Age of Wonder 4: what i would keep and trash from AOW3 and planetfall.

[Sandman25DCSSS]

1. Don't settle obsessively then? Try execrising restraint. I'm sorry but you did it to yourself. A dev had to step in and control your settling habits. At the expense of everyone else like me. Planetfall turned into civ5 where I settle the first 3-4 cities then be bored and blocked by cosmite costs on colonizers. I plan on applying the mod after i finish the current new haven planet game.

What do you mean as don't settle obsessively? In my current game I killed 3 AIs and I have 16 colonies already (that's 4 per player, I disabled camps) , there are 8 more AIs to kill. Do you play tiny maps vs a single AI only?

Maybe just maybe almost everyone else is doing it the wrong way? I see Modded t4s very regularly in my RMG Games.

How??? I tried a slow game where I didn't attack anyone before turn 30 and I don't use tier 3-4 units, no orbital relays either, 100% land and 0% water, now it is turn 51 and I control 1/3 of the map after killing 3 AIs and nobody ever attacked my sectors despite we have 12 teams here. I am first in every category and it is a boring game now. If I don't use teams, they stay friendly and just die one after another. I don't see a way to meet modded tier 4 AI units unless you do nothing during first 100 turns I guess.

Edit. Oh, I see now. Turn 188. My longest game lasted less than 90 turns. Do you have 4 colonies and peace with everyone on turn 90?

 

[mbuh]

A land type of map in galactic Didn't manipulate the settings other than increase the map size from medium to large. Already completed planet molarix last month and moved to new haven.

I suspect your map is around 40 (land) - 60 (water). I mean i never try 34 - 66, i'm interested to try it, i'll probably lower the land to 25 and see what kind of map i'll get, the main thing that prevent me to ever doing that so far is the fewer the land is the worse the AI is, but still i'll disregard that in trying to see how fare naval units in "island" type map, i believe 34 or even 25 land (there rest is water) should quite qualify as island map. I'll let you know my impression later.

At first glance, "island" type map in AoW3 is much better, i mean lots of water, lots of small landmasses, with quite a lot more incentive to build ships there. In planetfall, it seems not so much, but this is just first glance, i'll explore more.

Citizen/Colony Mods.

I assume it's like unit mods but for cities? If yes, it's interesting indeed

 

[akinata]

Not an insane idea, the game allows for you to play it almost however you like, so enjoy yourself.

But why are you complaining when others play it how they like?

Also, if you want stronger AI, there is a mod out there, which I have used, and it actually works quite well, for amping up the Ai aggression and ability.

which mod?

 

[Ericridge]

Not an insane idea, the game allows for you to play it almost however you like, so enjoy yourself.

But why are you complaining when others play it how they like?

Also, if you want stronger AI, there is a mod out there, which I have used, and it actually works quite well, for amping up the Ai aggression and ability.

I'm complaining because it was a change forced onto me. Its pretty much a worst change I've seen in all of planetfall so far. Planetfall was perfectly fine and good without completely unnecessary balloning cost colonizers. Just like so many bogus changes that was completely unnecessary forced onto me because a bunch of PBEM players can't control themselves and did ridiculous things to harvest exp. They called completely compulsory and necessary must to do. It was amusing to see a raw recruit become a grizzled elite by the end of battle because it managed to kill so many units. No more ;_; Nonsense such as Mortar shots and flame tank's fire breath being set on cooldown for some reason. Are you telling me their crews is napping and won't be ready to fight at all until after a enemy shot at them once? Or silly things such as punishing theocrats for playing good and using their t1-t2 units very well. I didn't take the hey, stop spamming heals very good and timing it so that you don't lose untis because you're playing carefully stop that. I hated that nerf to heal cd. So i stopped playing theocrats. I have never gotten a good explanation on why they was nerfed other than some pvp players lost a match and blamed on those stuff and had them nerfed.

