AI not colonizing properly

I just have had a nice race with another civs colony ship. We headed for a system with a pq5 and a px19 planet. Unfortunately the AI arrived first, but because the PQ5 planet was one smal square (parsec?)near, the Torians colonied this world and I could still get the pq19. This is not just about the Torians, any civilization do this. Btw, I also run a lot of times into system where low class planets are already colonized, but high class planets are not. Sometimes when a system have 4 low and 1 high class planets, I see the AI colonizing one low quality planet after another, geting the high class last. Thats just stupid. A fix would be great.
10,118 views 9 replies
Reply #1 Top
I think the AI picks a target for its colonisers, and then just forgets about them until they reach their target or someone else beats them to it. This could be a case of the AI either only spotting the lower class planet at first, or perhaps sending a coloniser towards the higher class planet, and then upgrading their colony ships to be faster so that the next one they built got to the lower class planet faster.

Or something totally different.
Reply #3 Top
all the time, I was curious about this...
Reply #4 Top
I've seen this happen before, but the AI usually has 3 or 4 colony ships on route to systems with more than one habitable planet and they colonize in order of what they see, I think it is either because they colonize in the order they find the planets or they see your colony ships too and figure they'd better grab what they can. After all, it's better to have a pq6 and your enemy have a pq20 than let your enemy have both.
Reply #5 Top
The behavior that I use, as a human player, is to head for the star with a cluster of planets, until I can read how many colonizable planets there are. As soon as I know there is one or more unrevealed but colonizable worlds (long range scan?), I have to pick: Colonize what I can see, or explore until I see all of them in the system.

So I look at how many moves my ship has left, and if there are any visible (or remembered) enemy colonizers in the area. If there's a good chance that someone could appear out of the fog, then I'll only explore until I have just enough moves to get to the best world I can see. If it seems safe, I'll go into next week looking for them all first.

Reply #7 Top
I colonize evey planet i see who cares?


Well the debate here is about the order in which you colonize them if you are faced with more than one habitable planet in a system and enemy colonizers on the way as well.
Reply #8 Top
The AI always behaves this way.

Personally, I love when you have a planet with 5 billion pop and right next to it a planet with 30 billion pop. The AI will ALWAYS choose the 5 billion planet to trade with!!!!!
Reply #9 Top
I saw this but I don't know if is an AI tactic to chose the worst planet or is actually a "bug".