Gifted AI

I'll help you tomorrow after some sleep, but first a question or few.

1) What race(s) do you play?

2) What galaxy size and settings?

3) Would you consider playing a custom race?

In general, players who are getting badly hurt at this level could learn to do considerably better starts. By the time the AI can attack you, your survey ship should be able to move more than 4 hexes per turn.

In the mean time you can learn to make your start similar to Icemania's here. https://forums.stardock.com/475253/page/1/#3624282

I want to fight the AI and not win by alliance so, of course I make some changes. Buying a survey merc will be a big help if there's some anomalies to go after as you'll often get help researching or even a quickly completed tech (unfortunate genius).

If you play a good custom race and start well, you can learn to crush the AI's even at Incredible (hint...be Malevolent). Godlike is a whole different experience and the AI's seem to be 2 or more likely 3 times as strong quickly when Godlike rather than incredible.

I find the way to be is to not go tooooo aggressive on the colony rush, purchase two colony ships in t1 and t2, then spend the rest of your money on factories for your first 4 worlds while normally producing colony ships if more planets are available. Those 4 worlds are your core, do everything you can to build them up as (usually) constructor worlds first before flipping 2 of them over to building research labs once they hit half full (otherwise it's painfully slow to build the labs). Set your global spending to a 50/50 split between Industry and Research with as much Econ as you need to not be losing money.

Use that core as your empire, prioritise spending any spare cash you get from anomalies on them and any other worlds you get as a bonus you just build up along the way until they come online on their own accord.

Also this will sound noobish but I don't know your skill level so it's worth saying, make sure your shipyard always has the maximum amount of production going to it, up to 5 worlds. Do this through the "Manage" tab in the shipyard screen!

If you have any specific questions I'll do my best to help you out!

Cheers, Fate

1. Humans

2. Gigantic abundant planets

3. Currently playing as custom race.

And so I'm not allowed to participate in colony race? Sorry but that's one thing I refuse to compromise on. I find colony rush to be fun. I must participate in colony race.

I abandoned the map. Too many Transports inbound and not enough ships. And plus I wanted my ideology points back because its became obvious that AI has vision cheats. Stupid AI, I only lose because of hardcore cheats and Ideology points being wasted on ideologies that don't work. Vision/sensor range reduction in pragmatic needs to be removed cuz it don't work on the AI.

So I'm guessing from what you two said, i have to make sure my first five worlds is nothing but manufactories? What about money?

http://imgur.com/a/XRnsl

First screenshot, My first five worlds. Selenia is Precursor world. Naturally it was able to finish building its shit fast cuz it had base boost in production.

Rossweisse II is Science.

Rossweisse III is money.

Felli is Production.

2nd Screenshot, All Manufactories + Military defenses.

3rd Screenshot, All Manufactories + Military Defenses.

 Okay I did have two more science and Money worlds in there but I can't remember atm.

I had fourth Shipyard with five worlds supplying it but its gone because of AI cheats. Five worlds was slightly better than ones in 2nd screenshot.

I don't see how AI can particpate in colony rush and field a large navy at same time. Its impossible to do both at same time. And have ALOT of science too! it was annoying.

All I wanted was more fleets to fight against not this.

All I got from the link was pictures of spaceships.

Look at bottom left of the picture? Sponsor Planets is listed there.

Unless you want me to take a screenshot of all fourteen planets.

No, don't give up on the colony race, just rush build a strong core and use your natural shipyard production to build your remaining colony ships, and develop those non core planets when you have spare resources or your core is well on the way to being functional.

Being on Gigantic with abundant changes the whole strategy. The AI is getting those early ships from Ideology choices or finding them in anomalies, you need to do the same.

Are you sticking to one Ideology or swapping between them? Stick to one!

So, I recently moved up from Normal to Gifted. Which is just a increase in one difficulty level.

 

No matter what I do, It feels like the AI can build their basic factories in 2-3 turns to my default 8 turns. This has consequence of them building fleets before the human player can. They're also farting out medium ships way before I can fart them out. This is hurting my economy. This results into all the AI around me except for pacifists ones, dowing on me. Just because I simply can't build infrastructure as quickly as they can. I will provide screenshots of my planets if you need to.

 

And then, I suspect they're cheating like hell on vision. I watch a 5 movement 1 Sensor range fleet of warships chase after my Survey with 4 movement and 8 vision deep inside my territory with my ideology that reduces vision/sensor of enemies inside my territory by 25%. By all accounts the enemy fleets chasing my fleets should be completely blind. This has proven to be not the case. I watched their incredible beeline so I am forced to conclude that they have vision of entire map.

