SMACX AI Growth mod

[bvanevery]

Ran an AI only test game.  In MY 2359, the Pirates were choosing Democratic Green Wealth Eudaimonic.  So there's definitely no late game problem with them choosing Wealth.  They had a -3 MORALE rating.  They had a strong sea based position on the map and built most of the Secret Projects.

The Spartans, on the other hand, tore up a supercontinent.  Judging by their start position, it looks like they colonized the Monsoon Jungle at the beginning of the game.  They built or came to control most of the Secret Projects remaining.  They're about to execute the Peacekeepers, which is why the game stopped.  I suspect that if I let it continue to run, they will overrun the Gaians in short order.  Then it will be a showdown between the Spartans and the Pirates, although expect it won't resolve before MY 2500.  The Spartans were choosing Police State Socialist Power Thought Control.

The Cyborgs have a modest sized island to themselves.  They have chosen Democratic Capitalist Power.  They have not researched Digital Sentience and so have not gone Cybernetic.  I would say these choices are not wrong for them, but the AI isn't smart enough to fight successfully from an island.  It appears the Gaians wiped them out within the first 100 years and they landed on an escape pod on this island.

[bvanevery]

As of MY 2438, the Pirates have finished the tech tree, and I think have researched Transcend 5.  They've got 41,315 credits.  They will finish the Ascent to Transcendence in 27 turns.  2 other factions are working on it, but they don't have a chance.  The planet has suffered an enormous amount of flooding, which I presume was precipitated by the Pirates.  However their cities aren't doing any eco-damage now.  Neither are the Spartan cities.  I wonder if the Voice or the Ascent suppresses eco-damage?

Anyways, I find it mildly interesting that the game will terminate with a winner before MY 2500.  But I'm not going to wait around for it because it's tons of tedious Spore Launcher shellings every turn.  You'd think the AI would be bright enough to clear those out.

Synthmetal Skirmishers survive as a popular unit even in the bitter end.  The Pirates have 36 active, 9 lost.  I think they were made in situ in various sea bases, because many are Green.  I guess those sea bases were never successfully attacked by anything.  The Spartans have 60 active, 2 lost.  I suppose when they swept their foes off the supercontinent, nobody was around to do their units any harm.

[Jade Panther]

Miscellaneous Topics

I find clearing out the entire map of supply pods, using +1 PLANET from Green, to be extremely profitable.  I tend to amass large numbers of mindworms and Isles when doing so.  It's a different play style, but it's hardly inferior to Socialist.  If anything I think it is seriously overpowered, but you may not have noticed this.  Especially if you played as the Gaians and had +1 PLANET already.  I guess you're saying as the Gaians you had your cake and ate it too!  Well, you can do that.  But the AI can't.

I'm well aware of the power of the play style - in vanilla, doing this while running Democratic/Planned/creche is what the Gaians do. But, in vanilla, you forfeit the ability to run +2 economy, which is an acceptable trade-off. I hadn't thought through that in this mod one can cycle between running Demo/Green/Wealth and getting +2 economy while farming alien artifacts, and running Frontier/Socialism/Whatever and pop booming while farming alien artifacts, which is pretty crazy.

More pertinant to your point, though, is that even though you've made it possible for the AI for most factions to run Democratic/Green/Wealth and farm artifacts while getting +2 economy and +2 justice, none of the AI's in my game have shown any interest in doing so despite having numerous chances.

Some factions have made the predefined X units, but none have committed atrocities with them.  I think that makes them a useless extra production expense.  A pity.

If they have them, that gives them the means to retaliate if players commit atrocities against them. It's also possible they might use them against Progenitors, which doesn't count as an atrocity in the eyes of Planet or other human factions. So it's not necessarily wasted effort.

Except that in alphax.txt, the cost of a Mind Worm is actually 4.  What to do?  What a puzzle.  The cheaper cost would definitely explain why in my last AI vs. AI test run, it was completely overrun with mind worms.

I agree with keeping the cost of mind worms at 4. At a cost of 5, I've never built them, but at 4 I do. The AI in my game is building them occasionally: low-tech Miriam is building mind worms (a tiny fraction of her massive army) while high-tech Morgan (with his -3 Planet rating) builds locusts, not worms.

