Clairvoyant AI?

I guess I would have 2 questions for you...

First, How long were you parked just outside Terran territory?

Second, Where were the Terran survey vessel and scout ships?

Survey ship was cruising through picking up resources - was not parked.

Terran survey ship was off on the other side - don't know about their scouts. It was still pretty early in the game - everyone only had about 3 planets at the time. Scout ships could do it for them but with uncommon habital planets they would need about a 800% luck factor.

Is it possible that the AI looks at the known factors (how common planets are, how common stars are, types of patters that planets are created)? I've noticed that you rarely have habitable planets alone in a system, unless some fairly specific settings are chosen.

The AI will purposely go to the outer edges of their range at times. I also have witnessed them using a leapfrog technique on me, or at least it seemed to be. They colonized a planet. Two turns later a colonizer is seen leaving that system(I didn't actually catch it leaving the planet)with only 24M on board.

I think the story is explained in Galciv1. These older races apparantly know where all the planets are.

The AI's prefer to colonise planets outside their own areas. This allows borders to be erratic and confused which in turn causes more interesting diplomacy mmmwwwaaahhh

Good for us, bad for them.

I think the story is explained in Galciv1. These older races apparantly know where all the planets are.

The AIs (except for the Terrans) have and use Stallar Cartography tech, but unlike GC1 that doesn't mean they know where all the 'good' planets are--they just know there are planets there of some kind.

Under normal circumstances the AI is required to scout before sending colony ships, but on levels above Intelligent it has a chance to 'guess' whether a planet is good or not. I *think* it may also be able to scout with its colony ships, rather than sending actual 'scout' class ships, too, you'd have to confrim that with Frogboy though.

Was the high CPU feature enabled?

I have noticed this too, at least on Painful level: the colony ships go directly to a habitable planet, even if I have observed none of their other ships coming within scouting distance. It certainly seems like the AI players know exactly where the good planets are right from the start.

On the rush building, in a recent game I saw the Drengin colonise a world, then a colony ship left the new colony a turn or so later. I did not think to check how many people were on the ship.

There was a bug fixed a while ago in GCII that caused the AI to *know* something it shouldn't due to garbage in a variable. Not saying that is the case here but it is a possibility. There was also a very specific way to test the theory that I'm sure is still documented on the forums somewhere.

I've seen the AI bypass a class 12 planet to colonize a class 6 and scratch my head wondering why. Later I spy on that class 6 and without fail it will have some special bonus tile like a 300% research or 700% industrial. Not that I think the AI knew that ahead of time but I can say it certainly changed how I colonize .

I don't use scout ships any longer. I just send colony ships towards systems that have planets hoping to get lucky. If no planets in the system I sent ships to I just continue to push them out. I don't see any reason as to why certain AIs wouldn't do this as well.

A comment or two on using or not using scout ships ---

The AI seems to like using a lot of them.

If you set up your games using abundant planets and abundant habitable planets there is less need to use scouts (or even stellar cartography) - most every star you go to is likely to have a good planet to settle on. I like to use uncommon habitable planets to make the game more interesting for me - and that's why I hate to see the AI go right to the plum planets.

Instead of (or in addition to) using the scouts to find planets, I like to load my scouts (use cargo hulls - forget the core ship scouts) with sensors. That way they sweep a wide path which really helps to find resources (economy, military, etc). Resources are usually tucked in out of the way places and if your scouts just go from star to star and have a limited sensor range they will not see them. Being the first one to find and settle on these resources can really turn the game around.

To answer Frogboy --- yes, I always use the high CPU feature. I greatly prefer to see clever AI rather than just cranking up the difficulty level which only gives me a bunch of moronic thugs with a barrel of cash.

I'm a student of real-world gov't and a lover of games. For the game, I want to preserve my sense of trust in Stardock's commitment to making the AIs play by the same rules we must use, high-diff bonuses aside.

The fact that any survey unit (mine or AI) can auto-target anomolies makes me wonder if there might be a unspuspected AI "cheat" re colonization strategies. But I must admit that many games ago, the fact that I often saw AI colony ships that were *very* far from home made me consider trying what I thought of as "wasting" colony ships by sending them to my unexplored frontier. Sometimes I get a liability this way, but sometimes I get what eventuall turns out to be a crucial production asset or strategic foothold.