The trick is balancing it.  I also wouldn't want the AI immediately bee-lining for every planet on the map.  But they should explore and expand.

That gives perfectly logical reasons why Ai wouldn't expand in certain circumstances.

I remember reading complaints that in GalCiv2 the evil races didn't expand - sounds as if this isn't an issue here.

I've started a couple of games on immense maps where I've noticed this problem both times. I thought the first occasion was due to the spiral galaxy; however, my second game is dispersed stars and same problem. In short, it appears to be caused when the AI is unable to adapt to a crappy starting area, likely caused by the fact I have both stars and habitable planets on rare settings.

Here is the configuration:

• 16 races - 8 original and 8 copies of the originals
• Each original race starts out allied with their copy (8 teams total)
• Challenging
• Immense
• Rare Stars
• Rare habitable planets

Here are the faction ratings and number of systems 103 turns into the game:

• Iridium 1 (me) - 54 with 4 systems
• Iridium 2 (ally) - 33 with 1 system
• Altarians 1 - 125 with 10 systems
• Altarians 2 - 36 with 2 systems
• Krynn 1 - 86 with 3 systems
• Krynn 2 - 64 with 2 systems
• Drengin 1 - 82 with 7 systems
• Drengin 2 - 45 with 3 systems
• Yor 1 - 44 with 3 systems
• Yor 2 - 32 with 1 system
• Iconians 1 - 49 with 2 systems
• Iconians 2 - 34 with 2 systems
• Terrans 1 - 38 with 2 systems
• Terrans 2 - 26 with 1 system
• Thalan 1 - 25 with 1 system
• Thalan 2 - 20 with 1 system

I then went and looked at the areas around the races with only their starting system colonized:

• Iridium 2 - 1 system not colonized in starting area
• Yor 2 - no systems available in starting area
• Terrans 2 - 1 system not colonized in starting area
• Thalan 1 - multiple not colonized in starting area
• Thalan 2 - no systems available in starting area

Conclusion: when the area around the initial position is good, it appears the AI expands fine. However, if the starting area is crud, the AI is unable to colonize the farther reaches and stagnates.

This has been my finding as well. The primary issue is lack of opportunity. I stopped using the maps that can cause these issues, the clusters, and play specifically on spiral (which does a good job) and scattered (which is a little bland but the best).

One thing I have noticed however, and your post kind of corroborates it. The Iridium tend to do terribly, always. So I took a peek into the factiondefs.xml wealth prioritization was weighted between 4 and 8x higher than anything else. This might explain why the Iridium AI tends to be terrible no matter the circumstances.

I took your advise and avoided clusters.

A tough game with abundant stars and habitable planets all of the AI players have gotten a share of new colonies and I have just barely edged into the lead at turn 66. This may be a game worth playing out to the bitter end. One of the AIs has accumulated over 50k of cash but that is probably since that race has become boxed in by 3 other races.

Hopefully in the 1.01 patch where it says they added "General AI strategy improvements", it fixes or at least helps in some way what the AI doing, like not colonizing.

But since it was annoying me in my game I did some tests and this may just be a coincidence.. but I was able to fix/kick-start the races I was noticing that at a point had stopped expanding.

Now there are so many odd factors that contribute to this, so it could be just one of them or some combination of it all that is stopping the AI from continuing to colonize after a certain point.

I had noticed, the Thalan, who had stagnated compared to the other races, had extremely low approval. So I traded for free the early specialist tech that gives a flat +4 Morale.. and what do you know a few turns later 5 new colony ships were built and on there way to the close by planets.

Using the god mode cheat what I noticed was that all the Thalan planets were focusing on growth, there home planet for example had 4 second tier2 farms giving them a total possible max population of 48, and they were in the process of building another one! but they only had 3 morale. now they did have a pleasure park on there home world but because it is broken and not giving Moral but giving 6 gold im guessing the AI assumed that it had built enough moral improvements. Now this may just be a specific problem with the thalans so i looked at the other possible contributors.

