Half the fun is fixing a problem and knowing why the solution works, though.

I've concluded that, like the Terrans and Altarians, the Torian tech tree does not lend itself to sensible advancement and needs restructuring.  Giving the AI some constraints in what tech it can choose in the early game means that it will always develop the technologies which are essential.

I have a question,

So this mod will fix alot of AI issues in the game (like the fact that the Alterians never building a sizeable fleet and getting wipe out), does it?

And is the newest patch required?

The AI itself is not changed by the mod.  But because the AI looks at things like tech cost, category and AI value when choosing what to research, having different values helps it quite a bit.  If Space Weapons isn't categorised as Military, the AI will effectively hit a research roadblock and not be able to develop weapons until it's way too late.

It's difficult to say if it will work in an earlier version of Twilight, I've only tested it with 2.03.

I'm fairly sure I've got the Torian tech tree working.  Well, working better than it was.

I can't really do much about their tendency to research all the weapons trees, so I've made Beam Weapons their primary weapon tree, and moved Missile Weapons and Mass Drivers so that they require the new Advanced Space Militarisation technology.

The lines leading from Xeno Factory Construction and Fusion Plants have been moved so that they require the new Advanced Manufacturing technology, which in turn requires Advanced Space Militarisation.

Schools have been scrapped in favour of a new super project, LGM Inc Labs.  This will give the Torians one fairly good research building just like the Terrans and Altarians, but they'll be unable to build any more research buildings until they research to Universities.  In the early game there is not a huge need for labs, so this actually works out pretty well.

The Cultural Enlightenment (Entertainment for Torians) line has been more heavily emphasised, so Torians will actually build Healing Pools and later stuff.

The Xeno Economics line has been more heavily emphasised so that the Torians build plenty of economic buildings.

I'm going to do another test run and then post a new update if it works.

Okay, see first post for version 3C.  It should help the Torians out a bit and they should develop heavy fighters and frigates in a decent timeframe.

The game that I'm playing now, the Torians did start out well, and they did have a good military going.  However they kinda gave up on developing new weapons after Particle Beams, while the Altarians and Terrans rolled out Plasma Weapons at a fearsome pace.  Some work still to be done, I think.

MarvinKosh if you need someone to playtest this for you then i would be happy to assist as i am not working at the moment and have time on my hands

Either pm me or email to marty.wraight(at)gmail.com.

Great mod!

That would be great.  If you grab the latest version up top you should be all set, I haven't made any changes yet although as I said I am planning to revisit the Torian tech tree and make them more interested in weapons tech.

My current game setup is a huge galaxy versus Terrans, Yor, Altarians and Torians, with Very Slow tech speed.  You can scale it down or up if you like but any extra races you pick should use their tech trees if you want to test out how well they do.  You can optionally throw in the Thalans if you like, their tech tree has been modded but not to the extent that the others have.  You can play on Normal tech speed if you like, see if it's any different than what you're used to.

I would love to get round to all the races at some point but I have to focus on one at a time.

Will d/l today and start testing for you

Oh yeah, I've added a little more flavour text for particle beams in the next version.  Not strictly necessary, but it annoyed me.  Here's a preview:

Particle beams are superior to laser weapons.  The abundant energies of hyper fusion makes very powerful magnets possible, both to accelerate particles to high speeds in a short distance and to steer them onto the target.  It is possible for our enemies to use magnets to deflect our particle beam, but we can make it more difficult by firing the particles at a higher velocity.

(Particle Beams II)

By producing several smaller streams of particles which are collimated together right before the firing aperture, we can reduce the the space needed to mount the particle beam on the ship without decreasing the weapon's performance in combat.

(Particle Beams III)

We've further reduced the space requirements for the particle beam by using a new type of energy conduit to power the magnets.  That's the limit of what we can do with the current design, but we have some new ideas for beam weapons that you may be interested in.

There seems to be a problem with your 3b, When I go to build and improvement, I can only qeue one Improvement per tile. As soon as I place the improvement, say a factory, it disapears permanently from the build list. What is the problem?

If you mean the basic factories and labs, as I said above, they've been turned into Super Projects.  That means you only get one of them, and you need to research more technologies to unlock more buildings.

However at the start those are quite powerful buildings to have, on the right planet.

So, I have noticed an interesting problem with the AI.

When it is at the bottom of the heap in terms of military power it will research techs that help to improve military power.  However, when it shoots past the other AIs and even the human player and becomes the dominant military power, it does less research into military tech, and you have to actually surpass its military might in order to get it to keep up with the Joneses.

Now don't get me wrong, a low-tech approach to war is great when your opponents have very little military power, but when they design ships with defences against your weapons, it doesn't matter how fast you can churn out low-tech ships, most of your firepower is going to be wasted.  Even worse, when those ships survive combat and their crews become more experienced, they become tougher to kill.

