Hi Gaunathor, I just spotted this thread after a long break from GalCiv. This looks like a great mod and I'm hoping to take it for a spin soon, once I get my current pile of work sorted out. When I do, will provide any feedback I can.

Really pleased to see this mod, and that the GalCiv modding community is still active.

I just found your mod and it looks interesting, especially the weapon differentiation. I'm curious about how the AI chooses its weapons now, if it favors a particular path. Unfortunately I just bought Civilization 5 a week ago and I can't play anything else for now, I'm addicted to Civ 5. But when I'm all better, I'll be sure to play your mod and give you some feedback.

I modified Tolmekian's mod myself, merged it with HRG Mod 2.0 and changed some things I didn't like. I also attempted to make the AI use influence starbases, and partially succeeded, see here. I think we should try to extract some cool ideas from all the mods currently alive and try and make a supermod which sticks to the vanilla experience but improves it and fixes some of the game's flaws.

One question.  Does your mod address the AI personality flaws that Tolmekian mentions?  Example:  Personality 7 ending up not colonizing much.

You, Tolmekian, and the major modders are the saving grace of the game.  Without you GC2 is a pretty paperweight.  With you it's the best space 4x ever.  Thanks for your work.  Brad should hire you guys to finish what he starts.

In Custom Planets, give them 3-5 good worlds to start with.  Perhaps that would jump start them enough?  You'll have to play around with the numbers for balance, of course.

To me, game play trumps all other considerations...  but if you feel you have them playing well enough then I suppose that's all that matters. 

One change I would recommend considering is to make the 3 Thalan starting GAs into Super Projects. The reason why is because where there are multiple players with the Thalan Tech Tree, it becomes a race to build the Hyperion Matrix and EDU first. Not having them is a huge disadvantage to one of the Thalan players, which can build momentum and lead to a weakened start.

I suppose so. The only real way that could happen would be if you were able to capture the enemy planets of the other player using the Thalan tree, which could happen.

Of the 4 mods available, I think yours is the most reflective of the story and overall in terms of balance, the most effective. I'm going to be testing this one out and seeing what else I can find about it. So far though, I think you're reaching a point of rapidly diminishing returns with your mods to the tech tree.

I've had only a limited amount of time to play this week (busy with life), so my sample size is somewhat limited, but here's what feedback I can give you:

The Torians, very much like Altarn and Tolmekian's mods do much better early game. Without AI 10 holding them, they seem to expand very rapidly and have a significant early game advantage. Now whether they can translate this into overpowered endgame domination seems to be inconsistent. Often the AI does catch up after some time for the other races, and they manage to "close the gap". In other cases, the Torian advantage is so overwhelming that nobody can really catch up.

I am also somewhat concerned about the Drengin. At the moment, they still do seem to play like a weaker version of the Korath. The other concern is that by the endgame, the Korath super ability is noticeably more potent than the Drengin one during conquest. They have certain technologies that the Drengin do not have something "as good" so to spreak. The Korath through Dark Influence are also a surprisingly decent choice for pursuing a cultural victory. I am unsure though of strictly from a lore, or a balance standpoint how to address this - in fact, I am not sure if this should even be addressed at all.

I'll  be playing more games next week, so I'll hopefully have some more extensive feedback.

What I did with the Torians was to make the Central Mine upgradeable to their own version of the factory. You can do that, have 1pp upgrade to unlimited improvements.

It means that they're guaranteed to have a little bit of industry on each world that has or had a Central Mine, but they're not left with an outdated improvement either.

To be honest, I'm not sure the Korath need a culture nerf. I'd be hesitant about making changes in this area. The  question is, should the Drengin be getting a culture boost - or perhaps a boost elsewhere such as economy?

And of course, any buffs or nerfs need to affect the balance of the 2 races to the others.

I would recommend against turning it into a 1per planet. The AI simply will not demolish or "reserve" tiles needed to build. With a PP, they'd quickly run out of space, not build it and no realize the benefit. I'd have to say that the super project falls under the category of "lesser evil". With super project, you'll have to use something other than the Propaganda Center or give the evil races something else to counter the changes.

Perhaps the best option is to just integrate it into research and make it more expensive to research. There are 2 options - integrate it into Xeno Propaganda and up the cost of researching Xeno Propaganda or the other option is to create a new technology down the line. Make it untradeable and unstealable. In the end, you're going to come up with an imperfect compromise no matter how this gets altered.

I'm not too sure of what your goals are here.

At the moment though, it seems the Korath have

- The slave canyon (shared with Drengin)

- A PP Devil's Forge (shared with Drengin)

- A PP Death Furnace (shared with Drengin)

- A PP Wretched Harvester

- A PP Aul Incinerator

Now it's the bottom 2 that are unique. It seems right now, only higher level worlds can truly take advantage of these incrementing bonuses, but at the same time, it makes the Korath very potent. One option is to get rid of the Devil's Forge and Death's Canyon, adjust that section of the tech tree, and balance the Korath by giving them only 2 PP industry improvements.

Without further clarification on what you want from the Korath tree, I can't really give feedback.

The more I think about it, the more I think that a technology based bonus is the only way to do it. The limitations of a PP improvement have already been discussed.

SP has another drawback. Suppose that the intended race builds an SP. This SP gives an empire-wide effect. What if it were to fall into enemy hands? It would make a bad situation worse. Imagine a culture SP that was on a planet that was "flipped" via enemy culture. That bonus is now in enemy hands. Now a human might put such an SP in a "core world" not so easily captured, but the AI given its limitations is not capable of doing that.

The other big problem with the Korath I find is that the AI isn't building all 4 PP improvements nor are they demolishing tiles on their planets for them.

When you have the time to, I'd recommend going through the Drengin and Korath AI values and costs tech by tech. At the moment though these two races don't fare too that poorly, provided the map settings to AI 7 are used.

I haven't had the time to observe the Arceans a lot but they do tend to struggle somewhat during the initial colony rush. So do the Korx to a lesser extent.

Depending on the game though, they often do recover, although neither of these two races tend to become the top powers in their games, at least from my experiences.

Right now, I'd lean in favor of a consistent maintenance pattern across each improvement, except maybe for the Thalan.

Also regarding the Korx, I do not know how aggressively they should be relying on trade early game versus using a traditional "colony rush" strategy.

Sorry about the triple posting - my browser formatting is giving me issues right now.