I'm fairly new to GalCiv2, and have been struggling to match the AI at "tough" setting in the early/mid phase of the game. Basically, the AI is always able to grab more colonies than I, and is able to keep the maintenance of all those colonies from crippling their economy. I'm currently playing 1.6 Dark Avatar. All this research was done with intelligence set to "intelligent", which turns on full AI, but no bonuses.

So, in order to understand how the AI does this, I decided to do two things. First, I enabled the "Reveal the entire map" cheat. Second, I play that race that gets a spy right off the bat. The spy is used to monitor what the AI is building. I don't actually place him, I just bring up the screen that shows the planet's buildings (both built, and under construction). Unfortunately, this still doesn't show the AI's financial information, nor their tech choices.

I noticed one thing right off the bat. In the spy placement screen, the production values of the planet are theoretical maximums, as in what you'd get for each if you set that slider to 100%. This makes sense, as knowing what the planet was actually producing would also tell you the empire's production settings. Thus, despite what that number says, the AI does *not* get huge production bonues.

The AI's smart enough to build what it needs right away. If there's a resource, it will build a constructor. Otherwise it builds four scouts, and a colony ship (or two if no constructor is needed). It does this via immediate buying. I notice that if it knows about a planet nearby it'll buy the colony ship before buying the scouts.

In addition, the AI buys the first two factories for the home-world, and a spaceport, followed by two more factories for the first planet colonized. On each subsequent world colonized, it builds a spaceport first (buying if it has enough cash), and a factory (again, if it has enough cash).

If you run the numbers, you quickly realize that the AI needs at least 10,000 bc's to do all that purchasing. I've seen this several times, the AI clearly gets a bigger opening budget, vs the human player. There's no other way it could get four scouts, two colony ships (or a colony/constructor), three factories, and a spaceport, all within about 5-6 turns.

Another thing I noticed is that the AI goes all-out to grab colonies. Looking at the treasury graph, the AI ran out of money (mirrored by his ceasing to buy factories for the new colonies), then started gaining money, despite having seven colonies (other than its homeworld). Keep in mind that the human player is charged 12bc/turn per colony. Thus, the AI should be charged 84/turn for merely having those colonies. I rarely can afford that kind of cost until my population crosses 15-20 billion. One possibility is that since the AI I was monitoring was "human", it might have gotten the "five most populous colonies may no maintenance for initial colony", for being "good". Actually, I just tried that (as I'm typing this), starting out as "human" I was charged the full 12bc/turn after colonizing Mars. I'll do more research on this over the next few days, see if the AI colonizing rapidly hurts it economically.

Thus, from my research, I've ascertained that "Intelligent" setting gives the AI at least 10,000 in starting budget, and the AI doesn't appear to be penalized for multiple colonies as much the human player.

Is there a setting I can play the game where the AI doesn't get these two bonuses? I'd like to be able to compete with the AI in the early game w/o having to overcome these two advantages. Even the initial $$ isn't nearly as bad as the lack of apparent penalty for the AI grabbing colonies as fast as it can. I really noticed this earlier last week when I set the universe to have 2-3 habitable planets per star, and was completely dominated in the colony-grabbing game (because I throttled back when my mainenance costs went through the roof).

I'll do more research on this over the next few days, including seeing if these bonuses apply at the lower AI levels.