Oops, having made that commitment to do another subject, i realize i need more info. I'm working on race AIs and trying to understand them. I'll post an appeal to the 'regulars' on a separate topic and hopefully get enough info to write up another section of our doc.

Rob,

Seems like you are already taking Project #3 by the horns. Can I designate you as the project coordinator and send all Project #3 supporters and contributions over to you?

Yeah that is fine Ray. This is my email for all who care:
[email protected]

As far as resources go, I have a server which sites on a 100MB pipe to internet and is currently hosting my galciv.wcfamily.com UBBthreads forums (little used at this time).

The server runs Debian (Linux) w/ apache+php+mysql, nightly backups to a SAN, 72 hour generator with DC backup plant, and I can set up whatever accounts are necessary on the box. Downtime should be minimal.

At this time (and for the foreseeable future) I have no bandwidth cap. If this would be of use email me at [email protected] and feed me any questions.

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Guys,

This is what i have on the section 'dealing with the aliens' so far. I haven't gotten much reply to the question of specific AI behaviors, so that section will probably be very minimal. Anyway please take a look and comment.

Topic 4 – Dealing with the Aliens

4.1 Introduction

What makes GalCiv so fun is that each different alien (a.k.a. “race” or “AI”) has a different algorithm for artificial intelligence. In short, each AI has a different personality and flavor, much more so that most or perhaps all other 4X games (where typically there is just a generic AI and many different enemies using the same AI). In order to beat the AI we must first understand the AI. Herein are general tips that work against all the AIs, then we’ll talk about the specific AIs.

4.2 General Alien Behavior

Generally, the aliens will behave a lot like the human player, they will first attempt to capture good systems, then any resources. They will then build up their systems and military, and advance in tech. Generally each AI will try their best to become the dominant player in the galaxy. It is not necessarily the case that all the AIs are trying to kill you, the human. Generally the stronger races will attack the weaker races, take their systems, become stronger, and repeat the cycle. All five AIs will do this to various degrees.

4.3 Diplomacy

There are several ways to interact with the aliens: via diplomacy, military, trade, and culture/influence. The most obvious is via actually talking to the AI via the ‘diplomacy’ screen. Here you can trade influence points, money, trade goods, techs, systems, starbases, or starships, in any combination that you and they both find agreeable. This is perhaps the most exploitable feature of the AI, their willingness in some fashion to conduct trade. You can use this to your advantage. The best players will use every new Trade Good or tech they acquire to obtain new techs, funds, or starbases over galactic resources.

4.3.1 Trading for Techs

The tech race is a critical part of GalCiv, until Dreadnaught tech. Typically if you make it to dreadnaughts before the other races, you will be in very good shape to win via military domination. Looking at the alien AIs, at higher levels it is revealed that they only research 1/3 to 1/5 of their techs! They get the rest mostly through trade. However, each tech has a value, and to trade tech for tech you may have to give multiple lower techs for one higher value (cost) tech. Additionally, the AI values some techs more (some, much much more) than others. For example, in the early game the AI values highly Construction and Defense Theory, and it may be advisable to research these techs instead of obtaining them via trade.

Secondly, the AI will pay dearly for military tech, particularly Battleship or Dreadnaught tech. A common tactic is to sell these to the really weak AIs or to the minors, in exchange for much tech. (However, this can potentially backfire, because the minor AI can in turn trade these juicy techs to a major AI).

Additionally, you can build Trade Goods and swap these with techs, however this was modified in version 1.03 so that Trade Goods aren’t quite the good deal they used to be, but this tactic can still be used.

Lastly, you can sell your techs for straight money. Not sure how much your tech is worth? Start off with 25 bc per month, and adjust the ‘months’ slider to the right until it is one nudge away from showing yellow text in the bottom-center dialog box. If this text is green, it is favorable to the AI, if it is yellow, it is not favorable (and they won’t trade).

4.3.2 Trading for Money

Another great thing about GalCiv is that anything can be done for the right price – money. So you need a lot of money to do things like rush-build Trade Goods, max out your research, crank out those Dreadnaughts, or whatever you wish. You can sell anything to the AI, from starbases and ships, to techs and Trade Goods, to planetary systems!

One common tactic is to sell your techs, preferably to the minor races (Alexians, Cartinoids), for cash. It seems that a small amount (ie 25 bc) over a long time is preferable than the equivalent amount up front; additionally often times the AI will have a negative or slightly positive balance, so they can’t afford to buy anything, or if they can it will have to be over long periods.