 

I'm fine with the AI cheating, but, um, this is kind of overkill and embarrassing to see such obvious cheats. Not even mentioning that it isn't really fun at all to not have any fleets ready to go when the AI is ready to go. I don't like playing catchup. And I don't want to drop down back to normal because Normal AI don't have any fleets for me to have fun exploding.

End of quote

Yes, the AI can see where are the resources and the best planets.  You can see any AI making bee lines toward a very good planet way outside their zone, ignoring lower level ones.

I had trouble too playing on gifted.  Now, I can play Genius most of the time.  I found a guide focusing on diplo victory for Godlike, and some of the principles are sound for any level.

But, it all boils down to the size of the map and who are your immediate neighbours.  Find yourself with the Krynn or Drengin or Yor right next to you and they will murder you before you can set up some defense.

You need to do some micro-management.  Use your survey ship to scout planets and anomalies.  Use your scout to survey star system and find the right planets, don't leave them on auto survey/scout yet.  There is one race trait that gives you free tech at start, it helps.  Ideologically, Benevolent will you give you a boost to research early on, so what I usually do is alternate my decisions to get just enough point for me to grab the building creating idelogy points (it's useful for late game) then invest everything in Benevolent to get research + influence.  As soon as you find a suitable planet, send your first colony ship while your shipyard is building one colony ship followed by one constructor followed by one colony ship followed by one constructor.  Alternate the ships to avoid overdraining your pop.  Do not colonize the second planet of your star system until you have at least 6 colonies.

Once you find the 2nd planet, buy the colony ship.  As you colonize, do not forget to add planets to your shipyard.

With your constructors, start building an economy starbase near your home planets, good distance to cover at the very least the two planets in the solar system.

As soon as you find anomalies, explore them, they often give boost to research, as you know.  They are invaluable.  Any ship you find, bring them back to your shipyard and upgrade them as needed.

When you meet a new race, try to discover their nearest colony.  Buy a trade ship, send it over there.  Do it for every AI nearby.  It gives you better diplomacy with them, it will avoid them declaring wars on you immediatly.

Do not hesitate to trade with races.  Even if you need to give them lots of money&techs to get the small and medium hulls, it's worth it.

As you colonize your planets, you can build Missionary centers and the other one for Neutral ideology.  With neutral, using the perks that have the AI be at peace with you for 50 turns can be invaluable as you can use this time to finish building your economy, researching weapon tech and building a fleet.  By the time this over, the AI will have good relations to you due to your trade and diplomacy bonus, so neighbours are less likely to attack you.  When you have a really decent size empire, you can also pursue the Malevolent ideology and pick the diplomacy bonus from there.

All the while, send constructors to build starbases on relics and minerals, but don't waste time upgrading them yet.  They will be the first casualty of war anyway.
However, if you have time, build a military base near your home world, to protect your shipyard fleet and your economy starbase.

Eventually, one hostile race will want to take your planets.  They are likely not able to reach you at first, but keep a close eye on them.  You should build planetary defenses, particularly the elerium shield, it will likely prevent the AI from conquering your planet.  See, there seems to be some flaw in the AI, it can't seem to be able to see clearly what is in your empire, so it will tend to focus on one planet to invade, if there's a transport ship built in a nearby shipyard.  Otherwise, it may not even try to invade.  Anyway, the AI will attack a planet it can "see" from his colony's point of view and this planet should be protected.  Once the AI has conquered one planet of your empire, they will likely fall one after the other.

So what you do now, is stall the AI.  You fleets will often be destroyed, so you should have a secondary shipyard to build colony ad constructors if needed while your home shipyards pumps starships.  Stall the AI, attack his isolated ships, try your hand at destroying his fleets, rebuild, counter attack, weaken it.  Use diplomacy to convince other races to declare war on this AI.  Eventually, you will either outpace the AI in your ship design of there will be an event for galactic peace which you can use.  If you go for the peace, try to increase your trade capacity and then trade for this AI.

Then you can either wait until you have researched all military tech and have fleets doing 80 000 beam damages before the ennemy is able to respond, or pick a weak neighbour and expand there.  By this point, the game is yours, you are an unstoppable juggernaut.  The trick is to survive the first encounter(s).  If you can manage to be at war no more than with one race, you can survive and conquer that race eventually.

EDIT: if all else fail, use the cheat code that reveal objects through the FOW, you will be on par with the AI to begin the colonization phase.