Punishment Spheres are deliberately cheap in my mod, and deliberately available early in the game.

This is totally an aside, but back in 1999 or 2000 Firaxis stated in the notes to one of SMAC's 4 patches that they'd hard-coded the AI not to build punishment spheres because it had no idea of how to use them. So how cheap or expensive or early or late punishment spheres may be is only relevant to players, not AI's (unless you installed from a 20-year old SMAC CD).

Curious side note. I just noticed that Santiago has lost two planet busters. I have no idea how that happened, although I assume Yang is responsible. The other AI's try to build them but can't, because they have to pay 3x cost for the first prototype, and they never finish the prototype before they decide they urgently need to build something else at that base.

I have not forgotten the problem of Wealth.  I simply haven't looked into it yet.  I need to see what the Pirates do, if they obey their primary compulsion or not.

My hypothesis for the way the AI decides this is: when an AI is deciding what to pick and their Agenda is one of the options (for your Pirates, when they're looking at Values, their Agenda of Wealth is one of the options) I think they just consider their Agenda vs. the default option, in this case Survival. So they won't consider how good Power or Knowledge might be. They'll simply calculate the net benefits of Wealth, and if that's over 0 they'll take Wealth, otherwise they'll do nothing (Survival).

Other factions that don't have Value Agendas will compare Wealth to Power and Knowledge, and almost certainly decide that the benefits of one or the other of those are greater than whatever rather meager value they assign to 1 Econ - 2 Morale.

However their cities aren't doing any eco-damage now.  Neither are the Spartan cities.  I wonder if the Voice or the Ascent suppresses eco-damage?

Every fungal bloom suppresses eco-damage, so fungal blooms will eventually solve themselves if you don't constantly increase production.

(Or it might have been something else. But it doesn't have to have been.)

[Jade Panther]

Generally speaking, I do not want players to be immune to the effects of -4 JUSTICE.  I want them to feel the pain and have to deal with it somehow.  I find that I candeal with it, but I have to make tradeoffs.

Then we're talking past each other. I don't have any problems with players having to make tradeoffs. But the AI will do what it will do, and in the case of AI Yang (for example), he'll run Police State/Socialist/Power at -2 Efficiency every game, and in so doing he will forfeit every game. Although he can and will build numerous units, his research, in the later game after he switches to Power, will not be remotely competitive with the stronger AI's or with a player who is competitive with the stronger AI's.

When AI factions consistently throw the game, it makes it less interesting for me as a player.

As a player I could run Power (-2 Justice) if I need it badly enough, and then switch out of it during periods of relative peace. The AI won't do that. Not just Santiago, but Yang, Miriam, and Morgan(!) have run Power constantly since I infiltrated them. Yang and Santiago have been locked in a death grip with each other, so they have an excuse (especially considering that Spartans are Robust), but Miriam, even in 2300 when she was at peace with everyone, has been running it constantly too.

On further contemplation of this, I'm not convinced.  You may be right, or it may be that 3 factions are sharing 1 continent and weakening each other because they're at each other's throats.  Both the Spartans and the Believers are Aggressive factions in my mod.

You shouldn't be convinced. It's a sample size of 1. And the war has definitely hurt them: Yang's bases have little terraforming; many of his pops are working fungus squares producing two food and nothing else; and he's lost over 20 formers to enemy action. The kicker for me was seeing how many of his bases are losing all their energy to distance-inefficiency. That's a deal-breaker. And the irony is that up until circa 2250 he was OK. It was only after he became more advanced, able to run Power, that he crippled himself.

The Peacekeepers, University, and Morganites are all Passive factions.  There's a reason they are able to sit back and accumulate wealth and technology, it's by design.  The Morganites, especially, functioned as sort of a ticking time bomb during a lot of my mod development.  I've seen the Peacekeepers often have this effect as well, possibly because they tend to gain the Governorship and get a lot of money that way.

