I had a similar behavoir in last night´s game (Gig Map, 9 AIs ), The Korx built nothing but farms and starports , maybe a factory, and left many tiles empty. The other races were doing fine... and took the Korx colonies, but did nothing to
change the planetary setup...

The AI does seem to generally fall in love with influance buildings for no apparent reason. I've also seen multi farm building on PQ <8 planets, which makes no sense since the max pop caps below the food generation, and these planets will have worse morale problems anyway.

Personally I wouldn't be against putting some hard caps on what the AI can build and where it can build it. Limit to 1 or 2 culture buildings per planet, and *no* farms for planets with PQs <8.

I also think that the AIs do not prioritize trade goods and wonders very well. I've never lost one to an AI, other than the handful which I don't pursue (aphrodesiac and micro repair bots normally, later galactic guide book and that privateer thingy). Part of it is my prioritizing the techs to build the ones I want, but why wouldn't an AI do the same? I play only on tough and higher so it shouldn't have anything to do with sub-optimal routines.

This usually happens when the planets are in someone else’s cultural influence. The AI starts making embassies and moral boosting buildings to try to counter the influence. I don’t usually see it otherwise. If you track how the buildings were before you may see that it was built pretty well before the planet was under attack from someone else’s influence.

The AI starts making embassies and moral boosting buildings to try to counter the influence.

Yeah, but they do not understand that boosting the influance on a planet with 5bil pop is useless!!!

That and they don't seem to use their SBs very effectively, though perhaps that's due to incomplete tech research. However, there is a feedback on that since they don't build the labs in the first place to generate the research...

Some AIs do ok on some planets, but generally they are underpoped on their high PQs and overpoped on their low PQs. Makes me wonder if there isn't a simple transposition of in the code somewhere.

Just last night I nabbed an Iconian class 18 that they'd had for a loooong time, and it didn't have a single farm on it! It did have like 6 embassies, even though it was never in any culture danger, and wasn't even positioned to push culture on any other systems.

Its really getting annoying to see this willy nilly culture approach. If you want to win a culture war you will have to build SBs at some point (unless you have tons of systems and planets in the game). I do see the AIs building some SBs, but they never really seem to add enough, or the right modules to them.

Reactionary AI: It seems to me the AI does pretty well as long as the game is somewhat competitive but when the AI perceives and projects it's own defeat it sort of goes insane.

In other words if a human player has gotten off to a good influence start by dominating mining resources, the AI goes into a frenzy of useless countermeasures. If the advantage is military the AI often seems almost paralysed.

When I have reached mid-game without establishing certain victory the AI seems to develop their planets fairly well.

franco fx - thats some decent reasoning you've got there, i've had a similar problem in my last game but the truth didn't click. its a bit of a bummer, but on the flipside - at least we know the ai is 'thinking' but it seems to need a quicker turnaround.

does anyone know if the AI builds new improvements over old ones??
i personally have never seen / noticed this and this may be important.