I do like the mod quite a bit, it's a different take from Glavius and there's a huge amount of good in there, some really intelligent thinking on how to get the AI to perform better. :)

A bit rambling (and dare I say inadvertently rant-y) of my take on this mod and relations, sorry about that, please take it with humour from someone that has less coffee in them than desired. lol

Of course having said that there are some issues on design which I think are not all that great, especially considering how much the AI are all psychopathic monsters.

I'm not even talking about the design choices, just basing the fact on some random stranger giving me a million dollars so I don't murderize him would in the case the AI got that would instead still murderize him and dance on the grave. ;)

First I should say my play style will change based on the empire I have, having said that this mod forces super aggression on players, anything that forces anything in any game is a horrible, horrible (non-) design choice.

One thing I always thought was messed up in vanilla was the trade deal opinion, so I'm glad that was changed, and then two seconds after that I thought that it was a horrible decision to go to the extreme that was taken. Favourable trade deals opinion modifier are now pointless because only an idiot would give anything to the AI since firstly it's 10% of the actual value, and degrades 250% faster. If you want someones TV and they offer you a TV and PS 4, and your reaction is "meh" I think I'll take it then attack you, then there's a serious problem.

-side note to the above, and this is a vanilla thing, it's really easy to accidentally break a long term trade deal, if anything it should be preserved with market place conversions somehow. Just a thought. The standard penalty is also way to high given how easy these are to break by accident, and the reason I gave up on long term trades.

While I very much enjoy the fact the AI isn't as silly as vanilla and is realistic in how it works generally speaking, there are some huge things that are not working logically. Due to the nature of the game the AI knows 'exactly' how powerful they are and therefore are evil warmongers, most of the AI is hateful which should be instead wary or ambivalent, and the initial relations are a huge importance in the game to allow for good relations later- however this is severely curtailed by low initial relations with hardly anyway to improve it.

I do like that the AI knows I want all their stuff, however I don't want all the different AIs stuff, and in many cases I'm good with only half the galaxy, so the AI should get that and not be so aggressive.

Frankly the thing in games that ticks me off the most is in this mod, the AI acts stupidly aggressive and doesn't accept reasonable diplomatic actions while prosecuting reasonable conflicts. I will be quite happy to focus my efforts on any empire that irritates me, to the point that the AI does not understand that I may lose the first war but they won't exist after the second war, or at least I'll make sure they wish they never started a war.




1) Initial relations are way to problematically low, both generally and specifically with certain ethics, particularly those that should be a bit more friendly.

2) The AI gets into wars that hurt it in the long run, the next 2-3 wars.

3) The AI doesn't properly take into account the productivity of an empire, how fast they can increase their fleet, and replace losses, kind of reminds me of Germany in WW II, having the tiny brains to think that economies 10x their size can't beat them.

4) Unless all AI species are crazy they should instead be a little friendlier.

5) Trade opinion is broken (as are probably a lot of opinion modifiers. While I do prefer a nerfing at how good it is in vanilla, this mod makes it unrealistic to use under any circumstance since the benefit is close to nothing.

If vanilla is 100% and decays 2 per year, and this mod is 10% and decays 5 per year then something more like 50% with a decay of 3 is still harsh... is it harsh enough to be reasonably balanced- probably not but it's certainly something much more reasonable, heck I'd be less irritated with the concept if it even mattered, but frankly since the AI has a -1000 modifier to diplomacy who really cares. (btw limiting trade opinion to +20 instead of +100 only goes to show what a hugely wrong direction this mod is taking since gifts are useless because they are not valued and the AI hates everyone because it's psychopathic, in what world would more nerfing of diplomacy make sense).

So frustrating.

I do thank you for your hard work, I just wish I could enjoy it but the diplomacy is completely broken as it currently stands. I think you went in the right direction but forgot you were taking a long walk off a short pier and forgot to stop. =)

all the best


p.s. I should mention one war in particular during the early game the last time I played. the relations were about -20 to start and of course IMPOSSIBLE to change, they were inferior in fleet size and I tried to keep my fleet size up, I'm not sure what they did but they must have spent every available effort into their fleet and as soon as they got a 1 corvette edge they declared war... absolutely stupid, I'm not sure how much cheating if any was used on ENSIGN difficulty, but for extremely little gain they started a war they couldn't win... they could however be annoying enough that fighting the war would weaken me against others, mind you there was nobody else in position to have that matter, it does go to show that later on with more neighbours I'd end up having minor and moderate powers fight wars with me for little to no benefit which would cause me to lose wars against major powers more than likely.