Call me crazy, but I think I managed to fix the AI farm/morale problem for good this time.

Okay, maybe not totally, but it has been definitely severely reduced. The biggest issue has always been the amount of farms compared to the amount of morale improvements the AI builds on it's worlds. Too many of the former and too few of the latter. In my previous attempts to fix this, I standardised the base amount of food the Civ Capital and the Initial Colony provide, and changed the food bonus of farms from an integer to a percentage value so the bonus tiles are no longer an issue. Now, I also standardised the amount of food the farms themselves provide. I originally wanted to keep the standard farms unique, by providing more food than the Robotic Farms and Charging Stalks, just like it is in the vanilla game. As it turned out, that was the wrong way to go. It also blinded me to the obvious solution. So what, if the AI builds four farms on it's worlds? As long as the food cap doesn't go above 20b, it's fine.

What this means is, that there won't be any 1pp limitations for farms anymore. Except for those, that already had them, and the new Nourishment Facility of the Thalan, of course. Yes, I gave the Thalan a new farm improvement. It has the single biggest bonus (+50%; i.e., 4mt food), but also the highest maintenance cost (3bc). All other farms have a max bonus of +40% (i.e., 3mt food), a standard maintenance cost of 1bc (2bc for the Robotic Farms and the Harvester), and can be build as often as you want.

The other part of the issue, is that the AI needs to build enough morale improvements. My previous attempt was a combination of a high AI value and a 1pp limitation for the starting improvement, to force the AI to build them, while preventing it from spaming them. Once I noticed how AIP 7 handles morale improvements, it should have been obvious, that the fear of spaming was unfounded. The AI is much smarter than I give it credit for sometimes. All I needed to do was to remove the 1pp limitation, set all morale improvements to a high AI value (currently 200), and let the AI handle it by itself. I still need to iron out some kinks, but the results look very good so far.

Is my new solution perfect? No. There are still occasions where the AI isn't building enough morale improvements on some worlds, while running very high tax rates (sometimes beyond what should be possible), but that was also happening in all of my previous attempts and the vanilla game. In the end, I think it's good enough. The only way to totally solve this problem is to rewrite the AI, and that is beyond my capabilities.


As for the Yor, I made some progress with them. I still haven't managed to get them to research Efficiency Studies early on, but their morale issues have been reduced. Well, mostly because I finally added some Morale ability bonuses to their tech tree. I also added a pop-growth bonus to the Charging Stalks. Yes, it's more of a band-aid, treating the symptoms, instead of a cure for the actual problem, but it works for now.

Speaking of pop-growth bonuses, I disabled the Fertility Clinic. The AI just couldn't handle it correctly, and none of the additional bonuses I added to it worked out. The econ bonus made it too similar to the Recruiting Center and the Orbital Hospital, while the the morale bonus made it compete too much with the other morale improvements for the bonus tiles. There is also the issue of there being too many must-have improvements. By turning the Fertility Clinic into another one, it would have made it even more difficult for the AI to use it right. A planet has only so much space, after all. So, I opted to remove the building and increased the Pop-growth ability bonus of the Fertility Acceleration tech instead.

I haven't been able to come with a replacement description for the tech yet, so if anyone got some ideas, please let me know.

Thanks, great work !

Yesterday, I started to play the latest version of your mod. It seems the Korath did not colonise much, a least after ca. three years game time, they still kept only two or three planets. Maybe just chance / bad luck ?

I started a new game (this time without the Korath), so I can't give more details.

The AI is insane about using fixed-output farms on bonus tiles without regard to the impact on morale.  This makes the AI play a weaker game.  It's a bummer, but there's nothing we can do about the AI directly.

I understand. For my personal pleasure, so that the farming bonus tiles will not be completly wasted, I have modified the farm improvements so that they give, in addition to the percentage bonus, a food production of "1" at all levels. I will see what happens ...

Hey Gaunathor, why do you have to do the quicksave fix for the minors on this and prettymuch every other smart minors mod?

I never understood it...for instance, what does it change???

EDIT:

Also, have you adressed the Market Center becoming Terran only by either removing the requirements or cloning it?

