(Odd, first time I posted it got deleted, now its in the 'My Posts' but it wasn't in any of the boards... second time was the same... third time is a charm?)
Here're a couple of issues I'm finding with the game... (I do quite love it though) - even with the 1.1 beta.
1) Arms Race - Instead of actually going to war with one another the different AI races will just build a ton of ships so that nobody will attack them... and they rarely go to war with each other on their own accord (this is playing Crippling - Suicidal difficulty levels with Huge and Gigantic map sizes) thus creating a huge surplus of crappy ships (I'll normally build up 3-4 fleets of high tech ships and wipe them all out). I wouldn't have much of a problem with this if it wasn't for the fact that doing so allows them to completely control all diplomancy in the game (making it impossible for you to do anything; I'm of the opinion that military power the way it is has far too much influence on diplomancy and race relations) and it causes the game to slow down quite a bit inbetween turns... What I see as a fix for this is making the computer players fight each other more (they seem to love going to war with me but never with each other) and also to lower the influence that military power has.
2) When the computer goes to war with anyone it'll often leave all its ships at home and at most send a couple of fleets into the enemy territory to attack them. While you can consider this defensive, the problem comes with what seems to be an AI bug. Instead of doing anything with the majority of the ships, the computer'll just leave them piled up in a single spot (well, a couple spots) where they're often not in a fleet (normally there's just one fleet on the stack of 40+ ships, when you kill that fleet the next turn it'll create a new one) and are completely unresponsive. You can fly a transport right next to them and they won't even move to attack you. This seems to be a huge problem since I've encountered it in each of my games (yet again, Crippling - Suicidal difficulty, Huge/Gigantic galaxies). Its basically dependent on me to destroy ships so that there isn't an ever increasing amount in the galaxy (instead of having two races that go to war losing ships overall... or at least staying the same, they'll continue to have a linear growth rate - the only times it doesn't happen is when you have multiple players ganging up on a single one, and even then its mostly not the case).
3) In the diplomancy screen races that have had contact with each other don't always show up on the 'Attack' option - basically making it that as a human player you have absolutely no ability to incite those two races to war. While I can understand this happening with allied players, it seems to be more of a random thing (though it may be tied to how close they are?) - at times they'll be in the 'Attack' option, at other times they won't. Can I suggest always having the races that someone has come in contact with available (even if they're allied, etc)?
Does anyone else see these problems or are they programmed in features? (I'm seeing them every game that I've done for the Metaverse)
