Thanks for the fast updates.

I doubt you tried every 4x out there, some like Civilisation have rather good AI. It's a fact though that AI is one of the most overlooked feature in gaming, especially if the title can be played multiplayer (thus you can bypass the problem). Diplomacy in ES is quite borked and i doubt i have all the tools to fix it. I could improve the Alliance positive factor though; if set high enough it could offset the other factors and keep them happy with you. The devs have made some improvements there with the EXP, unfortunately it comes with a lot of issues.

Not every 4x, but lots of them over the course of 20 years or so. Civ is a classical example that does all those things wrong I just talked about. Civ 5 was better in that regard, but still not quite there yet. I do not expect you to fix that, I just hope that someday, a 4x game actually lives up to the usual lies of "never before seen realistic diplomacy system"...

Oh yeah, i did increase the odds the AI would declare war (by popular requests) because the AI was often too content to be at peace (even the military races). I could work on those again and see if i could strike a better balance...

Someone actually had too few wars in a 4x game? How did that happen? Either you are behind and they see you as easy prey or you are ahead and they see you as a runaway threat that must be eliminated. No matter how you fare, you always get ridiculous attacks from many sides.

There was a lot of those feature to abuse, like rushing new colonies used to be much more effective than being slow and steady. My tweak to expansion disapproval did make that strat obsolete and helped the AI greatly. There was also certain improvements that were just too good and crippling if not used early (like the second research improvement). It's quite possible there is still some of those quirks left around that make it too easy for experienced players but not used by the AI.

Agreed, the +40 science building for example was far too good - your variant is much better. There is a reason I want to stick with your mod, even when I do not agree with everything you did.

stormfox wrote:


Not every 4x, but lots of them over the course of 20 years or so. Civ is a classical example that does all those things wrong I just talked about. Civ 5 was better in that regard, but still not quite there yet. I do not expect you to fix that, I just hope that someday, a 4x game actually lives up to the usual lies of "never before seen realistic diplomacy system"...

Strange because many players do praise the Civilisation series because it has a challenging AI (ie one that doesn't easily fold before the onslaught of human players). I can't comment much about it as i don't even have the game. Now, true, what players find challenging and true diplomacy in game may be quite different.

Someone actually had too few wars in a 4x game? How did that happen? Either you are behind and they see you as easy prey or you are ahead and they see you as a runaway threat that must be eliminated. No matter how you fare, you always get ridiculous attacks from many sides.

Without my changes, you would die of boredom with every other nations extremely eager to make alliance with you. Even when you would war them they would sue for peace a few turns later. The threshold for war was very high and rarely met.

Agreed, the +40 science building for example was far too good - your variant is much better. There is a reason I want to stick with your mod, even when I do not agree with everything you did.

Thanks for that.

Foraven wrote:
Strange because many players do praise the Civilisation series because it has a challenging AI (ie one that doesn't easily fold before the onslaught of human players). I can't comment much about it as i don't even have the game. Now, true, what players find challenging and true diplomacy in game may be quite different.

The original Civs were bad from a modern point of view, but excusable in that they were amongst the first games of that kind. Civ 3 does not exist (just like Alesia does not exist for the gauls, it was a bad beta test for some features that later wound up in Civ 4 and 5), Civ 4 is the one I played most in relatively recent times and that lots of people in my personal reach played alot, too.



Remember when I tiraded about the closed borders being a necessity? Play Civ 4 and you know what I mean. They always run past you with settlers, plopping down little towns right in the middle of your territory. They always declare war on you even if you were their best buddy for 3000 years and never wanted to harm them. Montezuma always declares war on everyone everywhere and is not above running over an entire continent, through the (of course!) open borders of all other AIs just to attack you with Spearmen when you have Cannons.



The only reasons it took some time to take over a Civ 4 AI after the initial clash (which usually lasted something around 5 turns) was that you had to station lots of units in freshly occupied cities and the fact that they always got units out of thin air right before you assaulted a city (you could "catch" them doing it by espionage) and of course because they cheated like hell in combat, making their units much better than yours.



