Vicarious wrote:
Ail, you're heading in the right direction, the AI now is too peaceful (I'm playing on Impossible difficulty level). But the reason I haven't tried this mod yet is your decision to remove alliances. Amoeba and Pilgrims need alliances, some of their traits and unique technologies give you nothing without allies.

+1! Currently Ail's solution is a radical workaround. I think no other more moderate solution is possible. This should be one of the priorities for the game developers to look in!

I've asked the devs several times for race-specific modifiers in DiplomaticBehaviour.xml but unfortunately those have not been provided so far.

As for the alliances: They caused some really strange behaviour in combination with the other changes I've done.

What about the good, neutral and evil traits?



Good players stick together and are loyal, neutral players are half and half going to eliminate the weakest players while also allying with players for trade, and evil players who deliberately kill the weaker powers to gain strength and will not like sharing resources, they respect only strength.

There is nothing of that whatsoever to be seen in any sort of mod-accessible code. It even seems there is no difference at all between good, evil and neutral. Of course that's something that could or even better, should be used if it was available.

Currently yes, these values do nothing from what I have seen.



(Looks like something in store for the future however.)

Waylander1982 wrote:
Disabling tech trading balances the game out in ways that can't be full explained.

This is interesting and very good to hear. What are the most noticeable effects of this? Does the AI do lots tech trading in vanilla (with other AIs)?



The only type of trading I like to do with the AI in vanilla is resources for resources. All trading involving dust or dust-per-turn is, imho, totally unbalanced.



Is there any way that I can use this mod, but mod it so that I can still trade resources with the AI? Thanks in advance

As I found out the old name for my Mod, "Diplomacy Mod" was very, very misleading and just didn't do what one might have expected from it, while probably being overlooked by many who have been looking for what it actually does.



So this is basically a new name for the continuation of the Diplomacy Mod.



So what does it do:



Fixes:

Starting Ship-Designs use their full capacity.



Balance Changes:

Outposts now have nearly no defenses and are much easier to conquer. (Idea by Igncom1)

Trading Dust, Technology and Ressources has been removed.

Alliances have been removed.



AI Changes:

The AI no longer uses the attitude-mechanism to determine it's foreign-policy.

It will, instead, make it's decisions depend on proximity and military-power.

The AI will no longer go for the Buildings-Victory. You might want to disable this victory-type.

The AI will rush the most important early-game-techs.

The AI will use all of it's heros for combat and distribute skillpoints accordingly.



Others:

The System-Governor-Setting "Diplomacy" now behaves like the setting "Balanced" with the exception that it won't build military-improvements such as defense-systems and ship-improving-buildings.

Includes and enhances the Mod "Colored Anomalies" by Luminality.



Installation-Instructions:

Unzip into (my documents)\Endless Space\Modding. This will create a new directory (my documents)\Endless Space\Modding\AggressiveAI containing a file index.xml and several subdirectories.

In the main game menu, click the MODS button, find the mod "AggressiveAI", select it and click load.

To keep the mod loaded: find "Endless Space" in the Steam Library, right click, select properties, and click the "set launch options" button. Add "+mod AggressiveAI" to the game launch command line.



Update:



Version 1.1.0:

AI-Colony-Ships now use the basic engine. This does not apply for the Pilgrim as those don't have enough space to fit it in.



Update:



Version 1.2.0:

Merged Registry.xml with the one from 1.0.63 to achieve compatibility with Virtual Awakening.

Removed several files that become or already were unneccessary for Virtual Awakening.



Version 1.2.1:

Merged several files with 1.0.65 that had been altered since 1.0.63.



Version 1.2.2:

Merged with "Fixes" Mod and tweaked some of the Building-Preferences for Governor and AI.

Ail wrote:
Yes, that should actually be pretty easy. When I'm at home in an hour or so, and I remember, I can have a look at the files and then tell you what to do to reenable Ressource-Trading.

Thanks Ail.



Does the AI do any resource trading with other AIs?

JetJaguar wrote:
Does the AI do any resource trading with other AIs?

Yes, all the time.

It's very easy to determine what they do:

The things they offer to you is about the same stuff they offer to other AI's aswell. And they offer a lot of Ressource-Trades.

