Although I feel bad about any crash bug, I think there may be other places to work first. I am not sure many users will hit the situation of having 22,000 ships. Let us make the AI play better, and turn down the buyout bonus so that these ships are more expensive.

Yeap, that's also my thoughs... But I need to try with the hangar stuff... If we are limiting the number of ship in the hangar to something less than 200 or perhaps 500 it can be messy...

I will report it and the priority will be done by some higher instances... but not for tomorrow work list...

If it does not crash without clicking on the system, then the other crash might be resulting from something I changed within my mod.

I've tried several things to make the AI build ships. The thing that actually worked was increasing . Perhaps one of my other changes has to do with the other crash. Or maybe also my changes to their diplomatic behaviour play a role.



What happened in the 5-10 turns? Did they actually attack you or have they been idle with their fleets? If they have been idle, then I guess you can guess what I think needs improvement.

iblise wrote:
I'm planning to try another game see what happens with governors, regarding careful sweeping though I must confess confusion - Far as I can tell its simply +2 dust per explored moon with 3 dust per turn upkeep, is it not?



When are you releasing the new update?

The tooltip of Carefull Sweeping and the Moon-Tractor-Thingy is bugged somehow but in both cases the benefits are for the people on the planet of the moon, not the individual moon.



Maybe in an hour or so. Haven't changed a lot but the cycling-issue was pretty big and this is fixed now.

Hi,



First of all thank you for work on this very important aspect of game, I believe that AI is the most important thing to mod/change, at least for players like me who prefer single player games.



I have question, is this mod content already added to the community-mod by davea, or this is a new version of AI improvements and needs to be added separately?



Also is there possibility to have something like loading mod order? I know about adding +mod parameter in steam, but if I add two mods which change same parameters, which one will be in effect?

Parts of this already are in the Community Mod, others aren't.

davea will pick what of this he is going to include into the community-mod and what not. For example the increased agressiveness of all the AIs might not be to everyone's liking.

Also I think he will not include the workarounds for stuff that Amplitude is gonna fix anyways.



At the end it will be a matter of taste.

The modders that are not making a total-conversion mix the results of others together to create different blends that combine different features that they personally like or don't.

Since nothing of this stuff is copyrighted everyone can mix the features/changes that he likes most for himself.

At first I wanted to make a pure AI-Mod but some ideas of others are just too good to neglect. ^^



About your other question: I'd like to know that for myself. I will investigate because since the colors-mod does not work in the main-directory but only in mods I need a way to launch the way with a specific mod aswell.



Edit: @adamkow: +mod YourModDirectoryName is how you keep a mod loaded.

AI-Players are generally harder to befriend and will be more aggressive towards as well to the player and eachother.

This tends to make the A.I weaker.The A.I tends to be better when it concentrates war on a single empire and not several at once.

Ashbery76 wrote:
This tends to make the A.I weaker.The A.I tends to be better when it concentrates war on a single empire and not several at once.

That is why I drastically increased the amount of repuatation for sharing the same enemy.

Basically it will tend to make the AIs to gang up on someone but in the meanwhile try to keep at good terms with others.

So this shall not weaken them too much... as long as they are not the poor empire being ganged up on, that is.

Also I think the AIs, even without modding, are trying to prevent multiple wars at once anyways.



However, I'll just play a game now to see how it works out. In my 1st half game with the partially finished mod, the UE declared war on me but did not mount up a whole lot of forces after their initial attack. When I jailbroke the savegame to see why they were so weak it turned out that they had the pilgrims were already invading several of their systems from the other side.

When I met the Pilgrims they liked me a lot because we shared a common enemy.



The main reason for that change was because some of the people who won on endless told that they never declared war on by some of the factions even if they did not have anything to defend themselfes. This mainly was happening if you start near a Sophon/Pilgrim/Amoeba. So by selecting only those races you could almost count on a peaceful game.



Edit: Great... 4 turns in and already found a bug. -_-



Edit: Edited the start-post.



Edit2: Edited the start-post again. In order to make the changes actually do what they should one needs to overwrite the original game-files. Otherwise it just won't work properly. This has huge advantages anyways for example you can play your existing save-games with the mod.



Edit3:

Now to bugs within the actual Mod:



1. When the AI switches from a food exploit to a non-food exploit it often will realize that it does not have enough food anymore and will switch back to the food exploit. When it has done that it will realize that it has more than enough food and will switch to something else. This can turn into a cycle of switching back and forth.

Ail wrote:
In order to make the changes actually do what they should one needs to overwrite the original game-files. Otherwise it just won't work properly. This has huge advantages anyways for example you can play your existing save-games with the mod.

