Cause of Teros' sudden tech progress spike???

[andy]

In my current game, (90 stars) I'm in a runaway lead on all stats so the game is effectively decided (but I'm still well short of the 2/3 for a diplo win).

The remaining 6 or so AIs are all bumbling along with Orthin well ahead of the others in science progress and science production (which is common).

However, when I was reviewing the graphs last night, I noticed that Teros, who had very little tech progress or science production, had a sudden immediate spike in tech progress, putting Teros far ahead of Orthin, which had lead the AI pack the entire game. But the Teros still has nearly no science production. I should have screen-shot the graph for you all.

It's possible that Teros attacked the big harpy base but I never saw a fleet traveling to the base and I'd be surprised if Teros would have won the battle. Plus the military graph shows no losses for the Teros.

Any ideas?

[sven]

Any ideas?

Maybe they colonized a derelict colony that had some big science boosts in it? It's possible to get high percentage completion of high tech stuff like Railguns or Dreadstars from a derelict colony. (Those boosts might not actually benefit the Teros AI much in practice, but, they might still show up as "progress" in the science graphs.)

Or maybe they destroyed the superdread at Ephelos?

[Arioch]

If you upload the game, we could take a look and see.

(With the game in question loaded, in Options menu, click "Upload Game Logs".)

[andy]

Arioch and Sven,

I turned on dev options and picked Omni so I could see what was going on everywhere. Then I opened the science progress chart and backed up the game until turn 1288. The teros have nothing going on. Turn 1289, huge increase in science progress for no reason. No colonization. No battles. Nothing.

It's uploaded just a coupe minutes ago as "game-9106". I've very curious about this. Thank you.

[Arioch]

Thanks for the upload.

On stardate 1288 the Teros discovered an ancient data cache when they colonized Toliman I, which was the site of a Derelict Colony special. This was in a system they already controlled.

archive_deciphered.jpg (426.91 KiB) Viewed 15275 times

If you have the ai_dev feature in Developer Options enabled, you can switch to an AI player's point of view by Alt+left-clicking on one of their planets.

[andy]

Thanks man! Not sure how I missed that. Didn't see any new planets colonized. That's a great archive, if they survive that long....

Thanks for the tip on switching players. I thought I had read somewhere a year or so ago that there was a way to do that but couldn't remember.