Beta 5: Weird surrender behavior

Were the Drath at war with anyone?

Yes, surrendering is weird at times, more often than not if you ask me. That's why I deactivate it 90% of the time, thank god this option was added!

Drengin and Korath.

That's probably why it happened, although it's still silly. A better AI would try to dig in with the new worlds and build up a bigger fleet before giving up - that is, assess its economic might as well as military.

I'd love to see more of that in the game, or I guess there's always turning off surrender.

Not really commenting on the "no surrender right after someone else surrenders to you" suggestion. I don't really have an opinion on that.

If that had been me, they would have surrendered to to Drengin or Korath. I can't count the times that one or the other AI "casts it's fate" with an enemy even when my military is number one and my relationship with them was warm.

I have never been able to figure it out

There is something wrong with surrender in the game. The AI seems to follow some general rules of thumb that aren't always relevant.

For example: I was playing a game where I had set the difficulty lower then normal because I was exploring the new economy, the result was I controlled most of the center of the map. The other 4 races were more or less each in his own corner. The Altarans were isolated deep in their own corner and had a big buffer of me all around them. They were at war with the Korath who were in the opposite corner. The Korath didn't have any star bases or planets that would let them even reach the Altarans and since they were also at war with me there was no chance of them building such. The Korath had no allies. So the Altarans were perfectly safe as the Korath couldn't even reach them. Needles to say in the whole war they never lost a ship, planet, or even mining base. But they decided that they couldn't survive any longer against the crushing might of the Korath and surrendered. (at least it was to me.)

The only thing else odd is that they never built any ships either so their military was rated at 0.

Even so

Some surrender logic tweaking is in order methinks.

I think part of the problem is that the AI only seems to look at military rating when evaluating its strength. And based on that it decides to declare war or to surrender.

A human player on the other hand always evaluates a complex set of variables:
- Of course also military rating, but at a very low priority
- Tech level. At least for me, that's the single most important factor. With high enough tech level, I can totally obliterate the galaxy with just a handful of techs
- Production capability. Most of the time I play sitting duck with almost no military. Why pay upkeep if I can just produce ships on an as-needed basis?
- Positions. No point in declaring war on an enemy on the opposite side of the map
- Preoccupation. Am I at war? Is my enemy at war with someone else? Looks like this is at least partially implemented: "Too busy risking war with us at the moment" or so on report screen. AI still likes to declare war on multiple enemies at a time though.
- the here and now
- the big picture

While some of these points are very hard to implement (the last two), others should be fairly easy. For example before declaring war, the AI should at least check if it has combat ships capable of reaching the enemy.

The AI in GC2 already is one of the best I have seen so far, yet still there is lots of room for improvement.

I have made it a habit to sell the basic military techs to all the races. This includes everything up to all weapon and defense theory techs. If you gave everyone this, it seems to deal with the early surrender syndrome that you are encountering. (It also gives me a early economic boost to boot, but that is just a nice side effect.)

Scincerely,

[email protected]

Interesting, will try that next time I play with tech trading on. My last couple of games have been blighted by unnecessary surrenders, as well as Terrans (who I've just been ranting about elsewhere) steadfastly refusing to develop any kind of military. Anything that could solve both would be most welcome.

I had this exact thing happen to me. The Altarians were outside my reach, I was playing Korath, but they surrendered to me two turns after all the good civs declared war on me.

IIRC, there was a similar extra-wacky surrenders thing during (and maybe shortly after) the DA beta. I played with surrenders off for quite a while, but in my last few DA games I didn't see anything too far from the baseline weirdness.

My guess is that the folks asking about why the computer players seem to ignore their economic (and tech too, maybe?) strength is the real problem. But that's only part of the muddle--it covers the Why question but doesn't say much about who gets chosen to inherit the surrender-monkey's real estate.

I've been seeing this kind of thing since at least Beta 4c. For example, I had the Drath surrender to me despite the fact that I had no military and was out of range of their planets. Even stranger, they declared war on me and then surrendered the next turn.

Still going on in beta 6. Was just playing a game with 9 AI opponents that had the Drengin go on a mad declare on war everybody rampage, and I mean that literally, and the Korx surrendered to the Drengin despite being on the other side of the map (immense size) and having not lost a single planet.

In general, I think the AI doesn't weigh things the same way humans do.

We human players put a much greater emphasis on economy and technology and population, knowing that advantages in these areas can quickly produce a strong military on the fly.

The AI seems to focus much more on the military rating alone. A weak military can harm relations and get you attacked, even if you have the strongest economy. Similarly, a high military number can improve diplomatic relations, even if you have a small civilization that wouldn't be able to sustain a prolonged conflict.

The trouble is, that with the emerging different ship building priorities for the racial AIs, it's making games predictable. Races who prefer to research up to mediums/larges or build lots of freighters instead of warships, like the Altarians and the Korx, seem to be surrendering left, right and centre in my games and everyone else's. Interestingly, the Terrans seem to have found a way around this with their no-attack defenders, which I'm guessing is just enough of an illusion of a military to keep them from surrendering, as long as no-one just destroys all their useless ships. At least, that's my theory since the Terrans don't seem to surrender as often as the Altarians despite having a similar long-term ship-building strategy (i.e. holding off on weapons research and going after big hulls). But it is irritating to have games constantly dominated by races like the Drengin, Korath, Yor and Torians who go after the early military rating with lots of small, slow, all-weapon ships and aggressive wars - I'd love to see even one game where the dominant power was the Altarians or the Korx.