You my good sir need a lesson in the power of the Dunov.

I'd put Dunov in the same general class as the Antorak, Vulkoras, Revelation, Rapture, and Radiance.  Very effective if used right, but its role is fairly narrow and it's not much in a straight fight.  Certainly not a top-pick for capital ship, but situationally or later on it can work quite well.

Oooooooooh.  Yeah, that makes much more sense.

I very much doubt that any new stuff will appear in a patch, patches are for bugs and tweaks.  A tweak might be something you could modify yourself.  I spent a couple of days on a pirate mod to familiarise myself with what was possible in the game.

As an example of a simple tweak, these are the original values that determine the strength of a pirate raid:

strengthPerOwnedPlanet .10 strengthPerCargoShip .0025 strengthPerBounty .00003

I wanted to up the sensitivity to trade and bounty at the expense of mere planet ownership, as otherwise I felt that there was a tendency to further punish poor starting positions:

strengthPerOwnedPlanet .05 strengthPerCargoShip .006 strengthPerBounty .0001

I was going to make another mod for the relations, but as with the pirates I got the feeling that something more than a tweak was required to make the system halfway serviceable.  The problem with the second expansion is that instead of replacing the poor features of the original, it compounds them with extra, awful, elements that weren't there before.  Instead of a revision of the pirate bid system it is added to with a pirate mission system.. instead of a revision of the relations system you simply have a tech tree and pacts placed on top of it.  Also, key features like cargo ships and the game's evaluation of the proximity of empires don't appear to work properly.  To have a proper implementation of pirates the game would have to make trade income dependent on cargo ships rather than on trade ports.  And any diplomatic system needs to rely on the basic observation that empire x is between empires y and z, therefore y and z are likely to be more friendly to each other than to empire x.

The pirate bid system is laughable really.  The buzzer sounds and its "Heigh-ho, heigh-ho its off to piracy we go, we'll honour our contracts and die in your cause, heigh-ho heigh-ho heigh-ho heigh-ho."  Its also difficult to avoid the early raids being too strong, or more importantly, one empire having the tremendous advantage of being able to afford to lose the bidding whereas another, for whatever reason, is very exposed.  There was a lot of talk about how it was necessary to make the pirates stronger because good players could beat them- like with any AI force- but they were kept out of multiplayer games because in games between evenly matched players they would have a random effect which tipped the balance.  Making them stronger with the same mechanic just made them worse.  Also, the notion of honourable pirates who attack starbases with super-tech is utter rubbish. 

Yet if we could go a little further than just a simple tweak the pirates could be much improved.   Lets get rid of the pirate work klaxon.  That feels good already.  Trade income depends on ships again not ports.   The pirates hang out in space, attacking trade ships.  They won't attack warships at all unless they have good odds and there is bounty involved, making them a useful help for cutting reinforcements off.  They will retreat quickly if they start taking losses.  Bounty earned from enemy ship destruction and trade ship destruction builds them new ships.   When their home is above a maximum number of ships, ships are sent out to a new location.  Instead of the current mechanic, the pirates prefer pirate-type locations so they go to asteroid belts or unoccupied planets.  They're not just simple tweaks, however the game mechanics do exist to support this type of pirate behaviour- the 'juicy target' designation could be reworked for 'unoccupied target' for instance.  Add in some sneaky special abilities like cloak, a simple change I made already in my mod, and you're there.  Then the pirate terror missions can be taken out of the early game and left to their special screens.

I haven't considered improvements to the relations system as much, but it seems to me that the pacts system took over the relations system to the extent that the relations between the factions became a secondary consideration to whether the AI could be made to sign pacts.  I would want to do away with the pacts screen entirely, it has very little information on it and you could simplify by making it so that if you have the appropriate level of relations the AI uill sign all the pacts the tech of both empires will support.  The current system has 0-20 relations level, with 10-20 taken up by pacts.  With 0-12 and 10+ taken up by pacts you can get rid of a crap screen and start making the AI relations system far more sensitive.  Also, as it is you have one empire with many labs able to take advantage of a smaller empire with hardly any research just on relations, which seems poor.  Instead, make the pacts available dependent on both empires having the right tech, if one empire has L5 pact tech and another L6 pact tech you are restricted to L5 pacts. 

Another screen that needs work is the relations screen, which looks like a beta (and seems not to be part of replays, as I found when testing the relations system).  What it presents is a lot of rubbish numbers which should be part of the hidden game mechanics.  What it should present is far simpler information- which of your enemies have ceasefires, alliances, and so on, which is far more elegant game design.  The mission system really needs the work that was required to justify the second expansion at all, to ensure that the AI gives the player missions to its advantage rather than the players.  If you are already at war with a faction the mission offers from other factions that target that faction should cease.  Also the demands for credits and resources should be extortionate. 

