What exactly is the AI building?

Well I don't know, but on a normal game I played most of the AIs planets were pretty well biult up and could crush me if they wanted (or I let them )

It depends, I know people who are still challanged by just the baic AI, in fact most the people I know are though that number is decreasing.

Try playing on a higher difficulty setting. They won't be smarter but they will get more economic bonus's, which should help them build up better.

Personally I always beat them, but then again I usually have my social spending set at 50% and my research at 50% (allowing my military worlds to develop really fast, then shift straight into military production and allowing my research and economy worlds to just develop really fast, though its still usually not enough to keep current)

I haven't seen that at the higher difficulties (and painful is certainly a higher difficulty) They usually develop their planets very well until they start getting pushed by influence and start building influence over production.

How do their core planets look? They may attend to them somewhat better.

I've played on several tough or higher level games where sometimes the computer has a high quality planet but builds nothing or next to nothing on it. They usually develop all their core worlds, but for some reason they just seem to ignore planets occassionally. I've never played a game were they just completely did nothing though.

What is the indevidual intellegince of the AI opps set at? as that has a lot to do with how well they preform and can be changed independently of the over all difficulty setting.

Intelligent or higher.

The core planets are actually developed pretty well, but only a couple. I didn't realize I could set the intelligence of each AI so I will try that and see if I can get a better game out of the AI. In all fairness, I come from a background of playing strategy games pretty seriously so although I haven't played this one much I have a fair bit of experience in the genre. And I am enjoying this game a lot, I was just expecting more after all the AI hype this game has been getting.

I play tough setting with 1.0.x and from what i have seen the AI is awful at developing planets. They seem to build incorrect buildings on bonus tiles, do ridiculous things like build econ capitals on planets with no econ buildings or worse still build them on planets at risk of influece revolt.

Its easily my most dissapointing aspect of the AI so far, hoping its improved in the 1.1 patch.

Please dont caomplain aout teh game if you dont have the latest version ... dont want to play beta ? fine but dont come here tellin that the ai in the first patch sucks ... im playing on masochistic right now and still the AI dont build up in full potential but still its really hard just increase the difficulty

I thiink Franco hit the nail on the head. The AI is makes good use of its tiles, save for trying to counter influence on its worlds. Only real time I've seen caps on bad worlds is when they got all crappy planets besides their homeworld.

My question is WHY do they build starport on really really crappy worlds like pq 5 or less ?

I play the latest version. They sometimes do develop worlds, esp home planet as you say...but many other times I've seen them develop resources on the wrong tiles or have what I would call very under-developed worlds even deep into the game. Some of those worlds may be new to them, but I know that many are not.
And it shows in the gameplay: it's not hard to crush the AI of any race economically...that's what happens when we develop 12 tiles but that AI only developes two. There is no way it can keep up under those circumstances because I can outspend it, out-buy it, out-research it and out-produce it. I don't know if this can be fixed or not, but the problem is surely there.
Those are just my observations and opinions.

I've been playing with the latest version and it seems to me that the AI still bugs out from time to time for unknown reasons. In most games at higher levels the AI will be fairly efficient at building, but once in a while it will be a complete dunce.

The problem is, you will not realize this until you either invade AI space and discover little to nothing in terms of infastracture, defences etc. , or you achieve a high level of espionage and see it for yourself.

I've now had more than a couple of games where after spending the first half of a game preparing for a challanging match I suddenly discover all my AI opponents to be even more ineffective than paper tigers. I would submit a bug report, but I'm not sure how you report something as subjective as "the AI is playing dumb again".

I don't know, maybe even the AI has bad days

I've seen this, but only on planets that I've taken over- I figured it was just the AI demolishing things before the invasion fleet arrived.

The only other time I've seen the AI 'go dumb' has been in games where it's basically been hammered into the ground from the outset. Both the Yor and the Arceans I've seen get surrounded with all nearby planets colonized by someone else- it's like they look around and think, "Well... ." Then they do nothing. There might be worlds they could grab, if they went past/into other factions' borders, but they stay home and just revel in having the highest treasury.

My past few games on b4+ (playing tough) I've been plesently surprised by how well developed the AI planets are. Previously, conquered planets required serious intervention to be useful, but now they're working fine left more or less alone. I do see a couple of odd things tho', like the AI (particularly the Krox) doing absolutely *nothing* save colonise their secondary planet, or managing to build two fleet defence coordinators (or whatever their name is, I don't use them so I can't remember it right ) or other stuff that you shouldn't/can't build two of on one planet.

