Newbie Questions about the Different AI Races

Hi. I'm about to play ToA for the first time and I have a couple of questions:

- what happens to the excess racial points of the AI empires? Should I choose their excess abilities for them?

- where can I find a description of the strengths & weaknesses of the AI races? I know that they now each have their own tech tree in ToA; this combined with their own racial traits/abilities must make each of them quite different from one another.

Thanks in advance 

4,021 views 4 replies
Reply #1 Top

You can assign the other races their points if you like, but they do it on their own if you don't, it just doesn't show up in the race selection screen, but the bonuses are there after you start the game.  You can look for yourself by running the game in cheat mode and switching to the race using the hot-seat key combination.   Look at bonuses in the stats and graphs section of the civ manager.  There's some other interesting customizations you can do on the races from the edit button on the race selection screen just prior to game start.  Look under Personality.

The races do have much more individual character in TA than DA, enough that you sometimes forget they're just bits and bytes running through a processor.  Sorry I can't tell you where to find any documentation on that.  Though, it should become obvious after you've played a few games.

Have fun!

Reply #2 Top

Quoting CraigHB, reply 1
You can assign the other races their points if you like, but they do it on their own if you don't, it just doesn't show up in the race selection screen, but the bonuses are there after you start the game.  You can look for yourself by running the game in cheat mode and switching to the race using the hot-seat key combination.   Look at bonuses in the stats and graphs section of the civ manager.  There's some other interesting customizations you can do on the races from the edit button on the race selection screen just prior to game start.  Look under Personality.

The races do have much more individual character in TA than DA, enough that you sometimes forget they're just bits and bytes running through a processor.  Sorry I can't tell you where to find any documentation on that.  Though, it should become obvious after you've played a few games.

Have fun!
End of CraigHB's quote

I guess it'd be more interesting to assign their remaining racial points myself, so that I could make each race more extreme and less generic. 

Reply #3 Top

Do it.  You'll find that assigning points in various areas can have a noticable effect on how the race behaves.  I've actually done that myself to a lesser extent.  I'm running a modded game with pre-assigned bonuses changed in a custom RaceConfig.xml file.  However, they still have their unassigned points to do with what they may.

Reply #4 Top

Quite honestly, the best way to see the strenghts and weaknesses of AI races is to look at the screen where you have to select your race: the list of racial bonuses and super abilities gives you a pretty good idea where their strengths and weaknesses lie.

Of course, if you have specific questions, feel free to ask - but I yet have to see a better summary table of the races than that single screen :)