The relationship victory condition is so poor that I would be inclined to scrap it entirely, sort out the artifact side of the game and replace it with a victory condition which required that you occupy all artifact planets, which would allow you to shorten the game, and is also simple to understand and interesting in game terms.  All you need then is a minimum number of artifacts to be spawned in every game.  As it is, even if the existing relations made the remotest sense, the relationship victory condition just leads to situations in a multiplayer game where one player will win and there is nothing another player could do to stop it.  It would be frustrating to see a player retain points from the goodwill of dead factions- if anyone used the victory condition, that is.

Lastly, the relations variables need a thorough rework.  The Advent hate the TEC- unless the TEC build two civic labs?  The structure of the modifiers is there, but the effect of the numbers needs to be better conceptualised.  Another example is the fleet stength modifier, you really need it so that the AI gang up on the leader rather than the weakest.  If its to prevent empires with huge economy and hardly any defence, what you should do is to penalise the leading economy rather than the weakest fleet.  Ideally there would be penalties for both the strongest fleet and the strongest economy.

A lot of words, but I hope that they are related to improvements that are possible and achievable, rather than having very little to do with the existing game.      

Whatever is done with the diplomatic aspect, I suggest that the patched game should have to pass a couple of tests- that the AI factions be able to create ceasefires and make alliances between them, and that the AI factions be able to combine against the leader or leaders.  It might then be possible to get the AI nearer to achieving a diplomatic victory, but this still seems somewhat of a task and it would be far simpler to have the diplomatic victory replaced by an artifact victory- you have 3 artifacts on tiny maps, 6 on medium maps, 9 on large and 12 and huge.  Possession of all the artifacts means victory, a simple readily comprehensible system already used by many succesful games, whereas the existing diplomatic victory is.. of an unusual nature.  It also means that we can separate out the diplomatic relations from any considerations of an overall victory, making them considerably easier to reorganise.  The number of artifacts possessed by a faction could appear on the diplomatic summary screen, along with the state of the alliances between factions- rather than the bizarre numbers that are there in the present version.

What I further suggest is that any factions of the same nature should start with the level of friendliness appropriate to a cease fire, as long as they are not adjacent to one another.  Since 3.5 is the current level for a cease fire, you would have similar factions getting +4.   Then have Vasari relations with other factions at -3, and Advent-TEC relations -6.  That might help the AI start to develop relations at first.. at least with factions of its own sort.  The tech for relations boosts needs to be toned down so that the game becomes less easy for the player- perhaps +0.5 per level, rather than +1.  However the top level should wipe out the full penalty of -3/-3 or -3/-6, to reflect how expensive it is.

Then you have the AI bonus rate and proximity factors, which I'd suggest should work in a similar manner.  You could have two levels of proximity, one for adjacent and one for only one gravwell separation.   If the AI bonus rate was 0.01, for instance, then the adjacent penalty rate could be -0.02 and the one gravwell separation rate -0.01.  The principle would be to stop the game ending in all-round ceasefires and alliances.  Unless the proximity penalty is progressive it isn't going have enough effect, and also making it progressive allows for a somewhat faster AI bonus rate.  This assumes that the proximity penalty can be made to work at all, however.  It seems a fairly simple piece of coding, and even seems better suited to a rate-type penalty than a one-off penalty?

The missions need to be more tailored to suit the AI, as I've written previously.  The AI should not target factions the player is already at war with.  The penalties should be for fleetStrengthMax and econStrengthMax rather than the existing fleetStrengthMin, to punish the leading factions.  The Pacts screen could be replaced with a single research pacts button on the main screen, either you have all the pacts you can possibly have, or none.  Better definition of which factions ally with which others is far more significant than having the difference between two styles of research pact as the equivalent in diplomatic points of the difference between war and a full peace treaty, which is both fiddly and silly. 

It seems a pity that there wasn't a new 'Diplomatic' style of AI created for the second expansion.  However, there was a suggestion a while ago that instead of having AI faction names randomly assigned, they should be linked to specific types, to add character to the game.  So that if you have two Advent faction names, the Prophecy and the Oracle, the Prophecy would always be militaristic and the Oracle more concerned with development, rather than having the names randomly assigned and sometimes being military and sometimes development.  It has the disadvantage of the player realising how a random AI is likely to play, but I still consider the advantage of greater characterisation more important.  

I quite like the sound of this. That would indeed be a more enjoyable system.

I've requested a bonus for similar factions of +4, with Advent-TEC relations at -6 and other relations at -3.  This is intended to promote better relations between AI factions by at least allowing similar factions to start at a ceasefire level.  However it occurred to me that while Advent-TEC relations are described as being the worst, the existing backstory makes little mention of splinter groups at all, there's simply no hint that any of the factions other than the TEC are divided in any manner at all, and the TEC are described as having resolved their differences before the beginning of the game.

