| One thing that would help is allowing the AI to design ships more than once a year. That's the current limit as far as I know, and it can make it very hard for the AI to respond. Personally, I would favor allowing the AI to design new ships every 3 months. |
| I realize what he is saying, mostly because there are races that slide into that pitfall --not adapting their ships-- and lose because of this. |
Ok.
A few things...
1) If you are not patched to at LEAST 1.2, or even 1.3(beta), you should NOT POST about AI shortcomings. The AI has been upgraded in each and every patch, and at this point, can whip my butt in about 5 out of 7 games.
2) If you DO NOT turn on Intensive AI (Allow AI to use extra CPU option somewheres on a beginning screen), then please understand that the AI is limited to updating ships once a year (52 turns)! I agree, that was ridiculous. But it was quickly(!) changed. Now, the Drengin will attack me with Missile with no defenses against my beam weapons/missile defense combo. The VERY next fleet to enter my sphere-of-influence has beam defense, with the SAME missile attack. This is within 3 turns, not 50! Of course, they may have just updated the AI to upgrade more often or based on need with one of the patches; but it was at the same time as when the intensive CPU was added.
3) If you DO NOT individually set each AI's intelligence from version 1.2 on back to the release version, there is a bug that will set an AI to completely dumb, or some other lower setting. Repeat: If you use the overall difficulty drop down, the game will set some AI to high intelligence, and some to low, to reach the level of difficulty you've set. Ever since 1.2 came out, and I read that from one of the devs, I manually set each AI player, and now I can barely win a game @ Painful. Not unless I get some resource bonuses and a mining resource or two.
I hope this helps.
-thefinkster