Why do some AI races seem not expand in TA?

I'd like to add that you should probably PM Frogboy the link to this thread to make sure it comes across his attention.

I've PMed a dev or two in the past to try and point them at threads that needed insight or attention.  There are a lot of threads on this board...one cannot read all of them.

this is an interesting hypothesis, SB. i wonder if there are ways we might test it. i can imagine using cheat mode and gifting them star bases to both expand their range and establish extra zones of influence.

i can think of at least one example of the terrans colonizing within "my" space, though. so perhaps to some extent it is AI-specific.

There is something I want to clarify:

I should not have said the AI will "never" colonize within one's own or another race's sphere of influence, but it won't happen until:

1.) All the planets in the immediate range are colonized.  In general the AI goes through 3 colony rushes, the opening Rush; the final habitables Rush, and the Extreme Worlds Rush.

2.) The AI behaves differently once it has Extreme Colonization. It then enters a new Rush phase, and no longer seems to take into consideration the "location" of planets, just the desire to claim them.

3.) OR, the AI may colonize a world if they are not "worried" about culture flip, ie already close to their border, or numerous conflicting influences (3 races in one system sort of thing)

Thanks Silverbeacher, I'll look more closely at settings and see if it makes a difference.

Dystopic, in most of my games the Torians colonise all the crappy worlds in my space that I ignore (along with everyone else's) so they seem to be immune entirely, along with (to a lesser extent perhaps, not certain) other big colony rushers like Terrans et al.

All this said, I've tried a few different settings in the past and the Drengin/Korath seem to fare poorly either way - either too far from everyone else or getting swamped by Torians. That might just be bad luck in my starting positions though (as a side note, once colony rush is over and Drengin have 3 worlds to the Torian 23, it's fun to see how many turns elapse between the Torians declaring war and them finally defeating the Drengin - and whether I can beat them across the map to do it first )

I had a bizarre situation - I found a cluster of 5-6 systems in easy colonization range of the Korath that had been left uncolonized into YEAR 6. Immense, abundant all game, cluster was in the far right corner with the Korath homeworld maybe 3-4 sectors away. No influence from anyone covering the sector - I never explored it because no one colonized it, so I assumed they were all class 0, but it turned out to have a minor civ, a couple resources, and about 12 planets, mostly PQ 10+

Thanks for this post Silver....very helpful info.   Hopefully the devs will get to the bottom of this!

Sentient species taste better...

Well its definitely not an AI problem; I've run some Tiny All Abundant maps with the Korath, and they hvae been colonizing just fine- following the same criteria/method as the Yor; only crossing my "border" once they know they don't have to worry about culture flipping.

So now its off to larger maps.

well....

Immense Map, All Abundant, Tight Clusters

Korath colonized their cluster just fine.  After that was done, they went after resources.  They had the range to reach the far clusters later on (the next closest was about 7 sectors away) but I never saw them building colony ships.  This could however be because they were still in their Resource phase.

Unfortunately, I got my first ever OOM error for TA; which considering that I never colonized anything more than Earth, and in the entire galaxy there were only 266 ships (from the Debug.err) I found it kinda amazing.   HOWEVER, I did just install the LogicSequence HRGM 2.0, which is a huge memory hog, and combined with the fact that I'm using 1.99rc, well who knows what funny effects that could have. And on Max CPU. 

But in any case, so I "proven" that if given the space and planets to colonize in their original distance sphere, they will grab them.  So next tests will be with more AIs.

From what I've seen in my TA games, which are not all that many outside the beta, the main theme I see is inconsitency. And I *like* that. IMO, it isn't good to know everything under the hood in a game you love. Maybe that's my role-playing streak having too much influence, but I'd quit playing if things got too predictable for me. This kind of "problem" is probably the top reason that GC2 has had more replayability for me than any other TBS game I've loved, including Civ1, MoO, MoM, Civ2, Civ3, and MoO2.

If my sloppy observations are of interest, I can report seeing colonizing in my territory well before the extreme phase by a range of civs across different games. Sometimes the Terrans, sometimes the Korx, sometimes the Drengin--they all seem to occasionally "throw away" colonies from my POV by placing them where culture flips will become a definite risk. But I've also seen Shunned Clusters like the one WIlly describes, and what strikes me as evidence that a given civ on the far side of the map from me just stayed home too much (but those I usually don't know a think about until 100+ turns).

Yes, Cari had commented a while back that she believed this to be the reason for the "dud" AIs--they overestimate the likelihood of losing planets to enemy culture, and never colonize them to begin with. AFAIK this should be addressed in 2.0.

Thanks for the insight Kryo