This could be something of an opportunity.   If the patch linked specific splinter group names to specific AI identities- researcher, fortifier etc., then perhaps those groups might then be given more character, such as an individual origin and diplomatic modifier?  All it would seem to involve is possibly a few lines of text and more importantly linking the initial diplomatic variable to the AI type, rather than just to the faction.  This could make up for the absence of a specific 'diplomatic' style of AI, as each AI type would come in three flavours- hostile, neutral and peaceful.

The human splinter groups seem easy enough to explain, not all of the existing groups joined into one single alliance.  The Advent are possibly more difficult, if there is a Unity of all Advent how can two different groups the Oracle and the Prophecy exist?  Each group must then have their own Unity?  I suppose you could say that it would be unlikely for all combinations of genetic enhancement, drugs and brainwashing to have the same effects, so each Advent faction has their own recipe.  But then should they like each other more or less than humans like each other?  Groups like that that have existed in human history have often been at each others throats.  The Vasari seem easier to deal with, any migratory group would move in a series of sub-units and they are supposed to be from widely different sectors of the Empire.  The individual hives would still be very mutually supportive. 

If that logic is reasonable then perhaps base Vasari-Vasari relations might be +5, TEC-TEC +3 and Advent-Advent +1, before any modifications based on which groups come up.  After all, researcher Advent and researcher Advent groups might not be of any kind of static social or individual makeup at all, so if they turn up in a game they might start at a higher level of mutual relations than even Vasari hives.       

One last possibility that semed to have potential for amusement... instead of the current returning fleets system, how much modification would it take to spawn another Vasari faction into the game if there was room, or to revive an old one...?  That would truly be a different sort of superpower.  Of course they would have to start off friendly to their summoners, but once they had colonised their own planets...

I like the sound of that very much.

Would it still be feasible to add in this patch the addition of a relatively simply selection in Game Setup for Pirate Strength -- much like we have for Research Speed or Building Speed? That is, instead of merely a toggle Pirates On / Off, it would toggle between Pirates Puny / Very Weak / Weak / Normal / Strong / Very Strong / Dominating / Off (or something like that), so that in addition to your excellent suggestions the player would have an easy way of tweaking the strength of all attacks throughout the game?

Though that is somewhat discouraging, at least there is still hope.

Many of the remaining players have modding skills that range from adequate to considerable.  If you were able to tell us the parameters within which changes can be made, then perhaps we could test changes and report back on this thread?  

I appreciate that it is not always easy for a small company to playtest in an effective manner, but it is very difficult to help without any kind of feedback other than a generalised thanks for trying.  How about if we were to post reports of how unmodified games are playing out, would that help?  Is there a single map you recommend for testing?  Apart from the pirates, my concern about the single player game after the second expansion is that the AI are just not engaging in any kind of effective negotiations with each other, allowing the player an easy win, unless they are locked into teams. 

I've tried this again with the Hard AI rather than the normal AI.  The only significant difference seems to be that I lost three points with all of the AI on the basis of 'fleet strength' at the beginning, but after a while this became 0 or some insignificant figure like -0.02 or -0.08, which I was able to maintain with my free capital ship and by building cobalts up to the maximum of the second level of supply.

Again the AI hate each other from the start, and are not able to get anywhere near a ceasefire.  They don't seem to use research or envoys at all.  I could let the game run further, but I am already about a third of the way to a diplomatic victory.  On to unfair level, however if the singleplayer FFA game has to be played at unfair level to get a game going then there are serious issues with it. 

Also, the only modifiers that the AI seemed to be affected by in the relations with each other were diplomatic and species inclination, fleet strength and military actions.  It's a long list of potential modifiers for most of them to be 0.00.  My opinion is still that the background numbers should be kept off-screen and the player should only be presented with what level of relationship (truce, treaty, pact) the AI have with each other.  At the moment the answer will be none whatsoever, but it will be simpler to read and understand. 

I've always had an issue with the use of numbers in computer games as a substitute for characterisation.  A better-designed game will tell you that the relationship between two factions is hateful or abysmal or whatever without also notifying you of the exact number of abstract 'points' involved.  Also, a particular Sins annoyance is when factions can be described as 'warming' to each other when they are still destroying each others envoys ships, or would be, had they any. 

Am I right about the current relations AI though, that it is nonsense and that the second expansion was very much progredi est regredi?  Has anyone got a counter-example for me to look at? 

DesConnor, I think you are judging the Diplomacy expansion too harshly when considering the AI's implementation of the new Diplomacy system. The Diplomacy expansion is clearly a "multiplayer" focused expansion. In that regard it is perfect in my opinion AND experience.

As for the Pirates, I am really hating them in Diplomacy and just turn them off. To me that = FAIL. SOMETHING needs to be done about them for anyone to consider playing with them on. Just from my estimates and the content of the posts that I see in the Strategy section NOONE is playing with them on. Unless they are testing them or their focus is on beating the Pirates.

Right now with them on the BEST strategy that me and my friends have found to win a game is to have one player focus on military to hold off the initial raids of the opponents and then have the other player focus on building an economy to flood into the Pirates. The Pirates win the game.