An aversion to Space Weapons

Which races were you up against? I've noted this behavior from the Terrans, Drath, Altarians, and Korx.

Declaring war should cause them to build up a military, unless you're so much stronger that the AI decides to surrender. During my first TOA game when I originally saw this behavior, both the Altarians and the Korx developed into two of the strongest military ratings on the map (though the Korx were a paper tiger with pitifully outdated ships), but the Drath surrendered immediately to an ally.

I don't think this behavior is a bug, as it's a strategy some human players use as well. However, the AI shouldn't surrender just because its opponent is temporarily stronger.

I hacked your PC - you were playing me!

Sorry, but kinda funny - I almost never research military stuff until I actually have to do so; Then someone declares war and I fight a delaying action until my (By then massive) research facilities have had their research perverted by the military into something horrid patriotically volunteered their services against the vile aggressors . . .

<G> - Jonnan

Works the other way round too - declaring war too early will trick the AI into building hopelessly weak Fighters. Sometimes, when lacking any weapon-tech - they will be unarmed, or, in case of Iconians (or any race that traded for their stock armour tech) have 0att 1def which is of the same worthlessness.

Well the first war in that game was pretty early, I took that one race out with fighters, each armed with a pair of lasers, and low-tech transports.  I kept expecting them to improve their weapons before I launched the offensive, but they never did.

Three custom races, plus Korx and Altarians.  Playing them again to see if I get a repeat of this bug.

Nope.  They were all quite happy researching up the weapons tree this time around.  Though it didn't do them any good, all my capital ships had defences as soon as I figured out what weapon type everyone was gunning for.

Go tweak the techtree.xml

For galactic warfare, space militarization, space weapons and 3 weapon theories increase the AIvalue  to a higher (say 50 instead of 10). This makes ai consider those techs important and research them early.

Just out of curiosity, I noticed at some point that there's nothing in the system preventing the creation of further 'exotic' weapons types in the tech tree - Has anyone ever done so?

This game I'm playing now, same bug.  It's crazy that these races will declare war on each other if they get gifted enough ships, but they won't research weapons on their own.

I used the cheat mode to switch to the other races in a new game.  There's nothing obviously wrong (like the line of techs leading to weapons being completely missing) but they're choosing not to spend very much time on working towards getting weapons.

My theory is that the increase in time taken for weapons research in TotA, plus the slow tech speed, means that the AI considers Space Weapons a waste of time.  So unless you like going influence or tech wins, playing with a slow tech speed is completely unchallenging pointless and could be considered an exploit in Metaverse games.

Okay here's something interesting.  I fired up the Tech Tree Editor, and took a look at the Altarian tech tree.  Space Weapons is categorised there as PD.  This is the same category which is given to point defence technologies.  Same dealio for the Korx, Terran, Dread Lord, Drath and Minor Race tech trees.

The obvious implication here is that if the AI is designed to check a particular pre-condition before research begins (e.g. does the enemy have missile weapons?) then it could fail to research this technology at all, unless someone researches missile weapons.

The Thalan tech tree has Space Weapons under the Computing branch and in the Pure Research category.

I don't know if changing these to what the other races have them as (Weapons branch, Military category) will help, but I guess it's worth a shot

So I've finally got them researching Space Weapons.

Unfortunately at the moment I don't know if that's a result of the tech tree amendment, or because I yoinked the aggression slider all the way to the right.  So I will have to start another game and see which it is.

Pretty sure they aren't going to develop Space Weapons just with the aggression slider maxed.

I've posted a mod over in the Modding section, please check it out if you're having this issue.

I should note that I've never seen the Thalans fail to research Space Weapons. Assuming your theory is correct, this is probably because there isn't a special reason why they wouldn't value Computing techs.

Edit: Also, this seems like strong evidence that this is a bug. Given that the AIs do start researching weapons when attacked, and that a pacifist strategy is in keeping with their backstories, I considered it possible that this was just part of their Race Personalities. However, it now sounds like an actual bug.

It was actually quite funny, last night I was playing my test game and the Altarians started extorting money from me because I hadn't built up a big military yet.