Thanks for the quick response Gaunathor. I know you've tried all sorts of work a rounds to get past hard code oversights.

Thanks for the reminder about saving and loading a game to get minors working as intended.

I was looking through some tech trees and noticed Stellar Cartography is located past an expensive tech in the Yor tech tree. It only costs 20 but can't be researched until a 187 tech is researched first. This effectively puts it out of reach for quite some time for any custom race. Is this as intended? The base Yor race starts with it and based on it's cost as well as how many other races have it to start it seems like it was intended as a possible starting tech.  It's a relatively minor thing.  Just wondered if it was intentional.

Do you have any idea what the Yor techs "Anti Virus Software" and "Firewalls" were supposed to do? I'm assuming they played some part in the campaign (which I've never touched) but they've always been empty on info and never done anything when playing a custom race. They just drain 20 points from choosing other starting techs.  I still take them out of principle since they seem like they'd fit when playing a Yor based race but essentially they are just a point drain. Cybernetic History and Expert Robotics on the other hand must be taken or the Yor will start with no buildings available to build and never get an option to research factories of any kind.  I'll look closer at Thalan after the Yor.

Btw, I really like your balances to the starting ability choices. Some of the vanilla choices were not balanced well.  The color changes to the races are also good improvements.

Time to start playing version 7 for me!  Will check in after a while and thanks again. 

Well, here it is: version 1.0.

If you already have beta 7, then there is no need to download v1.0, as I made only some small tweaks since then. (Xeno Mysticism now uses Pure Research as Category instead of Culture, Divergent Evolution requires Precursor History again instead of Xeno Biology, the Altarians now start with Stellar Cartography (while the Korx and Thalan no longer do so), and I made some changes to the Espionage entries to make them easier to read)

From now on, improving the AI is the main focus. However, I'm not ruling out any further changes to the tech trees and other areas, because I realised how futile that is. Back when I released the first beta version, I thought that I was already done, except for the AI. Maybe a few tweaks to the balance, but that would be it. Going through this thread, you can see how true that turned out. I'm not going to make the same mistake yet again.

I'm not so sure. The AI can still be improved, within certain limits, and I'm also considering to make some changes to the Korath-dialogues. They are currently using the generic entries, which feels a bit weird.

However, before I do that, I'm going to take a break. I'm quite exhausted at the moment.

Long time lurker, first time poster. Just wanted to drop in and say thank you for all the amazing work that's gone into this mod. I've been tinkering with Galciv2 mods for a few years, but the depth of the changes and testing that has gone in Autumn Twilight is really impressive.

This weekend I started playing V1.0, along with some of my standards tweaks (e.g. increasing colony module cost significantly to slow down the initial rate of colonization). Having a great time so far, and the behavioral changes of the various AIs is quite interesting. I'll need to get some more game play in before I have a good sense of how they've changed, but so far they definitely seem quite a bit more confident in early game play.

Thank you Gaunathor, and everyone else involved. You're why I'm still so excited for playing Galciv2 after all these years!

There is a problem with auto upgrading. The upgrade sometimes costs more (or less) than it should. However, that shouldn't be happening with the first upgrade.

In fact, I just tested this and it worked fine. I kept the production sliders how they are at the start of the game, built a Basic Collective on Iconia, and gave myself Collective Manufacturing I. The upgrade takes two weeks, while building a new Collective takes eight weeks.

As for the build cost, the Basic Collective has one of 45, and the Collective has one of 65. Both are correct in the PlanetImprovements.xml. If your production output is high enough (quite easy with the Yor), the time it takes to build either one is the same (1 week), so that may be why it seems like the Collective is cheaper than the Basic Collective.

Still, I'm not sure what is going on with the upgrade cost. It doesn't make sense. Is it happening on all planets, or just some of them? Also, did you make any changes to the files?

Out of curiosity, is there anything that can be done about certain random events like the Peacekeepers? I ended up in a game where the Peacekeepers were very potent towards the end of the game and it brought a partial stalemate.

Out of curiosity, what races are you finding are underperforming right now?

I've had issues with the Korath, sometimes the Yor, the Arceans, and the Thalans chronically underperforming in some of my games.