In my experience the University is not as tough as them and tends to get trashed, but I don't know what more I would do with them, having given them free Biology Labs on top of their free Network Nodes.

That's been exactly my experience of these three factions during my game.

I wonder if violent, at war factions choose Socialist?  And is it because they think it's Planned and are going to get a +1 INDUSTRY bonus that they're not actually getting anymore?  Or is it not hardwired, and just a consequence of trying to balance -JUSTICE from Police State or Fundamentalist?

In my game, Lal was running Democratic/Capitalist/Knowledge/Cybernetic, researching at a rate of 1 tech/5 years, while at war with me, for the longest time. Then three things changed: I built the Empath Guild and took the Governorship from him, I captured a trivial University base only 10 squares from the nearest Peacekeeper base, and I expanded my tech lead from 3 techs to 7. I don't know which of those things it was, or if it was something else, but he switched to Frontier/Socialist/Power/None, and is now researching at a rate of 1 tech/13 years, basically conceding the game when he was still in it. I understand only one part of that - once he'd switched to Socialist, there was no point in remaing Democratic, or maybe if he thinks the war has become real now that our nearest bases are relatively close maybe he wants to drop the police penalty (OK thinking the AI's that smart is a stretch), and since his Agenda is Democracy his only choices are Democratic and Frontier. But I have no idea why he switched to Socialist. In vanilla, AI factions that will consider both Democracy and Fundy typically run Democracy when I think they're competitive at research and typically run Fundy when I evaluate them as needing to catch up with probe teams, but I don't see why that would be relevant here. The AI seems to realize that -3 and -4 Justice are bad, but other AI's don't seem to have a problem with -2 Justice, and if Lal ran Frontier (to avoid the Police penalty)/Capitalist/Power he'd still be at -1 Justice. I don't get it.

It's interesting that Miriam still runs Fundy/Socialist/Power even though she's no longer under any obligation to, but she's way behind on tech, and Fundy has a PROBE bonus. Still, she could still run Capitalism, and Survival values would be better than Power.

[Rocky]

I'm glad to hear you want to keep the lower cost for mind worms for now. I agree with Jade Panther that they would be too expensive to invest in early on. In the middle game the cost wouldn't matter as much as you would have more production + Brood Pits, but I compared it with a vanilla AC game and the feel early game is definitely nicer/smoother in your mod with the lower cost.

In my game I noticed an increase in Trance or Resonance Armor enemy units after I started to breed native life forms on a large scale. Until I got the Dream Twister, there were many encounters where my mind worms were not a match against them and had to mix them up with regular units/Spore Artillery.


Thanks for the info about the atrocity. It's a good thing I didn't use it against Morgan when he was attacking my headquarters because chances are I might have had a Planet Buster used against me before being ready.

[bvanevery]

and running Frontier/Socialism/Whatever and pop booming while farming alien artifacts, which is pretty crazy.

+2 GROWTH from Socialist is not pop booming.  Pop booming requires a total of +6 GROWTH from various sources.  A Children's Creche is worth +2 GROWTH.  If you can make your people extremely happy, you can enter a Golden Age and get +2 GROWTH from that.  But with a -2 ECONOMY that's not easy to do with Socialist.  The expected way that players will get a pop boom, is to build a Children's Creche and choose Socialist and Eudaimonic.  That's a late game arrangement.  Before then, your only recourse is to make people very happy and get a Golden Age.  It's also Morgan's only recourse because he can't choose Socialist, but hey, he's rich.

If you can demonstrate how you're actually pop booming, consistently and early in the game, maybe with manipulating worker types, then I might consider it a problem.  I don't manipulate workers to make anything happen myself, too much micromanagement for me.

The original game has +2 GROWTH available from Democratic and +2 GROWTH available from Planned.  I don't have any growth from Democratic. 

More pertinant to your point, though, is that even though you've made it possible for the AI for most factions to run Democratic/Green/Wealth and farm artifacts while getting +2 economy and +2 justice, none of the AI's in my game have shown any interest in doing so despite having numerous chances.

