Insane Abundant Balance Mod
A mod designed around balancing the game for large maps with many planets.
Features:
* Massive AI work, to make the AI more competitive even on normal difficulty.
* Replaces Large Empire Penalty with stacking maintenance costs.
* Reworks the balance between 'wide' and 'tall' empires to make planet-grabbing less important, smaller empires more capable of competing with large ones.
* Fixes sensor stacking and engine stacking.
* Includes dozens of bug fixes
* Trade and Tourism more valuable
* Diplomacy less exploitable
* Ship blueprints improved
Install Instructions:
Just extract the .zip file to your My documents\my games\galcvi3\mods folder, then start the game. Activate mods by going into the Options meun, selecting the Gameplay tab, and turning on the 'Enable Mods' checkbox, then restart your game. To check it's working, just start a new game. If the minor races are listed as playable factions, then the mod is working.
Current Version:
1.7.1 for GC3 1.7
Latest version download link available at:
http://www.nexusmods.com/galacticcivilizations3/mods/13/?
Yep, that's me.
It was an excellent mod. I still play it. Can't wait to see what you will do with GC3 in the near future.
Updated to 0.7 for Gal Civ 1.11 (confirmed working with the latest official hotfix)
0.7 Change log:
* removed Durantium from ship hulls
* Quadrupled ship maintenance costs.
* Removed population growth from techs which give pop growth buildings.* Sensors given diminishing returns; going over 10 sensors now makes visibility worse.* Life Support now gets better mass-to-range ratios at higher tech levels; cost more maintenance* All engines given +1 move.* Big ships now need more engines to get the same speed (added -10% move speed for small, -20% for medium, -30% for large and -40% for huge).* Engines no longer get bigger with tech, just faster.* All ship hit points reduced by 40%.* All defense values raised 50%.* AI now uses strat resource-based buildings as hubs rather than standard manufacturing buildings (to prevent it frm spending 17 turns building a Durantium refinery the moment it settles).* Blueprint laser ships now get a second laser before they get more shields* Blueprints prioritize engines a bit more.* Thulium archive bonus halved* Promethium park cash bonus halved; 25% approval bonus added.* Fixed the complete mess that is ShipClasDefs.xml, so that the AI actually upgrades some of it's build choices.* AI war target value reduced from 1000 to 256 (to match the transport distance).* AI's diplomatic trade values tweaked.* 'Slowdown' starbase modules mssively buffed to 100% and 200% increased move cost per tile for the enemy.* Relics nerfed to prodeuce only 1/5th the bonus.* AI should no longer panick-surrender after losing a single planet.* Switch the production bonuses for Gifted and Genius.* Added Logistics Cap bonus for Godlikes.* Tweaked Weapon Augs.* Black holes more common* Higher chance of more antimatter around black holes.* Weapons made more distinctive. Kinetics are now medium range, with a very high refire rate but poor accuracy, missiles a very long range, decent accuracy and high cooldown, and lasers always hit, have a short range and medium c/d.* More AI diplo tweaks.* Asteroids impact on speed reduced* Nebula effects diversified a bit more* Civ capital now gives +5 cash and +5 approval rather than +2 approval.* Embassies and their follow-ups have become one-per-faction.* AI starts most planets by building a factory, a hospital and an approval building; now generally makes a serious effrot to keep approval at a decent level.* AI now much more likely to buy cash-generating improvements after the initial 30 turns or so.
* AI's diplomatic trade values tweaked.
Uh, what does that mean?
YOU DIDN'T.
DID YOU????????
HOW COULD YOU????????????? I TRUSTED YOU!!!!!!!!
HOW?????????????
I CAN STILL SAVE SCUM!!!!!!!!
The AI now penalizes players it dislikes more in trades; favours players it likes less in trades, and will gouge you more aggressively when trading multiple items at once. It values resources a bit less in trade, too, and has a somewhat more realistic idea of how much a credit is worth. It's still dumb as a brick, but it's harder to take advantage of that now.
Have you/can you upload this to the steam workshop?
If you can please do.
I can't. The workshop only supports factions and ship designs presently. Once the devs have implemented proper mod support for the workshop, then I'll add it; they've suggested this will be coming once the mod tools are released.
Nothing much, just saying thank you for the hard work.
How do you adjust AI strategies? That way I can do it on my own.
The reason is because on suicidal difficulty, the AI SHOULD just spam colony ships. Their bonuses are so large that they can easily tech their way out of their hole.
