Successfully modded minor races to colonize

Which files(s) did you mod to achieve this?

I edited the raceconfig.xml files so that the minors no longer used AI Personality 5, which is responsible for their non-colonizing and general stupidity. I set them to AI personality 11, but I suspect any of the other personalities used by major races (7, 8 and 10) would also work. I also replaced the mysterious <Tech>Root</Tech> in the file with the Terrans' starting techs (again, this is DA) in case this was also related.

For balance, I eliminated their 100% bonus to economics, but did give them small boosts to military and social production to help them keep up.

Also, in order to get the mods to function, when starting a new game, immediately quicksave and reload. For some reason, this is necessary to overwrite the normal minor traits; if you start without reloading, the minors will behave in their old fashion (not colonizing).

There is at least one thread discussing modding the minor races like this out there, which is where I learned about the quicksave 'fix'. Unfortunately, I can't find it, otherwise I would have provided a link.

Way to make minors less . . . minor

There ye be.

I did the work on modding the minors originally, discovering the quicksave fix.  Super Abilities worked fine with my mod.  I even tested the Super Organizer ability.  Trust me, you don't want the minors to have it!  If I had to guess why yours didn't work, I'd say that perhaps there are other traits in the raceconfig that control it.  Rather than just change the personality, I also add the other traits that Majors have but Minors do not.

Excellent work, qrt! Perhaps you should package this thing and upload it to i-Mod... it's pretty dead over there and could use some new blood.

It's official.  With the appropriate settings the minors can become monsters.  I'm playing a test game now and actually started a preemptive war against the Dark Yor.  They were out-colonizing me and encroaching on my space.  I'll also reaffirm that super abilities work just fine.

I guess I could go back an retract my statement about not knowing what the extra settings do.  They're the same variables you can adjust when you customize your opponents - how much money they get compared to you, how much CPU they'll use, how strong the AI is, and how aggressive they act.  Without them I figure the AI just goes into stupid mode.

It's kinda fun watching them go.  Brings back GalCiv I memories . . . sniff.

It sounds like that would only apply to TA and DA.

DL doesn't have those fields in the raceconfig.xml.

Yes, the mod only works for TA and DA. I have yet to determine how to make DL minors colonize, if it's possible.

I definitely did edit those other settings as well; in fact I set the Snathi to be ridiculously aggressive (warmongering squirrels are fun). The minors' SAs definitely don't work, though: in addition to the "League of Non-Aligned Worlds" I set the Dark Yor as Super Dominators, but when they fell victim to the Drengin's spasm of aggression in my test (they suddenly declared war on about five races at once) no Super Dominator corvettes appeared.

As mentioned above, the minors vary in power apparently at random. In this same test game, the Carinoids are putting up a good fight against the Drengin and the Paulos have built themselves a small empire; all the other minors are dead.

Ironically, in an unmodded game I started soon after, the Scottlingas colonized a planet and have a military larger then several major races, and are now waging a war of aggression against both the Drath and Yor. Go figure.

(BTW, I'm considering going back and buying GalCiv 1 myself, principally because of the random events, which I hear tended to be even more unbalancing then most mega events. Was the "minors gone wild" triggered by an event or was it a common thing? I know they could colonize, but that's not necessarily the same thing as the old stories of minors taking over the galaxy I hear from GC1 veterans).

Further note: I've now begun a full-fledged game with this mod, and the super abilities definitely do work now. In fact, it's resulted in the Dark Yor going on a colonizing spree thanks to the fact that I made them Super Isolationists and the Yor aren't in the game - giving them a chance to grab barren worlds well before everyone else. Both the Dark Yor and the Lentzlandians have actually managed to develop full-fledged empires of 6 or 7 worlds, the same size as some of the smaller major races, and the Dark Yor have the military to go along with it.

Some of the other minors still aren't really colonizing, though. While in the case of some it was just bad luck (for instance, the Jessuins were stuck right by the Thalan HW), the Snathi built several colony ships but never launched them. It reminds me a little of the TOA "colonization bug" and in fact the Snathi had the Drengin SA and the AIPersonality used by the Drengin, the only race to have the bug in my games of TOA.

This sounds amazingly awesome. I've tried to create mods like this before but didn't know about the quicksave "fix". Will you be releasing this as it's own mod any time soon? I could probebly recreate it myself, but It'd be nice to see what sort of tweaking you've done so i don't have to do it all m'self.

Me <- LAZY MF

Where could I get this mod to try?