Nevertheless, the Pirates just won my last AI only test game doing exactly this.  I think the next followup question is what does Morgan do?  If a sufficient number of money grubbing factions actually choose Wealth, then there is no problem with Wealth.  Doesn't have to be all factions, or even most factions.

If they have them, that gives them the means to retaliate if players commit atrocities against them. It's also possible they might use them against Progenitors, which doesn't count as an atrocity in the eyes of Planet or other human factions. So it's not necessarily wasted effort.

I don't need the AIs to wipe out Aliens faster, or the Aliens to wipe out humans faster.  AI vs. AI combat is pretty much balanced as is.  That was one of the earliest major changes I made, defanging the Aliens.  If the AI was smart enough to make chemical weapons when the Aliens are in the game, then it would make sense, but it isn't.  I believe it's possible to make a tech that only appears if a given faction is in the game, such as the Aliens, but that requires sacrificing a tech for that purpose.  A further problem is, do the humans and Aliens even know to use chemical weapons on each other?  They may not.

I've tried many predefined unit ideas that didn't work out in the real world, because the AI factions weren't smart enough to use them properly.  I chalk this up as just another one.  The usual pattern is I think of something that's neat for a player, and then it turns out to be rubbish for the AI.

while high-tech Morgan (with his -3 Planet rating) builds locusts, not worms.

What a goof nut!  I've often seen the AI pester my own Locusts, when I'm tearing up their back country getting rid of all the Sensor Arrays and so forth.  Those kinds of "didn't beef it up" Locusts often just bounce off mine.  A further irony is Locusts can be attacked by ground troops, you don't need Air Superiority units to do it.  I was surprised to find out that's true even in the original game.

This is totally an aside, but back in 1999 or 2000 Firaxis stated in the notes to one of SMAC's 4 patches that they'd hard-coded the AI not to build punishment spheres because it had no idea of how to use them. So how cheap or expensive or early or late punishment spheres may be is only relevant to players, not AI's (unless you installed from a 20-year old SMAC CD).

Interesting.  Explains why I've never seen the AI build them.  Doesn't matter though.  If a player wanted to skip all the usual happiness buildings and just have a low tech Punishment Sphere empire, they could do so from very early in the game.

Curious side note. I just noticed that Santiago has lost two planet busters. I have no idea how that happened, although I assume Yang is responsible.

Overrunning a base that has PBs in it.  Happens all the time.  AI is terrible about protecting them.

The other AI's try to build them but can't, because they have to pay 3x cost for the first prototype, and they never finish the prototype before they decide they urgently need to build something else at that base.

I've seen plenty of factions in plenty of games complete PBs.  Yeah maybe they pay top dollar for them, but they still do it.  In principle, they could build them at a Skunkworks as I intended.  I'm not sure how often they do it that way in practice.

My hypothesis for the way the AI decides this is: when an AI is deciding what to pick and their Agenda is one of the options (for your Pirates, when they're looking at Values, their Agenda of Wealth is one of the options) I think they just consider their Agenda vs. the default option, in this case Survival. So they won't consider how good Power or Knowledge might be. They'll simply calculate the net benefits of Wealth, and if that's over 0 they'll take Wealth, otherwise they'll do nothing (Survival).

Well I have Pirates=Wealth, University=Knowledge, Spartans=Power, and Usurpers=Power.  So that's what I'll be looking for. 

Other factions that don't have Value Agendas will compare Wealth to Power and Knowledge, and almost certainly decide that the benefits of one or the other of those are greater than whatever rather meager value they assign to 1 Econ - 2 Morale.

Lately everyone seems to like Power.  I've noticed the AI is rather tolerant to JUSTICE penalties, and downright allergic to GROWTH penalties.  Not sure about POLICE or MORALE.

[bvanevery]

MY 2163.  I'm playing a test game with myself as the University, which I drew randomly.  I made sure to include the Morganites in the game to verify that their SE choices are appropriate lately.  I'm playing with the new version of Democratic that only has -1 POLICE.  That feels a bit cake-walky compared to previous habits, but it may be justified as far as trying to incentivize the AI to do something other than Fundamentalist.  I'm in a war with the Free Drones.  They are south of me, separated by a fair amount of land and fungus that they have difficulty getting across.  I believe I'm out-spreading them.  I have retained the default Explore, Discover profile as I do not feel seriously threatened by them.  Worth noting is that the Drones have a default Explore, Build profile, so they probably won't come up with weapons faster than myself.  I am in contact with all factions, but I have not called an election because I don't have the highest population and wouldn't win it.

