Horatio Hornblower

What the heck happened to all my formatting?? Yay giant unreadable paragraph!

Hey, So as someone who played GC2 and DA, and could win, although not always, on suicidal, I was wondering if the TA AI has been significantly improved. It is my understanding that the planetary improvement code has been totally rewritten, which is great, but I was wondering if anyone has made any observations regarding improvements in the tactical AI. Things like unescorted transports, huge stacks of ships in orbit with no fleet manager, chasing after a scout ship with the

I really dislike the term "broken". The problem seems to be that a significant change has been made to the gameplay - that you can no longer acquire new techs easily through diplomacy - and this has made some people upset. It's not broken. Just different. If my strategy revolved around brokering techs to the AIs I might be annoyed. For others, myself included, who were of the opinion that it was too easy to just milk the AIs for tech and cash in previous versions this change is an impr

I believe I only asked for the rules to be the same for the AI as for the human player. If they don't want to change the way the AI values trades, that is fine. If they want to make the AI a smarter trader, that is fine as well. Just make it treat the human the same way as another AI on both the offer and accept side of the deal. <IMG onload="setImageSize_onLoad(650,this);" src="http://images.stardock.com/gc2/T_DL/smiles/Smil

I love this issue. Lots of people seem to complain about the AI 'cheating' by doing sweetheart trades with other. But lets say the AI didn't "cheat"...instead the AI tech traded like a skilled player - i.e. selling/trading every non-essential tech to every other AI as soon as they finished researching it. I wouldn't even have to login to hear the screaming from the forums. AFAIK, what people seem to want is the AI not to 'cheat' but also not to use the feature effectively. Whi

Anyone else notice that the Arceans, with their first strike ability, become basically unstoppable if they survive to the late game 'capital ship' phase? I had a good chuckle in my last game watching them shred endless Drengin and Korath ship with their tiny yet incredibly effective military. (It consisted of a single fleet with > 1000 attack). Cheers h

Hi, There are 2 major AI weaknesses right now (well the ones that stand out to me at least): 1. It's REALLY easy to bribe them into declaring war on another AI. If you make sure that all the other AIs are involved in at least 1 war at all times they will almost never declare war on you. It's almost essential to do this on maso/suicial. 2. The AI tends to strip a planet of defenses and then, several turns later, send in transports. This makes it really easy to swoop in

Semi-random, is probably the correct term. They seem more likely at the beginning of a war, and more likely the farther they are ahead of you in whatever branch. The chance does seem to decrease as you conquer more planets. I think I've always gotten a tech on the 1st planet though. I'm somewhat torn on the whole 'invade and steal doom ray when you've only researched lasers' thing...on the one

Now that they have a thread all to themselves it would be nice if Stardock commented on them. I agree I want to know the reasoning if this is a design in the game or if this is something that they've been looking at but, just haven't had a chance to take care of this issue being of more pressing bugs in the last few weeks. Well I'd imagine the hierarchy of defects goes so

Well, keep in mind that planets of that quality tend to take a very long time to develop unless you are rush buying the terriforming techs, redirecting a HELL of a lot of asteroids, or your have a neutral alignment in xeno ethics. In other words, these planets tend to start as an economic drain and remain that way for a long time. Unless you're the Thalans...then these planets are a total bonanza. Even if you're no

Really? Do they grow to be that big? Class 1 planets are among the best in the game once you get the terraforming techs. Any neutral civ should be clamoring for them. The AI ignores PQ 1 planets. This was not a bug prior to Dark Avatar. There were no PQ1 planets prior to DA. Really? My bad. Well, to be honest I had

The AI ignores PQ 1 planets. This was not a bug prior to Dark Avatar. Now PQ 1 planets now end up as some of the best planets on the map once you research all the improvement techs (PQ 15-18 or so). This gives the player a serious advantage. When I play, I ignore all PQ 1s (as I feel like it's cheating to settle them), but I would rather see the AI colonize them occaionally. Cheers h

I never got any of those. That was in about 3 yrs gameplay time I rarely get those AI tech trade offers, but it could be because I generally only lead in techs that the AI doesn't value very highly, like the sensor, diplo or cultural techs. Also, if you're ahead in tech you won't get them because the AI won't have anything to offer. So yeah, I agree with Vinraith. IMHO, the AI does not 'cheat' in this

Is it just me, or is tech trading completely nerfed? I can't seem to trade anything for anything - I usually trade "medium" techs for cash and a few low-level techs. Now I can't get _anything_ for less than 5 or so medium techs. I know they AI is evaluating them - but they don't want trade? Miniturization? Research centers? I can see not paying much for the colonization techs, no worries there. Confused - makes it pretty tough to end a war a

