course, the Terran and Altarian AIs still have a habit of buying ships in order to expand quickly, so they still experience a bit of an economic crunch during the colony rush. But this new arrangement should speed them toward a recovery.
Updated with the fixed version 3B. Well, as fixed as one can get when the AI decides it's going to blow all its credits on rushing colony ships, nothing I can do about that. The original post has the details, suffice to say I didn't see a point to keeping the basic labs and factories around, but the early game is definitely the place where a few new super projects are needed. They aren't horribly unbalancing, considering you can only build one of them.
I also decided that, since the Altarian and Terran AIs effectively have to research all of Artificial Gravity and Planetary Improvements, I've done what I needed to do. A high AI value can help to make sure a particular tech doesn't get ignored, but so long as there are other branches to pursue the AI isn't going to be too predictable in its research project choices.
I've included a readme in the archive, 'cause the mod description was getting a bit long.
Looks like I will need to take another look at the Torian tech tree, they seem reluctant to research Interstellar Construction for whatever reason (so they're going to war with piddly tiny hull fighters). It's probably because it costs five times more than for other races so I will need to either break it up like with Planetary Improvements, add a pretty heavy AI modifier, or revise the tech cost downwards.
It's most certainly the cost that holds them back. Through my playtesting I've observed that even small changes in cost can result in certain technologies and, as a result, entire branches of the tech tree being ignored.
For example, despite my best efforts the Arceans simply refused to do any serious research of diplomacy/culture techs. They would hold off on Universal Translator until mid-game, and by then the pressure to militarize prevented any serious pursuit of further yellow techs. Well, as I was going through each TechTree file and cleaning up the unnecessary junk, I noticed that the Arceans UT cost was 100 instead of 50. Hardly a big number - even fairly early in the game it would still only take a week or two to research. Still, that cost increase effectively shut the Arceans out of diplomacy, trade, and any negotiations for a good chunk of the game. It seems the AI looks at cost instead of how long it actually takes to research a tech.
We found the exact same problem with the Iconians early on in this thread. Even jacking the AIValue up quite high couldn't solve the problem. In the end I just removed the high value and let them have the same value as the TechTree. In fact, my final clean-up ended up removing all the unique costs and AIValues, letting everyone use the values from the TechTree. The sad fact is that while unique costs may add flavor for a human player, the AI just doesn't seem to be able to deal with it.
PS - The Krynn have the same issue with Interstellar Construction. Sections of their TechTree seem to have been cut-n-pasted from the Torian TechTree without even the smallest effort at finishing, such as changing the flavor text about being a semi-aquatic race or having inherited technology and whatnot. Hmph.
Well as it turns out, jacking the AI Value up very high (250) seems to get Interstellar Construction up there on the Torians' list of things to do. But before that can even work you need to get them to research Nano Materials and Xeno Engineering which are pre-requisites. I'm going to try breaking the Torian version of IntCon into two parts and see what happens.
What I've also done is to copy a few AI values from my (seemingly fixed) Terran tech tree, in which I have reduced the AI value on some techs, because it seems that the Torians are researching weapons techs a little too soon. There was a bug in the Beam Weapons tree with Disruptors being categorised as Missile weapons that I fixed, which might explain why the Torians were so insistent on researching missiles and beams.
@ MarvinKosh & Tolmekian - You two need to combine your mods.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
