I'll start off by saying I love GalCiv, I was a huge fan of GalCiv2. However, I think the balance in GalCiv3 is completely wrong in regards to economy and research.
I've just finished my first game (tech victory) and just before I won I was generating just over 31k research per turn. My capital Earth was turning 2715 research alone and was far from it's max potential (only 35 population and half the buildings were low tier since I couldn't keep up with manufacturing social buildings with the 1 building per turn limit). After the Ascension gate was built my research was ~63k per turn and if I had built another research cloister (imo it shouldn't be possible after you upgrade to quantum) it would have been ~69k research per turn. Most of my worlds were underdeveloped! Isn't this a little overkill since the most expensive technology only costs around 800? Most of the game I was researching every turn and it felt a little cheap.
My economy wasn't only scaled to research, even though that was my victory aim. I was turning over a net ~7k profit per turn and about 25% of my planets were simply culturally pushing the borders of my opponents. I was overflowing with cash and social/military production, with nothing to spend it on. My military was always at least twice that of the closest opponent if not more. Also, how is ascension victory possible with research so fast as I had control of almost all crystals by end game and only had about 1/3 the required points.
Soooo... I think it's going to come down to modding to try to balance the game to be more engaging for me. I'd like some ideas or pointers to people who have been attempting this. Currently I have on my list:
I do however worry about the effect on the AI, possibly their bonuses need buffing but that might make them too strong early game.
Any thoughts?
I've decided to look at it from a different angle. I'm going to try to balance it for normal difficulty using handicaps for the player rather than bonuses for the AI. It will make it easier to tweak without so many hidden abilities and compound calculations by the game using different mechanics to balance the same thing.
After the game getting easier against the AI after increasing maintenance I changed my tactic. I've currently reverted to playing on normal difficulty with the penalties to myself, the player, only. This in theory should increase the difficulty of the game, and it does, kinda...
My economy is about 60% wealth, 20 manu, 20 research. With large increases to maintenance I can't have a large fleet, I can't have many research worlds and I can't have high manufacturing. All things considered it's working well to do what I want, which is SLOW down the game and provide a challenge to balance my budget, except...
The AI will not expand, I never encountered this problem on the higher difficulties. Time after time I am out colonising the AI by leaps and bounds even though I have to make most generate wealth and therefore have much slower production than usual. The only two that seem to do better than most (but by no means well) are the Altarans and the Drengin.
Naselus said something about this...
Is there a difference to their expansion techniques on higher difficulties? I might have to look at that strategy file. I had never seen them sit with an uncolonised world in their borders before. Turn 120 and there are still planets free for me to take. I might have to go back to a higher difficulty (although I might have to reduce my penalties a bit or I'll get trounced). Problem with upping the difficulty is it's going to speed the game up again.
Sigh, I really didn't realise how poor the AI is without handicaps (before I had never played on normal difficulty). I didn't want to have to mod the difficulty settings, or much else besides. Guess I'll take a look at them.
Looking at some of the AIs and a few soaks I think I've found part of the problem...
Firstly, the AI handle pirates poorly. Turn 120 the Iridiums still only have 3 planets (Iridia, Vallus and 1 other colony). There are 3 worlds within their influence uncolonised. They are producing a colony ship, then a freighter, then maybe a laser interceptor. Unfortunately, they aren't moving anywhere and are all continually picked off by pirates a few turns after arriving at their rally point. This must have been going on since very close to the beginning of the game and they can't get out of the loop.
The Thalans seem to have been plagued by pirate also. The other problem is they have very low production, it takes them an age to produce anything and it's partly my fault I signed a treaty obligation with them that they obviously couldn't afford without gimping themselves. Their worlds are now sitting at ~1 manufacturing per turn to keep up their payments to me (10 credits per turn, not much but they only have 3 planets).
Obviously I'm going to have to stop selling to the AI for credits over time, I've never noticed this problem before but I guess it's less an issue with AI handicaps. There really needs to be some sort of mechanic built into diplomacy to stop the AI from making detrimental deals like that. The pirate issue, I guess I just have to turn them off for now.
As to the AI edits - the AI's strategy files are quite illuminating tbh. It has a number of strategies which I believe are decided with a weighted random array and last X number of turns. These then include weights for ships, spending priorities etc. And some of these are, well, a bit rubbish; the AI will likely churn out a freighter before turn 30, for example, and is only really locked into the initial 'expansion mode' for 30 turns (during which it spends 60% on military and 50% on industry, so it may not even get that many colony ships built - it's forced to build 2 first of all, but after that reverts to weights). Tweaking this strategy alone (making it last longer and upping the manufacturing output at he expense of research) has made the normal AI considerably more competitive early on - I'm interested to see what the higher-handicapped AIs will manage with their enormous production bonuses.
I hadn't even looked at the AI weight distributions yet, but indeed makes a lot of sense. I'm going to be out of the country for a week or so - will check it out when I'm back
One thing I'm wondering: how does the AI choose *which* 'assault' ship to build when it finds the assault type is the sort of ship it wants?
From a few soaks I noticed that at turn 30 some factions are shooting themselves in the foot in relation to production, no wonder they never colonise anything. Looking into those strategy files I see what you mean.