Well, I hate replying to my own post, but the opponents are definitely reverting to default AI profiles. The drengin, whom I had switched over to "Super-Warrior" as I dislike the "Super-Dominator" ability, are still getting loads of "Super-Dominator-Free-Experience-For-Any-Half-Decent-Ship-Lets-Slow-Down-The-Game-To-A-Crawl Corvettes". Cheers h

Ok, I'm still seeing this with 1.5X. Some opponents are hyper-aggressive and some are not. Probably has something to do with selecting random opponents... In my current game the Drath and Arceans are '--warmongering' and '-militaristic'. The drengin are merely militaristic (as usual) and the krynn and korx are none of the above. This is despite having set all AIs aggression to 100%. I even started another game to double check that yes, they were all still set to 100 aggression. <br/

Personally, I think the ethic choices are the bigger problem. It always seems that being good is a penalty (either in morale, finance or similar) while taking the evil choice is rewarded. It would be nice to see a few events where each alignment option gave you a different benefit (or penalty) for example, an event where the good choice gives a small bonus to morale, while the evil choice grants a bonus to research (and neutral pays out a few hundred CR). Ac

Hi, I've noticed that occasionally the "personality" settings for an AI will not effect them in-game - for instance setting aggression to max. It seems as though they are resetting to default. It doesn't seem to effect the AIs with any consistency: if I set all AIs to max aggression, some will end up being hyper-aggressive with the "--warmonger, -militaristic" diplomatic penalties and others will not. I play with opponents set to random if that's any help. Cheers

I totally agree with everything you've said. Great post. Since I don't care about the metaverse, I'd recently started a game with 5x hitpoints (great minds think alike? or fools seldom differ? we'll see...). Unfortunately, i had tech trading turned off and the AI started playing like a drooling invalid (failing to research trade, ignoring weapon techs, etc). However, I have just started a tech-trade enabled game and will post my observations once I get to the combat portion of the game.

Hi, Currently PQ will only update for tiles that are "auto-upgraded" via the neutral ability or orbital terraformer. Any tile made usuable in a "conventional" manner via an improvement (soil enhancement, etc) will not contribute to PQ even if you build the orbital terraformer or switch to neutral at a later time. Obviously this is not by design and is a bug. I've actually taken to editing my save files to update the PQ since it's really annoying to have a 2.5b pop ca

Yeah, I ignored the colonization techs in this game, as I didn't find any particularly enticing planets. But I didn't make a beeline for military techs either - I researched trade & adv trade and various social techs (ethics etc) and so forth. It was only when I realized my neighbour seemed to be totally ignoring military techs that I focused on planetary invasion stuff. dystopic: The more I think about it, the more I think it is the case. The AI puts HUGE priority on coloniza

So I'm playing a game (medium, 5 opponents, all AIs set to genius, max aggression and CPU, tech trading OFF, I'm the Thalans) and I'm noticing some weird stuff. First, NO ONE has researched trade, and the civ I just crushed, the krynn, was apparently ahead of me in tech but hadn't researched ANY weapons tech (they were building 0/0/0 defenders). I'm waaay ahead in military power despite the Yor and Drengin being present - this shouldn't happen on genius. I had no uber starting tiles an

Use the right mouse button to select a destination. The ship will move automatically every turn until it reaches there. If you have 'skip moves left over from auto pilto" enabled, it will end its turn when it reaches the destination. I use TAB to cycle. I have never, ever experienced it skipping a ship. I turn off "Allow game to select next ship left with moves" and "Follow auto-pilot ships" as I find them irritating. Cheers h

After my first experience dealing with 20 fleets of useless corvettes I decided to give the Drengin the "Super-Warrior" ability instead (which seemed like the most appropriate second choice). "Super Spy" and "Super Breeder" are 2 other fairly useless abilities IMHO. Well, the player could leverage Super Breeder effectively, but I'm not so sure about the AI. I wonder why there's no "Super Nerd" or "Super Capitalist" ability where you can build really cheap labs or markets like the super

Mistralok: I thought defense, if anything, was overpowered in DL. It was pretty easy to build tailored ships that would shred the AI fleets without getting their paint scratched. But that was cool in a way, as it forced the AI to adapt to your defenses (usually too late) and very occasionally you would have to adapt to AI defenses. Now the optimal tactic just seems to be to build endless swarms of small-medium ships with massive firepower. Late game you can play aroun