This is full test-game #2 using the v1.1 computer AI.  A lot of changes have been made that will affect game play. The purpose of this journal entry is to determine what works and doesn't work and what areas still need to be improved.

You WILL see bugs in this as it's our internal beta.

Things that have been changed in the computer AI and game:

• I am making use of the "No Tech Trade" option to see how well the new computer AIs deal with that.
• The computer AI is much more sophisticated than previously about researching technologies. But that sophistication comes possible "bugs".
• The computer AI is much more sophisticated on ship design with regards to deciding whether to put speed or range on its ships.
• The computer AI is much better at building up its planets.
• Because social production is funneled to military projects rather than wasted, the AI has to cope with that new reality.
• Logistics have been changed such that the advantage of larger ships is lessened.
• The AI now knows how to upgrade its ships
• The AI focuses more on fewer but better ships.
• The AI will build defenders that have no weapons to act as an obstacle to early game "rushes"
• The AI has been updated to deal with the new economic system (cleaner, more straight forward).
• The AI builds starbases much more intelligently. MUCH MUCH.
• The AI (in theory) will go after resource starbases (we'll see).
• The AI will patrol their planets rather than having their fleets be all in one spot.

So here's my game setup.  A large galaxy, uncommon everything. Playing against the Drengin, Humans, Torians, and Altarians.

The galaxy was set up like this.  I was playing again as the Dominion.  The Dominion with the Stardock logo was in a very good starting position.  The Terrans were in the middle.  How the galaxy would proceed would be interesting.

All computer players set to intelligent (tough) which means they're playing at the same level as I am.  I will take advantage of my knowledge of the AI and immediately raise my taxes so I can outspend them right away.

First thing I'm going to do is build a faster colony ship:

Using the new ship design features, I rotate some of my  new parts around in interesting ways. In the options menu, I can control how much I can rotate things (i.e. free form all the way up to 90 degree intervals).

I then send my ships out. One of the new features in 1.1 is that I can see the destinations of selected ships as animated lines:

Meanwhile, population growth being one of the things that's been changed in 1.1 requires me to worry more about my approval rating. Population doesn't grow nearly as fast anymore so the goal now is to make sure you keep them happy to make them repopulate faster and don't colonize too fast or else you'll end up with a crippled economy. So colony rushing will have to be considered carefully. I tried the standard colony rush last night and ruined myself because it took me too long to repopulate my planets and by then the AI had had plenty of time to build up and do bad things to me.

I was also sending out constructors around to look for things.  Now on Constructors you can see what area they will affect when they become starbases.

It's the economy, human!

By the start of 2227, the Altarians and myself have expanded our borders considerably.  It's a dead-heat in terms of economics though the humans amazingly have a slight edge.  They have a particular edge in research which is very worrisome.

It was time to adjust my spending to be more research oriented:

The updated domestic policy screen displays how many resources I'm getting from bonuses. What's nice about bonus production is that I only pay for half.  So here I'm getting 11bc worth of bonus production that I'm paying for but there's another 11bc that's off the books.

Let's look at Haven for instance:

I'm doing 46 units of research. 

Let's look at my summary screen:

There's a bug next to one of the Xeno labs. 1.1 will now display how much extra production you get from a special tile. So my research capacity is really 38 + 21 = 59.

My spend rate is 100%.  That is, I'm putting all my people to work. And 60% of my work force (from the previous domestic policy screenshot) are doing research.  So 60% of 59 is 35 research.  But I'm doing 46 research.  So how did that happen? Why am I doing 46 research even though I'm only using 60% of my research capacity?

Well that's where my research ability comes in -- I picked that at the start.  The Dominion gets a 30% Research Ability.

So that base 35 research then gets multiplied by 1.3.  That takes me to 45 research.  10 bonus research. 5 of that is free and the other 5 I have to pay for. 

But I'm doing 46. Where's that last one coming from?

On details I can see that my starbase is add +3 (and that's not clear enough so changing it to say Production/Research) as Starbases in 1.1 do both research and production bonuses.

If this confuses you, don't worry about it. First, we're going to try to add some tool tips that will actually explain what I just explained when you mouse over that number in the colony management screen. And secondly, it's just to let you know that the numbers now cleanly make sense. Those abilities you get at the beginning for social, military, and research production are taken into account at face value.

It's the military's time to shine

Using the new rotational features (the 3 dials) I rotated the wings so that they're arced up.  The 3 little buttons next to the space display are not hooked up yet but will let you toggle what components are displayed.

The Terran Alliance would be the first target. I wasn't about to let them just sit there and research doom weapons while I messed around.

The real question is, are the Terrans inviting quick defeat? They're way too defenseless compared to others. I'm the brown civilization (The Dominion) and if I have a bigger military then that's sad because I just have a few fire hawks.

Let's take a look at the source code:

The Terran Alliance AI module (pet peeve: When someone says "The AI in this game suxors" or whatever it means they've not played the game very much in all likelyhood. There is no single AI in the game. Each civilization has its own AI module which has its own C++ code. The Terran Alliance code here looks very different from the Drengin's. It's not just a bunch of different values.).