1. I am SP and I was happy to get the patch. It felt like work micromanaging all those 50+ colonies.
2. I am sorry, you are playing far from optimal way. I've never seen a modded tier 4 AI unit in my 1600 hours despite playing the largest maps with disabled victory conditions mostly. I even tried to use mods which increase cosmite income and energy, still no success in meeting them.

What do you mean as don't settle obsessively? In my current game I killed 3 AIs and I have 16 colonies already (that's 4 per player, I disabled camps) , there are 8 more AIs to kill. Do you play tiny maps vs a single AI only?


How??? I tried a slow game where I didn't attack anyone before turn 30 and I don't use tier 3-4 units, no orbital relays either, 100% land and 0% water, now it is turn 51 and I control 1/3 of the map after killing 3 AIs and nobody ever attacked my sectors despite we have 12 teams here. I am first in every category and it is a boring game now. If I don't use teams, they stay friendly and just die one after another. I don't see a way to meet modded tier 4 AI units unless you do nothing during first 100 turns I guess.

Edit. Oh, I see now. Turn 188. My longest game lasted less than 90 turns. Do you have 4 colonies and peace with everyone on turn 90?

You said it yourself, it felt like work micromanaging all those 50+ colonies. That's on you. I rarely have that many cities being micromanaged before the balloning colonizer change. I only settled as I needed and razed all the badly placed cities. Then fix it by placing cities in better spots and thus I didn't need that many cities.

Response to 2nd quote. No. I was actively warring and fighting AIs. And as you can see, look at the minimap, its a continents type of map. For you to say tiny maps vs single ai only it clearly means you don't even read my entire post. It must be too long for you. I'm not sure if i should even chat with this to you further. But i'll try. in the screenshot where I"m about to fight the yellow kir'ko across the channel .. you can see that it is turn 175. And five AIs is already eliminated. And I mentioned in the last post that control of the planet graducally came down to just two alliances fighting each other. It was me + Orange Dvar + light green shakaran VS Green Kir'ko + red assembly. Victory conditions enabled is Domination. Everything else is disabled.

Its not about the destination, its about the journey. I don't know what you're doing to murder the AI so very quickly. On the continent I started on, There was two neighbors who fought me for the control of the continent. The Syndicate + amazons with Yellow kir'ko sneakily settling in and stealing sectors while I was busy fighting two AIs off at same time with occasional skirmishes from yellow kir'ko. I won and defeated the syndicates then yellow celestial kir'ko betrayed the amazons and took their lands.

The start is usually the hardest, usually a tight seesaw balance that if it swings one way then other AI will notice and try to steal from you while i send armies after other guy. Usually have to cancel the attack and return to fight off the invaders. Its kinda hard to ignore 40+ units ready to fight. But if i'm fighting quite hard on one front while keeping the other ai at bay just barely on other front due to lack of units. And truce happens, depending on circumstances and the positioning of both AI and my forces i might take it and then go after the other ai who tried to sneak attack. And the truce might continue indefinitely for 20-40 turns. That suits me just fine because I do not need to fight everyone at same time. xD

That can cause a map game to drag on for a really long time. It doesn't happen every game I've had occasional maps where I basically already won by turn 100. It was just the circumstances of that map and random map generator being in your favor. That's fine, just win and move on. Or abandon the map and start a new one. I'm not too concerned with finishing as many maps in short time span as possible. I just enjoy each map I play on. If you're curious, 1175 hours on aow3, and 717 hours on planetfall so far. It might take me weeks to just finish one map. I'm too busy now compared to when AOW3 was released.

I suspect your map is around 40 (land) - 60 (water). I mean i never try 34 - 66, i'm interested to try it, i'll probably lower the land to 25 and see what kind of map i'll get, the main thing that prevent me to ever doing that so far is the fewer the land is the worse the AI is, but still i'll disregard that in trying to see how fare naval units in "island" type map, i believe 34 or even 25 land (there rest is water) should quite qualify as island map. I'll let you know my impression later.