Another common tactic to sell bad planetary systems to other AIs for cash. This tactic is especially cruel. Colonize a class 14 planet in a system in the middle of an AI’s sector. Develop it until it’s class 15 or it’s about to be culture assimilated. Sell it to an opposing AI (i.e. if it’s the Drengin’s sector, sell it to the Alterians). This will ensure that the two spend much time and effort fighting over that little rock and leaving you alone!

4.4 Tribute and Getting the AI off your back
4.5 Alliances
4.6 Specific Race Behavior

You're the man, Rob! Great stuff.

I've noticed a couple of things that I would like to comment on but I have to rush now. Will get back to you.

Dealing with the Aliens - NOtes:
(edited to remove the word trade as much as possible in prefernce for the less confusing words swap, exchange and tribute)


On Military:
The readiness of the AI to declare war on you (or on other AI) relates to a couple fo things:
- their perception of relative military might
- relationship
(relationship is improved by trade, and for goodies, being of similiar alignment, but these are not seperately copnsidered by teh AI when making war decisions. This means they WILL attack their main trading partner if they are vulnerable, even though the lost trade is more important in the long term...)

You can affect the relationship by giving gifts. Space them out - a tech or a ship every few turns makes more of a difference than all 6 techs in one go.

You can affect the perception of military might by:
- building or buying more ships. Note ATT factors are worth more than DEF, although both count. I don't think HP matter.
- improving your ATT/DEF factors by building ship-improving buildings (ie shipyard); developing military resources; and putting ships in orbit (yep, the bonus to your ATT for being in orbit affacts calculations of relative military might).

In general, no AI will voluntarily attack the guy in 1st place militarily.

Oh - a key hint: you can't bribe the guys in 2nd and 3rd to attack the guy in 1st. But you probably can bribe the guy in 1st into attacking the guy in 2nd (or 3rd, or maybe both). Any if someone is stronger than you, keep them busy! (And reduce their military by making them use it!)



On Tribute (and swapping techs for cash etc):

Some of the distinctions below are not terribly obvious at lower AI levels - as the AI gets more intelligent, it values things differently etc differently - and more of these issues come into play...

(1) Any tech you give a minor may get swapped to a major (or they might get it by conquering a planet).

(2) Many players don't swap the most crucial techs/trade goods to the major civilizations EVER. Some swap:
- all trade goods except Diplo Trans (or all trade goods except Diplo Trans, Tri-Stront and Grav Accel)
- all techs except diplomacy-modifiying techs; or military techs; or ...
[In case it isn;t obvious, more diplo for you means they'll pay more - more diplo for them means they'll pay less.]

(3) AI as 'research outposts': I don't want 'allies' working on researching tech I already have - I want them researching tech I don;t have, so I can get it sooner. Therefore: (i) I research techs the AI tends not to (ii) I try to get all techs to all races

(4) Tech as a leveler: I don't want one AI getting too strong - I try to level the playing field by spreading techs evenly... I will even buy tech from the leader so I can sell and give them to everyone else!

(5) AI don't really understand the scarcity of money: if they have it cash-in-hand, they will spend it, and commit to spending over months and years based on their currently full wallet, rather than a cash flow projection. (Sort of like Americans with credit cards, actually.) This means that you can easily bankrupt other civilizations (major and minor) by selling them more technology than they really can afford. You will notice when this happens - their bank balance sinks negative. Once they are below -500BC, all production on their planets stop, so this is a good way to hurt an enemy. But beware: if you only sell tech to your friends, don't be suprised when their economic and then military values drop alarmingly over time, and then they get wiped out.
- SO: provide trade income to the AI you want to trade with, and don't necessarily take all the money an ally has if you want to keep them strong.
- Corrolooary: I will often do the maximum tech-selling I can with all of the AI, just to reduce their economies - and contribute generously in cash to the few I want to support... (Example: Alexians at -1,500BC, when get attacked by my enemy. I immediately give them 1,700BC, allowing their production to kick back in, and I also give them some ships etc.)

(6) Trading off money and time: While rounding effects the income received from selling stuff, the maximum overall return seems to be in the 16-20 months range, and bell curving at both higher and lower numbers of months. So, a particular exchange might be, using bc times the number of payments (which is months+1) 100x1;33x3; 15x6; 10x10; 7x15; 6x19; 4x30; 2x50. You can see that the overall best return is 6 bc/m for 19 payments = 133 bc. If you are doing lots of exchanging for cash, maximizing your overall return may be far more important than the schedule to you. (And bring in 25% more cash!)