These settings explain a lot why the Terrans and Thalans always do so poorly. At turn 31 they go directly to their general diplomatic ratio which is 10% manufacturing... and only 10% of that military. There is a serious problem with that right there.
From the looks of it, all factions should enter the expansion or expansionaggressive stage at turn 31, but I have seen from experience that they don't. I can't be sure without testing, yay, this starting to feel like a job
Hehe I know the feeling.
With all we've managed so far, I think we could probably make a pretty good 'community AI upgrade' mod, if we got a few of us working on the same project. Better ship and collony plans, better AI prioritisation, better weighting of the various variables etc.
I think there's a random roll between the various possible strategies, actually. <turnstart> is the first turn that the strategy is available from, <turnend> is the final turn that that strategy can be either activated or operational (I think the former), and <turnlifetime> is the number of turns the AI is using the strategy before it picks from the list again.
This means that, for the first 30 turns, the AI can only pick 'startstrat' (unless they have the Aggressive personality trait, in which case they can have Aggressivestartstrat too). After turn 30, these stop being an option.
At turn 30, they then pick between Expansion, Aggressive, Cultural, Diplomatic, and Benevolent (depending on personality traits, again). These each last 15 or 20 turns, and the AI bounces around between them until about turn 150, when more options open up.
For large maps, I like to push the 'secondary' strategies back to at least turn 50, so you get more AI startstrat goodness; I also like to push the late-age ones back to around turn 300.
tbh, I've been collecting your ship designs and adding them to my games at home. I've been meaning to ask if I can toss them into the insane balance mod.
Yeah go for it, I'd just like a little aknowledgement line in the readme somewhere
Would make sense, and would definitely explain the <turnlifetime>. That may even be the intent but the problem is I've yet to see the Thalan use the expansion ratios in the last 3 soaks I've run. They are sitting in diplomatic continually after turn 30 until they reach the victory options at turn 150. This is pushing their shipyard construction of colony ships to 200+ turns, basically they start them and don't finish them until they change at turn 150 to pump out more manufacturing. It also means extremely slow improvement build, their 2-3 worlds are woefully undeveloped. The Terrans are suffering from exactly the same problem. Both factions basically crawl to a stop between turn 30 and 150.
There's something seriously wrong, but we are working in the dark.
What faction modifiers determine which strategy they'll follow?
'Aggressive' gives access to AggressiveStartStrat, Aggressive_Strategy_general and expansionstrat_aggressive
Benevolent gives Benevolent_strategy_general.
Diplomatic gives Diplomantic_strategy_general.
Cultural gives cultural_strategy_general.
Scientific gives ConquestVictory_scientific.
ExpansionStrat appears to be permitted for everyone, as is Wartime, ConquestVictory, ResearchVictory, ExpansionAscensionVictory, AscensionVictory and StartStratResearchVictory. StartStratResearchVictory may be broken, as it's start date is 150 but it's end date is 30.
Some also require other things - so wartime requires a war, Pirates is only available to the pirates, AscenscionVictory appears to requier all three tech ages (and turn 150).
It's possible that the specified diplomatic adds some weight over the other strats. Expansion notably doesn't have any traits attached (not even expansionist). We need a wider sample to determine the weighting scheme.
Expansion is also limited to the Age of Expansion and so I extended the Age of Expansion to 30 technologies to make sure that it wasn't eclipsing too early and I'm now 99.9% positive that the Thalans and Terrans both never make use of it and stick exclusively to the diplomatic strat between turn 30 and 150.
Even if they were able to use of expansion, it would expire swiftly upon them gaining 12 techs.
Perhaps the vision of Stardock is to have them not expand, /shrug. Right now running at minute manufacturing for so long it's just hamstringing them, leaving them with minimal colonies and undeveloped worlds. I always wondered why they were weak in my games.
One other odd thing I noticed, perhaps it's intended with Thalans having one higher quality world. The AI is decommissioning it's first colony ship that it receives at game start.
The only faction that I've seen use ExpansionStrat are the Iridium, as would be expected, who do not fall into any of the other categories. I'm beginning to think that ExpansionStrat is just the default. ExpansionStrat_Aggressive is also as expected used by the Krynn, Yor and Drengin.
I've ran about 12 soaks now and I've not witnessed any cycling at anytime to another strat between turns 30 and 150. The only exception is if one goes to war.
So all I can say, with them not being as dynamic as hoped, is that the default values are terribly unbalanced
Ive played many games now(using your formula from the other thread) and I notice the same races who always jump out in front and maintain that...Yor being one, Krynn, and Drengin. Altaria is usually still on top due to their research bonus but only in the research power category. Otherwise, its those 3 almost every single time. Im just going to keep an eye on what you find out, because every game is basically the same, right now. Im glad my research is slower, but only 3 of the races even really try it seems...and they are so predictable. Sigh...
I've ran over 30 soaks now and still have yet to see the AI change to another strategy (only exception is wartime) between turns 30 and 150. They don't cycle between those available, that may or may not have been the design intent, but from observed behaviour it simply does not happen. The AI use the following:
Once turn 150 arrives they start to choose the victory strategies which are more complex.