I haven't put it up anywhere. It's not that hard to do on your own, but if you want I could upload it to I-Mod.

qrtxian, did you modify the minors in any other way?  I gather you got the Super Abilities to work, but did you change the other ability bonuses?  I'm keen to see how the minors turn out in The Kushana Initiative.  Despite all the work I've done with them, it's my first game using modded minors.  I did run several auto-play games to see what the AI did with them so I could tweak them just right.

I gave them all small bonuses to military/social production, research, economy, and pop. growth to help them stay semi-competitive during the colony rush. In my ongoing "test" game, they've fallen into three groups that I think of as:

"Major minors" (Dark Yor and Lentzlandians) - on a par with the smaller major races,

"Minor powers" (Carinoids, Scottlingas, Paulos, and Jessuins) - minors with 1 or 2 colonies, good-to-fair abilities, and intelligent behavior, and

"Fools" (Akilians and Snathi) - the only minors that are like (or, more precisely, were like - they're dead) the normal unmodded minors.

There's also definite variance between the minors in behavior. For instance, even though the Lentzlandians are much larger then the Scottlingas, the Scotts have a much better military and have been battling for the fifth military rank with the Dark Yor and Korx for some time.

The super abilities are working, all right. Right now the "League of Non-Aligned Worlds", the Thalans, and my Krynn are all at war with the Drath after the Drath attacked the Carinoids. The League and Thalan are also at war with the Korath, although I passed on that one.

My only concern is that even though, as mentioned, the Dark Yor have a strong military, they aren't doing anything with it. My guess is that it's because they have a score of 30-something (they're ranked between the Korx - 40-ish - and the Iconians - 28 or 24 at last count). Their military probably should be rated higher, but the Drath, Thalans, and Korath are all so huge that they're artificially deflating everyone else's score - rather like Dread Lords in a way.

One thing I noticed in my auto-plays was that the minor races never initiated any wars.  The conditions weren't ideal, though - the game simply isn't designed to auto-play such large scenarios.  I even gave one minor ridiculous bonuses to see what they'd do.  They grew out of control and dominated the galaxy, but still never started any wars.  I used hot-seat to have some other races attack them, and they prosecuted the war just fine until the end.  I noticed that they refused to attack the last world remaining.  It was also the last world in the game, except mine, so either minors won't eliminate a major or they won't finish the game.  Haven't found out yet.

To bad the library is not working you could upload this, 

This sounds amazing, could you lay out exactly what you did so we can replicate this awesomeness!?

I suspect that if I edit CustomPlanets.xml to include home systems for the minors that the game will use them?

1. Open your RaceConfig file (for me it's C:\Program Files\Stardock\Galactic Civilizations II\Twilight [or DarkAvatar]\English\RaceConfig.xml).

2. Find the AI personality for a minor race. It should look something like:  

<Race Name="LentzLandians">
  <RaceID>17</RaceID>
  <DisplayName>LentzLandians</DisplayName>
  <Alignment>50</Alignment>
  <Homeworld>LentzLand</Homeworld>
  <Homestar>Lentz</Homestar>
  <RaceLeader>Harold Gibons III</RaceLeader>
  <Description>The LentzLandians are a fun-loving race that quickly turn on those who cross them.</Description>
  <ShortEmpireName>LentzLandians</ShortEmpireName>
  <AIPersonality>5</AIPersonality>
  <LeaderGender>1</LeaderGender>

Switch the AI personality from 5 to 7, 8, 10, or 11.

3. The minor will now colonize. However, when starting a game with the mod, you must first quicksave, then reload. This ensures that the old "stupid minor" is overwritten. If you don't do this, the minor won't colonize.

That's it! There's lots of other changes you make, as discussed earlier in the thread. However, this is the bare minimum needed to make a minor race colonize.

Note: The mod requires Dark Avatar or Twilight. As far as I know there is no way to make minor races colonize in Dread Lords.

Edit: AI personalities 7 and 10 are bugged on Twilight - make sure to set the minor to 8 or 11 if trying the mod there.

I've tried this with no success.  I haven't been able to get it to work for custom races and I haven't tried with a major race, so I'm not exactly sure that I'm doing it right, though.

This does work for custom races. Be sure you edit their home star and home planet in their raceconfig files.

Bumping so that any new forum members can know about this.

Edit:

While I still haven't seen any minors initiate a war on DA, I've seen them do it on the TOA version, though not too frequently. As one might expect, it only happens when they're stronger then a major race, which is uncommon but not unheard of. It is fairly common to see minors join in on the "dogpile" on a dying major, though.

As long as this topic has been bumped, I guess it's a good place to say that I just released a mod with colonizing minors.

Here's the topic for the mod: TechTree Fix v1 with colonizing minors

Enjoy.

Given the influx of new players now that the game is on Steam, bumping again.