*chuckles* And here I figured that about a week would be plenty recent enough to still be in the 'working out what works best' phase still Well the info is there if you'd like to still tweak things later, and I'll try to track down the other thread you mentioned to continue following the AI development. Being as I play mostly in areas with no internet connection, a robust AI as an opponent is vital for long-term enjoyment...

Sorry, I did not mean to come over rude.



As mentioned elsewhere, my main-concerns with the AI are the various issues that prevent them from making competative ships.



Giving them better build-orders for their improvements and exploitations just appears to be pretty much in vain when they cannot capitalize on that.

Oh I wasn't taking it as being rude (thus the chuckling and smiling), was just surprised at the rate of progress in "solving" that aspect I fully agree that getting something "closer" to ideal and then moving on to making them handle ships (and fleets...) better is a far better expenditure of time, assuming that there actually IS anything that can be done to solve the wasted tonnage issue and retrofitting especially without requiring an actual patch.

I workarounded the tonnage-issue by just changing the bonus-tonnage into bonus-hitpoints.

I was looking forward to the lategame to see how good the ships of the AI now would be in comparision to mine...

And then I noticed that they

a) don't design new ships when they don't build them

b) stop building ships during peace once a certain limit has been reached

c) upgrading their existing ships stops working with the Large1BisTemplate



So I only got to see very few of the "good" ships I wanted to see.



Progressing on the System-Management part went fast because in this regard as a modder you get almost all the tools you could ask for.

As soon as you fully understand how it works, there really are almost no limitations for you to make them do what you want.

The understanding is important, though. First I thought I would have to make a rule and evaluation for every single building.

But it turned out to be unneccessary because there already was an invisible hardcoded part that considered building cost/build-time-efficience when selecting what to build.

So there was no need for me to make sure they build the buildings they are allowed to build in the right order.

The AI would do that anyways so that only some small adjustments had to be made to this.

I'm definitely seeing better ship designs at least up through the midgame so far with the AI improvements in the community mod. However, I'm still seeing poor exploit choices, including such things as solid food exploits on conquered systems full of lava planets that are at max pop. There have also been some system improvement issues, such as xenotourism in a system that only had a single small (5 pop with the current tech levels and endo) tundra to "pay" for itself, and collaborator networks in a rear-line system which had built everything except for planetary institute - despite my having traded them the tech to build planetary institutes 50+ turns before my invasion. Do you have a later version of your AI mod than the most recent community mod version?

It isn't clear what you mean by "the latest version of the community mod". This one includes ail's latest 1.2.3 release:

/#/endless-space/forum/37-modding/thread/15801-released-community-bug-fix-balance-mod

Personally, I am going to wait a few days for the next game release, which is promised to have a fix for the tonnage bug, and may potentially include a lot of ail's work.

I meant the one linked in the first post of that thread you just linked to - does the one by iblise there include the entirety of the rest of the community mod features, just adding the updated AI and colorizations?



Also - I certainly hope that the tonnage bug is fixed in the next release, otherwise there's going to need to be another workaround done (or at least the current one adjusted). Two reasons: first being that the player +tonnage modules in combination with the % weight reduction on other modules leads to some very overpowerful ships compared to the base game. Second being that with all of the tonnage reductions I've currently got at least the first two tiers of invasion module taking ZERO weight for some reason... (I got screenshots which I can upload later if needed, but it's a pretty easy check in a moderately advanced game). Plus it would be "nice" to not need to not have the "overtonnage" warning when going to modify designs later Guess we will wait and see what the new release brings us and go from there though, wouldn't want to waste time fixing those issues only to have them made moot by the official code

raccoon_tof wrote:
does the one by iblise there include the entirety of the rest of the community mod features, just adding the updated AI and colorizations?

Yes. tenchars

raccoon_tof wrote:
I'm definitely seeing better ship designs at least up through the midgame so far with the AI improvements in the community mod. However, I'm still seeing poor exploit choices, including such things as solid food exploits on conquered systems full of lava planets that are at max pop. There have also been some system improvement issues, such as xenotourism in a system that only had a single small (5 pop with the current tech levels and endo) tundra to "pay" for itself, and collaborator networks in a rear-line system which had built everything except for planetary institute - despite my having traded them the tech to build planetary institutes 50+ turns before my invasion. Do you have a later version of your AI mod than the most recent community mod version?

This sounds a lot like the mod-loading issue. Some of the changes work and others don't unless you copy the directly over the game's files in the public folder. The Improvement- and exploitation-fixes were those that did not work from the modding folder.

That's why I said it in the first post of the "Download AI Mod-Thread that you have to copy it over the original files in order to work.



And btw. ThorTillas has already confirmed that the tonnage bug as well as the Large1BIS-Bug are fixed for the next patch.



He also gave me very valuable information about how the AI decides when to build ships and how to mod that stuff.



So the combination of the next patch + the things I'll be doing for the AI-Mod shall really make the AI do a massive leap ahead!

Ail wrote:
And btw. ThorTillas has already confirmed that the tonnage bug as well as the Large1BIS-Bug are fixed for the next patch.



He also gave me very valuable information about how the AI decides when to build ships and how to mod that stuff.



So the combination of the next patch + the things I'll be doing for the AI-Mod shall really make the AI do a massive leap ahead!

This is good news. I thank the devs for not leaving the community alone (as you can see with other games...) and I thank you Ail for your efforts with that stuff. I don't have the knowledge I think to help you modding the AI but I will test it and give you feedback.

Testers are needed of course as well... When I sit down for a "modding session" infact most of it is testing and playing.

I might upload a barely tested update of my mod later today, so you can test that then. ^^

Excellent news to hear. I guess I will hold off on anymore in-depth testing until the next release and oh, actually enjoy playing for a bit then :P