Another major issue im finding that is hindering the expansion is the Pirates, the Ai is just unable to deal with them in a meaningful way in most cases. I watched early on the AI try and send colony ships to planets close by and as soon as they see the pirates, even know they did start making defenders, they got to a point where they sorta just gave up on that endeavor completely. This may simple have been the fact that as it took them so much time to build up a fleet to to kill the pirates, there moral had gotten to low and they were like "oh im going to stop going for planets i have other things to worry about!". In fact at the start of the game if you clear the FOW, you can basically tell what order the power of each faction will be later by comparing how many local pirates near habitability planets are close to the AI home world.

There are so many posts already about the problems of Approval so I wont go to much into it, but im guessing once its fixed the AI will naturally get alot better. they need to stop building so many farms so early making there approval go into the red, this in turn will not give them all the penalties to production/research and such. I was watching there shipyard early on trying to build colony ships that would take them over 140 turns :/. And then hopefully once this is fixed it will at least give the AI more of a chance to succeed.

Just to report Im playing the game on Normal on a Gigantic Map with only the vanilla races, I have over 12 colonies, but the AI has just over 4, tops, heck Ive explored some of the Iriduim Corp cluster and they have 3....3! Level 14 planets sitting just next to a space station and they havent colonized them, heck nobody has colonized anything in like 50 turns despite a lot of real state being available.

I've come to conclusion that pirates should be rebalanced too. Maybe give them a later start tied up to some check-event like "races have colonized 20% of planets" or "someone invented galactic warfare tech". First check will allow the players to have the chance to grab some land before pirate shipyards start to appear and the second will let them have a fighting chance by been able of producing armed ships.

https://forums.galciv3.com/464542/page/1/#3544558

Check out my old post for an idea that might fix how the AI and Human player interacts with them

Yeah that idea is nice but only works if the pirates will stay in their area. What would you do if a pirate base spawns not far off you homeworld and their fleets will seige you planet not even letting you to lift your head? Still the idea is nice. At any rate some checks for the pirates and the ai REALLY need to be done. I like it more the way it was done in civilization series.

Quoting Bloodlust1983, reply 11

I told stardock once: tune every race up not just those Drengin scum. 

Oh that'll be fine, don't worry they told me.

Now -- fail

I told stardock yet again: you guys are going the same road to failure as you did in GC2 and it's miserable expansions. Your new game is having all the same problems as before.

This all will be different this time they told me.

Now -- fail

I told stardock a third time: fix here and there and especially the race creating tool.

Of course we will! Don't be so negative!

Now -- fail.

Way to go with your release stardock! 

 

So where can I buy your 4X game, oh mighty one?

Go troll somewhere else.

Quoting Bloodlust1983, reply 35

Quoting 00zim00,

reply 34

https://forums.galciv3.com/464542/page/1/#3544558

Check out my old post for an idea that might fix how the AI and Human player interacts with them

Yeah that idea is nice but only works if the pirates will stay in their area. What would you do if a pirate base spawns not far off you homeworld and their fleets will seige you planet not even letting you to lift your head? Still the idea is nice. At any rate some checks for the pirates and the ai REALLY need to be done. I like it more the way it was done in civilization series.

Pirate bases don't naturally spawn near your home world, and the ships themselves don't siege a planet. Its just like a starbasr where it counts what's in a few tiles around the base and claims it. Also it wouldn't take over your home planet even if it was close, as its already owned by you an not an unclaimed planet. Maybe I didn't make my idea in the post clear enough. Just think of a pirate base as a starbasr where just like a mining base can claim resources. They can always claim "blockade" a planet. The pirates arnt psychically attacking a planet its just preventing you from getting it until you destroy there base.

Well that could be working. Now let's wait and see for someone in the devs do something about all those glitches.

Ain't that the Troll calling the Troll green.

I noticed clusters create some funky staring locations. Using rare habitable planets has odd situations where they is a small cluster could have maybe 3 planets including the starting one, then a huge space where you have to build star bases and focus on range to get out. By then most of the other planets are taken.

