Interesting Loss on Suicidal

Just completed a game on Suicidal, Medium playing Krynn. Turned out to be great fun and a narrow loss.

Started at a disadvantage sandwiched between Alterran and Thalans at the bottom of map. Korath and Korx ruled the top 60%. Plain vanilla home planet, no bonus tiles. Was tempted to retart but then I wanted to see how this would play out.

Before I could say jack and the beanstalk Alterrans were all over the place (must have got speed +2). At the end of a short colony rush I had six planets of which 2 were PQ10 and the rest were 6 and 7. One had a bonus tile of 700% on manufacturing but that was it. None of them added significant tiles even after terraforming. My largest at the end of the game was PQ16 (acquired after knocking off Scottingale or whatever that minor civ is called)

Worked to get an alliance with Korath and got them to fight everyone. Kept developing and giving away weapon/defence techs to Korath so that they could clear up for me.

This worked out marvellously well. Though Alterrans and Thalans declared war on me I managed to somehow survive (probably because the Korath were giving them a hard time).

Towards the end all civs were launching dreadnaughts loaded with gadzillion weapons or defense. Had great fun watching them bashing each other up. Soon Thalans surrendered to me followed by Alterrans. Which left the Korx.

Now here is the interesting part. Korx declares war on me, Korath declares war on Korx. But there is little or no action. Korx sends fleets towards me but Korath fleets seem to have more or less withdrawn. I check what the Korath are doing and they are furiously researching the tech tree. In 5 rounds they had a tech victory! I almost fell out of the chair laughing.

If I had 5 more rounds I would have probably won. Or if the Korath had thrown a few fleets in I could have finished earlier. But no - its almost as if some condition had been triggered that made the AI push for tech victory. If thats been programmed for, thats awesome! Hey Brad - you are the greatest.

I noticed a few more things during the game.

It appears that civs were getting unbelievable bonuses. There were 2 Alterran plants just next to homeworld which started as PQ4 and were soon PQ12. Spying on them I was astounded to see research TP in the range of 500 and production over 250. And these were from Manu Centers and Invention Matrix buildings!!! Alterrans did not have any galactic resources or mining asteroids. So where did these numbers come from? I also saw similar stuff with one Korath planet.

In terms of weapons build up again the ships were packing such numbers of offense or defence that it did not make any sense. With hypershinker and psionic beams and massive scale I still couldnt get anywhere near those being generated by the AIs.

I think these are all issues that have been commented upon in these forums but thought I'd add my two penny bit.

It would be really nice to know what exactly do the AIs get as bonuses at higher levels. Surely it cant be so hard for the devs to put those numbers together. Brad - can you give us a leg up here please?