And for the record, Civ 4 actually HAS one of the best diplomatic and combat systems amongst 4x games. Which says something bad about the genre in general, not something good about Civ 4. Civ 5 went a bit better. Cities defend themselves and expansion is a bit slower, the AI does not cheat as obviously and diplomacy has a bit more logical basis, but not by much. It was widely different than its predecessors, though (mostly in a good way, but still it is not as easily comparable).

Without my changes, you would die of boredom with every other nations extremely eager to make alliance with you. Even when you would war them they would sue for peace a few turns later. The threshold for war was very high and rarely met.

I played dozens of vanilla games and had exactly those impressions I just told you about. If you appear very weak, they gang up on you (happened during my first few games and I believe that is partly because as a human, you have a few good fleets ideally with heroes in them while they have a bazillion crappy ones. I always have almost the same military power when I look at the quit-stats, but with 1/5 as many ships. In the military ranking that usually leaves me as last or very near that, giving them the false impression that I am undergunned). If you start to win, they gang up on you. Only if you somehow manage to have big fleets but do nothing with them and let them keep up technologically (and therefore economically) with you, they let you in peace.

stormfox wrote:


I played dozens of vanilla games and had exactly those impressions I just told you about. If you appear very weak, they gang up on you (happened during my first few games and I believe that is partly because as a human, you have a few good fleets ideally with heroes in them while they have a bazillion crappy ones. I always have almost the same military power when I look at the quit-stats, but with 1/5 as many ships. In the military ranking that usually leaves me as last or very near that, giving them the false impression that I am undergunned). If you start to win, they gang up on you. Only if you somehow manage to have big fleets but do nothing with them and let them keep up technologically (and therefore economically) with you, they let you in peace.

Have you tried Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes? I recently got that one and so far i'm impressed by the AI. It doesn't spam units or cheat as far as i can tell, but it can sure kick our asses if we are not careful. The diplomacy isn't stellar, but they do seem to honor their treaties (so long as you do not give them reason to reconsider).

Foraven wrote:
Have you tried Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes? I recently got that one and so far i'm impressed by the AI. It doesn't spam units or cheat as far as i can tell, but it can sure kick our asses if we are not careful. The diplomacy isn't stellar, but they do seem to honor their treaties (so long as you do not give them reason to reconsider).

Christ, that AI is opportunistic as hell.

Foraven wrote:
Have you tried Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes? I recently got that one and so far i'm impressed by the AI. It doesn't spam units or cheat as far as i can tell, but it can sure kick our asses if we are not careful. The diplomacy isn't stellar, but they do seem to honor their treaties (so long as you do not give them reason to reconsider).

Igncom1 wrote:
Christ, that AI is opportunistic as hell.

I have that on my radar for when it is on sale next time. Great to hear that it seems to be worthwhile, definitely moved it up a few spaces.

At this point i'm not sure i want to continue this mod. My interest in the game is currently pretty low and few players seem interested in giving feedback (something that could motivate me to work on it). I will update if anyone ask though.

I feel ya, I might wait for the next major patch or content release before doing anything like modding again.



Hell maybe we might enjoy the Endless Legends.

Foraven wrote:
At this point i'm not sure i want to continue this mod. My interest in the game is currently pretty low and few players seem interested in giving feedback (something that could motivate me to work on it). I will update if anyone ask though.

Feel your pain - I get this at the job too - no input from the devel team, so, you 'assume' its fine.



About the only thing I have to comment is late in the game (say, post turn 200+), weird things happen, like, fleets start loosing their ships, some ships have red X's on them (destroyed?), and it begins to lag (I guess the engine is having to compute MANY things, and 'looses its way' or 'forgets').



Anybody else see this?

Foraven wrote:
At this point i'm not sure i want to continue this mod. My interest in the game is currently pretty low and few players seem interested in giving feedback (something that could motivate me to work on it). I will update if anyone ask though.