So, a few glitches, occasional space fear, but I generally see well developed opponents.

What version of the game are you playing, how large (how many planets) did the Tor have, had they been at peace for most of the game or constantly at war, how long had they held the planets you're talking about (had they just captured them, or held them for years)?

It's funny, I've found the AI so brutally efficient with their core worlds at the start to the point where they always out produce and out colonise me by a long way no matter what I do - then after a while for some unkown reason they start to turn retarded, building planets with no factory, not fully building on planets, building like 5 farms despite not having anywhere near enough population to even use 1, or building 5 embassies on planets with only 5 billion pop where they will make almost no difference, I sometimes loathe it when the AI surrenders to me because it can take upwards of half an hour and an assload of credits to fix up the travesties they've built for themselves.

I think if the AI built the way players built, masochistic level games would be impossible. Beyond impossible. However, this does mean that on tough and lower, the AI is fairly flaky when it comes to building. I've see Omega Defense Centers on top of influence tiles, and then an Embassy on a regular tile. I've seen a factory on a research tile and a research center on a production tile in the same planet. Standard mistakes, that hamstring the AI.

At a minimum, it would be nice if the AI knew how many farms would be required to correspond with the maximum population of a planet, and used the bonus tiles correctly. On a gigantic galaxy that would result in a massive increase in AI production.

Another point on this subject: the AI destroys improvements so we won't capture them--is this wise? I would never do that. I'd prefer to leave the improvements and re-take the planet. If I'm so far behind that I'm not only going to lose planets but have time to see it in advance, destroying my own factories isn't going to help much because they already have the power to take my worlds.
It would be better, in my opinion, to use those few turns to develop planetary defense tech and fend them off. The computer could use this strategy too, as I rarely see them with good planetary defenses--even their toughest worlds take only a ship or two to clean up the guard force and a couple adv transports to capture.
The problem with this idea, I guess, is that it's too expensive (both short and long term) to build and maintain a good defense fleet for each planet. But without using their tiles better and beefing up their defenses, the AI planets will never be too hard to capture. Maybe the AI's priorities could be tweaked yet again?

Ok, a couple of things. You can NOT increase the AI difficulty past the highest possible for the overall difficulty you are playing. So in order to get a 'genius' AI level you must play at the difficulty that allows that level. Not good!

I played another game and have seen the following AI crappy building problems. In all cases there was no significant war yet.

A planet with 1 factory, 6 research stations and a manufacturing capitol.
A planet with 6 embassies, no banks and an economic capitol.
Planets that have been owned for almost the whole game with only 2 tiles developed.

I am playing on whatever level is above Painful with the latest beta build. We need a better AI than this!

While we're on the subject, the AI will also build multiple starports, 3-4 on a single planet. There is no useful reason for this, it just wastes their time and tiles.

The point shouldn't be to have to gift the AI an extra 100% economy or whatever in order to get a good game. The AI at full intelligence--tough or better--should and must be capable of more efficient and effective developement than this.

Good players already have a built-in advantage in that we know from experience how to build & manage fleets and economies in such a way that we gain an edge (I've been playing 4x games, for instance, since the 1970's when the "map" was laid out on the floor and the ships were little pieces of cardboard). I don't think anyone wants or expects the AI to be perfect or unbeatable, but it does need tweaked so it will not do things like building 3 starports or ignoring 300% tiles for the whole course of the game. That's just wrong. And what makes it worse is getting 3 days into a game on a huge map, then discovering that the AI is basically broke & defenseless, but it's still going to take another 2 days to finish them off because the map is so huge. At that point, it just becomes an exercise in repetition.

Sorry to be critical of the AI, I'm just trying to help make the game better if I can.

I am playing a game on crippling (2 levels over tough--all intellegent AIs). I first conquered the Drengin--they had done ok with planets, but the further from the core the better. I just started taking Altarians. There was one system I had been drooling over ever since they swiped a class 26 planet right out from under me. When my colony ship got the system, I grabbed the first decent looking planet--a class 12. Then the class 26 showed up on the other side of the system, alongside a 10, 8, and 6. AI got all of the 26 before my colony ship was built, so I sent it elsewhere. A long time later, I decided I wanted this system for myself. It had 5 good to great planets in a close area. When I finally captured the class 26 planet, I was drooling at all the cool structures I'd capture. I used only traditional warfare to preserve them. When I finally got there, it had only 2.6billion population, and about 3-4 squares developed. Whats worse is there was a 7x food square and a 2x research square sitting empty. I just shook my head, queued up factories, farms, and stock markets and ramped that planet up!