At first glance, "island" type map in AoW3 is much better, i mean lots of water, lots of small landmasses, with quite a lot more incentive to build ships there. In planetfall, it seems not so much, but this is just first glance, i'll explore more.



I assume it's like unit mods but for cities? If yes, it's interesting indeed

For AOW3, continents was my preferred map type. The more land there is the more better it is. But playing 100% land was quite boring. AOW3 maps was too small for me. Which is why navy wasn't even that relevant. Islands will never make navy relevant because ships can't bombard land units nor attack cities. That's just how it is. A unhappiness modifier don't count. Its a lazy man's cheap way out. Plus if it makes my cities very unhappy while AI's cities don't even notice ships in their waters then it isn't relevant and just more bs to ignore. Because that means the AI can siege your cities with ships while you can't return the favor.

 

[mbuh]

For AOW3, continents was my preferred map type. The more land there is the more better it is. But playing 100% land was quite boring. AOW3 maps was too small for me. Which is why navy wasn't even that relevant. Islands will never make navy relevant because ships can't bombard land units nor attack cities. That's just how it is. A unhappiness modifier don't count. Its a lazy man's cheap way out. Plus if it makes my cities very unhappy while AI's cities don't even notice ships in their waters then it isn't relevant and just more bs to ignore. Because that means the AI can siege your cities with ships while you can't return the favor.

It was more "island" than in planetfall though.

While i agree that ships cannot do anything to coastal cities in AoW series, a point that is worthy of note is in AoW3, most if not all flying units are t3, ships too, i mean they cost the same, but ships are stronger in general especially the galleon, if i wasn't using classes who has lots of amphibious and/or flying units, i found ships very relevant in island map. Archdruid used to be able to make ships float, that was hilarious, unfortunately dev said that was not intended

However in planetfall, flying units are t2 and they more or less can perform as well if not better than t3 ships in overall terrain. This makes planetfall ships feels less relevant. Still, i think planetfall ships are quite relevant as in scary against non amphibious and non flying

Other worthy of note point is that there's not much incentive to build coastal cities in AoW series, especially in planetfall. Water resources should be a little further from the coast, or at least introduce water outposts in order to make it even further, the outposts can exploit or link its exploit to any linked sector

 

[Sandman25DCSSS]

When clicking the images, the turn numbers are not visible. I see them only after opening images in a new tab.
I will repeat myself, there is a mod which reverts colonizer cost ("yet another simple mod") so you can still play the way you are used to. Yet it is quite funny, I am accused of having too many colonies (right, it is turn 59, 3 more AIs will die during next 2-3 turns and I will have about 40 colonies) and your solution for having too many colonies is a bad play when you can't kill AIs instead of limiting ability to spam colonies. Should I repeat that if every player has just 7 colonies (quite reasonable for turn 40-50), I am forced to have extra 42 colonies after killing 6 opponents no matter how many colonies I build myself? With old colonizer mechanic it would be 60+.

 

[Ericridge]

Archdruid used to be able to make ships float, that was hilarious, unfortunately dev said that was not intended

I remember that. It was another fun thing taken away from us player. :< But I can at least understand why. Flying frigates+galleons was OP.

Why build t2 units when can build galleons instead xD

I'm still reasonably certain its because of the distances between continents and ship's lack of ability to threaten cities is the reason why they are very irrelevant. I still remember the one time where assembly in one of my RMG games showed up with 30+ battleships I just ignored it and let it blow up my sector bases. Although I made sure to engage them in a manual battle and used mass driver shot to sink 0-2 battleships every 1 turn on strategy map. After 15 turns or so of the farce, the battleship fleet shrank in number and fled. Then I reestablished the sector bases by destroying whatever forward bases the assembly set up in the waters to block me from them with six gunships shooting it up. While all that was going on, i was just focused on my land war against a continental neighbor.

At most, it did prevent me from having up to 14 OP to use against my land enemies though.