Details learning Centauri Empathy in version 1 33

learning Centauri Empathy in version 1 33

I've just learned Centauri Empathy.  Am I now going to get an interlude like Jade Panther says?

Nope.

So far, can't reproduce this bug.  Notable differences in our situations:
- I am the University, not the Gaians
- I have never captured a mind worm

I'm going Green, as I think it would be useful for terrorizing the Free Drones.  I'm also quite gunshy about going Capitalist too early in the game.  Lotsa fungus for some hostile to come clobber me.  I prefer to wait until I've cleared fungus away from all my bases and know I'm not facing imminent mind worm threats.  Popping pods at sea tends to produce lots of mind worms and spore launchers on one's shores.

[bvanevery]

Details Deirdre's mistake

Deirdre's mistake

MY 2177.  Deirdre trades me E3 Intellectual Integrity for E2 Centauri Empathy, even though she hasn't finished the Ascetic Virtues.  Unless she's just about to, that's a mistake, and I doubt she is.  I wonder why the AI did that? 

I'm quitting this game because I'm not satisfied with the way I've torn up the Discover techs.  Need to fix that and start again.

[Rocky]

One thing I noticed (And Jade Panther mentioned it as well) is that the Hive AI is crippling itself with its government choices. He has a negative efficiency and it limits his research and energy income. He has one of the largest empires on the map but his tech per turn is only around 30. He's still keeping up tech-wise (presumably) thanks to his (Destroyer) Probe Teams but his energy income is in the negative.

I'm still having lots of fun with my Caretaker game. I wanted to fill up some of the space between my Empire and the former University territory but any new base is getting sniped thanks to Orbital Insertions. If I want a new base I'd better send some garrisons to protect it.

I just got the tech which gives Habitation Domes. (I love how this is earlier in the tech tree in comparison with the vanilla game. I often feel "locked in" when my bases hit their max early on)

[bvanevery]

I doubt the Hive can ever run out of money though.  The AI probably cheats at that.  Tech, well, I don't believe all factions should be awesome at tech.  If that were the one true strategy for winning the game, then every faction would be the same.  All that really matters is if the Hive survives long enough to provide a challenge to the human player, and that it's reasonable when a human plays it.  +3 POLICE is really powerful, and I've now got various predefined police units for the AI to play with.  A Police State Power faction also manages +3 SUPPORT, which matters at least through the midgame.

I've fixed the Sky Hydroponics Labs problem, by making it available with Advanced Spaceflight.  That will now be an E7 instead of C7 tech.  Orbital Defense Pods and the Cloudbase Academy will go to Graviton Theory, which will now be a C8 tech.  I'm not happy about earlier food, but we can't very well have a broken UI can we?  It's just a limitation of the original game.

Time to run an AI only game and see how the Hive does, I suppose.

[bvanevery]

Details Morganic police MY 2269

Morganic police MY 2269

With the new POLICE levels for Fundamentalist and Knowledge, the Morganites have made an interesting midgame choice with them.  I don't think this is wrong of them, as in my experience they don't actually benefit from a massive ECONOMY rating unless they've got a lot of peaceful Commerce going on.

Details Hive Peacekeeper symbiosis MY 2269

Hive Peacekeeper symbiosis MY 2269

The Hive started on an island, and managed to get to the nearby mainland, simultaneously occupying it with the Peacekeepers.  Remarkably, they did not come to blows despite intractably different ideology.  They are allied , but they do not fight the same enemies.  The Hive is at war with the Spartans and the Believers, and the Peacekeepers are at war with the Morganites.  The latter 2 are the most powerful factions of the game.  The Spartans are at war with the Morganites and the Believers, who have a Treaty with each other. 