The more colonies the AI has, the more it can take advantage of its innate bonuses on suicidal.
Also, regardless of the difficulty, the AI should expand to 50 colonies ASAP. Diminishing economic returns only happens around there.
Any AI strategies you program should only kick in after the "50 colonies" rule.
Glad to see my favourite Vicky2 modder join the stars .
Any compatibility with Hereward's Planet Traits and Planetary Diversity?
Yeah, we don't have that kind of control over how the AI picks strategies. Like, at all.
There's 5 triggers which the AI refers to when picking a strategy script - personality, war, turn, tech age and victory condition. That's it. That's absolutely all the things the AI can check. There's no point asking for anything that cannot be determined by those, so 'expand to X colonies' simply isn't a thing. You can tell it to produce 50 colony ships before it does anything else, or to ensure it has at least 50 colony ships active... but then it will always do that, regardless of if it actually should or not. This is the main reason why I say the mod is designed for insane maps - the AI works on a long turn scale and so thinks of the whole first 100 turns as the 'colony rush' phase, which would be useless in a medium or small map where everything is colonized by turn 30.
To mod the AI, you'll need to go into all the 'strat' files. There's about 15. If you increase the weight on colony ships, then the AI will try to build more of them, provided it can see empty planets to colonize. That's pretty much as close as you can get to what you're asking for, but it will likely cause the AI to spam well over 50 and then gimp itself.
Yup, both use appends and so should work fine with IAB.
Then I shall look forward to that futre day.
Yeah, we don't have that kind of control over how the AI picks strategies. Like, at all. There's 5 triggers which the AI refers to when picking a strategy script - personality, war, turn, tech age and victory condition. That's it. That's absolutely all the things the AI can check. There's no point asking for anything that cannot be determined by those, so 'expand to X colonies' simply isn't a thing. You can tell it to produce 50 colony ships before it does anything else, or to ensure it has at least 50 colony ships active... but then it will always do that, regardless of if it actually should or not. This is the main reason why I say the mod is designed for insane maps - the AI works on a long turn scale and so thinks of the whole first 100 turns as the 'colony rush' phase, which would be useless in a medium or small map where everything is colonized by turn 30. To mod the AI, you'll need to go into all the 'strat' files. There's about 15. If you increase the weight on colony ships, then the AI will try to build more of them, provided it can see empty planets to colonize. That's pretty much as close as you can get to what you're asking for, but it will likely cause the AI to spam well over 50 and then gimp itself.
The AI in your previous version is probably better than the AI in the current one on suicidal. However, I'm going to tweak it so that it prioritizes marketplaces more.
Also, going to look into making the other ideology branches more OP. On Insane, all of the level 5 ideology choices should provide powerful GLOBAL EMPIRE-WIDE bonuses.
You could always just grab the AI files from 0.6 and copy them over. It's governors.xml and all the '*strat.xml' files.
I'm probably going to load the old game that I didn't finish (the one with 120 colonies for some of the AI) and use your current version of the mod for that.
Yeah. The AI should spam colony ships for the first 20-30 turns. Then it should prioritize pop growth techs afterwards, and then on half of the worlds spam marketplaces (the other half researching the pop growth techs).
This is the best strategy. It's what I do.
For suicidal, consider giving the AI a TON of bonus money at the beginning, like 15,000. And make the AI value its money more, diplomacy-wise. This is probably the best way to optimize the AI in the early game.
Once again, I can't produce different AIs for different difficulty levels. And I'm balancing it for normal. I don't really care what would be best for an AI with so many handicaps it might as well just cheat. So what's best for the normal AI will go in, and if that's sub-optimal for a Godlike AI then too bad. I don't want an AI that is reliant on handicaps, which would be necessary to make optimal use of them. I'll worry about setting up difficulty levels once the mechanical work and tech bonuses etc are done, or when Stardock provide me with the tools to differentiate difficulty in the scripts.
I also can't really control what the AI builds on which world - it judges specialization based seemingly purely on bonus tiles. I can divide it up by planet class, and tell it how many special tiles it needs to decide to make a world one thing or another, but that's pretty much it. Don't bother suggesting specific strategies or cunning ideas for the AI, since it almost certainly cannot be done.
I see. Looks like the AI isn't very moddable right now. A shame.
