FreeOrion

Hi,

Basically title. I'm trying to figure out where the code is that assigns a random species to each Empire.

I find the species pretty imbalanced, and want to see what a "fair" game feels like, by assigning Humans to all the Empires.

I've tried poking around a bit in the /Empire and /universe subdirectories, but the closest i've come so far is a reference to the function GetSpeciesManager() in /universe/UniverseGenerator.cpp line 828.

However i haven't been able to locate GetSpeciesManager() yet.

Please don't put too much work into looking for it, i'm hoping someone will stumble along who kind of knows off the top of their head and if not i'll just keep looking. Thanks in advance for helping out a total coding noob.

Why don't you start a multiplayer game with one human player? You can assign the same species to each AI there (e. g. human).

Probably here:
https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/ ... res.py#L33
https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/ ... es.py#L459

Fairly sure it's in the Python, but as The Silent One says you can do it manually in a multiplayer setup. Or just change all but Humans in default/scripting/species to Native not Playable.

Having said that, while we've still got some work to do on balance we've done more relatively recently and, with a few edge case exceptions, I'm relatively happy with the balance at the moment, if you've got specific concerns we're always happy to address them, slowly balancing and expanding the playable mix is an ongoing project.

Thanks, everyone.

As i was just looking for a practical solution, i will just follow The Silent One's advice. Didn't realize that it was possible to control the AI races in the multiplayer setup.

I haven't played since 0.4.6 at all, and never really played a lot but my take is that in an average galaxy [EDIT: oh! i should have mentioned, that in my experience the AI wasn't very good around native species or space monsters, so i've almost always played with those options turned off. That probably affects my impressions quite a bit]

• the Laenfa are extremely overpowered. It's easy enough to stay ahead in stealth that you can continue colonizing long after other species are forced to start devoting substantial production to their military. I haven't played since the reduction to stealth in some of the ship hulls and that might affect this somewhat -- i'm not quite sure of the actual numbers.
• the Gysache are somewhat overpowered. The expansion advantage provided by the research/production bonuses, and especially the population bonus, feel like they outweigh the military deficit. I may need to test this more... i'm not entirely convinced on this one, but it's my feeling right now.
• the Egassem are underpowered. The bad population makes the humongous industry into only a fairly unimpressive bonus (i remember running the numbers at one time, but i haven't played in a while so i can't remember quite how all the mechanics work at the moment [EDIT: No longer true since 0.4.6's adjustments to order of calculation of boni affecting population/industry]), and the narrow planet tolerance is, of course, a major difficulty in many games.
• the Humans are underpowered. They simply lack any discernible strength. Most other factions can leverage their advantages and minimize their shortcomings by focusing their strategy, and the humans simply lack this capacity.

Anyhow, i'm not an avid tester, i've probably only played one or two games with each faction, so don't take my input too seriously! Sorry if it came off as rude or anything. I appreciate all the hard work that's gone into FreeOrion. I was mostly just trying to explain why i wanted to adjust the AI races; i didn't mean any disrespect to anyone who's worked on species balance.

And thanks again for the information -- it's greatly appreciated.

We're on 0.4.7 now, getting ready for 0.4.8, try the most recent Test builds, all your concerns have been addressed except for LAenfa, they're overpowered against the AI and underpowered against human players, the regular multiplayer group is clear they're the worst to play with multiple human opponents and there's some work ongoing to address this.

Egassem spent a large part of the end of 0.4.6 and early 0.4.7 cycle being THE most powerful species by quite a long way, that was me overcompensating, they were toned down temporarily until I had time to address the main problem with them.

Thanks, in fact i hadn't even played 0.4.6. I assumed i had, since that was the version that was installed on my computer when i went to update, but a number of changes from that version i hadn't seen before.

So, yeah i'm a bit behind the times, haha. Well, thanks again... glad i got to figure out how to edit the AI species. My only minor gripe with this method is that i realized to load my game i either have to manually add back in the factions on the multiplayer game dialog (i assume this would work didn't actually try it), or rename my save file to .sav from .mps.

Might be nice to add in a little link in the Single Player game dialog under number of AI players to allow manual editing of their species. Just a thought, keep up the great work .

An option to pick the race of each AI player you play against in single
player is something I've wanted for a while, but since it's not that
important and it makes work for other people....