-----


Ah i see sandman so you're including the cities you conquered. Its pretty easy to handle those ones too though. Those cities tend to be badly settled so the micromanaging is at most ripping out the food sectors or whatever else you don't need like production sector and put in a energy sector instead. Upgrade them. Then forget. Unless the intention is to convert it to a new production center for your units. Then just raze everythign else, the cities with only 1-3 sectors can be burnt down. their sectors can be added to other cities that isn't at max sectors yet. Minimal work is needed and then just place it on produce energy and forget. It has a bonus of being terrible city for enemy to capture because there isn't very much improvements built in the city so they can't use it against you immediately.

Tho i've been wondering about something. Its probably just worth it to make those cities exclusively food/energy. Not all cities being taken from the enemy is worth micromanaging. Some would be set to food/energy and forget. Others would be razed. And then very few great locations with cities in them will be micromanaged to crank out units. Semi decent cities could have decent production and bit of energy to crank out cannon fodder troops with.

The number of cities i micromanage is never very high , because some of them would be on producing energy permanently because all the necessary upgrades was done which is just happiness/militia structure then energy/food. Only time when it's really high is when I have completely subjugated a AI and i have to start reordering sectors to change their specialization, etc. Its not bad at alll, its a nice period to reorganize your forces and assess how the situation has changed.

 

[Sandman25DCSSS]

Ah i see sandman so you're including the cities you conquered. Its pretty easy to handle those ones too though. Those cities tend to be badly settled so the micromanaging is at most ripping out the food sectors or whatever else you don't need like production sector and put in a energy sector instead. Upgrade them. Then forget. Unless the intention is to convert it to a new production center for your units. Then just raze everythign else, the cities with only 1-3 sectors can be burnt down. their sectors can be added to other cities that isn't at max sectors yet. Minimal work is needed and then just place it on produce energy and forget. It has a bonus of being terrible city for enemy to capture because there isn't very much improvements built in the city so they can't use it against you immediately.

Tho i've been wondering about something. Its probably just worth it to make those cities exclusively food/energy. Not all cities being taken from the enemy is worth micromanaging. Some would be set to food/energy and forget. Others would be razed. And then very few great locations with cities in them will be micromanaged to crank out units. Semi decent cities could have decent production and bit of energy to crank out cannon fodder troops with.

The number of cities i micromanage is never very high , because some of them would be on producing energy permanently because all the necessary upgrades was done which is just happiness/militia structure then energy/food. Only time when it's really high is when I have completely subjugated a AI and i have to start reordering sectors to change their specialization, etc. Its not bad at alll, its a nice period to reorganize your forces and assess how the situation has changed.

It does not work for me, I still need to control all the regions which I conquered. Typically there are lots of neutral colonies after defeating an AI and other AIs are happy to capture them. Even if I raze the colonies (which I almost never do because it kills your reputation and thus your ability to buy NPC units, I have max relations with all 3 NPCs at turn 65 now), high amount of colonies would not help to get more fun as the battles are trivial and I still need to send lots of groups to conquer them and then remaining AIs would build more colonies there (especially with the way you seem to defend old version where colony spam is not limited). So I still need to build units for defending those colonies and if I am spending resource on that, I want to make sure they are not worthless so I still build sectors and other buildings. I have just 8 colonies of my starting race by the way and next colonizer costs 850 energy and 90 cosmite. I can build such colonizers for landmarks only. Previous colonizer was built for an area with 2 adjacent cosmite nodes. Also I don't need anything except cosmite now, sitting on 5k energy, several 20+ size colonies and researching future techs in both military and society tree. My cosmite income is 128 by the way I still continue the game because it is fun when enemy sends 3 stacks (including 4 tier 3 bombardons with 3 mods) to attack my 10 units of tier 1-2 without heroes and I still win without losses. Also I have many psi-fish units despite there are no psi-fish on the map, I evolved a found tier 1 psi-fish to Siren and it produces more psi fish for me.

 

[mbuh]

I remember that. It was another fun thing taken away from us player. :< But I can at least understand why. Flying frigates+galleons was OP.

