Lousy AI

sad but true,  it used to be much harder.  not sure what they did but i suspect the drastically toned down the higher level AI cheats,   the ray of light here is they continue to work it and i truly believe it will be good-great.  Feels unfinished.  There are mods in the forum that improve the AI, havent tried them but any others like em

It's a still a fun game, but there's the potential for it to be a truly great game, and it's only been out for awhile, so... [crosses fingers]. I haven't tried "godlike". I guess that's next. Or trying the AI mods, like you suggested. 

I'd like to refute that, but I can't.  The AI for GalCiv2 was written by Brad, who is a genius programmer.  Being a programmer myself, I'm not saying that lightly.  Of course, he had help and all of us contributed in part by posting our strategies so he could improve his AI.

The GalCiv2 AI was rules based and the GalCiv3 one is modular.  It has the ability to learn form us, although I saw some of that learning in the GalCiv2 one as well.  GalCiv3 has more potential, but it's early yet and it isn't anywhere near what it'll eventually be capable of.  I think of it as a child just learning its environment.  My hope is that the child learns quickly.

In the mean time, I'm finding the suicidal (godlike) AI enough of a challenge to keep my interest.  Perhaps you can give it a try.  It's much more aggressive than any level below it.  Yes, it has some extremely enhanced abilities that the human player doesn't have, but it kinda needs them to keep up with us. 

The game itself is rich and it can be immersive if you don't get too critical with some of the "Hollywood liberties" it takes.  

So give godlike a try.  Use only unmodified vanilla races for yourself and the AI.  You can also go with some of the AI improvement mods.  You might find the challenge that you seek.  

Good hunting.

Well, as of right now I'm beating God-like AI like an evil stepmother beating on a pathetic red-haired step-child.  

Ohohohohohhohohohohoho.  

Quoting marigoldran, reply 4

Well, as of right now I'm beating God-like AI like an evil stepmother beating on a pathetic red-haired step-child.  

Ohohohohohhohohohohoho.  

End of marigoldran's quote

Do you disable tech trading?

Thanks for the very well thought out reply!

Quoting damagctrl, reply 5

Quoting marigoldran,

reply 4

Well, as of right now I'm beating God-like AI like an evil stepmother beating on a pathetic red-haired step-child.  

Ohohohohohhohohohohoho.  

 

Do you disable tech trading?

End of damagctrl's quote

I enable tech trading SO I CAN GIFT TECHS TO THE AI.  

Have you tried the "One System Challenge"? Same principle as OCC in Civ with a few galciv technical modifications:

Rules:

- You can settle and use permanently only the worlds in your initial home system.

- You can conquer or settle other planets but you must destroy them immediately after conquering or settling them. Exception: You are allowed to reconquer and keep your home system worlds should you lose them.

- All victory conditions are available.

- Otherwise free to improvise.

I got the impression that you usually favor an all-out heavy expansion strategy so maybe a different kind of challenge might interest you...

Make sure you pick up the 1.2 update. The AI is substantially better.

The 1.11 AI is beating my ass as it is But I hope for other kinds of AI improvements in the future, such as coordinated invasion campaigns and not doing 2-turn declare war and then sue for peace cycles...

I definitely noticed this. Certainly the AI is getting a bit better at building fleets, and securing an area before sending in transports. They have also started to bypassing my front line fleets to get to my transports. Its also using the defensive buildings now, so I'm having to use things like Bio and Info warfare to win fights where I only have 2-3 population on a transport.

Its getting there little by little with each patch. Though a big help would be to start giving it more blue prints and better blue prints.

For example, once you get to medium hulls you can start making some ships that have say, 4-6 engines, and enough weapons/armor to take on shipyards. 2-3 of these in a fleet should always try bypassing front lines and hit star-bases and yards and such. I don't know much about AI programming, but a few "rules" make sense. Call this blueprint a "raider" or some such, and add a rule dictating its war-time use. 

At the very least, this will make us have to position a few defense fleets behind the front to intercept these annoying guys.

I concur.  Before, I could just build a few fleets of carriers and take an entire AI's navy out.  I'm now losing about 30% of my battles due to better AI fleet management.  It's forcing me to get off my lazy @ss and build even better fleets.

That, coupled with the higher tech costs upps the challenge.  I'm looking forward to more.

Good job to the devs. 

What difficulty? I'm still tooling my enemies and losing less than a 5th... but I'm only doing Gifted I think.

Still, I'm actually using buffs now. And for some reason my immediate foes refused to learn not to use missiles...

I am playing at genius and they are putting up more of a fight, not in military, since there has been only minor war and I stopped that with the UP.  (Love that trick!)  However, they are doing better at expansion and economy.  That is encouraging and threatening.  I'm waiting for the day I have to back down a level.    We get closer and closer to that with each version.

The AI adjacency usage still look pretty funky, and they build a lot of durantium refineries.  Of course, I sell them a lot of durantium, so it makes sense from one point of view.  But it doesn't seem to be helping their overall planet output as much as it could at all. 