I have seen this happen to the AI and human players. One game the Krynn wren't discovered for well over 100 turns because I had to bud two star bases with extended range to reach the last group of 6-7 stars. The poor Krynn were stuck there as there was only their starting system, companion, one other habitable and one extreme. The were waaaaaaaaaaaaay behind everyone in tech, etc.

I have been playing around with creating maps and removing fog to see how the settings are working. It seems there is no correlation of faction placement with number of habitable planets in an area. By that I mean 3 factions could be based around 6-8 planets while another has 6+ to themselves. Some get stuck in pockets of nothing.

So in short, IMO the map generator could use a little love when using rare settings. Also the AI needs to realize it is "stuck" and work on building starbases for range and techs to extend ship range instead of worrying about mining and such.

The safest bet right now is to use scattered. It isn't perfect, but it creates far less dead space opportunities were an AI, or you, get isolated on a space island with nothing to colonize inside your starting range.

Spiral is also pretty good. The factions on the arms of the spiral can get screwed over a little but, but everyone in the core, has super densely packed star systems.

After personal experience, I second Osbot's recommendations.

I would also recommend abundant habitable planets. It appears that option here is way nerfed unlike GC2 where nearly every star system would have a habitable world.

In my experience, they do colonize, but not enough. I think the AI has a long way to go in terms of how it colonizes and builds before it can keep up with a human player. None of this should be out of reach, the AI simply needs to specialize planets and utilize adjacencies better. I'm sure Stardock is hard at work on the AI, so I think there's a good chance they will get it sorted out eventually. Looking forward to starting a new game with the 1.01 patch to see how things are coming along.

In my latest game the AI is sending out flocks of colony ships. They are still not any good at developing planets but there is no shortage of colony ships.

I've basically figured out what the problem is.

It's primarily 2 issues. The issue we've covered already, regarding simply unfortunate map placement. The AI often has nowhere to expand to and by the time it can it's taken by someone else.

In regards to the second issue, I'll direct you to the Krynn, everyones favorite monster AI. Why? Morale. The AI is currently experiencing issues managing morale. A bug with the promethion pleasure park (it was giving 6 wealth instead of 6 morale) was compounding this problem. Even fixing that mixup, the AI still struggles with morale.

To test this, I made a mod that gave the AI a +4 bonus to morale on challenging difficulty, this is the first difficulty level where the AI gets bonus'. The difference? Enormous. The entire dynamic of the age of exploration changes. You are probably intimately familiar with the AI sending constructors across the galaxy to steal your resources. This behavior stops. Why? The AI was doing this because it wasn't willing to colonize further due to morale issues. Now with a +4 bonus the AI's morale problems are more reasonably managed and they spam colonizers.

There is a mod floating around in the mod section from someone who made a similar change which boosted AI morale. Until SD works out AI morale management, that is going to be the best fix.

Trust me it makes an enormous difference and the morale boost isn't completely crazy. Most players I am sure are rushing that +4 bonus in the second tier of research as it is for that enormous leg up.

Yes, the AI has trouble with pirates because they seem to ignore them, to a great extent. They also send their surveyors into graveyards until the hp are worn down and their ship is toasted. With pirates on default, most AI don't have a surveyor by T50. I haven't checked scouts but it is probably the same.

I also think that the AI has a problem with tight clusters and tends to colonize the star group they are in and then lose interest, as if they think the galaxy is finished. 

That is what I noticed as well, but thanks for bringing it up. Even with a spiral, my bud and I were on the same spiral arm. However, I have mostly 10+ planets and he had 8- and fewer and was stuck on the spiral tip. Really, I while better than most, scattered over spiral for now. I mean, I like the challenge in SP, but MP it takes away from what I have accomplished if other players are stuck in a worse position.

You can expand just as aggressively with the Yor as any other race, it just requires some modifications to your build order and other aspects of your standard colonization strategy. Once you get your manufacturing really rolling on your homeworld I would say you can actually expand much faster, since you can replace the population on your homeworld much more quickly than races that have to wait for it to grow naturally.