I am disappointed. This problem needs to be fixed in the game (not the fault of the modders)! If people start copying over their original game files, any number of things will go wrong. An official game update may be released at any time, which will destroy your files. People may start with one mod, continue with a different one, and get weird results. The best result in this case is actually a crash, continuing with some random data is much more painful in the long run.

Ali, would



IsPermanent : Keep the last turn value and add the new value -->



be of any help to avoid that loop cycle? I suspect you've already considered this if it is even applicable to your method of value adjustment... or maybe, damn it trigger events still aren't moddable, I was going to suggest if food improvement is active then substract food improvement values before calcing :S



One other thing, is there a way that I could help you test and confirm that there is indeed a bug and the only way to make it work is by overwriting the master files, you've said before that you have issues running mods, maybe this is a problem on your end? Would be easy to confirm if you just tell me how to test for it.

iblise wrote:
Would be easy to confirm if you just tell me how to test for it.

Some help for this would be great. The problem is that if there is something unusual/wrong with the mod, the game will ignore it and either use the original game file, or no file at all. It may also possibly ignore other files from the mod and other original game files. There are no messages to indicate this; the only way to tell is to observe that the game's behavior is not matching the mod behavior. It may also not match the original game behavior, such as refusing to build any ships larger than destroyer.

Yup, I just poke the the system governors with a large stick and watched them for about 30-50 turns once with the mod and once without. There is definately differences, with the mod they wanted to spam build dust improvements and exploits. Overwriting the files produced more acceptable behavior with food exploits.



Bugs so far with overwriting method(could be game or the modded code, not sure):



Assigning a system governor to balanced on the same turn the colony is created results in nothing happening until the population updates in 5 turns or whatever. Setting it to balanced on the turn after produces normal behavior.



Ignored the 2nd planet on my home system, refused to give it an exploit for about 20+ turns, no idea why, no problem elsewhere.



Built careful sweeping on a system that only had 1 moon



Ignored building exploits in favor of improvements fairly regular



Not a bug per say, but tried to spam colonize an ocean planet immediately after 2nd pop generated on the terran planet I settled despite the fact that the ocean had acid rain with a -20 approval rating. I overrode that one for about 10 turns or so, then finally let it colonize the planet as all it did was spam that ability.

iblise wrote:
Ali, would



IsPermanent : Keep the last turn value and add the new value -->



be of any help to avoid that loop cycle?

I found another way to avoid the loop-cycle. But I've to test if it has other disadvantages.

iblise wrote:


Bugs so far with overwriting method(could be game or the modded code, not sure):



Assigning a system governor to balanced on the same turn the colony is created results in nothing happening until the population updates in 5 turns or whatever. Setting it to balanced on the turn after produces normal behavior.

Had seen that when I did NOT use the overwriting method.



Ignored the 2nd planet on my home system, refused to give it an exploit for about 20+ turns, no idea why, no problem elsewhere.

What type was the planet? Maybe I have overlooked a possibility that can cause the check for all types of Exploitation to fail. The thing that I did to fix the loop-cycle will probably fix it aswell because it made food-exploits not require to fulfill the food-improvement-circumstance of my formula so it can be built and kept when the check for the other buildings fail.





Built careful sweeping on a system that only had 1 moon

What is the problem with that. Careful sweeping generates Dust*Pop on the Planets with moons*taxrate/50. I plan to calculate the exact benefit using the taxrate. But I haven't done this yet.



Ignored building exploits in favor of improvements fairly regular

I assigned a value of 3 to some of the super-effective buildings like Industry1 and Science2.

Exploits have a value of 2.1-2.3. So it is pretty normal that they come after those 2 buildings on newly colonized Systems.

I reduced the value of Industry2 from 2.3 to 2 because I did not like the AI to rush it so early but also did not like to have it require 50 Industry like davea did.



Not a bug per say, but tried to spam colonize an ocean planet immediately after 2nd pop generated on the terran planet I settled despite the fact that the ocean had acid rain with a -20 approval rating. I overrode that one for about 10 turns or so, then finally let it colonize the planet as all it did was spam that ability.

This again sounds like something where the Mod does not apply. And also I have not observed any behaviour like that.

$(ClassStarSystem:Population) ge $(ClassStarSystem:AlmostMaxPop) should prevent that from happening. (AlmostMaxPop being MaxSystemPopulation-1)

Here's some results from my test with a little more up-to-date-version that shall prevent the cycling.



Food-Exploits now behave almost similar to when it was forced to use them.

On the other hand the AI in that case almost always spares itself from making any other food-improvements. This works exactly like I intended it.

I had one case were the governor would not build anything at all. I have no clue why that is. I manually overrode it and once the manually ordered buildings were finished, the governor took over.

I had one case were the governor wanted to build Ind->Dust on a new planet. That planet had only 1 production so I think it might be somewhat resonable.