The problem is turn 31-150 and these need rebalancing in my opinion. The differences are too much for some factions since this a lengthy and crucial period.
Terran and Thalan factions grind to a halt. Their manufacturing ability is crippled, which results in their colonies becoming underdeveloped. Until turn 150 arrives any new colonies they have besides the starting system often have multiple tiles with no improvements. The AI upgrades (very slowly) any improvements they do manage to build before adding new ones to blank tiles, they simply cannot build fast enough and gaining upgrades to base buildings actually hinders them in this situation. These two factions also have no colonising power beyond any ships they manage to produce before turn 30 since they are effectively only pushing 1% of their production into ship building. Their increased research is worthless in the long run since they don't develop. Ironically, if they go to war in this period it helps them, since they switch to the wartime strategy.
The Drengin and Krynn benefit the most during this time, which in theory shouldn't be unexpected, they are aggressive by nature after all. However, building up a viable economy is important for all races and in these crucial early stages no faction should be neglecting social production. The same goes for military production, in the early game it's not actually military, it's colony ships.
The Yor would also benefit like the Drengin and Krynn, however right now they are suffering because of the Assembly problem. Many of their colonies continue to raise their population past the cap at the expense of developing their worlds. They very often queue 2 assemblies, while having multiple tiles unimproved in addition to already exceeding the population cap.
I don't know what they were thinking by crippling the Terran and Thalan as they are, unless they go to war they are likely to be left in the dust. I'm actually astounded that this hasn't been addressed already.
On a side note, pirates cause significant problems during the colonisation stage. All factions play cat and mouse with them, their colony ships repeatedly moving towards the planet, then moving back to the shipyard rally point again and again. While most of the time it's not a huge issue and it just delays them, in some cases I've witnessed it completely blockading expansion, especially if the faction starts out in a corner and the auto path all go through a pirate area.
Good work.
Now we need to figure out what happens when there's 2 strategies with identical requirements available at once; does the AI then alternate those?
Either way, we need the diplomatic strategy to be considerably rebalanced; the AI should NEVER go under 30% manufacturing or 30% military, since these slider settings effect all worlds. New planets simply can't become viable at 80%+ research.
Agreed, good work rspiccaver and good points
No there was no deviation in the strategies whatsoever unless they go to war between turn 31-150.
It's very confusing considering the way the xml file is built I'll admit.
Yet another issue is the <BuildFirst> tag doesn't impact their decision making whatsoever. Quite often I witnessed 3 or 4 constructors/scouts/freighters built before their first colony ship.
Unrelated to the xml file I also noticed a couple other problems that are plaguing their colonisation power. The AI are building shipyards (sometimes their first improvement and therefore takes a long while), yet upon them completing they are appearing for a split second before mysteriously vanishing, the AI then queues them to be built again after a couple of improvements (I watched this happen multiple times in a row, and to multiple worlds). The other thing was many freighters that are built (far too early in the game imo) are being decommissioned, hence wasted production.
Also, building constructors is a bad idea for the AI in the first few turns, not only does this mean a colony ship wasn't produced, but the very act of mining hinders them since new colonies love to try to produce a durantium refinery immediately (which takes far too many turns).
It's possible that they're just picking the first non-locked eligible category in the file. I suspect that it may qualify as a bug; no-one in their right mind could possible think the AI sitting permanently on 80% research from turn 30 was a good idea.
Also, bear in mind that the FactionDefs.xml also contains some AI weighting; I'm not at all sure how these interact with the strategies (if they do at all - your finding seem to suggest they don't).
EDIT: Scratch that, the factiondefs stuff is tech weighting.
Take a look in GalCiv3AIdefs.xml. There's some interesting bits and bobs in there, which are difficulty-agnostic. Amongst other things, it looks like the AI gets halved research costs, regardless of difficulty - probably to try an offset tech inflation.
There's a whole bunch of stuff for determining diplo, and a lot of things relating to picking starbases etc. Also seems to define the AI's willingness to sue for peace during a war, how weak it has to get before surrendering, how likely it is to retire a ship (this is probably why it keeps building and then killing freighters), and most importantly, how it judges whether to attack or not and where to set it's rally points.
We should probably kick off a whole separate AI thread, tbh. Maybe after we teach the AI to actually play the game, we can start looking at ways to fix the bad mechanics.
Yeah I've looked at that for a couple other things I was working on but not in too much detail (there's a lot there as you said). I think it was when I was looking into the AI undervaluing a lot of their trades in diplomacy.
The thing that really aggravates me at times is often when you think something does one thing it turns out to be entirely different. Getting the time to test every damn change since we have a limited point of reference... it wouldn't have hurt them to have added a few more comments...
A new thread is a good idea, I've been thinking we are going off topic. I've got my parents visiting this weekend so I wont get as much time as I'd like to muck around. I'm trying to think the last time I actually just played the game.
I've not actually played vanilla in a while. I sometimes start it and watch what happens. I do play my own modded version from time to time though - there is a good game buried under these issues, but currently you do have to get creative in the xml.
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