RadarContact

Join Date 12/2011

Is there a concensus on settings that fix TA's eccentricities?

looking to make the game challengeing

I just bought Galciv 2 ultimate on steam after briefly playing the original years ago. After playing my first game I was quite disappointed by how little challenge the games broken AI gave me. After browsing the forums the problems seem to be common knowledge and well documented. Is there a post with a summery of game-play settings will make the game playable? I'm not looking for the latest mod or to edit game files I just want to play the game at its best.

My experience seems fairly common: My first game I was looking for a challenge so I set difficulty to masochistic. I chose to be Yor with Terran alterian Torian and Iconian assuming that the good races would ally against my evil one. I started in a small corner of a large galaxy with only a few low quality planets within range. 50 turns in the other empires were 10-30x larger then me with dozens of planets each except the Iconians never bother to colonize any planets at all. . 200 turns in I hadn't been attacked so I got tired of waiting. Unfortunately alterians built only transports so surrendered to terrans within 5 turns of declaring war. The terrens attacked the Torians whos fleet got crushed because most of their planets had no buildings. I then went in and took all the undefended planets because the Terrens didn't build any transports so couldn't conquer them. The Terrian economy then imploded for some reason so they sold most of their ships and stopped producing or researching anything.

Complete waste of 10 hours carefully building my small empire expecting a fight when all the AI were too broken to challenge me.

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Hi,

Short anwser: No there isn't.

Long Anwser:

There still isn't but there are some tricks.

Edit each race (in game) and set it's personality to Generic. The Generic AI Personality (AIP11) will continue to build up planets and do a decent job colonizing. AIP8 (e.g Human) also works well.

This will still leave a problem in the some tech trees where 'Space Weapons' is categorized as Point Defence (PD) and will only be researched if you or another AI developes Missles. This bug effects the Alterians, Drath, Terrans and Krox techtrees and can only be fixed by editing game files.

It is not terribly difficult to make a small mod to fix the techtrees using the techtree editor that shipped with ToA.

Good luck.

M.A.

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There are some great mods to help you out:

https://forums.galciv2.com/400674 and https://forums.galciv2.com/405819

These mods will turn those lame AI's to a real threat!

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qrtxian

Join Date 03/2010

+30

Agreed - I'm using a homebrew version of a mod like that, and it's made my game significantly more challenging.

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I've never understood why Stardock hasn't addressed this several year on-going problem?

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MarvinKosh

Join Date 08/2005

+87

As has been mentioned, GC2 uses an older compiler which is not supported under Windows 7. Migrating it to a newer compiler would take time, money and people. It's possible to run the older compiler in a virtual machine on Windows 7 with a bit of kajiggery, but that presents its own set of problems and still requires time, money and people.

Plus, even if you can fix the problems you have to test to see if you haven't just gone and introduced a whole new set of problems. If I had even just five testers playing games with the latest mod and sending back useful information, I could spend more time actually tweaking tech trees and improvements and so on.

Put simply, when the AI makes a bad decision about which tech to go for (and deciding whether it is bad can be somewhat tricky) I have to look at why it valued that tech wrongly. Then I have to figure out a way that it will still pursue that tech, but not before some other tech. Then I have to rinse and repeat. Now it is possible to accelerate things by letting the AI play against itself, but after a certain number of turns the interface locks up with several screens trying to open at once, and it's impossible to break into the turn cycling and examine the AI's current research project. Plus, the AIs do not experience the same pressures with no human player in the game. I play the best I can, without too much accelerating of turns, to expose the weakness in their strategy, and then fix it.

I don't know why Stardock hasn't given us an inkling about their plans for GC2, but the game's got plenty life left in it yet, as long as people don't give up on it entirely.

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Thanks everyone I'll give those ideas a try.

I was really hoping for a sticky like some other abandon ware games have along the lines of,

Step 1: only play VS races A,B,C.

Step 2: Use game settings X Y Z

Step 3: Install this collection of mod fixes.

Step 4: Enjoy

I'm sure the thousands of new players coming from steam would appreciate it, but I guess its unlikely since this is an official forum.

I'm amazed that there are so many people still playing and supporting a game that was abandoned in an unplayable state so many years ago. You're the only reason I'm giving it a 2nd chance rather then just loading up Civ 4.

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MarvinKosh

Join Date 08/2005

+87

Twilight of the Arnor is only three and a half years old, and it has been updated since release, though.

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TotA comletely took the GalCiv fun away from me. Problem was I did not play Dark Avatar when it was released but instead got an extensions pack. Needless to say I wanted to play Twilight then, as it promised to be the best GalCivII experience with all those amazing features and several A.I. personalities.

TotA unfortunately turned out to be unfinished in my opinion. The new features somehow just felt like randomly added checklist features lacking a fair amount of balancing and we all know that most A.I. personalities are completely or mostly broken. TotA was a huge disappointment and I had no motivation left playing the "outdated" Dark Avatar" instead but completely left GalCiv behind.

Now with the recent Steam release I was prety sure Stardock would have fixed the bugs before risking some bad reputation in front of the huge Steam community. Well, didn't happen, they hust put TotA 2.03 into Steam. However I gave Dark Avatar another shot and ignoring what TotA promised but never became, GalCivII Dark Avatar on its own IMHO is just one of the best 4x games ever.

