Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: Icemania

ORIGINAL: Tanaka
I think its safe to say you will see a lot more playing and testing from most people when the extended version is out. Im really looking forward to it! Also waiting on the official patch to be released! [:)]

Agreed ... and it's coming. However, if people come up with good idea for changes that apply across races after the Extended version is out, I will need to modify 62 races (i.e. 22 Vanilla plus 40 Extended). So the earlier I get good comments the better! And for that reason I really appreciate everyone who has commented to date!

ORIGINAL: Tanaka
Any chance of engine re-balancing to be included with your weapons re-balancing?

How would this improve AI performance? I would suggest this is an item to discuss with lurchi for Research Reloaded.

ORIGINAL: Tanaka

But if your mod is being included with lurchi's mod and he is balancing the engines then that would be great too! But if he doesn't then I really hope you do! When your mod is finished will his take much longer to complete and combine?

ORIGINAL: Icemania

Thanks Tanaka, a good point about the AI tendency to travel too far early and mid-game. Let me get the Beta release out for Extended first and have a think about whether to do it in an update or leave it to lurchi.

It will require a fair bit of work to apply the AI Improvement Mod to Research Reloaded due to the massive changes in the Tech Tree. lurchi needs some support from Elliot to make his mod work. I have a long list of Developer support in my wishlist in the OP ... and they are very quiet at the moment ...

ORIGINAL: Icemania

Hey All:

As a surprise for you all I'll shortly be updating the OP with an Alpha Release for an Extended Version of the AI Improvement Mod.

Note that I have only tested 4 of the 16 Extended races so this is a genuine Alpha. I'll test other races in the near future, as time allows, but if you want to pick you favourite race and see what happens please do so and report back any observations. I have not yet implemented Race Biases changes and also I'm sure some of the designs could use some optimisation. So fair warning, you will probably find issues, but I could use your help to test.

The download is a new theme to avoid copying and pasting files between Mods. This way, if Haree78 updates his Mod, the AI Improvement Mod will not break (e.g. adding a single component is enough). I'll be able to review the changes and update this while everyone can keep playing.

Cheers,
Icemania

ORIGINAL: Tanaka
Small request would it be possible to only include only the files from Extended that you modified and not all the files as I am using a modified Extended version of my own and it makes it hard to figure out which files I need to replace and which files I don't. [8D]

ORIGINAL: Tanaka
For one I find that the less that automated ships are allowed to run off and fly across the galaxy by researching just one engine the more they stay close to home and do what they are supposed to do. Constuctors, defense fleets, mining ships etc... If engines were balanced to reasonable ranges not only would it be more fun and make more sense by adding a reasonable pacing to the game I do think it would help the AI! It would force the AI to the same reasonable ranges as human sends their ships. We don't send our ships off to the other side of the galaxy to mine or build stuff. This should not be until late game when the appropriate balanced engines would be researched.

ORIGINAL: Tanaka
Also realized that balancing the engines would also help the AI by giving the pirates a reasonable range and would prevent them from being able to do so much destruction of AI empires so fast. AI nations would have more room to grow before being attacked. AI has a hard enough time with pirates and monsters.

ORIGINAL: Icemania
I really like the changes to early game drives as the jump from speed 2,000 to 12,500 is far too extreme. Cool.

What I'd suggest reconsidering is the late game, where I consider default speeds to be far too slow. It's often a mop-up operation, faster speeds would help speed-up the late game. So I would prefer more than default speed, not less ... at least once you get to Tech Level 5 and above.

Also, once Gerax is available, I'm finding in the AI Improvement Mod that there is little incentive to focus early on Hyperdrive research, as other areas provide more significant benefits. This may change if there was more of a range in Hyperdrive speeds. It always struck me how limited the change was from Tier 1 to Tier 7 ...

ORIGINAL: lurchi
Oh, don't worry. There will be more and higher speed drives in Research Reloaded. Also a new one with extremely high speed. The drive tree will be completely redone like the rest of the research.

While lurchi has this in hand for Research Reloaded, I'm currently testing my own interim changes that combine slower Gerax Hyperdrives with increased speeds from Tier 5 and above.

If anybody objects to this in the next release please let me know real quick because I really like what I'm seeing ...

ORIGINAL: Blackstork
Hey mate, great job, but i been trying to understand what are the files that relate only to your mod - since you provided full theme i would like to separate files that do changes in order to make some merging experiements/pre-integration tryouts

Is that all racial txt files, all templates, all policies, and components files? Do i miss something?

ORIGINAL: Sithuk
+1

Hi Icemania, I'm looking forward to the tweaks to the hyperdrives. I think on higher research cost games there is an issue with the over-dominance of the pirates in the pre-warp era, which hampers the AI empires as they can't deal with the pirates as effectively as the human player. I'll be interested to see the results of your tests.

What (other) improvements do you foresee for the AI by the hyperdrive tweaks?

ORIGINAL: Icemania

ORIGINAL: Tanaka
Small request would it be possible to only include only the files from Extended that you modified and not all the files as I am using a modified Extended version of my own and it makes it hard to figure out which files I need to replace and which files I don't. [8D]

The files changed as part of the AI Improvement Mod are:
1. Everything in the "designTemplates", "Policy" and "races" folders
2. components.txt
3. research.txt

I would prefer the theme is used so I can focus my community support on that theme, rather than get caught up in problems that are unrelated to this Mod.