Yeah, with the bugs fixed (well as far as we're able to) the AI is very challenging on what used to be a difficulty level which didn't seem challenging enough.

There are definitely a few bugs in the DA tech trees.  One well known one is the MCC.  Two others I have found are that one of the "Barriers" techs is worse than the one before it and one of the higher weapons (can't remember which one) is completely screwed up (I rarely use that weapon tree, beam, I think, but IIRC you have to research it to get to the next one but you can't put it on a ship).

In DA Suicidal, the old hands had it down.  There are some odd wrinkles possible in naming things like your home system or homeworld that give you an unexpected edge, for example.  I discovered one such independently, but rarely use it.  I win at Suicidal by rejecting bad setups (homeworlds with no useful bonus tiles, for example) and by making sure to bribe the AIs into multiple wars before they declare war on me.  Meanwhile, I rush to get Trade and trade it to everyone I meet.  Once the AIs get into wars, suddenly I am the one of only ones they are trading with so they delay declaring war on me a bit extra.  That and being careful to do a good colony rush yet not over-extend are the basic elements.

I tried going down a notch in difficulty, but the games seemed boringly easy by comparison, so I went back to Suicidal.

You can get it via Steam.  I got the Ultimate Edition for 20 bucks.  I think it's cheaper now.  

In fact I highly recommend it.  

If those posts were to me, my view on TA is that if the company does not care to support the product , then I do not care enough to spend money to buy it.

DA was supported until all but a couple bugs were fixed, not so for TA.

If TA received a new patch fixing the known bugs so that I did not have to try to use a mod to make it playable at the fun level, than I would buy it.  Until then, I will not.

I agree with LTjim, it's not worth the £14.99 just to get the last expansion.  It's only worth it for new players because at least they can play DA if they find TA to be too much of a pushover.

If Stardock were still updating GC2 then it might be worth it, but that's not going to happen any time soon with all the development issues that have been cited.  Anyone who buys the Ultimate Edition is getting an unfinished product.

At least they're getting a finished manual. When TotA got released, the manual was just the one from the Gold Edition with a new cover.

Still, I wouldn't call TotA "unfinished". KotoR 2 was unfinished. SotS 2 was unfinished. TotA is just bug-ridden, unpolished, and unbalanced. This puts it more into the ballpark of NWN 2 or ToEE. Well, maybe not exactly ToEE, that was even more bug-ridden, but you get my drift.

Let me put it another way.  When the early adopters paid full price for each expansion they were getting a better deal than the folks who pick up the UE now, because if they found a bug that required a hardcode fix there was a chance of it being squished, as opposed to now.

Oh.  What bugs? 

I've noticed that some AIs like the Altarians and the Arcaens don't expand much.  The Drath and the Iconians suck too.  But that's balanced by the Torians, Krynn, Thalans, Terran, and sometimes the Korath.  They can be monsters depending on starting location.  

There's only a couple of AI personalities which work properly in TA with regard to expansion.

The Arceans are crippled by their speed penalty.  Super Warrior is a trait which requires fast ships - so that they can get into range and be the aggressor.

In the early part of the game any AI will attempt to overcome its problems by spamming improvements which are supposed to improve the deficient area - mainly production and research.  It also builds ships at every single colony.  Unfortunately by doing this it crashes its economy very early on, halting expansion prematurely.  Even worse than that, it will attempt to make up the deficit by raising taxes, but that actually slows their early population growth down to a crawl.

The early improvement spam is the reason why I cut many of the basic improvements in my mod, created some early Super Projects (can't spam those) and have the improvements unlock in an order which allows for a better economy to be established before all the maintenance and funding-hungry improvements get into play.  The AI still spams ships at any colony it has a starport on but because it has lower maintenance, it can get away with it.  In fact in most games they all do some serious colonising.

Because of some of the fixes to the tech trees, when I take a look to see what the AI is working on I'm hardly ever thinking 'Why the frell do you need to research that?' and I'm more like, 'Okay, that's going to be a problem for me.'

I've noticed this one at least:

Thalans have Lvl 3 Manufacturing matrices.  The best factories in the game.  They also have industrial theory and slave pits because you bribed them with it.    Guess what they do? They build the inferior industrial complexes and slave pits.  

 

Another benefit of bribery....

That's a diplocheese tactic though.  The AI can't upgrade those buildings without the necessary technology so it clogs up tiles with those low-yield factories and slave pits.

 

 

Oh, I absolutely agree with that. I just don't think, that the term "unfinished" is fitting. All the game mechanics are implemented. They may not properly work, due to bugs, or the AI may not be able to use some of them, but that is also the case for most games out there. If you apply the term here, then you would also need to call MoM, SMAX, and BG2 unfinished, for example.

Still, there is one area where I'm actually inclined to agree with the term. The last mission of the TotA campaign uses placeholder-text for the first contact greetings of the Krynn and Iconians. This was the case when I first played the campaign on release, and it was still case when I was fixing all the campaign-bugs a few month ago. It's not the only time this happened during the campaign, and it's also not limited to TotA. However, in all the other cases, those races just didn't have any texts assigned to them, and used the default ones from the sandbox instead. It didn't make much sense sometimes (allies treating you as if they just met you for the first time), but it was still better than this: "Iconian morality msg 0"!

I get that not everybody cares about campaigns, but how has this gone unnoticed for over five years? Heck, how did this even go past QA in the first place!?


Only due to the low maintenance cost. Which is pretty strange, considering that it is supposed to be higher than, or at least equal to, what the other races pay. The factory with the highest base output, however, is the Yor Ultimate Collective (13mp).


Not only that. It also makes no sense lore-wise. For the Drengin, even designing a machine to do slave-labour would be dis-honourable. If you got caught doing that, you would quickly find yourself working in the Slave Pits. If you are lucky, that is. As for the Thalan and Yor, why would they use something that they would regard as inferior technology or completely in-efficient, respectively? The Iconians, on the other hand, are entirely reliant on their robotic servants. I doubt, that they even know how to use a screwdriver.