Why build t2 units when can build galleons instead xD

I'm still reasonably certain its because of the distances between continents and ship's lack of ability to threaten cities is the reason why they are very irrelevant. I still remember the one time where assembly in one of my RMG games showed up with 30+ battleships I just ignored it and let it blow up my sector bases. Although I made sure to engage them in a manual battle and used mass driver shot to sink 0-2 battleships every 1 turn on strategy map. After 15 turns or so of the farce, the battleship fleet shrank in number and fled. Then I reestablished the sector bases by destroying whatever forward bases the assembly set up in the waters to block me from them with six gunships shooting it up. While all that was going on, i was just focused on my land war against a continental neighbor.

At most, it did prevent me from having up to 14 OP to use against my land enemies though.

Yes, that was too OP, they make dreadnought's cannon like a child's play. Still, the fun is real back then, even in multiplayer back then.

Absolutely that is the main reason why ships are not that relevant in AoW, i still think the other reason is there is insufficient benefit in settling coastal cities, at least as opposed to civ and AoW3 to lesser extend. There are some options for future AoW game (if there is), of them is makings ships able to do some threat directly to cities or land sectors like you suggested, other is probably making water resources further from land, in AoW3 water resources can be very far from land, but then again there is water outpost there.

 

[Sandman25DCSSS]

which mod?

I guess "More stronger AI". https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2131544833
I used it and AI had more units and much earlier.

 

[Ericridge]

Yes, that was too OP, they make dreadnought's cannon like a child's play. Still, the fun is real back then, even in multiplayer back then.

Absolutely that is the main reason why ships are not that relevant in AoW, i still think the other reason is there is insufficient benefit in settling coastal cities, at least as opposed to civ and AoW3 to lesser extend. There are some options for future AoW game (if there is), of them is makings ships able to do some threat directly to cities or land sectors like you suggested, other is probably making water resources further from land, in AoW3 water resources can be very far from land, but then again there is water outpost there.

In AOW3, my favorite race to play as humans and they had every incentive to settle coastal cities. The more water hexes they had, the more happier the city was! Something like that. Been awhile since i played aow3 so i hope i still remember correctly. The reason I never feared the enemy navies wasn't because I played as Dreadnought almost all the time back then. Its because enemy navy couldn't siege my cities. I could just ignore building a navy.

Oh boo hoo my coastal city is suffering -800 unhappiness because there's a enemy ship parked next to it. Ultimately it did nothing. And if I tried to do the same to the AI cities, they would have waves of manticores ready to kill my ships or if they don't, making the city unhappy did nothing vs emperor ai. They won't even notice it at all. You need to dump massive amount of morale debuffs onto a single city via spells just to make a emperor ai flinch.

Thus, having a navy is even more irrelevant.

if triumph studios decide to let ships wreck cities in aow4 then i would need to be able to build a harbor fortress upgrades. Complete with a fort and cannons to fire onto the besieging ships And if the assault forces also brought land units at same time, well. Clearly they can participate.

But if they are participating then does that mean coastal cities will now have two types of militia that participates in the battle?

The city center's militia and then harbor's militia. Now this is going to be a fun thought exercise on how to balance it out. I need to take some time to think this out.

 

[mbuh]

Oh yes, the human get +15 gold by building harbor from economic racial upgrades (lv 2 i think, been 2 years since i last play AoW3), this encourages city spamming for the human, i have no problem with that though

Anyway, i'm starting to tinker with planetfall mods today. Goal is for increasing the AI priority for higer tier units, and mod them later, but for now somehow i'm interested in making new units, for now biological only, like units you can get only from special quest. Recently somehow it seems i've seen the AI manage to field 4 bombardons at turn 18, unmodded though, and i'm still exploring how to make it more constant, for now besides the unit priority parameters, i opt for a bit more resources income to make it more constant, but once i figure the other variables that impact AI unit priorities, i'll probably reduce the bonus.

