Ai economy - I don't get it, some help please?

Here's the story - Immense, 9 challenging players, etc. I'm playing Drath. The Terrans next door were getting too big and started dumping Influence bases in my space, so I built some heavy cruisers and decided to put them in their place. I made an extremely effective drive for Earth with a load of Transports and took over their entire core systems.

Unfortunately I didn't have the resources on nearby worlds to continue taking their remaining planets, so I bunkered down, built up the worlds I took, and let the influence of Earth flip remaining worlds. They were left with a handful of Class 8ish worlds (nothing bigger than a single Class 11, a couple class 5s, etc.) and I figured that they were done. I used my spies to look at their planets and found that there were nothing but factories, the occasional research lab or morale building, on the remaining planets.

As I built up a defensive fleet, I realized that near-endless fleets of Terran warships were pouring at the worlds I took, all being built on the few remaining planets they had. I was somewhat floored by this.

- The Terrans hadn't built a single economy building, and I took their planet that had the economic capital.
- There were maybe two farms amongst the 8 or so planets they had left.
- These planets were strict manufacturing centers, churning out endless waves of warships.
- I had destroyed all their own trade routes. They had SOME money coming in from trade with other races, but it would've been very little, as there were almost no trade routes amongst the other races. I had pretty much sent everyone to war against each other at this point so trade routes would constantly collapse.

How the hell did the AI have ANY money at all? They kept this up for several dozen turns, massive, expensive frigates popping out of worlds to try to blow me up. They showed no signs of slowing.

I was similarly struck by the realization that if I didn't have economic planets built, my economy would've collapsed into ruin long ago. When I used spies to look around, I realized that there were barely any enemy economic buildings on any of the AI planets - it was almost completely non-stop manufacturing.

What am I missing here? I heard the AI doesn't cheat, but for the first time I had my doubts as they seemingly completely neglect any economic improvement, but are able to churn out endless numbers of spacecraft.

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Hi!

Immense, 9 challenging players

TA is still beta and is probably not yet ballanced properly. I can not check with the game to confirm that. But you can do some simple tests: have you talked to Terany yet to check their treasury? They might have a big cash reserve

. The other thing is AIs could tax their pop skyhigy. I'd suggest you to save game and retire. So you'll see what's their average tax rate. If you get the first level of espionage (5 spy/months needed), you can also see the planet approval rate. If it's low everywhere, the skyhigy taxes hypothesis is confirmed.

BR, Iztok

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On the foreign relations screen, look at the stats section. Even without having done any espionage, you can get detailed breakdowns of their economic statistics.

What I'm thinking here as possibilities:
*They have a very strong economic ability that magnifies their taxes (need low espionage to check this out)
*They're running their taxes high (you might be able to take advantage of the low morale to use information warfare in invasions)
*You blasted a lot of their production and infrastructure, saving them from the costs associated with maintainence and production.
*They're running off a substantial treasury, as suggested above. If their deficit isn't huge, this'll last them a long time.
*You've crushed the majority of their military, which frees them from much of their upkeep costs. Not a whole lot you can do about that if they're capable of fielding warships that will do significant damage... you can't afford to leave those ships around unless they're safely being used as defenders.
*They've got some kind of economic base or bonus that's magnifying their production (at no extra economic cost, the bonus is mostly free.) If they have economic starbases left, knock 'em down.
*Influence dollars could be a significant factor.

Most of this can be confirmed in the economic statistics.

The Terrans are fairly strong economically, and their factory worlds could very well be paying for themselves as opposed to running a significant deficit.

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The Challenging AI is supposed to have a slight(5-10%) economic penalty. There may be a possibility that you had a 10x or 5x tourism boost event and the Terrans are getting tourism cash and are using a sky-high tax rate, along with racial bonuses and economic starbases. To stem the output of warships, destroy all their economic starbases and blow up their asteroid mines, while setting up influencer starbases to slashing their tourism revenue. Also, track down their mining starbases and blast them as well.

Another possibility is that their flagship is off in a distant sector of the galaxy, and is collecting lucky 1000 bc anomalies bigtime while remaining safe from your warships. To stop this, either build fast surveyors and snatch the anomalies for yourself, or hunt down and kill the Flagship. Also, other AI races(esp. Minor Races) may be paying tribute and funding the war from behind the scenes, so you'll have to incite proxy wars and stop this cash flow.

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Perhaps this is all possible, but like I said, I noticed that AIs almost never build economic structures. I've continuously scoured their worlds with spies looking for economic structures to hit to damage their treasury (thus making it harder to neutralize my own spies), but I never could find anything. Just loads of factories and labs.

Also, IIRC Challenging is 'fair'. Normal AIs have a tiny penalty.

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