What this means is that smaller empires tend to research weapons technology too much, never able to match the military might of the aggressive neighbours because of lack of money, lack of manufacturing capability, and a lack of population base to fill troop transports and start invading someone's brains out.  The bigger empires as I've said tend to concern themselves with military tech only when they become number two.

I suspect that I need to first of all make early colony rushes less profitable.  For example, I could set the food capacity of the new colony improvement to say, 2bn instead of 8bn.  I don't actually know how the AI will deal with that, but I suspect that if it keeps trying to colony rush with only 2bn max per planet it will get eaten alive by maintenance costs and have to stop because it has no money.  I think that human players will find that they need to beeline for farming improvements to get growth going.

Hopefully this will result in more evenly-matched empires.  Anyway, it'll need testing, a lot of testing.

I've been considering the colony rush problem myself.  Also, one way of at least semi-balancing out the issue of ship firepower is to make each race an expert in only one attack/defense pairing in the tech tree.  Lots of relatively cheap techs of one pairing, with much fewer and more expensive techs for the other two combos.  That should help alleviate some of the issue of an empire getting ahead just for packing on tons of defense because of the research gap from military power.  Their more primitive ships should still be able to give as good as they get.

I'm not sure how the AI would respond to a "specialist" setup like that though either.

I think the reduced colony food bonus is also a good idea because of the "waste" of food tiles due to the population's morale cap.  Anything over 20 or 22 billion drops morale in the toilet?  That means a 300% food tile is pretty much useless unless you put a lesser farm in it, which makes researching the full tech less effective.  My own answer to this so far has been to have certain improvements "eat" a point of food just for existing.  It's a representation of the segment of the population that needs to work that improvement rather than in agriculture, thus reducing the maximum sustainable population.  Either way, the bonuses that each level of farm provides need to be reworked anyway for that same reason, food bonus tiles are just too often wasted.

Well, I gave the colony food reduction a go.  It does make things more even, but many planets never get a farm.  Updated farming technology never seems to come along which means that where farms are built, they are the horrible basic tile-inefficient farms.

I suppose I could try upping the maintenance cost.  I'm fresh out of ideas to get the AI to buckle down and research properly though.  Every time I make a change it seems to throw the rest of the tree out of whack, and then there's those time-intensive techs that the AI insists on researching even though there are far better things to do first.  I have the feeling I can't specify a negative AI value.

I guess maybe the AIs themselves really are flawed.  I genuinely thought they were fine and it was just the AI values of techs and structures etc that were the problem.  Bummer.

I have had some success with a new approach.

What I've done is gate a number of the high-end technologies behind several 'Technology Advancement' techs which have a fairly high TP cost.  The cost is drawn from those technologies which have it as a pre-requisite (so they actually get a 20% discount each) so in essence it's just shifting TPs around.  However, because of the high cost, the AI should and does ignore it until it has exhausted many of the technologies available to it.

Going to need to test it out a bit more.

Gatekeeper techs, hmm?  Interesting idea.  Maybe I'll investigate that.  But does that have much effect on how they develop their planets?

Not really.  Although for example, they aren't going to be rolling out the wince-inducingly expensive Industrial Sectors any time soon.  Ideally the AI should just build lots of Advanced Market Centres or Trade Centres, it doesn't have the revenue to support anything else if it does a regular old colony rush.

I may actually make another gate to give it plenty of time to get those built, but first I have to see if the ones I just introduced do get researched when there's enough research output going.  I don't want to stonewall progress completely, after all.

I've posted Version 4, so if you like you can try out the changes I mentioned.

One of the minor changes is a modified sound effect for the Space Cannon.  It gets used for a few of the early railguns as well.  What I did was to borrow the first 0.3s of the Mass Driver firing sound, and blend that in to the original sound.  If you like the original better, you can delete the battle_mini_attack.wav file from the sfx folder of the mod with no ill-effect.

Keep getting stuck in never-ending dialog loops with Ctrl-Z cheat

Worked on the Altarian and Torian tech trees this morning.  I've applied the same sort of gating there as I did in the Terran tech tree, and I'm going to see how it goes.

Also, I have come up with a scenario file that starts the races with most of the techs before the first gate, like the Accelerated Start scenario but without all the early weapons.

Bumping so that this can be more widely seen - I'm using my own mod, but any of these seem to make the game far more interesting and balanced.

I've done some more modification to the Torians, but it's not turning out too great for them.  See usually, they get their cheap mines built and get right to work rushing lots of colony ships out there.  I wanted to restrain them somewhat by making those mines a bit less productive and giving them the option to upgrade after researching Xeno Industrial Adaptation (it's their version of Xeno Industrial Theory) but as you can guess, they don't really produce that big rush of colony ships any more, in fact they struggle to net their fair share of colonies.  I'm going to play a few more games on auto and see if that's always the case, but it seems I might have to do some tweaking.