The trouble with the AI is that the racial tech trees were rushed to the finish line.  The categories show up wrong in the editors and that seems to be reflected in the game too.  Modded tech trees help to correct bad AI decision-making by telling it that a tech will help it to improve the PQ of a planet, for example.

There are some AI personalities that don't fill out their planets with economic structures.  Again, easy fixed.

Playing modded tech tree and modded AI personalities ToA is quite a bit more satisfying than vanilla ToA, in my opinion.  It's not perfect but it's better.

And yes, if you want the full experience you need to crank the difficulty up to at least Tough.  Don't randomise the opponent intelligence.  I think this unfortunately means you can't pick random opponents, but don't worry about it, there's enough that happens differently each game that knowing who your opponents are ahead of time is not that much of an issue.

Yeah well I didn't create a mod for people who were thinking about getting ToA, I made it because I'd already got it and didn't want it to suck so badly.  And if people who already have the Ultimate Edition want to give ToA a try, there's nothing to be lost by trying it with the mod installed.

But hey, I agree and I have said that a patch is really the only sure fix.

Okay you know what irks me, is that yes, people have been buying the Ultimate Edition recently, and they're not getting their money's worth.

As cool as it is to go blow up some stars, if you're going to play vanilla (and a lot of people are not even going to give the modding section of the forums a glance) you might as well play DA, because vanilla ToA is like a Vorlon planet destroyer without the destruction beam installed.

You want to go take it for a spin, but you know you'll feel sad when you push the big red button and nothing happens.

Okay you know what else irks me is that Fallen Enchantree now has a modding library.  What do we get?  A quasarnaut if we're lucky.

The GC2 mod database has been devoid of any new entries for years now.  I know, it's crazy right?  I have to link to the mod on my own site.  I'm actually surprised that nobody has said, 'Dude where's the mod in the database, I don't see it.'

That said, might as well be invisible posting my mod in the modding section of the forums.  I've got no advertising, no review of the mod in the news posts, not that many people jumping onto the topic and yelling in caps THIS IS GREAT.  There are some people downloading the mod, usually the same month I throw an update out there.  But you know, we're talking double digits, and I don't mean eighties or nineties.

I actually thought you know, that modding the game, doing all the testing, playing the game to get a feel for what it's like, all that was the hard part.

No, it's getting people to play it.

What you have to understand is that I don't have style, I don't have a cool name or recognition like some of the other modders, I just sort of got into it because I noticed a few things that didn't seem right.

Tolmekian would tell you pretty much the same thing, and his mod is way cooler, like his avatar.

Well they're both tech tree mods so you kinda have to use one or the other.  They also both alter the raceconfig file so you may need to hit Clear when customising your opponents for the mod to take effect properly.

Try them both (one after the other obviously) see which one you like better.

They aren't as challenging as they should be, though.  I'll tell you how bad it was, I had got all the way up to Phasors and the AI was building frigates maxed out with... wait for it... shields.  No weapons, just a hull jam-packed full of shields.

Now it's a different story if I (or one of the other races) were to develop missle weapons, since the faulty tech trees effectively say 'If we need defences against missile weapons, research Space Weapons.'  What?  Just... what?

You can't rely on the player (or the other races) to pick missile weapons every time though.  And this is just one example of how the unmodded tech trees are broken.  There are piles more.  What do you think has kept me busy working on a mod for two years?

There are ultimate weapons, but they take a bit longer to research than before and they've been scaled up in terms of both damage and space required.  The reasoning behind that was that the AI was just going to use its miniaturisation tech to mount them on fighters.  Some of the high-end non-ultimate weapons have been scaled up as well.

There are military-assist weapons for military starbases but the number of modules have been cut back.  Unfortunately, the number of modules that the AI can use is limited (to about a hundred) and I had to make cutbacks somewhere.  You can still do a military starbase strategy but not to nearly the same degree as before.

A lot of tweaks and personal preferences come about as a result of annoyances with the original tech tree.  It's too easy for both human and AI player to race up to ultimate weapons.  We have no choice but to cut the starbase modules down so that the useful ones fall within the 100 limit.

I wish it were Stardock fixing the tech trees and sorting the AI out and removing such an arbitrary limitation but they're not.  Or at least not that we've heard.

So, with mods (MarvinKosh's or Tolmekian's, etc.), is the AI in ToA now on par with DA?

Come on Stardock; we need a 2.05 patch to fix these tech tree issues.

Still, I hope we get an official fix. Stardock can just observe what was changed in the mods, and implement their own fix that way - without borrowing any code.