I am playing on genius and have the problem that the AIs never finish each other off. Once an AI is pretty much defeated and most ships/orbital infrastructure is destroyed, they suddenly get tons of cash. Im guessing this is the bonus income they receive from the difficulty level and not spending it on any maintenance. At this point the AI wars are always ended, so I assume they use their boat loads of cash to buy peace. The problem with this is that the AI empires never grow at the same pace as me because they never actually finish off any other AIs to take their space and resources completely.
So my suggestion is to nerf peace making between AIs a bit so that I can get some big empires to face mid/late game.
I am playing 1.7 beta and loving it, small things like this make the later game a bit dull though
Agreed! No planetary growth means no expansion. When only 1 empire is expanding in the game...it's sort of a foregone conclusion who's going to win.
I believe a large part of the problem is the flaws in the military Ai, such as poor fleet management, sending insufficient transports, lack of engines, not protecting conquests, and fleets only attacking once per turn (a big exploit for humans and Ai to use), among others.
Basically, they don't 'finish each other off' because they can't. Short of a surrender, I have never seen it happen in a game.
If the Ai was actually able to fight a war reasonably well, they would end before the situation you described could arise. Empires would grow, and become more challenging to human players mid-later game.
Diplomacy plays a part there too, with civs allying against a dominant one, or forming better alliances in general later game. But the dev say diplomacy will be worked on in the next update so we'll see.
