Freudian Freudian

AI - Emperors new clothes

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AI - Emperors new clothes

from GalCiv2 Forums
Like most who play this game I was intitially impressed by the AI of this game simply because they kept attacking me when I was weak. But the more I play the less impressive it seems.

Research: The AI is horrible at research. Military, military, military. In my latest game I am up to 2035 and no AI race has Industrial sector or Invention matrix yet. They never research any of the diplomacy or cultural domination tech lines (even those that persist in building influence starbases). As long as you hold them off initially, the game is very easy to beat even on the highest diffilculty. At first I was happy with the no tech trade option in the new patch, but if they can't even get a good balance with insane amounts of tech trade how will it look if they can't?.

Starbases: The AI doesn't know how to build starbases. Or rather they build a lot of crap ones but never a good one. As a player I focus on getting fewer but good starbases. The AI likes to have 5 economy starbases around its planet, each without a single module.

Influence: A concequence of the AI never researching any of the Influence tech is that I win cultural domination victories without even trying. My latest game (huge map, bright difficulty) I currently have pretty much all the map dominated now. And I wasn't even trying. Two embassies over 15 planets and not a single influence starbase. Still I am taking over planets culturally. Why? Because I researched all the way up to cultural conquest while the AI never do. In a desperate attempt to avoid winning this way (pretty much every game I play end this way, long before I get to build any cool ships) I gave all AI races that whole tech line for free to avoid taking over. Seems like it is not working anyway since I am so dominant now. Guess I just have to avoid researching that whole tech line in the future. But taking over planets without trying revealed the next AI flaw...

Planet management: The AI can't build decent planets. Way too few factories, so they are constantly underdeveloped. They put embassies on tiles with bonuses for research/manufacturing. I have yet to accidentally culturally conquer an enemy planet where I felt they had made a good job making the planet useful.

Ship construction: The AI does a good job adopting their weapons/shields after what I have previously used against them. But they never build the larger ships, despite having the tech to do so. Just fleet after fleet of smaller ships.

I think this game has a lot of potential and it is kinda fun. But the flaws in the AI make it far less challenging than it should be. Sure I can play at Suicidal that will enable the AI to cover up some of the flaws by insane spending. But the flaws will still be there.
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Reply #76 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Same is true on ships. It's easy to say AI should build faster ships. But the AI doesn't script out what technologies it should get. The reason the aI doesn't currently tend to have faster ships is because it doesn't priorities getting faster propulsion techs enough.

Not exactly true.
For example in my latest game, all the AI:s have warp drive. I even got the technology from some other major.
This doesn't mean that they always put them on their ships however. In my experience, they research propulsion technologies well enough but they don't use them much.
I often see escorts with two warp drives. I sometimes see frigates and cruisers with one warp drive but more often than not they don't have any extra engines severerly crippling the designs. I have never seen any heavy fighter with engines. Transports have always only had one engine (isn't it possible to add two so that they have the same speed as the escorts?).
Reply #77 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I'd like to echo Random50's comments about blockades. I tried the exact same tactic on Painful difficulty, with the same results. My attack one defense zero ships were capable of trapping the AI to its planets for many, many turns and it didn't seem to make any attempt to break to break the blockade.

My suggestion, for what it's worth, is that perhaps the AI should be encouraged to make some (more?) tactical evaluations of the ships near its planets. It could look in a square of side 2 times the speed of the fastest known enemy around its planets. If it sees armed ships of said enemy and is at war then there is little use in building unarmed ships.

Granted it's not obvious what it should do, but I would suggest either building one big ship to hurt the enemy as much as possible or perhaps bring in a fleet from somewhere else in its empire (assuming it can) and stop building until it's safe to do so.

Also, sorry pasty11, I wasn't trying to make a personal attack, just pointing out that my experiences with the AI differed somewhat.
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Reply #78 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
A followup to my last post. I seem to have gotten some things wrong.

This is now my understanding of how the AI uses his different military shipclasses:
Tiny:
Fighter: No engines. Attacker.
Small:
Defender: No engines. Defending planets.
Heavy Fighter: No engines. Attacker.
Escort: Multiple engines (often see them with two). Defending transports.
Medium:
Frigate: 0-1 engines. Attacker.
Cruiser: 0 engines (at least I don't remember having seen any). Attacker? Defender? Maybe both?
Large:
Battleship: 1 engine (haven't seen any with no engines yet). Attacker.

No engines on defender is IMO fine. I have no opinion on no engines on fighter because I never build those. Heavy fighter would benefit from an engine though since the AI otherwise wouldn't have any fast attack ships before Medium hulls. Cruisers are okay as planetattackers if they have faster attackers screening their advance, would also be good defenders, otherwise probably not much use.
Now frigates should IMO always have one extra engine but they don't.

Here are the Drengins different generations of frigates that I could see in my current game (he has lots of old ships left as you can see):
gen. weapons. defense. speed
M2-2. missile+2.
M2-11. mass+2. 1*warp=+3
M3-4. mass+3
M4-1. beam+6. armor+1. 1*warp=+3
M4-10. mass+4. armor+1,shields+1. 1*warp=+3
M5-3. mass+5,beam+2. shields+2
M6-2. missile+8,beam+4. shields+2
M7-1. missile+12,mass+1. armor+2. 1*warp=+3

Sometimes he skips the extra engine in favour of more weapons/defense which is dumb if I'm correct about cruisers, because then it becomes identical to one.
I've noticed that the Terrans in the same game builds incredible many frigates, almost exclusive. This makes them IMO much more dangerous than the Drengin whom also builds lots of heavy fighters and cruisers. Even though the terrans military is much smaller.
And the terrans frigate M7-2 is so much fun
mass+24 (3 nanorippers) armor+2 speed+3
Almost as good as my best medium hull, the Death Dealer:
beam+24 (2 psyonic beam), armor+2, speed+6

I also noticed something odd with Drengins latest transport M5-3. It has 3 ion drives, 3 adv. troop mods and 1 extended support. It could have had 3 warp drives instead of the ion drives because they are both size 10 on a cargo hull which would have made his transports 6 parsecs faster per turn.