But somehow it knows of ressources and habitable planets far outside its senor reach.
Here is another test to find out what the ai knows without scouting:
Unhide the map, 2x turn. Then surround every scout and flagship with summoned battleships (Ctrl- In most cases the AI will build 2 Scouts. If all 3 ships of a race are blocked, just watch. In some cases it seemed to influence the ai resulting in fighters being built instead of colony ships. But i had a cases where the Yor send constructor straight to a military ressource their nearest scout ship was 14 parsecs away from. HOW could they know it was there? Good guessing on planets may happen. But ressources? Common. No one can predict where they are. But the AI definitly knew it. |
The resources are another matter. It's the same code as GalCiv 1 so I can't really say how they find resources. It's possible the AI knows where the resources are and if that's the case, it's pretty easy to fix. But in the bigger scheme of things, that's fairly trivial. I didn't write that code and it's pretty old. The AI rarely beats me to resources so if it doesn't know where they are, it's not doing a very good job exploiting it.
Your claim was very explicit, however: You said the AI "instantly knows where the best planets are" which is nonsense. They absolutely do not know where the best planets are. They have to scout them like players do.
I wrote that code personally and know for a fact that the AI cannot colonize a planet unless it knows about it.
In 1.0X, for instance, just to be double-safe, I added a special flag to planets so that not only do planets have to been in sensor range at some point but they have to be tagged with a bIsKnown boolean that is only set when one of THEIR ships scans it with their sensors.
So you can say that I don't take kindly to people making these "it cheats!!" claims given how much effort was put in to having the AI figure out it needs to build scouts, sending scouts out to find planets, then adjusting its production to deal with known planets.
I do have the AI randomly go out with colony ships into a cluster of planets at higher difficulty levels as a "guess" (just like a human player would) but it's not b-lining to a good planet other than by sheer luck.
I'm going to lock this thread. There are other threads like this and I've taken the time in the past to walk through.
At the end of the day, it's really about trust. If you think we're lying about the game not cheating (other than at the highest levels), then well what's really the point?