What difficulty is your test on?

It doesn't nearly look as bad as some of the empires in my last game.

Also what davea said, has indeed to be considered. One thing we can't see though, is when buildings are scrapped and heros dismissed. The Sowers for example don't have a hero. Probably because they never could afford to hire one.

Yes davea is correct. I just took the value by jailbreaking and indeed you need to consider that the AI has an approval bonus, I forgot that. I decided to test its performance on normal and not on hard or serious to reduce those kind of bonus to the AI.



After 100 turns, I can say that there is some good, but also some bad news. I'm actually quite surprised to see that the Hissho are performing very well. The Sophons and Horatio are quite good too, their situation is better than what it was at turn 50. Maybe it's related to the fact that we are all at peace, so they get good bonus from trade. However, it's pretty much a game over for the Cravers and the Sowers, as you can see here:











This is a bad surprise, in my previous save (turn 50), they were both the best regarding the score. It demonstrates that there is still a lot of work to do with the AI unfortunately. In most of my games, 3-4 AIs were usually in this situation. I thought that the Sophons and the Horatio would be like them. By the way it's a miracle that the Horatio is still fine despite all the crappy ships he built. He has something like 160+ cp and he only researched the first technologies in the military branch. Anyway, the bankrupt/rebellion state only affects 2 AIs for the moment but I think it's still too much. They had ideal starting positions and they should not end up like this.



Regardless, the AI is better than what it once was. The star systems improvements it builds are good and the tonnage bug fix is really appreciated. Now if we can find a way to prevent the AI to end up in this situation, it would be great.



Oh and I don't know if it has been reported before, but I have a strange "Waiting Time: $Value" in the tooltip of all the diplomatic treaties.



Save game: UNITED EMPIRE - Turn 101.zip

Thanks for the investigative work. I've linked your savegame in the VIP-forums, hoping the devs will look at it.



I will do another test with changing 50 to 80.



Maybe it does work to some degree. But I still doubt it'll stop them from making ships.

I'm not really sure wether it helped or not. But in my test-game at turn 121 only the Cravers are affected by the issue.

So I'd say increasing the EmpireApprovalMin decreases the chance of it happening but can't stop it from happening completely. I think it is not possible without changing something about the ship-production-mechanism.

So what exactly does the EmpireApprovalMin value affect? It tells the AI not to build ships unless the approval is above this limit?

Nope, if this would be the case, then there would be no problem. It only affects tax-ratio. But it does not do miracles. So if they need more money, they will still rise tax more.

Since I do not want to wait for the patch that actually gives me the opportunity to do what I want, I have now decided to make some bigger changes to the game-rules with a new mod.



It will contain of 2 steps:



Step 1: Reverting the upkeep change to 1 Dust per CP instead of 0.4*MaxCommandPoint Dust per CP. While this will trivalize the upkeep-management, it will relieve the burden of it from the AI and shall prevent it's bankrupcies. (very easy to do)



Step 2: Completely redo how diplomacy works. The plan is to turn the current Attitude-based-system into some kind of statemachine. Attitude will work completely differently when I'm done but I hope that it will allow me to get way more logical decisions out of the AI, when it comes to deciding to go for War, Peace or Alliances. (quite a lot fo work ahead)

Thanks for your efforts Ail. I hope that reducing the upkeep will not allow the AI to build so much ships that it will not be fun anymore.

Well, it's pretty much like in 1.0.19 but with the difference that the AI does not "forget" it's ships due to bugs and stuff like that. I think one of the devs somewhere said that the 2nd add-on will have a completely revamped ship-building-layer so we won't have to bear it that much longer. ^^



Btw.: I think I'm close to the result I've been aiming for for step 2. Maybe I'll upload it later after some more testing.

Her it is: All-AIL-Mods-Mod.zip

For each connection with a system of another empire an empire generates tension. It is important to know that the tension is per connection, not per system! So if you colonize a system that is connected to 3 of theirs you get three times the tension.



In the original it is a value that slowly rises to 15 over the course of 15 turns, stays there for 30 turns and then goes down to 5 over the course of another 15 turns or so. Also it is limited to a max of 80 Tension ( ~6 connections).



For the purpose of making the AI more aggressive, I felt it was not too helpful, that the tension would slowly go away or take so long to build up in the first place, so I just made it to use the max-value all the time and increased the limit to 180 Tension (reached at 12 connections).

Ail wrote:
5. No-Retread-Mod.

Since the AI cannot play the retreat-card, there seems no valid reason for the player to be able to. So Retreat-Card will be removed here.

Maybe you could consider making the retreat card blockable by some cards if possible, rather then removing it all together.

The AI only declares war, when it hates someone. But a mean and fierce creature should not have to hate its prey in order to hunt them. There will be a possibility to declare war without having to hate the potential opponent and war-weariness will be reduced when the war is going to be won.

Regarding wars, would it be possible to decrease disapproval rating slightly rated to taxes, basically you could have higher taxes during war. War weariness would increase at a certain rate, but as long as you won battles, it would dramatically slow down

Skyrah wrote:
Maybe you could consider making the retreat card blockable by some cards if possible, rather then removing it all together.

You could consider making your own mod that does this.

Complete removal of it has been proven to force better decison-making the best. For example it also prevents you from scouting around with ships you probably don't wanna lose.



@iblise: As far as I know, war-weariness currently is an AI-only-value to determine when to offer/accept a cease-fire. (Tell me if I'm wrong, but I've never seen a reference to that ingame.) Right now it increases faster when you lose battles but it also increases when you win. But I don't see a purpose for the latter other than being able to show mercy, which, then again does not fit to a "Ruthless-Mod".

So please explain a bit more. Sounds like you know something I don't.

I've uploaded everything so far into the 1st post. Any feedback would be appreciated.

hmmm, I totally misunderstood regarding war fatigue... Would it be possible to introduce war fatigue as an actual mechanic in game, rather then just an AI decision tree, through an approval adjusting value?

I guess it would be possible the variable should be accessible from the empire-class. But I don't have any incentive to do it.

What do you do to install these mods? I don't see a mod folder in my documents/endless space or the main endless space directory.

Bridger wrote:
What do you do to install these mods? I don't see a mod folder in my documents/endless space or the main endless space directory.

You're actually supposed to create the "modding" folder. There is a tutorial here by the way: how to install a mod, how to create a mod, and so on.

As I said, I still have problems using mods the way they are supposed to be used and so make a backup of the public-folder in the Endless-Space-Install-Directory ( for me it's F:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\common\Endless Space\Public\ ) and then copy the contents of the mod(s) into it.



When I try to load the Mod from the ingame-menu the game closes itself and won't start again.



Just tried this:

In Steam, in the launch options dialog box, put "+mod All-AIL-Mods-Mod"



This actually seems to work. So I would probably suggest this as a way to run it.



I will edit the 1st post to describe it in some more detail.



Oh, and a warning for people who download the mods seperately: Some of them are not compatible with eachother since they edit the same files.



For example, if you want Mod 1 and 2 but not the rest, take the All-AIL-Mods-Mod and throw the changes out that you don't want away.