Well here is my answer to anyone moving up a level that can't beat the ai. If you are playing a harder difficulty you shouldn't be able to beat it right away. Any game that let's you do this is wrong.

Important: select the option to not upgrade until planet is full. First, build your planet, once you have built the basice research, industry, farm, market, morale improvements, then have the planets upgrade.

I'll probably break this into a couple of separate posts. First off, I don't play 4x space games to be nice. I play to exterminate the AI's and either win by conquest or if quicker, influence or some other way when you have much of the map controlled (depending on which game).

I used to base my start on Sullla's method (check his site) where you are buying factories on the HW and building CS (colony ships) but when I tested a method based on Icemania's start playing vs Incredible where you build factories and buy CS, I ended up just as strong but quicker and with more tech.

I find the following custom race to be extremely good.

Intuitive as 500 free RP allows for a good start and almost 3 free techs that I want immediately. Zealous as I will be attacking and taking planets quickly and want the free +15 IP for each planet conquered.

For traits:

I want a good early start so I take Productive+2 and Clever+2. Next is Dense+1 as it allows for slightly better CS and my constructors can have two modules and still some speed and range.

Now I go with Fast+2 as movement is EXTREMELY important and as I need a -2 to offset I select Craven-2 as if my planets get invaded I am likely ruined anyhow and also I may lose the planet to the invasion anyhow. Note that I go with absolutely no planetary defense the way I play. I rely on my fleets to keep the enemy away.

Looking at the list of traits: http://galciv3.gamepedia.com/Traits I see a couple more that I'd like to have and a couple -2's that I probably could handle to offset them so this race may change.

For tech tree, I go with Thalan and for home system I want a great HW so I pick one that has just the class 16 planet. 

My settings are large galaxy vs 7 random AI's and default minors. (this comp isn't loaded with memory and the game takes long enough anyhow since I micro EVERYTHING.) Most other settings are common. If I choose abundant planets since 1.6 I've often ended up with more than 20 planets coming out of the colony rush vs Incredible AI's and I am simply overwhelmingly strong. Pirates are default and extreme planets also default. PC relics I set to abundant since there's only a few of them anyhow.

My initial start is similar to Icemania's. https://forums.galciv3.com/475253/page/1/#3624282 

Turn 1)

I use my free tech to get Hives, and Interstellar Travel and Hyperdrive specialization which will need 1 turn to finish. Once again, I want movement capability! My sensor ship has 10 interstellar sensors and a hyper drive. Perhaps I am better off not having the drive and losing 1 movement but adding a sensor. Another option is to use my ship but remove a sensor but add more range. I typically run out of range even though I am expanding quickly which expands range. What one wants to see quickly is anomalies and planets to colonize. In a large galaxy I think I can get away with no support modules initially for the sensor ship. Like Icemania I move my starting CS to the HW to add the pop to the HW and upgrade it to the survey ship. Mine with the drive rather than the extra sensor costs somewhat less to upgrade, but to each his own. This is quicker and cheaper to get a survey ship than buying one (expensive!!!) or buying a cargo shell and then upgrading.

My starting scout can be upgraded cheaply to a better ship with hyperdrive and a better sensor and two support modules. I move it to the edge of my influence and in a direction where it can move towards galaxy edge and get out of the vision of my intended movement for my sensor ship.

I position a hive on my nice HW where I can hopefully get some useful buildings around it...ie factories and tiles that have bonuses.

Next is to buy a cheap CS. 2 Hyper drives and no environmental support can always get to a couple good planets in my galaxies. Later one will want more support and also to use prototype drives if you can. 

More later ......

That 50 turn of no war declarations turned out to be exactly what I needed. I started on new map only to find out there's Krynn to my north, and Drengin to my southeast.

They was stuck screaming insults at me for fifty turns as I used those fifty turns to start cranking out ships. I decided to go after Krynn first because they're weaker than Drengin so I have several fleets of Laser+Shields being rammed into their direction. This of course, means I have nothing to battle against Drengin. They specialized into Missiles+Chaff+Armor. One of their large Missile fleet is chasing my scout for some reason so I decided to lead it into one of my main Shipyards which is producing Lasers + Chaff. It will be bloody massacre for drengins, I hope. Cuz its a 9 ship fleet vs 1 with four other in construction. My fleet which will face it will be using Lasers + Chaff.

32 Turns til Large Hull tech unlocks.

I got a new problem though and I suspect I just need to buy a new ram. Sigh. Galciv3 suddenly minimizes and refuses to open again so I have to force shut it down in task manager. Maybe in few weeks I will pick one up.

