The AI is only balanced on 'intelligent' After that the AI gets extra bonuses etc. Below that the AI is penalised. Therefore to play a balanced game play against intelligent civs all the time.

Wouldnt suprise me if the Galciv 2 AI can cheat at higher levels. The Civilisation 4 AI also cheats on every level, makes the game unplayable IMO.

Above crippling I believe the AI gets the 200% bonus to everything , making it simply impossible to keep up in the beggining. To expand you will probably need to gang up on the losing side of a war and grab some planets before the winning side does.

I play at suicidal level all the time. The AI at the start will zoom ahead of you, he will colonise more planets, gain tech at a breathtaking speed and build a nasty looking military force. This is because the AI is cheating with a 200% bonus to military/social and research production. But the developers have stated repeatedly this is the case, its to give players like me a challenge. Its simply impossible at the present time to develop a AI that can compete against a human being, it will remain so for a long time to come.

The AI however does have some serious weaknesses that means a good player will win in the end. Those are:-

1) Poor planetary development, this undermines the AI's 200% bonus, meaning u can match there production rates by mid/end game by developing your planets well.

2) The AI performs with average competence in a war. The AI leaves ships in orbit around every planet to defend them (I do not leave 1). This means u can concentrate your forces to take 1 or 2 planets at a time. The AI also lacks the killer instinct when trying to conquer planets, meaning you can use a very fast troop transport to replace population/soldiers lost in frontier worlds from interior worlds.

3) To survive early get trade routes to your potential threats, try to get spin control center as soon as possible, this will stop u being attacked by the AI's and give u some breathing space. An alternative to this is try to strike at a neighbour quickly and gain a planet advantage, negates an AI's bonuses.

Hope this helps u compete at higher levels.

use tech trading to keep near the competition tech lvl. build a monster economy so you can afford to buy opponent troop transports. they may still fight wars, but if you grab all the transports as they are built you drain thier populations AND make their wars pointless. in other words, keep the borders stable until YOU decide to change them. that one ai who was gonna run away and eventually overwhelm you now just grows within his own borders, wasting his ships bashing other ai ships.

Wow you can do that ? Ummm... That sounds pretty chessy. I take it the AI doesn't attach the proper value to losing billions of it's population. lol.

Hey anyone from stardock, for the sake of the metaverse please fix this exploit !!

it is often possible. not saying you can grab every transport from every ai, just nerf the one you see as getting out of control. transports are sorta expensive, but not so much that you can't buy lots of them if you stay on the ball. of course if it is the torians you could be in trouble, lol. you have no choice but to check for them every turn tho, cause once they fleet up you can't touch them. this is just a variant on a puppetmaster strategy i had to develop when i saw the price on a war jump from 600(with maxed diplomacy) to 600k on being patched. not saying 600 was reasonable, but 600k is just as unreasonable. and as to fixing it, that should be rough to do in a ballanced way. unless you just want to simplify the game, start making it into a straight forward slugfest. what makes this game stand out is that there IS more than one way to win. suppose you could include an algorithm to pre determing how many troops you will get when you buy that ship(you don't always get full ships) and add to the cost. that's the only part of this tactic that i see as being cheesy. other than that it is just straight forward ship buying. oh, and you could make ships more expensive/impossible to buy from an ai at war.

i believe you. i am playing on medium maps now at only tough lvl, to get that racial medal knocked out. had to seriously adjust my strategies for it. got spanked hard first game trying my maso/gigantic ones, lol. map size changes the character/pacing of the game tremendously.

I just started my first game at maso (or whatever the highest is) having won on all lower settings. So far I'm hanging in there. There hasn't been any wars yet. I just got the evil weapons so I'm gearing up to take out my weakest neighboor. I think on maso you need to really focus on your ecomony to compete because the AI gets a 200% bonus.

You have almost zero chance of keeping up technologically through your own sweat and toil. Maybe, just maybe you can keep pace if you build almost nothing but research buildings and set the slider high...but it'll be a race whether you get the infrastructure down before the other races come a-warring.

If you have tech trading on, you can neatly circumvent the difficulty in keeping up in the research race by...not even trying. Build economy buildings instead and buy all your tech in. You'll need *some* research buildings in order to research those things the AI doesn't care about (ie sensors) or if nobody is willing to be friends and sell you weapons at a reasonable cost, but mostly it's about cash flow. When the invasion phase starts, tag along with a strong AI who doesn't hate you who is picking apart somebody smaller. Let him do the dirty work, then sneak in at the last minute with your transports to steal the planets from under their nose. Really, this should annoy the AI, but at the moment it doesn't seem to! It's a good idea to have used some of your enormous cashflow to get advanced espionage on the races you're invading since I'm fairly sure that boosts the odds you'll steal tech on a successful invasion. Do something similarly underhand with resources. Park your constructors somewhere near the starbases, wait for a stronger AI friendly to you to take them out (assuming you're not strong enough yourself) then swoop in to claim them before they do. Again, this *should* piss the AI off, but it doesn't.

If you're playing with tech trading off on the highest levels...well, when you work out a way to win convincingly please be sure to come back and let me know.

Awesome tips, Thanks! Glad to hear that I'm not missing something as far as the AI zooming ahead at higher levels. I'll try some of these tactics and see if I can win a game on Maso.

As far as the AI, yea I figured the AI was not programmed to actually compete against Human players using the same rules. They'd probably have to develop a serious breakthrough in artificial intelligence to do that.

Posted my strategy in the " AI Suggestions " post by Random 50; reply 13.