You get offensive/defensive modules for researching weapons and defences with this mod too.  There aren't a lot of them because, as I noticed in some of my games, a cunning human player can create very effective kill zones populated by just drones and military starbases.  So there are fewer ship assist modules in the mod now, which is just as well since I had to trim as many as possible to get most of the modules in before the 100 limit for the AI to use them.

How do I choose more than one mod at a time in the mod folder? :/

Can't do that.  Reason being, mods can override the same data files - tech trees, buildings, etc.  In order to use one mod with another you need to merge them together,  Using Windws Exlorer, take what's inside both folders and drag it over to a new mod folder.  For example, if I wanted to combine my mod with the High Resolution Graphics Mod, I'd make a folder called 'SWFM V HRG' and drag the contents of both mod folders to there.  Don't drag the actual mod folder over, else it won't combine them into one mod folder structure.

This assumes that one mod can work with another.  As I mentioned, some of them can override the same basic files.  So you can't get the features of both without opening up conflicting files in Notepad or some other editor and doing it manually.  So you have to know what you're doing with them, else you can crash your game with circular tech dependencies and stuff.

I've once again come across odd or buggy AI-behavior in my current game.

And once again I don't know if the mod has anything to do with it or not.

Several of the opponent races (I have Spy-Level High in all their empires) have idle starports.

They allocate resources to it. They have the tech to design war-ships. Yet they simply waste resources to build absolutely nothing.

I think for some reason they just do not design ships sometimes.

Another thing about this mod: Due to the inavailability of research- and production-buildings the AI will turn their 1st planet into an eco-world. That is nice for games with a lot of colonizable wordls. But when everyone can only have 2 planets they fall behind in tech drastically but instead make way more cash than they could ever use.

And another thing. I think it's an issue in unmodded ToA as well as modded.

While a lot of buildings can only be built/kept by their specific race there seems to be a bunch that can be traded. Unfortunately it is not possible to upgrade them into your own type of buildings and thus the AI will neither upgrade it nor replace it.

Really, the longer you dig into all that stuff the more inadequate logics you can discover.

The whole racial stuff looks unfinished. And considering the complexity and sheer amount of workload there, it is hard to expect any modder to fix it all.

This industry is driving me nuts... They keep making new games but don't "finish" the old ones. In my book Civ 3 had the most potential to be the best 4x game. Unmodded it's actually quite terrible.

If you know the right tricks you can improve the AI a lot by modding.

But they put some idiotic unmoddable flaws in it. For example that every transport-vessel will be protected by up to 3 naval-units. Which is a complete waste of potentially dominating the seas.

I think with enough effort GC2 can be modded to be outstandingly good. Unfortunately the effort i'm talking about probably is in the range of months for a single person.

The biggest time suck is not the modding though, it's testing out the mod through normal play.

Even then, there are limits to what can be done by modding.  Unless I created a whole new version of the mod designed around low-habitability galaxies, there's no way to prevent the AI from spamming the wrong kind of buildings.  All I've done is stave off economic meltdown in the early game, by depriving AI and human player alike of money-sucking buildings.  It's up to Stardock to come up with a smarter AI that can use buildings more effectively in the first place, demolish buildings that it no longer needs, and use bonus tiles to maximum potential, without making the early game even more painful for the AI that it already is.

What you have to appreciate is that designing an AI that can strategise and build a thriving economy like a human player is no small task.  Some of the concepts we take for granted (like holding onto the initial treasury and running at a loss to use full production) fly in the face of what a simple query tells the AI about its situation.

So I completed my latest test game.  No issues at this time.  Well apart from the fact that the Altarians, Yor and Iconians dominated the galaxy under a banner of evil, stealing the Drengin thunder.  I've got to take my game to a new level, invest more heavily in research, get a military up and running sooner, and start picking on the unfortunates.

So I've decided my next game I'm going to be evil.  Really evil.  I want to try out those psyonic weapons and watch my enemies flee in terror. Hehehehee.

A new thing that I finally decided irks me.

Sensors.

The first tech is sort of useful because it gets you the survey module and a bonus to your Sensors ability, but the Sensors Mk I module itself is worthless due to the space it takes up.

So I've made a slight adjustment to the space used by Sensors Mk I and II and slightly decreased the cost on the Mk II.

I've also decreased the cost for the Sensor Array while increasing the space usage, making it less expensive to use early on but not so competitive that you never want to use Sensors Mk III.  I will be adjusting the research cost on that as well, since it's basically a bonus tech for picking Terrans.

It's been nice to play without starting over from scratch.  I've got far enough into the weapon tree as an Evil race that I can see how useful (if somewhat costly) the alignment-specific weapons are.

I've also noticed that the Iconians are struggling again, despite having researched their economic structures they don't seem to want to build them anywhere.  I'll need to check it out in cheat mode, see if the Emporiums, Barter Stations are actually available.

Yep, the Iconian buildings are available, it's just the AI doesn't want to build them.  Probably because it got itself set on personality 10.  No idea how that happened.  Nothing for you guys to worry about though, the mod's raceconfig has the Iconians set to personality 8 instead.

There is a bit of a snag with the Improved Colony.  When it becomes available, it can be built on a world that has a Civ capital.  The AI seems to fill up their homeworld too quickly for this to be an issue for them, but a human player might build one by mistake on an empty tile and then, once it's there, it's impossible to get rid of it.

It's not a huge problem, but I thought I should mention it anyway.

So I've had a look again at the beam weapons.  There's not much of a gap between Disruptor IV and the Doom Ray in terms of cost to damage ratio or damage to size ratio.  However if I make Doom Ray better, it's almost worthless to play a race that gets Disruptor on their tech tree.

So I've created a new end-game beam weapon for races that have Disruptors instead of Phasors.