In earlier versions they felt different about tech-trading aswell but according to the Devs there was a massive exploit with that so they changed it in a way that the AI hardly wants to trade tech anymore.

Go to Simulation\Term.xml and find:




StrategicResourceBasePrice="300" StrategicResourceFactor="25" LuxuryBasePrice="150" LuxuryFactor="50"

PriceCoef="1"

AttitudeMalusCoef="0" HyperbolaCoef="80" AttitudeMalusOffset="-30" AttitudeTrendCoef="0"

PriceOffset="0" PriceMin="0" PriceMax="10"

LuxuryResourcePrices="2;2;2;6;0" StrategicResourcePrices="4;2;2;4;0">





%DiplomacyResourceTermDescription









(should be at the very bottom)



Now replace "DiplomacyBonus8" by "DiplomacyBonus1Swarm;DiplomacyBonus2" and Ressource-Trading should once again work.

Added an Enginge to the Colony-Ship default-design.

Does not apply for the Pilgrims who don't have enough space for that.

does ai care bout mp? or they just follow the weight guide when design ships?

It's not a "guide" it's a couple of templates.

And yes, they follow it really strictly while not caring about MP at all.

When the game was first released those templates were beyond terrible. They are much better now but of course still not as good as what good players do.

If someone had input for templates that he feels improve the AI, I would certainly not neglect them. But I feel they have more pressing issues on other aspects.

New version in first post.

Should be compatible with "Virtual Awakening".



I will probably have a better look once the patch is actually realesed. The reworked way of how the AI uses heros could potentially mean that there is new potential to mod it even better.

Ail wrote:
New version in first post.

Should be compatible with "Virtual Awakening".



I will probably have a better look once the patch is actually realesed. The reworked way of how the AI uses heros could potentially mean that there is new potential to mod it even better.

What did you do to improve the AI's use of Heroes?

Foraven wrote:
What did you do to improve the AI's use of Heroes?

Mostly complain about how bad it was and suggesting how it should work. Like in this video:





In the Virtual-Awakening Beta I still found some things about how to further improve it via modding.



But as I said, I don't know how the final version of VA will be different from its beta so I'll have to look into it once the patch is out so to see what still needs to be done.

Ail wrote:
In the Virtual-Awakening Beta I still found some things about how to further improve it via modding.



But as I said, I don't know how the final version of VA will be different from its beta so I'll have to look into it once the patch is out so to see what still needs to be done.

Will the AI use more then on Hero in the next patch? Or just use them where it matters?

In my game in the VA-Beta, also on Serious, the AI-Horatio had 5 Heroes by the midgame, most of them clones. The lowest was Level 11, the highest Level 20.



I was Craver and met them several times while invading our common enemy, the teal UE. Most of the times I met their fleets, they had a high-level hero with them and would blockade me. I got only one of the UE's systems and they got all the rest.



They ended up second behind the winning Amoeba. I was 4th among the remaining races. All of them had at least 3 heros.

Ail wrote:
In my game in the VA-Beta, also on Serious, the AI-Horatio had 5 Heroes by the midgame, most of them clones. The lowest was Level 11, the highest Level 20.



I was Craver and met them several times while invading our common enemy, the teal UE. Most of the times I met their fleets, they had a high-level hero with them and would blockade me. I got only one of the UE's systems and they got all the rest.



They ended up second behind the winning Amoeba. I was 4th among the remaining races. All of them had at least 3 heros.

Nice, so that mean we will have more of a challenge when the new version hit. Do the AI also get more clever when using it's heroes in systems instead of fleets?

The winning Amoeba only had System-Heroes.



Since one of them was sitting on a 4/4 system, I had critizised the mechanism of what systems where picked for the heros and suggested to use the following formula:



Assign the Hero with priority to the system where the result of MaxPopulation²/CurrentPopulation is the highest.

This should assure that early on the least developed systems get a hero but eventually they are moved to systems with the highest population to reap the most benefits of it.



I was told this will be implemented, so we'll have to see once the patch hits.



So yes, it is definitely going to be much better all over the board.