AI adaptation?

I'd like to start this thread to get examples of how the AI responds to your ship designs, and if you think it is making the right decisions.

So I was playing a head-to-head game against the Drengin last night (crippling diff), and dragging out the war without capturing any of his planets, just to see how the AI would adapt to my ship designs.

I had a large ship, stats were 9 beam and something like 5 armour, 2 point-defence. This was old tech, but I was holding off deploying more advanced ships to see how the AI would respond.

It built a frigate with 1 beam, 3 missile and 7 shields. Now, maybe I'm crazy, but this seems rather imbalanced to me. Sure, I had a lot of trouble penetrating those shields. It made for longer fights. But I know the AI had decent lasers and missiles. It abandoned further weapons research to push up shields.

I think in designing a ship to counter another, the first priority has be ensuring you can penetrate it's shields often enough. As a rule of thumb, if your attack is less than or equal to their effective defence, you are on the wrong part of the curve.

Also, what's the point of splitting your attack against an opponent who has reasonable defences?

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I think the point in splitting your attack against someone with reasonable defense is that unless they're using weapons o the type you have a defense against, your defense number gets the square root taken to apply towards defense. Although I'm not a math whiz so I can't tell off the top of my head if it would be better to have 10 of a weapon you don't have a defense against or 5 of two you don't have a defense against (as you would get two defensive rolls if I recall correctly). However, I can tell you that it would take them less time to research mid-way up two weapon trees that to keep going up one tree, so maybe it is a time factor? The AI felt it would be best to have two class 5 weapons in X turns rather than one class 7 weapon in X turns?

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One of the main problems I've noticed with the AI's military strategy in late games is that they hoard out mass amount of small and medium ships, when I am only pumping out massive sized ships. They have the tech for massive ships, but they don't build them.

I think once the AI starts building engines on their ships (next patch) they will be more effective militarywise. I say this because the only reason I can wipe out the AI's army most the time is because they ALWAYS have to defend. I hate to say this, but usually my fleets can take out their fleets before they can attack back. Something has to be done about that. Maybe doubling the base hit points of all ships would do the trick? I think it'd help at least. That or set up a new tech line that allows you to build "hardening" modules which add HP. ALso, I believe defense needs to be slightly buffed to counter this.

Overall the AI is pretty smart, much more so than any other game I've played, but it certainly could be tweaked:)

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It may be prudent to *research* two weapon tech (In this case, it actually researched 3, since mass drivers were it's most advanced field). It's not prudent to put them on one ship, unless the enemy has no defence.

In that case, against his beam, I have a 0-2 for armour, and a 0-1 for missile defence. For his beam to do anything, I'd have to roll 0 on both, so a 1/6 chance to do one damage. Instead of 1 beam, 3 missile, 7 shield, with the same tech he could have built a 6 missile, 4 shield ship, possibly 5 shield. I think that would have been significantly more effective.

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