There needs to be a smart solution for Trade-Buildings.... Or more precisely it is smart for all but the first. An empire-wide trade-count needs to be put in charge and only when there are no more free trade-routes it shall build those.

Other than that it looked very fine and behaved almost exactly as I would myself.



Also interesting was the AI-agressiveness. They wanted a lot of stuff from me just to go to peace with them. And in case of my direct neigbour (Hissho) it seemed impossible to prevent war.



On the other hand I outexpanded them despite using the governor for building selection. I think they invest too much in early ships to prevent rushes. But then again I was playing on "Normal". I'm at turn 83 right now and will continue the session later.

I'm planning to try another game see what happens with governors, regarding careful sweeping though I must confess confusion - Far as I can tell its simply +2 dust per explored moon with 3 dust per turn upkeep, is it not?



When are you releasing the new update?

IMPORTANT:



Do not install it like you should do with a mod. It will bug around!

Supposedly the whole "make the AI smarter about picking what to build"-part will not work.

Just copy the files over your "Endless Space\Public"-Folder. I recommend that for any mod because even if some parts of the mod work and everything looks fine, some other parts won't.

Of course don't forget to make a backup of the original files.

To get the Color-Changes working copy the contents of coloredanomalies.xml to the end of Localization_Locales.xml.



I'm really sorry for all that trouble. But I just could not get the Mod to work properly as long as I had it as a mod. Only replacing the original Game files achieved the desired effects.



Gameplay-Changes:



Because of a Bug that prevented the AI from using tonnage-boni gained by technologies the tonnage-boni were replaced by hitpoint-boni.

Delete the file EmpireDesctiptor.xml within the Mod-Folder if you do not want this debatable change.

Because the AI lacks the ability to retreat from battle, I felt the player should not have that big of an advantage in that and removed the Retreat- and Offensive-Retreat Battle-Cards.

Delete the file BattleCard.xml within the Mod-Folder if you do not want this debatable change.

Both of these changes will of course be reverted as soon as Amplitude fixes the tonnage-bug and implements retreating for the AI.



AI-Changes:



AI-Players are generally harder to befriend and will be more aggressive towards as well to the player and eachother.

AI-Players will design way better ships inspired by the way players design their ships and trying to avoid weaknesses.

AI-Players know way better how to handle their improvements and exploitations. They will avoid improvements they do not benefit from and will priorize better.

Especially their food-management has been vastly improved in a way to reduce overproduction without losing a lot of growth. Sowers were taken into consideration here as well and will shun Food-Exploits.

AI-Players will use and train their heros as fleet-heros to further increase the power of their fleets.



Miscellaneous:



Added an extended version of Luminalities "Colored Anomalies". This is purely optical and helps to evaluate planets faster without the need to hover over everything first. Details can be found here: https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space/forum/37-modding/thread/16338-released-colored-anomalies



1.2.1 Update:

Fixes an issue that caused cycling between food- exploit and other exploits.

Included the Localization-File (only english) with the Color-Changes because those won't work with the "copy over the original game-files"-method.



1.2.3 Update:

Fixes an issue that caused cycling between food- exploit and other exploits. This time for real.

Prevented AI from building Adaptive Industrial System before Supercities were built.

Changed the Tooltips for Improvements that work per population on planets with explored moons to reflect that they work per population on planets with explored moons.



1.3.0 Update:

Allowed the AI to build ships now all the time instead of Industry to Dust.

Further experiemented with Diplomatic behaviour. (might not show good results yet)

Tried to fix an issue where the AI would use subpar armor-modules instead of the best ones. (I doubt it worked though)

Hi Ail! Thanks for the cool mod. It seems to make the AI somewhat better which is a nice change. I haven't found any issues yet (½ way through first game).

1.2.1 is uploaded. Very minor changes but it felt bad to leave the cycling-thing in.

Actually the cycle thing seems worse now, I was having repeated issues of governors building food exploits and swapping to dust either the next turn or within the next 3-5 turns a lot...



Regarding Careful Sweeping - I'm rather confused now



[code][/code]



That looks like its +2 dust per explored moon - how does population figure into that?

I gave 1.2.1 a try, by copying it into my game install directory. I played 60 turns (using hissho evasion cards!) and looked at the AI positions. For the first time, I think there wasn't a single thing which was "glaringly wrong" with their exploits or build order. There are some things I might have done differently, but nothing major. The biggest thing I see now for the AI economy is one we have tried/failed to fix, which is specialization of heroes, especially the "admin-hopping" tactic we all use. Your mod currently makes all fleet skills. But, there is nothing modders can do better on this. And it seems your fleet design is much better, but still I hope the dev team will just fix the AI tonnage allocation bug rather than modders trying clever workarounds.



Your system improvements look great! Good job.