GCII - DL: Is this a flaw in the game's AI?

Game settings...
Difficulty: Tough
My race: Terran Alliance
Map size: Tiny
AIs: 3 others
Game period: 12 years

The first 8 years saw the Drengin decimating one of the AIs and assisting me to eliminate another race. Eventually, they were hostile towards me so I declared war on them. Now, there were a couple of things that I noticed when fighting against the Drengin with them having:

- more planets
- a much stronger army
- technologically superior
- they have all the resources
- much more production resources (all their planets basically only had starport/factory/research)

The advantages I had:
- slightly better speed technologies
- better diplomacy
- One of my planets had a spin control center. Even with a fully protected planet full of decent ships (small size), their army rating still vastly outnumbered mine (I believe I was rated at 93 while they were rated at 230).
- the highest PQ planet (19). the rest in the game were 16 and below.

With this I was able to win the game through military conquest without ever being stronger than them.

My 'strategy':

- build cheap tiny ships that could be built in 1-2 turns. this was to prevent the AI from invading my planets.

- when the AI was able to successfully invade my planets, I rush-bought custom, ultra-fast 1-turn transports and took back my planet

- whenever the AI left a planet unguarded I took it over

- destroy any key resources they are utilizing (economy, military, research)

Throughout the war, the only fleets moving around on the map were the AIs, which moved quite quickly to blow away planetary defenses so that they could invade.

After a few years of fighting, I had dominated about 90% of the map, with the remaining few planets eventually flipping to my side.

Some problems with the AI I've noticed because of this game:

- AI does not do a good job invading planets. their tactical movement is atrocious. I'm surprised they built so few fleets (they had only about 4-5 on the map at any given time) and they never attacked and invaded simultaneously. I was almost always given enough time to rebuild my 'planetary defense'.

- A LOT of my planets were undefended, especially the ones without starports. Instead of invading those, the AI only seemed to invade if it felt that enough of my planets were undefended. As long as 1 or 2 planets had ships defending, they sought to attack those first before invading.

- The AI doesn't seem to always take notice of what's around it. I've had quite a few cases where I had a transport completely open about a few squares away from an enemy ship. did the enemy attack? nope. I was able to get my transport to invade...

Is this dealt with in DA? (I only have DL right now)

On a side note, not sure if this had been noted already but the very last mission in the DL campaign is like you're facing nobody. The planet isn't defended by the Dread Lords, you're given a massive army to start with, AND the map is tiny. Really disappointing

strategies

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Well.. usually I play at Crippling, but most of the time the AI has ALL of its planets defended. The AI gets insane economic bonuses and all their worlds have factories and a starport (and yet the planet's income is still TWICE the expenses!) so they can, and do, build ships from all their worlds. Early in the game the AI builds a lot of defense ships and later on switches to capital ships ASAP.

Perhaps you should elaborate on your "strategy" since I don't see how the AI is controlling space with ships flying around and you're able to invade their worlds.

For the most part, the AI will attack your ships first, while sending transports. I find the weakness is in the transports' lack of protection. Usually a fast Frigate class ship can out-maneuver the AI's fleets and attack the transport fleets which only have very weak escorts. Also, you can stall AI ships by running away in circles and they will follow you.

In any case, the AI is still pretty dumb. It only becomes difficult at times when its production and tech is way ahead of yours and you're not able to effectively fight them. But for a more interesting game, perhaps you should increase the difficulty level and allow the use of "more intensive AI algorithms." DA allows you to customize the personality of the AI, different races have different AIs, the CPU usage, the economic bonus, AI abilities, what they use their 10 ability points on, etc.

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If you'd asked this a week ago, Sponge, I'd have agreed with you. My last game on Tough, the Drengin played almost exactly how you described. I bypassed Challenging and moved up to Crippling this week, and Wow! much different games. I would definitely recommend bumping up the difficulty.

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