On maps with lots of space, in mid game they lose their expansion momentum in grabbing relics, resources, and even planets.  I can still explore my way across the galaxy and find unclaimed space way behind them.  Definitely not as much as there used to be though, and that is noticeable, too.

Whatever you are doing to the AI, it is starting to work.  Nice.

Also, I drew a large number of pirates.  There are fleets of 10-11 pirates running around.  Yikes!  They haven't yet in this game, but I have had them start taking out starbases and shipyards before.   That can get all too exciting.  I love it!  I have changed my early game military priorities greatly.  I want to point out that the AI does not clean up their fair share of pirates.  I want to complain about that in the UP, but there is no such resolution.  (However, it is still an unfortunate AI behavior and hurts them a lot more than it hurts me.  So, it does need to be looked at.)

It seems to be running a little snappier on my lower-middle-class system.  Then again, I may just be seeing things slower these days.  Everything else seems to be working slower. 

I started a new game with 1.2 and it is far better this time around. One ai actually has 7 fleets it parked on the eastern side of the map AND on insane all the habitable planets are snatched up! I got into a war with Iridium and we are at a stalemate.  The Ai is fleeting up and ARRIVING at my door PRIOR to DOW, this is making me have to build several fleets to patrol my  border. Can we get a way point pathing option?

The cost of LARGE HULLS and Plasma weapons and Photonic torpedoes is SUBSTANTIALLY higher than previous iterations! Great job. Large hulls was a whopping 57 turns to complete while other techs were 8 turns. 

Keep up the Great AI work Stardock. 

Sounds promising.  How many planets can the AI get by turn 30 on Insane? 

I'm on godlike.  I altered my approach and haven't lost a battle for several turns, which would be about 30 or so engagements.  (Well, I did lose a constructor that I had forgotten about a few turns ago.  I had it on guard and it was taken out by a passing fleet.  I didn't bother to replace it.)  I've all but destroyed the Krynn and am sending my surplus fleets toward the most powerful player, the Yor.  We'll see how they react. 

I'm not sure what you mean by using buffs.  Is that a mod or min/max thing? 

As far as missiles, they're a great standoff weapon.  Beams are a good secondary.  I assume you're going heavy point defense there.  I tend to stay away from defenses and prefer a long range offense, similar to the "Glass Cannons" in Endless Space.  If you can kill them before they fire, you don't need defenses.  

One really awesome thing is the speedup in "Quick Battles".  It's not perfect, but at least the time delay appears to be significantly diminished.  I still have 2 or 3 fleets moving to attack at the same time due to the movement slowdown, but I move the display to an empty space when it gets unbearable.  Once the ships are no longer in view, the slowdown timer seems to skip.  

I think by buffs he means the ships and starbase modules that buff other ships. Like the fleet-wide PD thing.

Tagetes, 

As all of you know I  play on insane but rare/rare. What also determines the number of habitable planets is the '"umber of planets" setting which I am tinkering with to find a good value. This game that particular setting was on uncommon. 

I had 14 planets before I discovered that the Ai's colonized the entire galaxy. I had opened about a third of the map using sensor wagons. I was competing with Ai that KNEW the locations of all the hab planets and bee lined right to them. It was glorious! Now with me and the ai about on par with both of us having the same number of planets the only big difference was production and research. At gifted the ai out produced me but I was better obviously at specializing research and money. 

The game is very fun. I added several new ai from the workshop and they are tough. The Reapers literally have 7 (medium 6 ship) fleets in my own territory AND they look like they are staging to attack me! They have no transports but they could do some serious damage. I am concluding my war on the opposite side of where the Reapers are and moving assets to counter them. Also the Yor to the north of the map have many large fleets staging for war. Oh the fun. Battles are NOT forgone wins and i am having to customize ships and fleets to be optimal. 

The game has come a way from launch and I look forward to mods and improvements in 1.3!

Well, this isn't promising. Look what I found added to literally every AI difficulty setting in the 1.2 files:

This is even present for the easy AI. Basically, it means any AI ship not out in space will now pay no maintenance, on any difficulty level. If it's 'stationed' (in orbit around a planet or SB), it has it's maintenance cost reduced by 100% (this may also stack with other multipliers, which might make high-tech AI Iconian ships pay negative 100% earnings when docked - so bigger ships will MAKE money).

That's a flat-out crutch. It's actually not a bad mechanic - I was thinking about adding a discount to stationed ships anyway, and this target qualifier makes that a lot easier to do - but if it was doing that it ought to be a Global Def, so that it applied to the player as well. In this particular case it's just covering for the AI's poor budgeting skills again. That's not a fix - it's at best a band-aid until we have AI that can actually play the game, and at worst it's applying a cheat bonus to the AI which will even impact players who choose normal precisely to avoid the AI cheating. And the fact that it's applied to everything, even the Easy-mode AI, means I don't really think we can wave it off as a handicap rather than an outright cheat; this is the AI simply not following the same rules as the player, permanently.