AI quirks and a trick or two . . .

from Stardock Forums
A few I've noted:

1) When the AI gets in influence/cultural trouble it starts building Agenta centers. Too bad, it takes too long, so they're dead before they get even one built. It needs to do a better job seeing the influence train coming down the road . . .

2) Bad AI move - not totally stupid, because I can see a human doing this to. Yor and I had some good trade going on. We're one (Yor) and two(me), and he declares war on me - plus he's at war with almost everyone else too - while I'm at peace. His economy goes to hell, losing lots of cash, he quickly asks me for peace and I agree.

However, I don't start any new trade routes with him, the ingrate, I take my extra ones and move to another race. He can trade with me but I won't trade with him. His economy continues to crash. He moves from #1 in every category - military, influence, economy, research, etc. to middle or bottom. His morale on his planets plunge to the 20-40s. He has to disband most of his fleet because of his money problems, hahaha, revenge for all those lost games is sweet :)

3) The AI doesn't seem to like stadiums. When I take them over, they oftentimes/sometimes seem to have morale problems, and stadium are one of the first things I build for morale, you get a little money with your 20%.

4) The uber-ship ploy. Your first two research vessels can become uber-ships due to all the goodies you find. When your first war comes, draw them back and put one each in the two colonies the AI focuses on - usually it's one or two. These become deathtraps with the uberships. They'll take out oodles of starfighters, defenders, even battlecruisers - all because of their hitpoints and boosts to attack and defense from anomalies. At least long enough for you to build/bring in reinforcements.

All that said, I lost my first six starts - finally won tonight - or on my way to winning, I'd say, so I'm NOT saying the AIs easy . . .

Grifman
105 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
AIs make a lot of Constructors, but they only build on top of resources. They also spend many ships increasing base defense and offense. That is inefficient use of Constructors. They should create a few star bases in sectors with 2+ colonies and then focus on production bonuses. They should use regular ships to protect star bases, at least until late game.

AIs have great manufacturing strength, yet they rarely build any galactic trade goods.

AIs suffer from excess production of Colony ships. Considering that AI know all the good planets, they shouldn't make a lot of extra colony ships.

AIs don't concentrate their military forces. At least they don't move together. It's easy to pick them off one by one. It's good to spread forces over large area, for defense and raids. But there needs to be at least 1 concentrated group, moving with loaded transports, that does most of the fighting. It should make a routes from one enemy planet to another, without getting distracted. Otherwise wars drag forever and AI eventually gives up.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
My games have AI's with bases that are not on top of resources. (And it wasn't much fun cleaning them out before my big invasions, let me tell you!)
Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
With the AI I'm really trying to make sure that the gameplay between "genius" and "dumb" is just that. Most game sjust pile on resource advantages. But we're really trying not to have that be the case here too much.

So on the lower level,s the AI doesn't coordinate attacks or find other near by ships to attack. At higher levels they do more. Of course, the downside is that the higher levels take longer to calculate.

Here's a really simple example:

Dumb AI won't look and see if there are nearby ships that are better targets. If it has a target to go for, it won't bother to look to see if there's a transport scooting by.

But at genius, they'll always look near by. But you can imagine the CPU hit here. You got 600 ships to look through for each ship each turn that's a lot of ships to look at.

You can really see why most AI's just flagrantly cheat though. If we could just have the dumb AI but give them a ton of free money then they could just overwhelm you and still be fast. ;)
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
I always play with genius AIs. And they don't do a good job of coordinating their military effort. You are worried about having to do a target search routine for 600 ships, but that's cause all the ships are spread out. If you make AI stack ships into a dozen small fleets and 1 huge fleet, you will need to do target calculations only once per stack of ships. Besides, the biggest stack of ships should have precalculated "planet-to-planet" route, and not get distracted by other ships, unless they are very close to the main stack.