How Good is the AI?

from Stardock Forums
Hi I've been flirting with the idea of buying Galciv for a while now. I've followed its development / release for a year. Now that I have time to play a bit Im thinking about purchasing. Id like to know just how good the AI is. I love 4x games but there are only ever challenging / interesting against the comp players for about the first half of the game.

I have yet to play against an AI which has the ability to invade the human player and put them on the defensive to any great degree. Is it so in Galciv? Does the AI scare you late game with multi-front invasions with forces held in reserve etc?

Thank you for your replies,

Sith
281 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
You could always check out the demo before buying.

As with any AI/game, the computer is going to be handicapped by how much cheese you choose to employ, but aside from that, I think the AI is one of the best I have seen, esp at the higher levels.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
the AI is best i've played to this point in time. do not dally sith, cough up and get crankin'!

:)
Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
To be honest, the A.I. could be better in a couple of areas. Keep in mind that I really enjoy this game and the following comments are meant as honest, constructive critisism, not complaints.

Although it can be very aggressive in attacking your ships, starbases, and planets, it doesn't cooridnate it's attacks all that well. For instance it doesn't group its combat ships together with troop transports in order to take out a planet in one fell swoop the way a human player would do it. Instead, it tends to attack, attack, attack with combat ships to take out your defending navy, and then in a later turn send in the troops for planetary invation. I've never seen a deliberate flanking manouver.

It also doesn't manage starbases very well. I'd like to see the A.I. build more cultural conquest bases, and build up production boosting starbases, things like that.

What is great about the A.I. is that it follows the same set of rules as the human player. When you take out a resource, then the A.I. suffers in the same way that the human player does. The A.I. has to raise money via taxes, and tend to planetary moral issues, managae its economy, all these things the same as you. If you disrupt any of these things you can see the effect of your actions.

Also, each alien race has it's own, unique A.I. code. It's not just the same A.I. for five differnt faces, but five unique artificial intelligence opponents.

At the more difficult levels, the A.I. does get production bonuses and so forth, but it still follows the same rules. This is, it doesn't just pull ships out of the vacuum of space, it still has to raise money and build everything. It's just doing everything on suped-up steriods.
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
The ai is better than in any other game of the genre and worth playing against.
It recognizes some threats (buildups, culture bombings inside their sectors, ...) and may also preemptively attack you if you are weaker than them militarily but start building up a military (arms race).
Diplomatically, they are not very good at pitting people against each other, but they don't gang up for no reason either.
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
I also think the diplomacy is pretty good. When you first start playing it looks like the standard 4x AI - declaring war at random, asking for ridiculous amount of money to not attack you. When I first started playing (and up until a few weeks ago) I thought the diplomatic side of it was pretty crap. But now I have got the hand of how to deal with them (gifts, bribes, getting them to atack each other, tech trading etc) - I have done a complete 180 and probably place it up alongside SMACs model (though less complex than that). It's one of my favourite parts of the game now.