Details Believer western empire MY 2269

Believer western empire MY 2269

The Believers colonized a split empire at the beginning, with their western capitol securely behind a peaceful Morganic shield.

Details Believer eastern empire MY 2269

Believer eastern empire MY 2269

The Believer eastern empire is getting wiped out by the unified Spartans pushing up from the south.

The Gaians and the Free Drones skirmish on another spindly continent, with the former seeming to get the better of the latter, but the outcome is uncertain as of yet.  The Believers are also colonizing another portion of this continent, making them a triple split empire.

This is a weird game!  I'm not sure why it terminated, as none of the factions were actually about to die.  For some reason I woke up from a nap with the Spartans in MY 2100 ready to settle their 1st city.  This generally means the faction I was watching, lost the game and a new game started.  I went back to Autosave 2, because usually if a game is terminated, Autosave 1 will just keep going and you'll be at the game's end.  Looking at Autosave 1, it's from MY 2270 and the game hasn't terminated, so I don't know what happened.

I wonder if the game crashed?  Ordinarily I don't have any stability problems, but Windows 10 recently updated itself to version 1803.  I noticed some audio buzzing, which is caused by that, but I haven't been playing long enough to determine if it persists.  Well I will start this game up again and let it run awhile longer, to see what of interest develops.

Details Peacekeepers refuse Democratic MY 2270

Peacekeepers refuse Democratic MY 2270

Now this is baffling.  Why won't the Peacekeepers choose Democratic?  Clearly they know how to do it, they just won't.  -1 POLICE is the slightest slap on the wrist, it merely prevents nerve stapling.  Democratic is almost a giveaway now, and it's not like other factions don't choose Democratic.  Notably, I've seen the Pirates choose it plenty of times.

Details Gaian warmongers MY 2270

Gaian warmongers MY 2270

The Gaians have chosen Fundamentalist Green, which is rational and completely in character for them.

Details Free Drones cagey MY 2270

Free Drones cagey MY 2270

Huh, the Free Drones also dislike Democratic.  The AI seems to be allergic to a trivial POLICE penalty.

Or maybe not.  Maybe in both cases, the AI has calculated that a net -1 ECONOMY doesn't matter compared to -2 ECONOMY.  Additional JUSTICE is not valued because neither empire is terribly large at this time?  So if neither of the benefits particularly matter, perhaps it figures it should retain its right to nerve staple.  If so, then the empires should get bigger and more in need of Democratic at a later time.  So I'll run the game and see what happens.

[bvanevery]

Details Morganite victory MY 2271

Morganite victory MY 2271

And here is my answer.  Termination of the game was legit.  No bug.  Now, how the hell did Morgan pull it off?  What amount of money was needed to start the Economic Victory countdown?  I'll have to go back 20 to 30 turns.  I haven't seen a game resolve with Economic Victory in a long time.  I don't think I've ever seen it happen in an AI only game.  The last time it happened in one of my games, I realized I had overpowered the ECONOMY bonuses and took 1 of them out of the game.  Nowadays it is only possible for Morgan to get to +5 ECONOMY, as he starts with +2 and only +3 is attainable from SE choices.  +5 is the max the original game ever intended to be available.  And seemingly, Morgan didn't even use that to win.  So what's up?

At game's end, Morgan had 7 Tree Farms.  He had built the Weather Paradigm and the Maritime Control Center.  He was working on the Planetary Energy Grid.  He built 10 Energy Banks.  He had 1194 energy credits.  Not what I'd call a world conquering economy.

In MY 2260, Morgan has 1029 energy credits.  He is Fundamentalist Capitalist Knowledge and has a +3 ECONOMY.

Details Morganite prehistory MY 2250

Morganite prehistory MY 2250

The Morganites used to be Democratic!  They had a +4 ECONOMY rating.  They had 918 energy credits.  At this time, they have already activated Corner The Energy Market.  Victory will come in MY 2269.  Unfortunately the auto-saves don't go back any farther than MY 2250, so I've just missed the window of understanding what happened.

The Morganites did achieve Planetary Economics.  That's the required tech for Economic Victory, same as the original game.  Maybe my changes to the tech tree, have made going up the Build part of the tree much easier than in the past.