Anywho... The ulMyMilitaryRating = 48 means that its Military Quotient is only 48. 100 is average.  It's basically worthless at anything less than 75 (think of a real IQ test, 100 is normal, anything less than 75 is "special".  The Terran Alliance is basically drooling).  So I'm going to tweak this so that they don't let themselves become such an obvious target.

The Terrans are staying out of war thanks to their high diplomacy which gives them +1 right now in relations and they're getting +3 from their trade (I know that because I looked in the debugger because I wanted to know why they aren't being squashed -- bug or by design?).  They're also pretty far away from other civilizations and it's only 2228.

Dominion Options

For the past year, my civilization's been experience an economic boom. So has everyone else.  And so I have tons of money. But then again, so does everyone else.  I'm using this money to build up my infrastructure as fast as I can.

The Terrans clearly had some ideas on what their strategy was. Look at that, 4 economic starbases in their home sector.  All producing extra production for Earth and Mars and all heavily defended. The Terrans (And other AI) had gotten much better about building starbases.

So my strategy is to build up a military starbase and take out the Terrans quickly.

My high influence has impressed the Drengin.  Military isn't the only way to win after all.

Once I remove the pesky humans, I will use my vast culture to take the rest of the galaxy. Whoahaha!

I've been building up as well incidentally.

My two star bases are parked right next to each other. Oh, how is that? Because under 1.1 the humans and the AI live in harmony under the same rules -- 4 starbases (of your race) per sector placed where ever you want.

The Vigilant class ships have come on-line.  They will spearhead my Terran assault.  Stupid Earth humans.

It was about time for them to die now.  The key to a good surprise attack is..well surprise. This sort of thing only works on maps where a side only has a couple of planets tied together. People who "Beat" the AI tend to play on maps where each side maybe has 1 or 2 planets.  It makes it a lot easier to do a sneak attack like this.

I almost feel sorry for the Earth humans.  They like me. 

It's also time to take the path to the darkside.

And so I prepare for attack...

And yet they're oblivious.  Time to look at the code again..

Using new APIs since 1.0X, I can now look at ships relative distance away in terms of striking distance, galaxy size, and how far away they are from their homes relative to me.

Time to put in some changes...

(reload)

Better. But too late for this game.

Let the dogs of war run!

Higher logistics values in 1.1 means bigger fighter battles! W00t! The Terrans have no chance. Not even one ship lost.

My one medium ship towers over the others.

Meanwhile, the Altarians are not amused by my influencer bases. Sure, maybe, maybe I'm doing something deliberately, but no court could prove that right? Isn't it cute though? The Altarians are building their own influencer starbases to try to counter mine.

With the Terrans crushed, there's no much left to do except...

Accept their surrender.

With that, it's now time to culturally dominate the galaxy.

The United Planets has put a major damper on me though...

My cultural domination strategy involves putting a lot of modules on starbases.  I may have to leave the United Planets.

The Torians and the isolated Altarian world would be the first victims of my cultural conquest.  To effectively do this without going nuts, I put some rally points for my constructors to go to as they're built:

The economic boom continues into year 4.  Fantastic.

Culture of Dominion

The economic boom that's lasted 4 years has finally come to an end.  Now I'm in deficit spending. But with 20,500bc in the treasury, I can go quite awhile with my deficit spending.

The key for an influence victory is going down the cultural domination path on the tech tree.  The technology tree of Galactic Civilizations II isn't supposed to be like the traditional technology tree. It's more of a technology toolbox. It's supposed to be "big" because there's a lot of options, a lot of paths to take.

Part of the victory strategy here also involves trade. I need trade to keep them happy with me even as I assimilate them into my culture. The aliens are perfectly aware of what's happening. They are very sensitive to cultural conquest strategies (they're very easy to spot). However, they are also designed to play as a civilization and not as a strategy gamer -- like in the real world, you can culturally assimilate a culture if you are making the population happy and wealthy enough through trade.  Something to think about next time you're having that McDonalds hamburger while drinking a Code, wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt of some pop culture icon/product/company as you walk with your Nike shoes.

Seriously though, this is one of those "single player" advantages I'd say. In a multiplayer game, this sort of thing would never work because a human player would immediately go to war and you could simply never have a cultural domination path that involves these starbases unless you had immense military power to back it up.

Like I said, the AI isn't stupid, it knows what I'm doing. It's a question of whether I'm going to have enough money in trade to bribe them from doing something. The higher the difficulty, the more $$$ I have to have.  The Torians monitor my progress carefully.

One of the big changes in 1.1 for Influence strategies is that you no longer have to all the way up the line with the piddly influence modules. If you get Cultural Domination, you can start with the big modules right away now which makes it a lot cheaper to do this strategy and a lot less tedious.

Too easy? We'll probably be tweaking these values. But with 4 modules I got 180% cultural bonus.