Omega Beam
This new ultimate beam weapon is a disruptor weapon of colossal power which actually unravels the space and time that the target is occupying.  Because this breakdown is temporary, it does not harm our universe, but it is very harmful to the target.

Noticed that the Arceans seem to be getting stuck on Weather Control.  I've recategorised it as Terraforming instead of Colonisation, hopefully they'll be more inclined to go for it next game.

Posted a new version today with the changes to engines, sensors, sensor array and the new Omega Beam, and the fix for Arceans getting stuck.  I've also included a new evil custom race for you to try out, they have the Super Warrior ability and are focused on industry.

There might be some issues with getting the race to display their logo, you may have to go into their config file in CustomRaces and edit the path to logo.  Or it may work fine.

By default you will not be able to select them to use as your race, you'll need to drag them from the mod folder, change the file extension so it reads raceconfigxml, and maybe a couple of other things.  They're meant to be used as an opponent race.

Actually, I didn't pack an updated TechTree.xml so that's probably the problem.  All fixed now, so if you already downloaded from the link one post up from this one, re-download it.

I just noticed actually that the previous version of the mod was posted in May, and so there are a couple of other things I forgot to mention.  I've pulled together the change log, which I didn't think I was going to have time to do until Tuesday, but there was some kind of alarm keeping me awake all night so, made the most of it.

Sorry it's been a while since I updated the mod.  I've been busy hunting for work, which surprisingly tends to mean posting letters and CVs in envelopes like a caveman.  Maybe I should sign off my letters with Yours sincerely destroying the planet one letter at a time.

Anyway, I will keep going with it and try to get in a few more updates before GalCiv III finally breaks its time lock and gets released... and then I have to start all over again.  Well, we'll see what happens, anyway.

So I haven't had much of a chance to play GC2 what with XCOM Enemy Unknown and Fallen Enchantress hogging my time.

But guess what?  GalCiv III isn't here yet, and neither is a patch for GC2, so it seems I'm not done yet.  I'm not sure when I will update next, it really depends on what there is left that I can fix or improve.

What I would like is for someone to post an AAR of a game using the latest version of the mod, or even a review of the mod gameplay if that's more your thing.  I had one going for a while there but doing that and working on the mod at the same time was just killing me.

MarvinKosh, If you can, can you include MORE military-assist modules in the tech tree.

It is ridiculous that you beefed up the other two categories of starbases but completely neglected the military starbase which in the right situations, are the most powerful of all starbases.

I left the mining modules alone for the most part and stripped some modules from economic/culture.  That's what I wrote in the changelog.  If there are more manufacturing assist modules than there were before, it's because I added racial-specific manufacturing techs.

This is really good work.  I'm actually looking forward to playing ToA now (I liked ToA more, but for playability had to stick with DA instead)

Hi people

Well, if i want to play vanilla Gal Civ 2 , i don´t want to use mods that change too much of the game.

But yes, i can remember that some races built ship hulls without any weapons. And i want to fix this.

Do i simply have to remove the <Category>PD</Category> in <Weapons ID="Space Weapons">for all affected tech trees ?

Nope.  You need to change it to <Category>Military</Category> like in the first version of the mod.

To be honest though, I think you're wasting your time playing vanilla GalCiv 2.  Where I've made changes, it's usually been driven by some kind of annoyance or lack of balance.  There hasn't been a major patch for three years.  Besides, you lose nothing by playing a modded game for a few hours to see if I'm telling you the truth.

Please forgive my confusion.  I once downloaded and installed the Tolmekkian Tech Mod.  Do I have to uninstall that before installing the 5D version I just downloaded from here?

If you put each mod in a different folder in the mods folder you can switch between them if you like.  But you can't use them at the same time, nope.  If you check the top post you'll see I've also included directions to fix your mod folder selector not working, if that's not working either.

Current state of the mod: Still playing my Altarian test game.  It's going really well actually, someone picked a fight with me and immediately three other races declared war on them.  I haven't lost any planets to invasion yet, but I need better ships and more of them if I'm going to fight back.

Although the Altarians initially start out with a penalty to their Weapons ability, between a starbase built on red anomaly and beelining to Dark Energy Research I've got about +26% in it now.

Overall  I like what I've done with the Altarian improvements.  Their factories have a small but cumulative bonus to manufacturing.  Of course, the Altarians do not get power plants in the mod, but they don't need it in order to compete in manufacturing, as previous games have shown.

It's going to take a while to get used to the fact that I don't have any cool ship templates handy.  I would really have loved it if someone had come up with some naval-style ship templates but in the Altarian style.

I'm going to be posting a few screenshots from my latest test game on Twitter.  You can follow the action as it happens, so to speak.

If you want to offer some pointers, or some comments, feel free to post here or send a message @marvinkosh.

If you caught the running commentary on my latest game you might remember that I said the Arceans were struggling.  I haven't revealed the map to find out whether that's because they started in a bad place or whether they've been marginalised by the other nearby races.  They are at war with the Yor, who seem to be gobbling up other empires at a frightening pace, so the latter theory may fit better.

Hopefully I will get a chance to see if they're able to progress through their tech tree like the other races without getting stuck again.  I'm not too hopeful because they're only just researching Laser III, but I guess we'll see what happens.

Anyway, until I have something more, there's not much in the way of changes to be made.  I may have another look at the weapons balance, in particular Laser V vs Particle Beam I.  Okay, fair enough the particle beams are fairly cheap to research, but unless you research Miniaturisation it is often necessary to keep going until you hit Particle Beams II.

Others have made the argument (and I agree) that having five grades of laser weapons is quite obnoxious.  The basic weapons techs are not something that either the human or AI player should be spending lots of research time on.