I agree a sticky for new players would have been helpful (as it would have been three years ago), telling them how to work around the worst annoyances or even suggesting to give Dark Avatar a fair chance and completely forget about TotA.

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I agree with puntarenas and still play DA.

I never bought TA, as the problems made the game quite unappealing.

However, if they fixed the game, I would buy it. I still would, but they still haven't.

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qrtxian

Join Date 03/2010

+30

For the record, I believe that the new features of TA, when combined with one of these mod fixes, make the game worth playing regardless of the bugs in the raw product. The AIs that do work are noticeably improved, for one thing.

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MarvinKosh

Join Date 08/2005

+87

Well any game where the Drengin start going on a rampage instead of hiding in the corner drooling is a big improvement.

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Well qrtxian and MarvinKosh, you both are true heroes of TotA community mod fixes to me. You spent a lot of time in analyzing the flaws and worked around them as far as things could be fixed without source code access, probably setting TotA in a mostly playable and enjoyable state as a result.

Although I for one don't feel like playing "workaround mods", I really hope Stardock will finally use your findings for balancing techtrees while fixing the broken A.I. personalities. TotA could have been a milestone of its genre, but for now it is a broken unfinished piece of crap to me and I will stick with DA.

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qrtxian

Join Date 03/2010

+30

Well, it's your choice, but at least with my personal modifications, I'd say that the game is entirely playable, if that's your concern. Like MarvinKosh, I keep tweaking to make things more challenging, but right now it's pretty much equal to DA (I play both, though the original GalCiv II is now fairly neglected on my part).

In point of fact, the original game itself was playable - it was just that only some of the races would ever pose a threat, and even they wouldn't really use their tech trees. What the mods do is open up those tech trees and make it so every race can pose a threat, though some still tend to have an edge. I've seen everything in the AIs from the Drengin going on a rampage to godlike Terrans (literally, they won a tech victory) to the Iconians defeating me - admittedly in a test game where I wasn't trying too hard, but still. So if you have a personal dislike to workaround mods, that's fine, but they do produce a game that can stand alongside DA if that's what you want.

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I must admit I was a bit pigheaded. Because DA metaverse login is broken for me at the moment (I hope support can sort it out, tried all the known workarounds afaik) I gave MarvinKosh's Space Weapons Fix Mod a try. With that TotA was a lot of fun and I had some great games. The A.I. did well, even the evil players had their share before Terrans, Altarians or Torians began to dominate.

I have one more game running and after that I am looking forward for Tolmekian's TotA TechTree Fix v2 release. Sounds interesting what he did to the weapon trees and defences to work around some balancing problems. It is good to see there is still life in this great game's community, I am just badly missing Metaverse, so I think I will return to being pigheaded as soon as DA works for me again.

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Quoting dnzrx,

reply 2

There are some great mods to help you out:

https://forums.galciv2.com/400674 and https://forums.galciv2.com/405819

These mods will turn those lame AI's to a real threat!

That first one looks good. I'm probably gonna download that one once my current match is over. The second one you linked to...minor races that colonize scares me. It's hard enough competing with the major races over planets... I don't know if I want to download that one unless it can be turned off...

I just need to stick the mod in the mods folder, right? If I activate it mid-match, will it totally screw up the AIs?

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qrtxian

Join Date 03/2010

+30

Quoting Aegix_Drakan,

reply 15

The second one you linked to...minor races that colonize scares me. It's hard enough competing with the major races over planets... I don't know if I want to download that one unless it can be turned off...

I can't speak with certainty about Tolmekian's mod, but I know my own mod for colonizing minors doesn't make them into too serious a threat. And his latest version 2.0 comes in a "no minors" variety, though it does make some more changes.

Quoting Aegix_Drakan,

reply 15

If I activate it mid-match, will it totally screw up the AIs?

Actually, no - it won't effect them at all. You'll have to start a new game for the changes to go into effect.

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Thanks

Quoting qrtxian,

reply 16

Quoting Aegix_Drakan, reply 15The second one you linked to...minor races that colonize scares me. It's hard enough competing with the major races over planets... I don't know if I want to download that one unless it can be turned off...

I can't speak with certainty about Tolmekian's mod, but I know my own mod for colonizing minors doesn't make them into too serious a threat. And his latest version 2.0 comes in a "no minors" variety, though it does make some more changes.

Quoting Aegix_Drakan, reply 15If I activate it mid-match, will it totally screw up the AIs?

Actually, no - it won't effect them at all. You'll have to start a new game for the changes to go into effect.

Thanks!

And yeah, I'm realizing that I REALLY do need to apply that mod...I just ran into the altarians in my current game...and while they have some impressive planetary invasion tech...they don't have ANY weapons.... That's not acceptable.

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MarvinKosh

Join Date 08/2005

+87

Well that was the whole idea behind modding the tech tree.

I'll admit that with an early jump on Planetary Invasion, you could begin rolling out transports without escorts and take a sizeable chunk of galaxy before the AI has a chance to react. The thing is, it does not work very well for the AI. Not only does it not have an inkling that it's military might is superior (despite not having a single space cannon to fire with) such a move is easily anticipated by the human player and is very easily countered.

So by moving the Planetary Invasion techs (and a whole lot of other things for that matter) we make things a little bit fairer for the AI, giving it the ability to defend its worlds at least before it sets out to invade others.

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