SOME MAJOR THOUGHTS ON BALANCE MOD!!!

first i would like to start by thanking the creator of balance mod heavily, i really enjoy it, and although the ai is still no match for my freshly graduated university brain it was however better than the computers in SEV standard and it did surprise me by attacking me with a fleet of about 10 ships all at once which i misjudged and lost an equal fleet of ships to them on strategic combat but i think the computer, not the AI, itself doesnt fully comprehend the battle, because i can easily outsmart any ai and not lose a single ship if i do tactical anyways i've gotten off topic my major thoughts were as follows:

1.) i played a NO WARP POINT game just a few hours ago and i got through about 400 turns before i finally got the tech to make my own warp points, before that i didnt even know such a tech existed (im new to the game) but when i finally found each and every computer player they had done nothing the entire game except research a few combat techs there were several planets in their home solar system the COULD have colonized, they had 400 turns just like i did to research rock and ice colonys and to research planetary utilization so they could teraform them all yet all they did the whole game was build a bunch of satellites and a few ships around 3 planets and then send them after me once I opened the warp point to their home planet

2.) dont really understand this but at some point throughout the game randomly one or so of my ships just randomly become under the control of a computer player i havent even met yet, either that or i the same thing happens but to the computer player and i get control of something he has, please, if anyone has any thoughts on this would be greatly apprecaited.

3.) ok i read a post earlier about how the turns are slow and i figured out a way to make the turns faster and i did it and it worked, some one had mentioned that in SEIV the computer and player had knowledge of where everything was in every solar system as soon as they explored it so it was easy on the cpu because the computer didnt have to reanalyze what it was doing each time it moved one hex, so heres what i came up with if in options you make it so everything is known once you explore a solar system, I.E. no need for sensors, then the computer takes CONSIDERABLE less time, however upon thinking about this i realized there would still be alot of players who want to explore their newly found solar systems one of which happens to be me, so if we rewrite the AI to ALWAYS know where everything is regardless even if the player doesnt, first it would make the AI more difficult which we want anyways and second it would sure as hell lessen the drag on the cpu besides in almost any game you play the AI always knows where you are, what you have, and whether or not it can beat you, this should give the AI here enough turns to analyze whether or not it can kill a player before it even decides to build that worthless fleet of incoherent junk that they always seem to build

4.) last thought this is getting kinda long, i think that the tech tree besides the great job at reordering it, should go back to being those high levels of techs again, i managed to finish the entire tree in just under 500 turns in a no warp point game and had over 250 research centers on my like 40ish planets and still there was more of the galaxy unexplored, so i was faced with tearing down my research labs and building nothing but mineral storage facilities, if you dont revert the tech tree, then maybe expanding the levels a bit more for those of us who in the beginning go straight for the highest amount of research points we can obtain.

thanks again sorry for the long post

Mercy is for the Weak, Peace is for the Foolish, to believe in either one is to allow your enemy either a second chance, or an unlimited amount of time to plot your inevitible demise.

~Arrow