1.0.5.6 AI Expansion Issues

[tornnight]

I play with 1400 stars, irregular galaxy. 20 total players Low Planet Quality Setting Young Development for AI players Starting Development for myself.

At least half the AIs have extreme trouble colonizing other worlds. They simply don't go beyond the starting colonies.

Given that I only had a little experience before playing 1.0.5.6, I don't know if this is a new issue with something like the Planet Quality Setting.

Uploaded Save called AIExpansion1.5.0.6.zip

[BoogieMan]

Those are pretty harsh starting conditions, and I am fairly sure through my own experience the average system size/complexity (less planets, moons, asteroids etc) is lower when you have it on max galaxy size. I've had trouble a few times with AI empires struggling too much, so to help them out I toggle the editor on, go to edit empires and I give them like 150,000 credits or more if it's later in the game. It usually helps them out after some time passes.

Oh, and I forgot to mention I'm using the patch before the beta patch.

[tornnight]

Ok I kept going and all but two empires are still stagnant.

There doesn't seem to be any pressure on them as I took care of the pirates. Hmm.

I've still out colonized all the empires by quite a bit. However, given the population bonus they had at start, I'm still behind on the economy.

Seems like their colonization has to be at least a bit more aggressive even if they don't find ideal planets. There are plenty of 55-65% planets around them.

[aprezto]

I have continued to expand far faster than the AI, but I do note that their economies seem decidedly better than mine and I start to struggle keeping the empire working. This should be a resource crunch that is relinquished as I push further through the timeline, but I wonder if this is affecting them?

[korenje]

with so many bugs in the game, imagine how worse the AI might be. I noticed that AI might never expand.

[caerr]

I'm running a game with following settings:

* Normal size * Normal planet quality * Max. Aggression * No pirates (just to make sure the AI isn't in any way hampered in its colonizing efforts) * AI gets Young size while I start with one planet (to make sure they have some extra income)

During the game I entered the editor periodically to see how the AI was doing, since I've been getting a lot of games where the opposing empires just amount to a few planets.

By the end of my session I had expanded to 40 planets (manually colonizing everything not too far from my core empire), and there was still a large amount of empires that were mostly milling around in their home systems. I checked their account balances and everyone but two had positive account balances, some even had huge amount (100k's) of creds.

The most succesfull empire (20 vs my 40) in terms of expansion was the Teekans (also my race), which kinda makes sense since they get massive income boost from their race and mercantile gov. so they'd have more money to spend on colonizing efforts. However still doesn't explain why some empires were sitting on 100k credits and not colonizing like mad, maybe their exploration efforts had failed or maybe they didn't simply have enough exploration vessels.

EDIT: Checked the ship list and mostly everyone had plenty of explorers, except the Teekans which had none!

Since colonies are "free" (cost no upkeep, save from colony ship cost) I see no reason for the AI to hold back on its colonization in the way it does.

[korenje]

considering that it's not adaptive AI, the AI's colonization ships might enter some loop where they get killed by pirates all the time or something.

[caerr]

I did consider pirates being a factor, that's why I disabled them in my test game.

Wars with other empires might cause an issue though, where they might prioritize war efforts instead of colonization. But that's mid to late game, I think.

Edit: I'm not sure if this is related at all, but in all of my games the galaxy map screen stops showing potential colonies (yellow dots) at some point even though there are plenty of potential colonies in the expansion planner. Maybe connected to AI not colonizing said planets?

[caerr]

(Expansion planner screen showing plenty of high quality planets)

[elliotg]

Thanks for that report. The initial game settings make a big difference to how fast empires can expand.

Having said that, there may be some issues slowing empire colonization in some situations. We will investigate this.

Please also upload any savegames you have, showing these problems you encountered.

Thanks Elliot

[tornnight]

Uploaded Save called AIExpansion1.5.0.6.zip

This also exhibits the swapped AI issue (Dhayut <-> Hakkonish).