Three major issues with Federations DLC

[Caligula Caesar]

We've done some work to improve this for the upcoming patch. In terms of the AI not proposing federation laws, there was a bug hidden deep in the depths of the AI diplomacy code that meant it will never propose, no matter how high the weights are, even though it was meant to if the weight score was above a certain value. Once we fixed it, we soon realised that the AI was so keen on these federation laws that it became a bit painful to be in a federation with an AI at all, because they'd change diverse laws while you weren't watching... So what we have in the next patch is:
- AI is able to propose federation law votes, but the threshold is fairly high
- If there is no player in a federation, the federation leader will feel 1.5x more strongly about all issues, so AI-only federations will be very likely to pass all manner of laws - certainly including federation centralization and fed fleets. In player federations, it's intended to be a bit less active, but it'll still pass certain laws.

I'm pretty sure that the 2nd point is fixed, though I don't have any juicy details to spill there! Re point 3, that was an unintended side-effect of the AI generally feeling OK about sanctions, and either loving or hating most other resolutions, so sanctions ended up being the lowest common denominator. It should be a bit better in Nemesis - the AI is now scripted not to want more sanctions for at least 10 years after a sanctions law has been passed.

 

[Caligula Caesar]

Apologies, but is that really the best solution? Shouldn't there be a bit more reasoning behind the AIs votes? Some simple stuff like the following would already go a long way: Is there actually an empire in breach of galactic law? If yes, how is the relationship with those empires? Bad? -> support sanctions. Else, don't.

Right now, it's really hard to find a reason behind how the AI empires in Stellaris act, presumably because often there is none except an arbitrary scripted cooldown. This makes the game significantly less enjoyable than it should be (at least in my opinion). The Galactic Community has a huge untapped potential.

Edit: this is not restricted to the GC, but especially noticeable there.

Things can always be done better.