Funny thing though, Krynn sent two trade routes to me early game + Drengin sent me one as well. So I sent One back into Krynn. That was unexpected boon which I took advantage of.

I'm just losing few small escorts every time I do a fleet battle with Krynn atm. But in exchange, Krynn is losing entire fleets of Medium ships. I feel like Im winning the trade in here but There is currently no small escort reinforcements coming cuz I'm busy producing two fleets of Laser Frigates to send against Drengin.

Edit: Played few more turns until other crash. I had to wait like seven turns for a constructor to reach where my warfleets was stuck waiting. In that time span, Krynn managed to dig out two fleets of Prototype missiles. That resulted into destruction of the most laser fleets I was sending forward but I succeeded in bringing down their last shipdock. Now They're reduced to two worlds, with fleets on them. One of them big laser, and other one small missile. I have two more transports ready to go but need to remove the defenders first. This is also where I decided to stop and wait for the upgrade to my PC.

Although when a crash happened I saw a very quick popup saying SDCrash something, so I"m asking in support subforums to learn what it says so I can know what I need to do to upgrade my pc. I only can hope to hear back from them..

I have found that building 5 embassies on my 5 firsts planets helps a lot to delay the first declaration of war.

Sorry for my English, I'm not a native speaker.

This is an excellent opportunity to design and build specialized constructors with lots of drives and just enough range to get there, if you are not doing that already.

For support such as this, it's better to create a support ticket.  Maybe it's a bug.

https://esupport.stardock.com/index.php?/default_import/Knowledgebase/Article/View/496/161/general-galactic-civilizations-iii-troubleshooting#supporttool

there is a link to the support tool at the bottom, download it and run it when you have a crash, it will collect info that you can then send to Stardock with your ticket.

oh crap, already sent in the ticket then I read this post. welp. gonna run it then.

And GhislainBlais,

I have few embassies built by now. I'm not too sure on how effective they are. But it's probably keeping Altarian Resistance from dowing on me I think.

Uhh, that awkward moment when I realize I have yet to design an custom constructor lol.

Hello,

I manage to figure out that each embassy is a +1 in diplomacy. Despite the fact that the little panel just show up to +3.

I tried putting an embassy (and upgraded them to their next version) on 10 planets and almost everybody wanted to be my friend. It was to easy, so I build only 5 now.

If you like the colony rush method rather than the diplomacy to placate everyone method, then Macsen has a great let's play for you. He plays godlike and ALL negative racial traits and still manages to grab an impressive number of colonies fairly quickly and secures a win even after an early war with the Drengin.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHMuUHsmNFlRVIyIEnO1RKtccGjM5sfzR

Out of curiosity, how would you all alter your openings for maps with virtually no planets, no events, and no anomalies? I mean, expect to come out of colony rush with three planets total and end the game with less than 15.

restart the game?

if that is the case, I think I would try to research planetary invasion and launch unescorted transport before the AI can respond.

My only gripe with any of the difficulties is the fact that the Ai can see through the fog of war. I am ok with research or production bonuses but being able to zoom to the planets while I stumble around in the dark for some reason really pisses me off. 

My request would be to be able to customize you opponents at game generation. Say another tab where we can use a slider or such which  has all start points in the middle for 'normal' and you can increase production, or research bonuses from there and 'check off' has fog of war' or not. This would go a LONG way to allowing me to have the Drengin be aggressive and making the Altarians research kings. 

This would be my request for a future add to a dlc or expac. 

Good idea larsenex.

As far as I know, this has been officially removed at all difficulty levels.  I believe it is credited with actually optimizing the AI processing because the AI was trying to evaluate everything it saw all the time.

That is in doubt when AI at war with you is following your sensor ships with their warfleets which only have 1 sensor range inside a pragmatic territory with 25% reduce in vision+ sensor. I need confirmation from devs on this.

Think I saw this customization option in GC2 - worked really nice there all for it. Most of us do not mind giving the AI a bonus or two but having control over it goes a long way as far as acceptance goes. For an FPS it does not really bother anyone if an enemy has twice the HP but in a strategic game this is considered to be unfair and I think these cases should be cut down not hidden from the player.

You can still have "difficulty" levels for the AI, but the highest difficulty should be the plain AI performing at its best. Giving bonuses to the enemy should really be a whole other option and this would really prevent the discussions about cheating AI altogether as well as result in endless options for AI difficulty.

I misunderstood I thought you were talking about prioritising ai goals or actions not giving them unfair bonuses.