(7) The amount different races will pay varies with a number of factors:
- which race (The Yor and the Carinoids just aren't into swapping cash for technology, for example, although they give good deals selling their trade goods.) (BTW - the Alexians are darn generous payers... I like them!)
- the difficulty level
- that races play strategy in the current game
- what type of tech it is (so military techs more valuable to military AI, which the Dregin usually are)
- (I suspect but do not KNOW) - their relationship with you

(8) Don't forget to BUY tech etc) from the AI sometimes - if one baddie is leading the tech race, you might buy the tech from him for a total cost of a 1000, and sell it to 4 other major civs and 3 minor civs for a total PROFIT. (Although soemtimes I am happy to do it for a loss for strategic reasons.)

(9) Oh - although this isn't really about exchanging, if an AI is too far ahead on tech (etc) - DESTABILIZE THEM. Make them spend more of their money on morale. It may not lead to planets rebelling, but it will reduce the amound they can spend on tech by a lot more than the cost to you of the destabilization (depending on their bonuses, and on your ability at destabilizing...)



Race specific comments:
Alterians have the strongest long term economic focus, which means they can be a serious threat late in the game.
Dregin are the most warmongering and aggressive. They attack early and often - if they think they can win.
Arceans have the strongest strategic/tactical skills - they are really good at maneouvring.


NB: The are lots of alignment-focussed behaviours - such as the tendancy for good races to offer ships to other good races who are fighting evil. However the "its our mission to wipe out evil races and you are one" message is just a bit of role playing. They are attacking because your are weak, and the evilness is just an excuse.
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EVENTS IN GAL CIV (A partial summary)

Rebellion - A star system breaks off of an empire. Does not escalate, but eventually produces the I-League.

Fundementalists - A group of systems break off from different empires, and form a new minor civ. The Fundimentalist's homeworld seems to be the first planet from the least evil race that was subject to defection by the event.

Espionage fest - A minor race teams up with a major race to steal all techs. It can escalate to something major, but I haven't seen it yet.

Draginol - Something bad is about to happen to your planet. Escalates into a major minor race. (Always one of your planets.)

Calor - - Something bad is about to happen to a planet. Escalates into a major minor race. (Always an AI planets.)

The Dark Arnor is a linked series of events that always occurs at an AI system. The first tells you that an alien cult found an artifact, and one of them (probably the second) has a brief history lesson in the event description. The second and third events in the sequence suggest conducting espionage, and if your current espionage against the race the event hit is high enough when the third event comes, they are prevented from being revived. Otherwise, the Dread Lords, a major minor race, appear.

Telenath Crystal - An alien race found a special crystal and are growing in strength. +1% to a random attribute per turn for that race but does not otherwise escalate. While after a few hundred turns, these guys will be unstoppable, it usually happens to a race that is doing very poorly at the moment...

Espionage

Solely WRT your knowledge of their empire:
The amount you need to have spent on espionage varies with the population (and I suspect the government type) of the AI player. Once you achieve a level of espionage, you only need to make additional spending to match/overcome their population growth: if you have their population declining (grin), you don;t need to spend more.

There is a random event that destablizes relations, if you don't have sufficient espionage on the empire. Something like "the X diplomat inadvertently insulted the Y ambassador; if only they knew more about the culture, this might have been avoided..."

There are certain events that only occur when you have a high investment in espionage, and others (bad ones) that occur when you don't have a high investment.

Exerpted from http://www.galciv.com/browser/msgboard.asp?BoardID=GF&id=57572&MaxReplies=

SURRENDER

- Surrender is a way to save the taxpayers, not the government
- Surrender appears to be to the civilization most highly ranked in military other than the 'major' enemy killing the surrenderer; but sometimes seems more random. In particular, sometimes it is to someone at war with the surrenderer, sometimes to an ally; sometimes not. (And yes, sometimes they surrender to the Terrans.)
- Relationships, alliances, and alignment do not seem to affect who surrenders to whom
- The logic here is that the aggressor MAY be scared off by the reputation (military power) of the new owner. If surrender was always to an ally, it would be more likely that this would do no benefit to the taxpayers as the aggressor is likely at war with them, and would keep coming.
- Perhaps it should be called a revolt against the incompetant loser government, rather than a 'surrender'.

Exerpted from http://www.galciv.com/forum.asp?id=66333&BID=GF&page=2

Rob, some of my comments,



Your statements here give me the impression that they are doing the above sequentially, which is not really true. I have seen constructors sent out even before colonisation is over. Similarly, the building of economy, military and tech are done simultaneously.



It is a good point that you made that the AIs in Galciv are not programmed to gang up against the human (though it may seem that way to many ). Where does alignment come in as part of the writeup? Because different alignment AIs will obviously act differently.