Sneak peak at 0.8's changelog:
0.8
* AI now builds Influence starbases.* AI now really, really likes ascension crystals.* AI less enthusiastic about producing constructors in the early game* Fixed a bug which prevented Scientific AIs from building constructors for 80-odd turns.* Cultural AI now like defenders a lot more in the early game.* Mid-game strategy now stretches all the way to turn 300.* Added some extra personality-specific mid-game strategy scripts.* Fixed a bug in AggressiveMidStrat1 that meant either no-one used it or everyone did (not sure which).* Nerfed Antimatter powerplant production point bonus a bit (50% was too high for an early-game colony-unique).* Improved Drengin and Altarian AI tech choices.* Yor pop cap techs raise in line with all the other techs* Yor AI given slightly better choices in tech* All AIs now appreciate how cool the governance techs are.* Reconciled some new lines of xml added in 1.11* AI much more likely to try and specialize worlds now.* Numerous AI tweaks to make the AI expand in a wave pattern, with lulls so it can build up infrastructure.* Fixed a serious bug that made very high but less-than-100% approval cause huge growth and influence penalties.* Produdction points, unlocked techs and military power score weights increased.* Cash and Research planetary projects now give a flat +1 per 10 manufacturing spent, so they're still not as good as actually devoting the population to it but are much less awful.* AI will now build transports even when not at war.* Picking points in multiple ideology trees now gets very expensive very quickly.* Picking points in the same ideology tree now gets expensive slower.* Yor now recieve both pop cap and approval from their approval buildings.* Culture buildings buffed to 25%/50%/100% rather than 25%/33%/50%.* Culture buildings now add small ideology point-per-turn multiplier effect.* AI given more leeway for deficit spending and profit when trying to break even* Defenses nerfed a lot; resistance buffed a lot.* Drengin with soldiering bonus techs are now genuinely terrifying.* Yor see the need to research the matrix line of techs.
It's turning out to be a rather AI heavy one. In my only test game so far, where I'd only made about half a dozen adjustments to the Altarian AI tech choices, they had roughly double the score of any other AI by turn 170. Not sure whether that's down to blind luck, or the changes I made to the weights, but it's a good omen either way.
Likely to be released on Friday, as usual.
1. Can't commit to play this yet, I must wait for the finished mod.
2. Now that starbases can have all rings, any chance for you to increase the starbase effect range and reduce the placement limmit range (now 5)?
3. Now that pop scales to 100, you should also buff invasion modules to carry more.
The mod will be finished sooner the more feedback I get, and feedback from those who have actually played is inherently more valuable than people who are merely commenting on lines in a change log.
I've no plans to do either tbh. I don't really want to see SB stacking, which verges on an exploit imo, and these measures would make that more common rather than less.
I'm not sure on this, either; invasion is grotesquely unbalanced in favour of the attacker in vanilla and the pop re-scale has helped a lot. I'm more likely to nerf defences pretty hard tbh; I WANT a heavily populated planet to require multiple transports to conquer, but without relying so much on the (frankly rather silly) blanket % reduction in attacker numbers from defenses. Let them fight it out on the ground.
Even in 0.6 - 0.7 it seems that the Altarians are much more powerful than they used to be previously. Altarians used to always be somewhat worse than average, now they are becoming more powerful even than me, the human player (playing as Terrans). This is partially down to the ways in which the game calculates power and partially due to their much greater military strength (from having much more Durantium).
I suspect it's down to the xenophobic AI tbh. Ironically, it's the least expansive script early on - it doesn't really start the major colony spam until turn 30ish. That means that, by the time they start colonizing, their homeworld can take the population hits and has enough industry built up to be able to catch up with all the progress the others have made by turn 40 - and remains built-up enough to avoid the bankruptcy cycles the other AIs fall into until later on and then really churns out ships.
I've been adapting the other AIs to make more use of this - they're now expanding in waves and then consolidating every so often. Different AIs expand at different times, though, so we should see some good variation.
1. Don't take me the wrong way, I do play a test game.
2. I have concrete reasons though:
A: Bigger effect range helps with economy starbase placement, and more importance for military effects.
B: It's about tall vs wide: same with the terraforming becoming repeatable, and pop scaling. If I can spend the hundreds on constructors on an insane map then I deserve the reward?
C: Don't make me play the silly tetris like SB placement game. This is a strategy game. It is natural to cluster bases in a system. Don't remove it completely just make it 3 from 5 and see how that goes.
3. OK, will test it more.
My thoughts are in the direction of a game with less tedium and more important choices.
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