Back to topic. Regarding ships threatening cities for future AoW, i'm not sure if the current engine can support it, probably triumph need to do quite a significant revision on their game engine for the next game. Anyway, naval battles has always been a problem for most strategy games though, probably civ series is the only game i know that quite represent it well

 

[Sandman25DCSSS]

Alpha Centauri had really great naval warfare:
1) Naval cities could be directly attacked/defended by ships
2) Ships could bombard offshore hexes destroying any terrain enchantments like farm or borehole which took quite some time to build
3) Ships could bombard ground units damaging the whole stack
4) Ground forces could use artillery to have an artillery duel which lasted until either the ship or the artillery died
5) You could raise water levels in UN charter meaning now more cities could be attacked by ships and even some cities could sink if they didn't have naval city improvement
6) Assault ground units could attack offshore cities directly from transport ship which was a very dangerous threat because typically you didn't see the transports until they captured your city

 

[mbuh]

I hope those can be incorporated to the next AoW, probably not all or exactly like that i mean, but the concept at least

For planetfall, currently to make naval units more relevant, at first glance at the modding tools, other than buffing the ship stats directly, maybe it's possible to quite alter the landmass generation ratio from the base map stats to make the map more islands type than continents type

 

[HousePet]

5) You could raise water levels in UN charter meaning now more cities could be attacked by ships and even some cities could sink if they didn't have naval city improvement

Strangely, using naval Formers to sink an enemy base was not considered an Atrocity...

 

[coodav]

Alpha Centauri had really great naval warfare:
1) Naval cities could be directly attacked/defended by ships
2) Ships could bombard offshore hexes destroying any terrain enchantments like farm or borehole which took quite some time to build
3) Ships could bombard ground units damaging the whole stack
4) Ground forces could use artillery to have an artillery duel which lasted until either the ship or the artillery died
5) You could raise water levels in UN charter meaning now more cities could be attacked by ships and even some cities could sink if they didn't have naval city improvement
6) Assault ground units could attack offshore cities directly from transport ship which was a very dangerous threat because typically you didn't see the transports until they captured your city

Alpha Centauri had really great naval warfare, if you think that Waterworld should be the name of every movie. The naval units in that game were so grossly overpowered that it was stupid. I purposely beefed up my fleets in early game, got the 6/6 and 9/9 upgrades, and dominated the entire world with my horrifically OP Tier 3 naval units that could not be killed. I regularly conquered entire planets starting with like 10 or 12 naval units.

Civilization VI now does that a bit better, as they don't 1-shot everything, and have good usefulness without being utterly OP. Still crazy powerful, but not as bad. That approach is impossible to use with this combat style, with multiple stacks in combat through completion, but there may be some middle ground.

As for the Original Post:

■ what i would keep from planetfall:

and

■ what i would keep from AOW3:

For this, I think that there is a 500 lb. gorilla in the room. Without a better AI, there is really just no hope. This is the absolute bane of these games, but it is something that simply cannot be overlooked.

As of 15 days ago (my last game), there was no losing. The computer's city management was abysmal. The computer's combat strategy was singular and abusable. Unless it was 4:1 or worse, the computer was about to get smoked, maybe even without losses. The computer would just expand brainlessly, and even with perfect visibility, (it sees the entire map and knows where all of your assets are), would regularly overextend and get itself overwhelmed.

The AI is just so bad that almost no matter how much you let it cheat, that there is just no real challenge. Sinsling did a 12 v 1 insane AI, hardest possible settings, stupidest possible playstyle, and it was close. I regularly did 12 v 1 just for the heck of it, and never even bother to save. Empire mode made it better, but that is just because it cheats even worse now.

I fear that if you want to make a more compelling game, you have to have more compelling opponents. The AI just isn't doing it, and that is too bad. There is only a few ways change this though, make a smarter AI through lots of hard work, or use machine learning to shortcut it. I have never done either, so good luck to them on this, I wish I could help.

And as for the gameplay itself, that is beset by another 500 lb. gorilla. The UI and city management tools are unfinished and unhelpful. So much so that conquered cities feel impossibly hard to manage. I have posted endlessly on this, so I will save it here:

There are two types of problems with Empire Mode...