Unfortunately, it seems that the interest in the game itself is somehow waning, hopefully new releases will insuflate more life (i.e. meatier background and feeling of life in the universe) as the game is aesthetically impressive, in my view, but tends to feel increasingly shallow after usage. Thanks for what you have done hitherto

fredzeppelin wrote:
Feel your pain - I get this at the job too - no input from the devel team, so, you 'assume' its fine.



About the only thing I have to comment is late in the game (say, post turn 200+), weird things happen, like, fleets start loosing their ships, some ships have red X's on them (destroyed?), and it begins to lag (I guess the engine is having to compute MANY things, and 'looses its way' or 'forgets').



Anybody else see this?

Do you have a savegame of that? I would like to give it a look and see if i can figure what is going on. But my first guess is you are running out of dust to pay for the upkeep so the game scrap ships to keep the Empire affloat (there is a routine for that, but not sure if it apply only to the AI or the players as well). But that would not explain the lag.



--------------



I haven't given up on ES yet, it's just that i don't know what else i could do with my mod that doesn't require a massive rewrite (one reason i haven't started with the expansion, i feel too much would be to rewrite). However i finally found out why the game ran so slow for me: my video card was in the wrong slot. For some reason my PCI-E slots are not equal, and i was wrong to ever use the other slot (had swapped to make some room in the computer case). That damn mistake did make me waste months searching why my computer had become so sluggish when playing games (not just ES)...

Bad luck Foraven! I had similar issues like you in the past with the hardware...

Hister wrote:
Bad luck Foraven! I had similar issues like you in the past with the hardware...

Bad luck could describe my whole year as it is... So many mistakes and bad twists of fate for me (like that mess with the credit card). On the bright side, things are getting better for me lately, i just hope it keeps going that way.

"Do you have a savegame of that? "



Here you go!



Nippon - Turn 213.txt (don't forget to change TXT to BIN)

fredzeppelin wrote:
"Do you have a savegame of that? "



Here you go!



Nippon - Turn 213.txt (don't forget to change TXT to BIN)

I'll check that out once i have some time. May take a few days before i can though .

Hum... I did load up the savegame, and it did take quite a while to get in the game. Seem the file has become quite big, and my computer nearly chocked on it (the music had some hiccup while loading). I can rule out lack of dust for the cause of disappearing ships (you have plenty of it), but i noticed a huge stack of fleets in one of your systems and another (much bigger) in an Hissho system. I guess the problem there may not be my mod per see but how much stuff has been built that far in-game. Now it's quite possible something i modded be the cause but i don't see how i can figure it out from just playing it :/. I did notice a bug though; there is an Hissho fleet seemingly leaving the galaxy. It's not normally possible to send ships to no-where so this is indeed a bug with the game...



Btw Fredzeppelin, did the AI pose some challenge along the way?

Hello, I don't know if this mod is still active or not but I put it in my game and am experiencing a major oddity with Pirate battle. My Pirates show 0 battle points and their weapons don't fire, at least visually anyway.



Despite this, there is an actual battle, even if unseen. I know this because the Pirate ships start with a green bar which drops to yellow during the fight (then red, then dead.)



Any else seeing this?

Stormlover_51 wrote:
Hello, I don't know if this mod is still active or not but I put it in my game and am experiencing a major oddity with Pirate battle. My Pirates show 0 battle points and their weapons don't fire, at least visually anyway.



Despite this, there is an actual battle, even if unseen. I know this because the Pirate ships start with a green bar which drops to yellow during the fight (then red, then dead.)



Any else seeing this?

Sorry for not answering earlier. This mod is mostly on hold until i find something i want to do with it. As for this bug, it seem to have plagued my mod for a while, yet i haven't found why it happen. I will check it out again and try another fix.



Edit: What makes this bug hard to squash is that the custom pirates i made only spawn quite a while in game. In my test game i'm nearly at turn 50 and i haven't seen any of them. I have turned random events off though, maybe they require a pirate spawn to start showing up...

Grrr, i can't force them to spawn without turning random events on it seem. I guess random event pirates are what spawn the other type of pirates (the ones that are bugged).

Just checking - is this still active???