Details no governor MY 2250

no governor MY 2250

An election was last held in MY 2239.  By proposing something else, I was able to determine that no one is Governor.  As Lal is actually in contact with everyone, I'm inclined to guess that the last election was deadlocked.  And also, that there wasn't any previous election, that it took a long time for everyone to get into contact.  I am thinking that the lack of a Governor, threw off the game's Commerce values.  Making it very easy for Morgan to buy Planet.

If I am correct, then this could be a repeatable strategy?  Don't contact anyone if you can help it.  Grow as much as possible, amass as much money as you can, and buy Planet before a Governor is ever established?

[Jade Panther]

Now this is baffling.  Why won't the Peacekeepers choose Democratic?  Clearly they know how to do it, they just won't.  -1 POLICE is the slightest slap on the wrist, it merely prevents nerve stapling.  Democratic is almost a giveaway now, and it's not like other factions don't choose Democratic.  Notably, I've seen the Pirates choose it plenty of times.

I now have a hypothesis for this. If you remember, a few posts ago I mentioned that AI Lal in my game abruptly changed to Frontier/Socialist/Power/None from Democratic/Capitalist/Knowledge/Cybernetic and this really puzzled me. I've played 20 turns since then, and Lal has been working on an absolutely massive military build up since then. My new hypothesis is that the AI has a mode where it says "I'm going to be in an all-out fight... need to place a high negative value on any negative police rating."

Or maybe not.  Maybe in both cases, the AI has calculated that a net -1 ECONOMY doesn't matter compared to -2 ECONOMY.  Additional JUSTICE is not valued because neither empire is terribly large at this time?  So if neither of the benefits particularly matter, perhaps it figures it should retain its right to nerve staple.  If so, then the empires should get bigger and more in need of Democratic at a later time.  So I'll run the game and see what happens.

Have you ever actually seen the AI nerve staple? (If you have, that's really cool, but I've never noticed it doing so.)

I am increasingly of the hypothesis that the AI doesn't think about the end totals of ECONOMY, etc., but just gives each one a weight, depending on the personality of the faction and the situation it is in, assesses each option (politics, economics, etc.) independently, and then the end results are whatever they are. Remember, Firaxis didn't do QA around "how does the AI play when people mod alpha.txt?"  They did QA around "does the AI make reasonable decisions under vanilla conditions?"

Also, this would be easier to code.

This hypothesis implies that the AI isn't thinking, "choosing Democratic will put my final value at -1 POLICE" but the programmer was thinking "this AI's about to go to war, and choosing Democratic will give it -1 POLICE all by itself, and who knows what the POLICE implications of its choices for Economics and Values will be? Better not do that."

I'm quite sure that the AI does not consider how large it's empire is when it decides how much to value EFFIC/JUSTICE. If it did, AI Yang in my game would not be running SE choices that leave 2/3 of his bases at 100% inefficiency.

[Jade Panther]

The Morganites did achieve Planetary Economics.  That's the required tech for Economic Victory, same as the original game.  Maybe my changes to the tech tree, have made going up the Build part of the tree much easier than in the past.

An election was last held in MY 2239.  By proposing something else, I was able to determine that no one is Governor.  As Lal is actually in contact with everyone, I'm inclined to guess that the last election was deadlocked.  And also, that there wasn't any previous election, that it took a long time for everyone to get into contact.  I am thinking that the lack of a Governor, threw off the game's Commerce values.  Making it very easy for Morgan to buy Planet.

If I am correct, then this could be a repeatable strategy?  Don't contact anyone if you can help it.  Grow as much as possible, amass as much money as you can, and buy Planet before a Governor is ever established?

I don't think you need to complicate your hypothesis by wondering whether not contacting anyone makes an economic victory easier.

According to the "Help" files, "Controlling the Global Energy Market will require a sum of credits roughly equal to the cost to 'mind control' every remaining base on Planet." So it's relative to the size of other factions. It might normally be cheap to meet the energy requirements early in the game, without it showing up in testing because in vanilla the tech requirement wouldn't be met early on.

