Returning player from 15 years ago....

[PoeticJumpshot]

Hey all so i played this game in the early 2000's, never had AX until recently. I mostly mastered the game back in the day and quickly rediscovered my root strategy's by my 2nd play through on max difficulty after picking it up off GOG. I came here and picked up yitzi's, the custom faction pack, and binary dawn as well. I also grabbed someone's harder ai changes but it didn't seem to help with the AI's thought process issues. So I read a lot of the read me's attached with everything and I mostly understand a lot of it but there some things I ran across in test simulations that I was curious about.

- Certain factions had access to level 3 reactors very quickly, and all that had it achieved it before level 2 reactor. I don't know if this is a bug or oversight in the new tech tree system.

- Psi defense probe team unit? Is this something that is discovered super early and I made an oversight or is this a predesign for some special reason? On another note - the ai builds a giant amount of probe teams and constantly "purchases" cities.

- I thought I read somewhere that movements for units (needlejets?) was being reduced but they still seem to have base movement numbers. I may have messed up an install somewhere along the line.

- On another post - gaians are said to be adjusted to pop cap of 3, but in the game they are at 4. Possibly another incorrect update application on my end though.

General things:

- Ai communication concepts and behavior are still really bad and predictable though I don't think this can be fixed
- AI Builds wayyy too many military units
- automated units don't properly nav fungal squares or bug units
- even with the aggressive ai setting the amount of bases they get up and running still lags behind, and most often only 1 or 2 factions begin sea colonies within a proper time frame.
- haven't studied terraform behaviors enough yet

I feel like even with reading a bunch of different forum posts and trying to piece the various readme's all together I could use a brief breakdown of all the changes if anyone could help me out. I know the combat formula has been altered, that's something I can learn through a play through, but something like a patch list change log for factions would be nice, if nothing else so I know I have everything installed like I think I do.

Also, of the massive custom factions list, are there considered balanced enough to run in the multiplayer games y'all might be playing? I've gone through them and tried to pick out some that are interesting but not overpowered to see how they would fare in test runs, but i'd assume you guys would know better so I can save myself some time.

[PoeticJumpshot]

Some random thoughts that popped in my head:

- Map squares height distance is hard to vary without creating 'slanted' tiles that prevent borehole construction. Has anyone thought of shrinking the sea level range for solar collectors and artillery (and terraform raise/drop I guess) to be smaller to achieve similar effects but eliminate the slanted tiles? Not sure if this is something that's been done or is possible, but it would be very minor quality of life change, but just now thinking it is probably easier to just remove boreholes inability to be placed on slanted tiles

- AI specific change = not sure if the terraform updates and super formers that we're created fix the AI's former tendencies of building a bunch of sensor arrays. If not, could a simple swap of sensor and solar collectors in the text file placement for AI's pref/tendencies be plausible? I don't know if it's a terraform algorithm or the ai's general warmonger preference that innately makes it prefer the arrays

- As far as tendencies are concerned, I know for cities you can activate governor and limit what he can build, but I think altering the what options the computer can pull from the explore/discover/build/conquest tabs innately would probably help. As in under discover the cpu is more likely to build labs (it's probably already this way, but perhaps numbers can be tweaked or the pull log for each can be refined? I have my own specific build path for a base from it's inception at least for against cpu's that I think would be a great option for ai's instead of picking build and having them make 6 scout patrols and colony pods for instance. Having essentially 4 pre planned building que settings would be an awesome time saver. So in place of the 'explore' governor tab it would just have something like Poetic Inf that follows a build list to optimize the bases infrastructure. Obvious issues would arise as tech is variable and I could see issues happening when the next priority building isn't available, or lets say that ai is building a secret project than discovers a building as part of the q and switches off to finish the "priority" building. I'm not sure how they decide what is important and if that's anything within our control, but if nothing else having personalized automated base building without having to personally que would be nice, though once again I have no idea if this is something that's even possible.