Include declarations of war and peace. You can also note that selling declarations of war is another means for the human to declare war on an alien (and also circumvents the senate vote). Another point being that trading is available even when you are at war with the trading partner (though I suspect the trades are harder). On other important point about trade is that you could make trades for up to 100 turns rather than the 50 turns allowed via the slider.



Arguable. Some TGs and techs are best held and not traded, others held till an opportune time.

A point I wanted to make is how you are going to differentiate strategies for different difficulties. At Maso, some of these strats (such as selling TGs for money) is ineffective. Maybe we can pitch our strats at Intelligent?



I would suggest a rephrasing to say that capital ship tech is a critical landmark tech to obtain as they represent a new era in ship combat. Personally, with the increased Battleship and Dreadnought research costs, Battleship is also a important safety level but definitely dreadnought with the AMMs is the killer tech.



You meant Industrial instead of Construction. Defense has been made cheaper but I think they are still more expensive than the other starting techs. You may want to state that for ships techs, Deflectors, Corvette, Interstellar Tactics, Battleship, Dreadnought, Ranger, Avatar, Overlord, Excalibur are valued more highly by the AI. It appears to me that Phasers, Shields, Turbo Phasers, Defensive Phasers are relatively cheap.



You can note that the cheesy strats of selling planets below class 15, planets that would flip easily back to the ex-owner via culture and useless starbases are ineffective as the AI would simply disband or refuse the trade.

That's all for now.

Ray, Ralegh, very good points, I'm working to incorporate everything into the 'guide'. Thanks much for your imput!!! We need someone to host the Guide, several people have volunteered; Ray can you set up something simple for us??

Thanks, I'll get back to you all when i have more (tomorrow or next day).

Rob

BTW what does WRT mean?

WRT - With respects to

Great topic - this is what gaming is all about - sharing ideas and helping others.

I am struggling with a lot of the basic 'how to' issues of the game and I'm sure I'm not alone. I like the idea of huge html file or zip file user can search offline.

The GalCiv site does have 5 games a developer played but the level of detail is very general and in my opinion of little use to a newbie.

Some 'how to' items the manual missed in my opinion:

How to settle second planet in system
Tech tree (thankfully JavaScout has great site for this)
A good walkthrough with lots of detail (assume gamer is an idiot)
Ship to Ship combat example (along with invasion example)
Starbase over resource example (level 1 on up - how much does each level improve?)
Recovery of rebellious planet example
Diplomatic exchange example
Use of Autolaunch (when it's good and when it's wrong)

These are just some ideas - remember there are lots of people out there who are new to the 'support on the web' idea. If you want lots of copies to continue to sell, the entry of a casual gamer needs to be eased a bit for them to want to buy GalCiv2. Searching through multiple threads to get help can get boring real fast.




~SDC~

Uhmm most of this stuff is covered to some degree in the 'new' manual, did you get a chance to read it yet? The link is on the GalCiv news at the main GalCiv web page (www.galciv.com).

Let us know if you can, if you think these issues still need covering after the new manual.

Rob

No, I have not read the manual thoroughly Rob but I certainly expect that there would be elements of strategy that is not covered in the manual.

If the manual is already rather complete, we could still compile a bunch of strategy tips from our collective gaming experience.

What bgofct was refering to was more of a 'how do i do ...', which would be covered in a user manual. That's different from a strategy guide, which Ralegh and I are hard at work at. The guide is now too large to submit to this forum, except in small pieces. Can someone host a URL so people can download and comment??

Download here:

http://www.orionsector.com/pages/galciv/downloads/The_Unofficial_GalCiv_Strategy_Guide.doc

Comments here:

http://forum.orionsector.com/viewtopic.php?p=12486#12486

Kudus to Robert!

New version coming soon. We also need someone to make a HTML version from the Word version. Any takers??

Rob

I think I can handle that.

Update. Ralegh has done alot of work adding content to the strategy guide. I've been mostly formatting. Anyway we are about at the point where I/we can't think of anything else to put in it. So bottom line expect a downloadable version sometime this week.

Rob

Update. We're done with version 1.0. Ralegh and I have done alot of work on this, it's now 37 pages and includes lots of tech trees and charts/pictures. I'm pretty happy with the effort so far. I am trying to pursuade Robert Huntington (Orion Sector guy) to make an HTML version. Anyway he will post it there and send me/us the link. Whew (off to drink a beer...)

Oops, sorry for the delay. MSWord version here:

http://www.orionsector.com/pages/galciv/downloads/The_Unofficial_GalCiv_Strategy_Guide_v1_0.doc

PDF version coming as soon as I can borrow the software from folks at work. Probably early next week.

HTML version coming soon afterwards...