You've made Morgan into a regular faction that gets +1 energy/square from the day he lands on Planet. Much stronger than he is in vanilla. He'll be richer in the early game than Firaxis ever expected any faction to be. (Not inherently bad, as in general your factions look stronger than their vanilla equivalents: in general they all look, at first glance, like regular factions with bonuses.) It wouldn't surprise me if it's harder for him to get Planetary Economics by 2250 (which I would have thought to be really hard) than to meet the energy requirement.

[Jade Panther]

I doubt the Hive can ever run out of money though.  The AI probably cheats at that.

When a human-controlled faction runs out of money, the game sells one of your facilities for you. I expect it does the same when that happens to an AI. A survey of my vanilla games shows that the AI rarely runs deficits and, when it does, it could balance its budget by reassigning some of the energy it is assigning to research, however unrealistic an expectation of AI Zakharov that may be.  In my game with your mod, the Believers, the Hive, and, after Sparta went to Power, Sparta, were all running deficits, but a casual survey of the Hive in saved turns didn't show any signs that they were actually running out of money. Yang was getting infusions of money from somewhere, I don't know where, but wild mind worms are one possible source.

Tech, well, I don't believe all factions should be awesome at tech.  If that were the one true strategy for winning the game, then every faction would be the same.  All that really matters is if the Hive survives long enough to provide a challenge to the human player, and that it's reasonable when a human plays it.  +3 POLICE is really powerful, and I've now got various predefined police units for the AI to play with.  A Police State Power faction also manages +3 SUPPORT, which matters at least through the midgame.

Time to run an AI only game and see how the Hive does, I suppose.

Unless they're extremely unlucky, the Hive will prosper in the early game and fade into technological irrelevance after it gets the ability to run Power.

-2 Efficiency means that every base that's 16 or more squares from the headquarters will be at 100% inefficiency (unless it has a creche). That goes beyond "not awesome at tech".  It's just not a viable strategy in a mod that's intended for large maps.  It's not a problem for the player, who can easily see that the tradeoff of Power, -2 Justice for Support and Morale, is not worth it.  It's a problem for the AI.

Morgan had a couple of pretty big drawbacks in vanilla, which you removed while giving him permanent baseline +2 Econ, which is fine. (Lal, Zakharov, Deirdre also got buffs. I haven't thought through the others). Buffing the factions compared to vanilla is a fine design decision. But why then are you nerfing Yang badly compared to vanilla, taking away the ability to run his Agenda without a -2 Efficiency/Justice penalty (as well as all of his other strengths) away from him?

"Power" works nicely in vanilla because -2 Industry is a big penalty to the player while being a somewhat meaningless penalty to the AI, who are more constrained by their inability to effectively terraform than by INDUSTRY modifiers. -2 Efficiency/Justice may seem like a smaller penalty than -2 Industry, and arguably from a player's point of view it is, but it's a much bigger penalty to the AI than -2 Industry is. The AI effectively gets +3 Industry at Transcend difficulty. It does not get +3 Efficiency.

Anyway, it's your mod and I've nagged you enough about this.

I've fixed the Sky Hydroponics Labs problem, by making it available with Advanced Spaceflight.  That will now be an E7 instead of C7 tech.  Orbital Defense Pods and the Cloudbase Academy will go to Graviton Theory, which will now be a C8 tech.  I'm not happy about earlier food, but we can't very well have a broken UI can we?  It's just a limitation of the original game.

I wouldn't worry about it.  In my playthrough of your rules, I researched (and built) the Manifold Harmonics (which gives, among other things, a food bonus to every fungus square, which rather makes SHL's irrelevant), before I developed the technology for SHL's.  Really, by that point in the game, you've got the food problem solved.  (One of the cool things about SMAC is how you go from struggling to survive in the opening game to the God-mode of the end game.)  In my house rules I nerf SHL's indirectly by making Cloudbase Academy much harder to get (Applied Gravitonics E14), so that every SHL is only worth 1/2 food to bases without aerospace complexes, as it was in SMAC before Cloudbase got introduced in SMAX.