Does Spying anger the AI?

When I catch a spy, I have no way of knowing who sent it. I assume it's the same for the AI.

As for ways of souring relations, I find that declaring war on them works well.

Espionage is untraceable. If you want a harder diplomatic game (and a less passive AI in general) try turning up the "aggression" in the personality tabs of the enemy AI's (assuming you have DA). It makes the game much more interesting.

Is it possible to turn it up mid-game?

Three other approaches to ticking off the AI:

-- try to influence flip several of their planets: build influence based starbases close to some of their border worlds, especially larger more valuable ones, and keep upgrading. Eventually, the AI will notice and start asking you to remove them.

-- loom: build a number of warships and park them (using the "sentry" or "guard" function) next to the AI's planets. Eventually, the AI will ask you to remove them too.

-- delay military production: If you wait to start actually building ships, the AI will see you as "weak", and start demanding tribute and techs from you, eventually declaring war. Be sure to notice: I mean only to delay building the ships: you should keep up the pace of military research, and make sure that you have planets capable of rapid productions, so that you can start churning out ships when war does come.

All of these aren't really necessary at challenging or above. At the harder levels, and with aggression turned up, I usually don't have any problems getting the AI angry enough to come after me.

A-

Take a couple massive fleets with about a dozen troop transports, and park them in the square right next to their homeworld for a few turns. Theyll get the idea.


Make sure you've cut off any trade with them, of course.

Sadly not, it's got to be done in the initial game setup. Your best midgame method for ticking off the AI is Bingjack's suggestion.

You could build influence starbases near their worlds but you'd have to be careful not to actually flip them. The process of flipping a world annoys the AI, but once the world's flipped the AI not only doesn't hold it against you, it is weakened and thus tends to like you more.

I do this a lot. I make sure that I build lots of hulls so that stacking weapons onto them takes just a turn...

Stacking Hulls? This sounds like an intriguing strategy, can you elaborate a little? What is the benefit of this approach? Doesn't the upgrade costs kill you?

Dano

It seems to me that if your military is strong enough you can go the whole game without a war regardless of aggressiveness settings, unless you get an event that triggers one. I made a custom opponent and named them the Shadows after the Babylon 5 villains. I set them to totally evil and totally aggressive, gave them all the military bonuses and a 20% economic bonus. In my current game they haven't attacked anyone yet and we are late in the mid game on crippling difficulty. They and the Altarians have been hostile on and off, but they never had a war. I just started a war with the Yor after building up a good military just to break the monotony. Currently my relations with the Shadows is 'warm'.

Basically, the AI hates you when you are weak and loves you when you are strong. When the Yor had the leading military and I was making my first generation ships they were hostile and on the diplomacy screen it would say things like "we hate you" and "I was just plotting your demise". They quickly changed to neutral relations when I started producing medium hulls en masse and my military rating went throuh the roof. I think the intention is that if you want a war, then start one, but if you don't want one you can sometimes avoid it without every game becoming a war game.