Evil races dont expand

Yes I reported this back on July 14, it can be found under twilight of the arnor with title "most evil races not expanding" and was up to 3 pages long. Last post was Sept 12. I believe carielf said they had found something to do with "influence ratio" but not sure if this is the issue or what happened.

https://forums.galciv2.com/318189/page/1/#replies

Some players have questioned the validity of the error.  I can confirm after being away since v196 that the bug still exists in 201.  I just started a game, 9 players on crippling difficulty, gigantic map, hab planets=common, number planets=uncommon, stars=occasional, star density=loose clusters, tech rate=slow, 6 minor races, extreme planets=rare and the evil races are doing very poorly.  The drengin and Korath seem to be the worst, not colonizing outside the 3 or 4 initial stars they do right away.  Other races are then able to colonize the remaining planets around them.

I am ready to quit this round because they are not competitive.  Want to stress that as I reported before, if I go out and edit the personality of these evil races to something non evil such as making them all krynn personality they will expand like crazy.  I confirmed this back in the summer when initially reported.  Hopefully we can get some more confirmation and then perhaps stardock will fix.

Folks I can promise you this is an issue and I am asking that it be investigated and documented here so we can get it fixed and make this a better game.  I am not saying it occurs in every map size or difficulty level.  I tend to favor very large maps and the crippling difficulty.  I can tell you that one time I did find a 21 planet right next to drengin well into the game and it was way on other side of a gigantic map.  This should never happen.  Dean 

Yes I reported this back on July 14, It can be found under twilight of the arnor and it was up to 3 pages long. Last post was sept 12.  I believe carielf said they had found

Here's what i experienced with latest patches even

when you start they will colonize planets that are in the colored sphere at the start

They will only go outside the sphere if they are isolated with no others around including Minors

except with invading

i've restarted many times because of this,a few games they did well but most they didnt

I am experiencing the same problem. All Evil Civs do not expand past their original influence radius. I am playing TA fully updated only with the high res graphics mod. I noticed this myself over the last few games.

I tested it and after 30 turns the Yor we not expanding. I cheated, opened up full exploration to check it out. I then gave the Yor 5 colony ships and placed the ships besides worlds they should be happy to have. Next turn all 5 colony ships were auto destined to the Yor homeworld. I looked at their home world and the already had several colony ships of their own but had not launched them.

It seems to vary with the Korx, Korath, and Drengin. The Yor always have this problem with me. I have even tried to up their difficulty level to no avail.

I re-installed. Still the same problem.

Evil races expand to the initial influence, and then stop.

They end up way behind with many colony ships just sitting unlaunched on their home world.

This bug is still found in ToTA 2.02. It's a game breaker.

I don't keep good notes or have the sharpest memory for details, but I would confess to having an impression that the Korath, Drengin, and Yor are not quite as scary as they once were. I tend to play Gigantic and Immense maps (and hence fewer games), so I was half-consciously assuming that the unique tech trees were the variable here. But I'm too much of a niche-setup player to have any certainty.

Why hasn't this thread gotten any responses from the active posters who are better students of the game than I am? If the topic is indeed covered in another thread, I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd appreciate a reference link. DethAdder, Silverbeacher, Loupindour, Sole Soul, et al?

My name was called, and so here I am.

I did some testing back on this last fall, you can read the post here: https://forums.galciv2.com/326874

There was another thread somewhere where Cari answered, saying it was due to the AI putting too much emphasis on influence (more correctly, losing worlds to other's influence)

Kryo seconded this in my post.

Brad even seemed to notice some issues when he played his death matches (see Developer Journals) and yet....nothing has been done.

I haven't done enough testing to say for sure if its the tech trees or not, I've had some games where the Yor and Korath do alright if you give them enough of an economic bonus. But still, they are nothing compared to what they were in Dark Avatar.  Its gotten to the point where I just make my own custom evil races.  So far, I've found the Altarian AI to be the 'best' in TA, that is it seems to be doing everything it SHOULD be doing.  One possible suggestion, in the interim, when setting up a game, go to Edit Opponent, and change their AI scheme.  NOTE: That being said, if you don't want them to be talking like Altarians you will need to edit the customrace.xml in your My Documents/Games/Twilight folder (and My Games/Twilight/Metaverse for MV games).  There is a line that says "Dialogue Tag"  Change that back or to the race that you want, and that's the dialogue that will be used in the game.