But like I said, the other civs are sensitive to this.

The Altarian War

This would be more of a challenge than the Terrans were. But I have the advantage, I have both my planets and the Terran's 3 planets.  Our militaries are pretty similar.

The Altarians were removing my cultural influence the really old fashioned way.

Quality vs. Quantity. Except...except...the Altarians were the ones with the quality now. Oh that's right, people on the forums complained that the AI wasn't good enough. So they now focus on making better quality ships. Nasty. Tough. Evil. Ships.

Wish I was running at higher resolution for this, everything seems so tiny at 1024x768.

As Joseph Stalin said, quantity has a quality of its own.  Those 3 Altarian fighters might be great. But I've got 9 of mine and that's enough to end that conversation.

It's a tough war though. Lots of battles, lots of damage to both sides. The AI being better at targeting starbases and such is more effective than I'd like. I really rely on starbases like most other experienced players.

My big concern is protecting my morale resource mining starbase:

3 Altarian fleets have cleared out my defenses and are heading to it. It's providing a 20% bonus to my morale which lets me keep a very high tax rate.

Unfortunately, I lose it and my morale jumps way down.  What's ironic is that the Altarians have, in my opinion, the weakest of the AI modules. They've done decently here but I can see some of their weaknesses coming up that I'm correcting as I play.  The main one being that the Altarians don't worry about logistics very much which is hampering their style.

And so what I couldn't get by influence I take by force.

Not escaping notice is a Drengin scout ship that is monitoring things and keeping an eye out to see if those resources that were..liberated in battle are still ripe for constructors.

They also have built a little starbase out there. Some people on the forums have said "Why do they do that? That's stupid?" Because the AI doesn't cheat, it has to build starbases just like the player to extend its range. It wants those galactic resources, therefore it needs to plant a starbase at the edge of its range to make it so that it can get constructors to those resources.  If there are any AI developers reading this, they can tell you that it's non-trivial to write something that plans several moves ahead -- formulates a strategy. Especially in a game where the turn button goes by in less than a second. There's no "please wait" dialog.  But yea, that's why you see starbases on their own. The AI is trying to expand its range.

But the Drengin now have other problems.

And the Altarians want peace..

No.

Well, okay, since I've finished cleaning the area of your starbases, but it's gonna cost you.

I'm doing pretty good at this point. I'm definitely going to win and the AI has learned a lot of new tricks and I've added a bunch of new ones from this game.  If the Altarians had had better logistics, they would have been a real force to reckon with.  If the Terrans had not let themselves be so obviously vulnerable and then blind to my attack, they would have done a lot better too.

And there's a lot of other ideas that I can add in the future as time permits.

Cultural Inevitability.

The Drengin surprisingly have defeated the Torians. Well, that's not really that surprising, the Drengin have the best AI module right now in this cirumcstance. But still very surprising that they made up the difference.

But my culture has spread far and wide at this point. And there's nothing anyone can do about it.

The Drengin have the military power to put up a fight. And if the Drengin and the Altarians teamed up, they could probably defeat me. But they won't and I'll tell you why: The Dominion is evil. The Drengin are evil.  The Altarians are good.

This is where playing against the computer can be more fun.  The Drengin don't care if I win culturally.  The Altarians care a lot. In the report screen the Drengin don't have my influence as a negative. The Altarians do.

I do design a couple of new ships. I'm somewhat disappointed with the Drengin designs though.

Something I'll have to work on tonight is make the Drengin and other players focus more on what technologies they need rather than scatter shot it.  The other issue is they haven't focused enough on logistics. Logistics matter.  If you can't build large fleets whether they be fighters or large ships, you're going to have problems.  You can get away with lower logistics if you have big hulls since bigger ships will take out a lot of smaller ships, but the AI is not aggressive enough in this area.

I have a pretty lethal fighter now too. The F-20 Sky Shark:

I used the new ship designer tools to turn around those wings. They look pretty cool I think. My large ship, the Orion, is also quite lethal.

My fighter uses 2 logistics points and does 10 attack and has 6 hit points.  My capital ship uses 6 logistics and has 30 attack, 6 defense and 28hp.  Even though it has 3 times the logistics cost, it does 3 times the attack, has defense, and over 4 times as many hit points. 

The Altarians have been completely consumed by my culture and the galaxy is just about mine.

Influence victory!

So what happened? How did I win? Where did the AI go wrong?

1. The Terran Alliance was too weak for too long. It allowed me to make a surgical attack that wiped them out.
2. The Terran Alliance was oblivious to my build up until it was too late.
3. The Altarians, who could have done something, were not researching logistics technologies enough
4. The Altarians also didn't improve their ship sizes.
5. The Drengin, might have been able to do something but got a bad start and by the time they got a better start, they were too far behind.
6. The Drengin squandred research points on scatter gun researching.

These 6 items I've implemented.  I've also adjusted the logistics costs on ships so that large is 6, huge is 8. Logistics techs have gone up as well so we'll see bigger fleets all around.