I just found another huge bug.
The weapons/defense ability bonus was getting added in twice.
Ever notice that the computer players ships seem a lot tougher than yours? Like their battle ships could take on your Avatars? That's because they must have gottena higher weapons ability and it was adding it to their rating twice.
Remember, the AI in GalCiv is SUPPOSED To be playing by the same rules. That's how I found it. I was playing and was getting annoyed because their 10/6 battle ship was like 40/20. What the heck! I looked at their ability score and it was mightily impressive at 100% (this is late in the game mind you so they've gotten tons of stuff).
But that doesn't add up. 100% would only bring htem to 20. So I looked at the code to see if maybe they had build a bunch of planetary improvements and whatnot but theere it was, it did this:
ulAttack += ulAttack*ulWeaponsability/100;
and then later it did it again.
So you'd go from 10/6 to 20/6 and then 20/6 to 40/6.
The downside is that the AI is now...somewhat less formidable.
The metaverse code will fix some of that but there isn't any to base the current AI off of.
Let me explain:
In a game where you can't realistically research all the techs (or you'ren not supposed to in a tpyical game) you have to pick a path. So how do you get the AI to do that? How does it know what techs to research? Well, in the final game, it'll use the tech paths of the top players on the metaverse -- i.e. when you submit your games you submit your game strategies and the AI can make use of them to be more intelligent. But the tech tree in beta 3 is much different.
So right now it just meanders all over the place. So I got my Avatars and they're running around with Battleships still even though they are more technologially advanced -- I b-lined to avatars, they futz'd around.