And this feels a bit like the previous issue: in that it would benefit from lots of polish. It is different in that it is really mechanical, so it feels solvable, if Flagship put in the work. But they never have, so who knows if it will ever get solved. I just hope that when the next AOW comes out, the interface doesn't suck for no good reason.

This all gets me to what they did do right. This Empire system is incredible. This is a modding system which is fully integrated into the game. I don't believe I have ever seen anything like that before, and they are really onto something. If they can get that right, maybe this is the breakthrough that changes everything. It is limited in that they really lean into cheating harder than ever, but it works anyway. I have had more close calls with this system than ever. And think of what else they could do. I mean, try the original quests using an Empire-mode system. That would be pretty damn sweet.

So whatever they do, have Empire mode be a part of it. And use all of the good ideas from your modding community. It could really be amaing.

 

[mbuh]

I agree. I give up waiting for the official AI patches for the current game, so i look into what the modding tools is capable of in that regard, so far unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a lot of hope (at least for me), the amounts of resources the tools allow to access regarding the AI is not much, or rather a bit too simple (in my opinion for planetfall's mechanics), it is sufficient for previous AoW game, but insufficient for planetfall (in my opinion, at least for now). There doesn't seem to be a lot of revision in planetfall game engines compared to AoW3, at least it is less than i expected

It's possible to create a quite complex AI, but not going to be easy with this level of access to overall game's resources the modding tool allows. I haven't check all possibilities though, so i'll still delving further, probably there is some hope for the current game AI improvements.

 

[Sandman25DCSSS]

Well, existing mods do solve the problem of AI being too weak and passive, I am currently attacked by 28 units on turn 30 while my main army is fighting another AI which attacks my colonies from 2 directions with "just" 12 and 18 armies. I have only 5 colonies after killing an AI because I am forced to defend my colonies instead of expanding.
I built max defenses in my capital and had a hero and a few elites defending so the AI tried to ignore my capital after capturing a sector and was going to attack another colony. I used my main army to threaten the army so it retreated to captured sector and was waiting for reinforcements during 3 turns, then it retreated a few tiles to join them. I have just recaptured the sector with scout and this is what I see, I am sure the army will attack my capital next turn. Quite smart play of the AI IMHO.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2359129373

 

[mbuh]

I'm not sure that's mostly because of the mods, i haven't try any AI mods though, but being attacked by full 5-12 stacks (that is 30-72 units full of modded t1 and t2) by turn 22-30 happen regularly in my game without AI mods, the most extreme is if i'm surrounded by 4 AIs, they often attack with 14-20 full stacks from 4 directions, each with 1k-1,2k power, happens usually around turn 25-35. This is why i (and few other posters in this forum) often complain about late game AI instead of the early game one, this is also why for now my focus on my AI mod is improving their use of higher tier units then later for them to mod those units.

What i found out so far by tinkering with the modding tools, the AI plans after mid game are quite weird, they still use early game plans at a turn where said turn is defined as mid or late game, by default the game consider mid game at turn 30+, late game at 55+, by default the AI seems to have different perspective regarding this though. I suspect this is part of the reason why they only use tier 3 and tier 4 in quite high number after turn 150+ (i never saw it myself, but looking at Ericridge pictures), there are several other reasons like unit production, research and unit upgrades priorities and the shifting between plans is influenced by chance. Personally the level or depth of access for the game resources is less than i expected, but i still think it's possible to create a decent if not good AI, it's however quite tricky for now, that being said i experienced decent amount of success so far in regards of making the AI use t3 and t4 much earlier than default, but too extreme for now, so i'm still figuring the right values for the variables

 

[Sandman25DCSSS]

I see. Yes, those changes would be great as currently the game is like "survive until you have a strong army of tier 2-3 and then you can't lose". It looks like you may want to check https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2317785019, it is a recent mod with similar goals. I haven't used it yet though.